Today I hit six months sober. My longest stretch of sobriety in eleven years. I am writing this as a checkpoint, a marker laid down in the middle of the most transformative period of my life so that I will remember what it felt like to be standing here. I am also putting it somewhere people can read it, so if it reaches anyone walking the same path, then good. But underneath all of that, first and last, it is a letter to myself.

What replaced God

To understand my drinking, I have to go back much further, to a question that has been running underneath everything for eighteen years.

When I was ten, I was confirmed into the Church in Wales. The Bishop of St David’s led the service and preached on family values, honesty, and the sacred bonds between people, and I believed every word. A few weeks later, he was on the front page of our national newspaper for allegedly having an affair. The man who had stood in front of that ten-year-old boy and spoken about sacred bonds had been quietly breaking his own. I did not have the language for what happened in me, but it happened overnight. I went to bed believing in God and woke up believing in nothing. If the person whose entire purpose was to be the link between me and something eternal turned out to be a fraud, then perhaps the whole thing was a fraud, and perhaps there was nothing up there at all.

What replaces faith, when you lose it that young, is not another faith. It is a question. If there is no plan and no meaning sewn into the fabric of things, then what is all of this? Why am I here? And why does it feel like it matters when by every available measure it does not? Since then, I have been a militant atheist, agnostic, a Christian again, Buddhist, agnostic (again), moving back and forth so many times I have lost count. I have never settled. That tangle has kept me on my toes my whole conscious life. It is exhausting, and it is also the engine of everything.

The pub across the road

That year, my father visited me in Wales from America. This was only the third time I had met him. He took me to Theatr Elli to see, of all the films in the world, Mr Bean’s Holiday. Before it started, he took me to a pub across the road where we ate fish and chips and he, of course, drank beer. A little way into the film, he leaned over and told me he was going to the toilet. He was gone for an hour, maybe more. I sat there in the dark beside an empty seat, watching Rowan Atkinson fall about the south of France, too young to do anything but wait. When he finally came back, he told me he had bumped into the landlord of the pub in the foyer of the cinema, and that the man had offered him a job, that he was going to move across the Atlantic Ocean and finally be near me!

Except he had not met anyone in any foyer. He had been across the road, in the pub. He was not moving to Llanelli, and the job did not exist. It was a lie, told to a ten-year-old in a cinema, and it was one of a great many. My childhood was a run of lies from men who purported to possess some kind of truth. Bright promises that dissolved the moment they were out of sight.

When it comes to my father though, I don’t blame him. Not for the empty seat, not for the lies, not for the years of absence. I know now, with a clarity I would have given anything to be spared, exactly what he was, because for a while I was it too. And like him, when my drinking was at its worst, I made empty promises I could not keep. I disappeared on people in the very same way he disappeared on me in that cinema. A man trapped in destructive cycles of behaviour, for which alcohol is a contributing factor, will say anything at all to protect his access to the thing that is quietly killing him. I know that from the inside now. So when I look back at the pub across the road, I do not see a villain. I see a lost and lonely man who could not do the one thing his son needed: to be present.

Suffice to say, by fourteen, I was depressed. Looking for that way out and alcohol not having made its grand entrance, I began self-harming. Dealing with trauma and existential dread carries a cost. Staring into the void is not a personality trait. The question of why you exist is not always an intellectual exercise. Sometimes it’s what keeps you in bed all day. Sometimes it is the thing that sits on your chest at four in the morning and will not move. And sometimes… it is the thing that makes you hurt yourself.

Drinking the questions quiet

It would be easy now to draw a clean line. A boy loses his God and his hope for a relationship with his Dad in the same year, and grows up to drink. It is a decent narrative arc, but it isn’t true. Nothing in here caused the drinking on its own, not the bishop, not my father, not the pervasive questions lingering around me about one’s place in the universe. No, my substance abuse crept up over the years, with no real starting line, and the deeper truth is that no wound ever poured a single drink for me. I did that.

I had a serious problem with alcohol for about five years. I had enjoyed drinking since I turned eighteen, in the ordinary way people do, but that changed in 2020. The isolation of those first lockdowns, not being able to see friends, the relentlessness of it, and then the world itself seeming to come apart in slow motion all exacerbated an innate problem in me. When you feel everything as deeply as I do, when it seeps into your bones, and the world hands you fresh evidence every single morning that it is cruel and indifferent, drinking stops being a pleasure and quietly becomes a way of coping. That September, I moved to London, and from there it grew, more or less exponentially, into a daily habit. Alcohol was my greatest love and my worst enemy at the same time. I think drinking is wonderful; people have done it for thousands of years. But for me, with all that existential machinery whirring away, it was simply too easy a way of switching the lights off. Of trading the discomfort of being conscious for the comfort of not quite being.

The warmth and the loss

Even though spring 2020 marked the beginning of my troubles with alcohol, and the world felt like it was unravelling, at the time, I was oblivious to what the isolation was doing to my mental health. At the time, I thought it was actually quite lovely. During the first lockdown, we had a fire pit in the garden. The weather that year was unusually kind, and we spent nearly every day outdoors, admittedly with a beer or a bottle of wine. But even on days without the booze, something happened that I did not fully appreciate at the time: the fire made us honest. My mother and I had some of the most open conversations we had ever had around that fire. She told me things that humanised her greatly, and I told her things that had been burdening me. The fire softened us, creating a kind of permission that did not exist indoors under electric light. It was a beautiful deepening of our relationship that I will forever be grateful for.

Not everyone was as lucky in that period, however. I lost a very beautiful friend. He spent most of that first lockdown in hospital with cancer, he caught COVID, and he died. And there I was, in a garden, around a fire, having these enlightening conversations. For a long time, I did not know how to reconcile those two things, but I have come to believe you are not supposed to reconcile them. You are supposed to hold both of them at once. The warmth and the loss. That, I have learned, is what existence should feel like most of the time. Both things together, refusing to cancel each other out.

Fire has kept arriving in my life ever since. It finds its way into gardens and in back rooms of spit and sawdust pubs, and the ends of long evenings surrounded by nature. I’ve noticed that whenever one is properly burning, people tend to drift towards it without being asked, and something between them loosens. Fire demands honesty from people, and it brings forth something spiritual in those who commune around and with it. This force, flickering through the darkness like an ever-shifting sculpture, calls you towards it, asking you to be baptised in its warmth.

Sometimes, you have to step into the fire to see the truth.

Six hundred miles

In 2024, my four-year relationship, the last nine months of which were spent engaged, came to an end. I’d been sleepwalking towards it for a while, half drunk and half depressed. Drinking every day does that: it switches off the self-awareness you’d need to notice you’re being a dreadful partner, so even though I was the one quietly wrecking it, the end still came as a shock. When that kind of commitment is pulled out from under you, you are left standing in a very empty field. You do not know who you are or what you want. You are not even sure the thing you lost was the thing you wanted. You are just standing in the middle of your own life with nothing around you but horizon.

So I walked. First, a pilgrimage to St David’s, along the Welsh coast, which was really a practice run. And then, in the spring of 2025, the Camino itself, which was a bigger and messier thing. Around six hundred miles on foot from the French side of the Pyrenees to the Atlantic coast of Spain.

The Camino had been circling me for years. I first read about it in Jay Griffiths’ Tristimania, where her own walk across Spain is anything but a triumph. After that, it kept surfacing: in a film, in a documentary, in incessant YouTube recommendations. I had always half wanted to walk it, but never felt any urgent need to. Then I was single, with all the strange and sudden time that being single hands you, and one evening in December of 2024, I booked a hotel in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port with no real plan beyond that. The flight booking came in January. The rest I arranged slowly, in whatever pockets of money I could put aside. There was some vague, unexamined idea of healing attached to it, but truthfully, there was barely any thinking involved at all. I love walking. I told myself, with a fair amount of naivety, that I would simply go and find out what happened.

In March 2025, I finished a theatre job in Coventry, took a National Express to Gatwick, flew to Bordeaux, and took two trains south, stepping off the last at Saint-Jean. The sun was going down, and the clouds had caught the light, the whole sky the colour of fire. It felt, absurdly and completely, like being spoken to. Like something was saying, “you are finally here, now enjoy it”. On a bustling platform full of other pilgrims hurriedly gathering their packs, I wept. What broke loose in me there carried me, I think, the whole of the next month.

The walk began and quickly became a game of repetition, and the repetition was the point. I woke up at half past five in the morning and was moving by half past six, walking through the first few hours as the sun rose, then stopping for the same breakfast every single morning: a café con leche, orange juice, and a pastry. One foot in front of the other, hour after hour, across a country that changed around me like a slideshow. Snow on the high passes one week, scorched flat plains the next, then the green hills of Galicia that looked so much like home that something in me ached. I have always loved walking, and the plain mechanical rhythm turned out to be exactly what I needed, a way of being carried across a country without having to decide anything. People will tell you the Camino is about the journey, not the destination, but for most of the way across Spain, I would have told you the opposite. I wanted to get to Santiago. I wanted to reach the end and feel it.

For the first week and a half, I walked with a group, thirteen of us at its largest, a collection of strangers from every corner of the world thrown together by the single fact that we were facing the same direction. I have always been anxious in groups, and the thing I find hardest to explain is how completely that anxiety fell away. None of these people knew me. I could be anyone! But the person who turned up to meet them was the most open and honest version of myself that had been in front of other people in years. It was the first glimpse that the man underneath the existential crises, the anxiety and the booze, was far kinder and warmer than I had been letting him be.

And then there was the drink. I was still the better part of a year from becoming sober, and out on the Camino, it did not feel like a problem at all. My first night in Saint-Jean, I ate alone, a bowl of Basque oxtail soup and a single glass of red, blissfully ignorant of what was coming. After the first full day of walking, I went to the pilgrims’ dinner and met that tableful of people. We drank beer in the bar and wine with the meal, and it was communal and warm and exactly the image you conjure when you picture the Camino. It stayed that way for a long stretch. A cold beer at the end of a hard stage, a bottle of wine with whoever you had walked beside that day. I loved it.

But then we reached Burgos, the first major city on the route, and I got unbelievably drunk. I have no tidy story about that day, only the fact of it. That afternoon, a woman from New Zealand named Georgia sat me down on a bench outside the cathedral, took both my hands, and prayed for me. She had seen what the easy company of the trip had let me keep hidden. She could see that the drinking was not really a choice I was making, that it had a hold of me, and she prayed over it with a tenderness I had done nothing at all to earn. I was grateful, and I was cut wide open.

When the group decided to stay in the city to rest their blisters, one of them, a young woman from South Korea, decided to keep going, and from then on, it was mostly the two of us. We began as strangers and, a month later, finished as two people who had, at times, physically carried one another. We set out separately most mornings, chose a town on the map, and met there at lunch to see how the other was holding up and to decide where we would sleep; I would push on ahead, steadfast and longer-legged, find the beds for the night, and wait for her to arrive. When we needed company on longer or more challenging days, we agreed to walk together. Those days were filled with conversation: comparing notes on Korean and Welsh culture, our upbringing, family, relationships, and, my gosh, did we bond over food! You build a strange and total intimacy with someone that way. I learned to read her like a book.

After Burgos, the wine and beer carried on, though more slowly as the walk wore down. Once it was just my new friend and me, it was usually a few quiet beers after a long day, with food, before sleep. But there were evenings I could feel it tilting, feel myself wanting more than the day called for, wanting to push past the point of sense. I am fairly certain that if she had not been walking beside me, I would have found my way into real trouble somewhere out there on my own.

High on the route is the Cruz de Ferro, an iron cross where tradition dictates that pilgrims leave a stone they have carried from home. Mine had come from Swiss Valley reservoir, picked up on a walk with my sister. Leaving it there was the first time I had ever set any of the past down on purpose. I did not let go of all of it, not by a long way… I am still putting pieces of it down now. But the plain physical act of laying a stone on the pile and walking away without it was the first real step, before the therapy, before any of the rest, towards understanding that letting go is allowed.

I had hoped, I think, to hear God out there. I sat in old churches, I walked beside people whose faith was a living testament, and I kept trying to talk to him the way I had on the road to St David’s, where something had seemed to answer. Nothing came. The voice on the platform at Saint-Jean was the only one I got, and I still do not know whether the lack of response was God leaving me to it, or just silence. Some days I walked harder and faster than I needed to, as though to prove I was owed a reply. The closest I came to anything sacred was, as it always is for me, in the natural world. The sun coming up and going down, the animals in the fields, cows and sheep that were almost the ones from Wales, but a slightly different, slightly otherworldly breed. Red Kites appeared overhead exactly when the walking was hardest, or when some heavy thought had settled on me. It was difficult not to read something into that.

Walking into Santiago was at once overwhelming and underwhelming. We already knew we were continuing on to the coast, so it was not quite the ending it was built up to be. Still, a piper was playing as we came into the square, and we went to the pilgrims’ mass in the cathedral and watched them swing the Botafumeiro, the great silver censer trailing smoke across the crowd’s heads.

From Santiago, we kept walking out to Finisterre, the cape the Romans called the end of the world, the last edge of the map, with nothing past it but ocean. The night before, we stayed in a town called Cee, where I made the same terrible joke far too many times about being by the sea, in Cee (see? Sí!). A week earlier, we had crossed a mountain with snow up to our knees, and now it was twenty-three degrees, and we were swimming. I tend to romanticise this night in my head. There was something about sitting on the beach together, looking out at the water, talking about the journey we had just been on, what our plans after this would be, knowing that in 24 hours our first Camino would all be over. The two of us bonded through some incredibly tough days of walking in the rain, over sheer mountain paths, through fatigue, and moments of total honesty about where we were in our lives. The Camino had invited an openness like a roaring fire, and I will be eternally grateful to have shared that with this person.

The final day was the shortest distance we walked all month, so we took our time, even buying a bottle of wine each for the last few miles. Alas, I only had my small camping knife on me to open the bottles, and I managed to slice two-thirds of the way into my pinky finger. A tourniquet fixed the bleeding, and it seemed more dramatic than it was, but of course, across six hundred miles i had avoided any blisters, any major injuries, and then nearly cut my finger off 2 miles from the end. As if this moment couldn’t get any more ironic, as we entered the village of Finisterre, the entire electricity grid of Spain and Portugal suddenly failed, the lights going out across two countries while we stood at the edge of the known world. It was so absurdly on the nose that all I could do was laugh whilst a big lizard sat sunning itself on the rocks, oblivious. We lost phone signal, so I couldn’t share this momentous moment with the outside world in real-time. I simply looked out at the Atlantic Ocean, and I cried, the way I had on the platform one month and six hundred miles earlier. It was over. And underneath the relief was a strange uncertainty: it was not over at all, but the beginning of something.

People expect the Camino to have remade me on the spot. It did not. Almost nothing I felt out there made any sense while I was walking it. It settled into me slowly, over the year that followed, the way the rain works its way down into the soil. Heading back to the UK the very next day, I felt a deep sense of unease that any answers I had harboured the hope of finding had not revealed themselves to me. I did not come home transformed. I came home exhausted. The real change came later while I was doing other things.

Those months of walking were a long lesson in resilience, in being alone, and in how to let a thing go. These lessons were later compounded in therapy, where I confronted my own insecurities and learned how to set them down. In particular, the fear of abandonment I have carried since I was a child because my father was not around. Those wounds had quietly shaped several of my relationships and had made me a difficult person to love. Part of why I walked was to step out of my own way for a while, and to come back as someone better than the man who had left.

Other people’s landscapes

After the Camino, I went back to my mother’s house in Llanelli, where I had been performing an approximation of living. My family were welcoming, the rooms were exactly as they had always been, and none of it could hold me. My whole life was up in the attic, boxed and stacked above my head while I slept, and I was a guest in the one place that was supposed to be the opposite of a guest. Familiar in every detail and not, in any way that counted, mine. The field that should have been the fullest one I had was hollow.

The year set about handing me its other extremes, and it began well. I had been commissioned to make a performance piece in Swansea, a show called what the fuck is going on? (or how I see things), about technology and how it might reshape the most ordinary corners of our lives. This was a relatively brief interlude in the year, but one that would later pull me back to the city, a mere 20 minutes from where I grew up.

Not before long I was back on the road. A few months as a video engineer working across England, on a couple of musicals and an opera, dipping in and out of other people’s productions and waking up in a different hotel room every few weeks. I had known it would not feel like the Camino, and it did not. There I had been folded into a band of strangers who carried me; here I was a freelancer passing through, surrounded by people and entirely alone. Every few weeks a new town, a new room, a new company of people who would be close for the run and gone by the end of it. I was learning to make a temporary home anywhere and to keep none of it, which I suppose is a useful skill even if it’s a lonely one.

A near-perfect city

In the late summer, I flew to Korea. The year so far had been one long lesson in letting go, and yet I arrived in Seoul with my hands full. I had gone to see the woman I walked beside across Spain, and to settle a question I had carried since the trail: whether the thing that had grown between us could survive in the ordinary world of work and routine and supermarket trips. Underneath that was a quieter hope that the city itself might become a doorway to a whole new life.

I landed late at night, and she drove us from Incheon to Seoul. The first thing that struck me was the colour. Leaving the airport, the dark was broken only by the road, and then the outskirts of the city began. The light came up around us, and rising above the shopfronts and the gaming bars were neon crucifixes, electric and red, glowing on the second floors of ordinary buildings. I had been confirmed into an austere grey Anglican church that had broken me, and here was faith remade as light, looming over the bustling streets. I was overwhelmed, not by tall buildings so much as by streets that seemed to run on without end. That first night we went to a Jimjilbang (a traditional Korean sauna), and I cleansed a forty-eight-hour journey out of my body in the hot pools, the only white man in the place, naked, at eleven on a Thursday night. A baptism of a different element…

Seoul is a near-perfect city. The trains run on time, the streets are clean, you feel safe in it at any hour. Technology runs through it all, in the tablets you order your food from, the endless screens in cafe windows and on the tops of buildings, and the navigation apps that visually track your bus as it approaches. It has been rebuilt almost entirely from the ground up since the war, and its oldest things, the palaces of the old dynasties, are held with a reverence we have long since lost at home. For all that newness, it is a calm place, and the people there are unfailingly kind. My friend’s work was relentless, so most of my days were my own. Naturally, I walked a lot, far off the usual routes, drawing puzzled looks from people who could not place a tourist in their quiet corner of the city, and I spent time working in its libraries where I creating digital art inspired by the peculiar environment I found myself in.

By luck, I was there during the city’s art week, and I spent hours in the dark in front of work I would never otherwise have found. There were two films I watched that deeply resonated with me. The first was Park Chan-kyong’s BELATED BOSAL, fifty-five minutes built from black-and-white negatives, the natural world turned inside out and shown to me in a way the naked eye will never see it. The Camino had left me spellbound by nature met head on, the rotation of the earth visible as we walked through the sunlight and rested at dusk, animals as witnesses. Here was nature seen through a cold, modern lens, threaded through with radioactivity. Japan, the only country ever attacked with nuclear weapons, sitting half a Camino away across the water. The film’s character, Gahye, walks the forests alone with a radiation meter. I watched her and saw myself, a man who had spent a year moving through landscapes, trying to measure his spirit. I thought ‘I could do that. I could live like that, measuring an estranged world step by step’. Then the film ended, and I walked back out into the lit gallery, into the crowd of Koreans and tourists, no longer watching but watched.

The second film made being watched its subject. Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me was a film I had wanted to see for years, ever since I found it in the title of a song by The 1975. It sat inside an exhibition called Séance: Technology of the Spirit, a name that could have been lifted straight from the work I have been hurtling towards all year. The film is a shamanic thing, Beuys wrapped in felt and shut in a room with a Coyote to confront and heal what he saw as America’s psychic wounds, and never once setting foot on American soil to do it. Outside of two trips to see my father, neither of which brought answers, I have always kept America at arm’s length, a left-wing Welshman with little patience for it. Sitting there however, I remembered that my father had been stationed in Korea in the late eighties with the US Army, that his own father and uncle had been Green Berets in Vietnam, that I was watching this in a country my father had once walked through in uniform. A uniform built on a promise to leave no one behind, and then left me alone in the dark of a cinema for an hour. No man left behind, my arse. I realised in this gallery that this is the America I carry: a grand creed of fidelity worn by men who cannot keep it.

Watching Beuys commune with the coyote, I thought of the Red Kites again. They were only ever circling the mice in the fields, predatory and hungry, indifferent to me, and still I read them as a sign anyway. The film was made in 1974, and it found me anyway. Both these films were about detachment from place, one in the way it was shot and one in a man who travels to America without ever touching it. I had flown halfway around the world to attach myself to a place, holding on with everything I had, while the art in front of me quietly described the opposite.

The holding on extended to her, too. I had come to her turf, to her city and her routines and her exhausting work, and we no longer had the single shared direction the Camino had given us. I would come home from a wonderful day among all that art and discovering parts of myself to find her wrung out by hers. She would order food for me without asking what I wanted, which fed me things I would never have chosen and which tasted wonderful, but left me feeling like a guest she was managing rather than someone she was building something with. I do not think that is what she felt, but it certainly presented as that.

The dent came when we travelled to the east coast. I had understood that the two of us were going away together, just the two of us. She had taken the Friday off work and had booked us a modern Hanok at a forest retreat, the kind of quiet in which I thought the conversation about a future would finally happen. On the way there, she mentioned we would meet some of her friends at the beach the next day, which put pressure on the moment. Or I did. What if the conversation went badly? How would we share the day with her friends if something went wrong? That pressure got to me. I cooked us dinner, we laughed about life, but the conversation never happened. It was just a quiet evening away. The day at the beach itself was good; it started with a visit to a Buddhist temple, and swimming in the East Sea was excellent, but the group we joined ran out of English quickly. The conversation kept slipping back into Korean, and I sat at the edge of it feeling like precisely what I was, a foreigner who did not belong there. Then the evening came, and the food came, and the soju came with it, and I forgot myself.

There are small courtesies around drinking in that company: covering your glass when drinking in front of elders, and holding it lower when clinking glasses. She had taught me every one of them in Spain months before. But the more I drank, the more of them I let slip. I had been drinking in my own way for years, and it is not a habit you unlearn in a single evening on the other side of the world. Nothing terrible happened. I was simply graceless in a company that asked for grace. On the drive home, she told me she didn’t think it could work, that we were too different, and I told her how alone I had felt all day, and we both cried, and half mended it, but the thing had soured, and we both knew it. Here, after years of watching drink switch off the better part of me and make me a difficult man to love, it had reached all the way to Korea, trashing the one thing I had crossed the planet to protect.

I had let myself imagine the city becoming home, the eventual goodbye turning out to be temporary. It was not the place that closed the door; I could live in Seoul tomorrow as an artist and be glad of it; what I could not do was live the life that was actually on offer to me there. In practice, the only way I could have quickly moved to Korea was to become an English teacher. A life of strict hours and no balance, customs I was unaccustomed to, inside a country that had rebuilt itself out of occupation and war into a culture of relentless effort and efficiency. It was not soil I could grow in.

After three weeks, it was time to head home. The goodbye was almost nothing, a few short words at the airport where she could not stop the car, and then she was gone. The flight out had carried me there full of zeal. The flight home, I spent the other way around, drinking through a 13-hour layover in Vietnam and then through the plane itself, passing out and waking up in a foggy English morning at Heathrow with a heavy head, making my slow way back to Wales with a fresh set of questions about what I wanted and where on earth I was ever going to put myself down.

All that steel and money

Those questions were still loud in me when I took a job in London, a vast production far bigger than I had grasped when I said yes. By the end of its five weeks, a new and quiet hunger had taken hold of me. A pull towards a life slower and calmer than the one I was living. The work was beautiful, expansive and exhilarating, but it was theatre made on an industrial scale. The theatre, a gigantic monolith in Canary Wharf, was surrounded by the banks that quietly fund the worst things in the world and building sites that never stopped. Having grown up in a post-industrial town in South Wales, where I have watched grass and bramble climb back over the dead factories, I couldn’t breathe in all that steel and money. The people I worked with were kind. But every night I went back alone to a cheap hotel room, in a city I had once called home. The drinking, which on the Camino and in Korea had at least happened in company, was now something I did on my own again, in a grotty Wetherspoon, with no one left to see it but oblivious strangers. I needed community. London, of everywhere I went last year, gave me none. It was the gateway to an existential breakdown.

I spent less than 5 days back in Wales before I took myself to the south of Spain for a week, alone. I spent every day swimming in the sea and drank 2% lemon beers on the beach, which I can see now for the small signal it was… a man trying to keep the shape of a thing without the thing itself. I thought about where I lived, which was nowhere of my own. About the drinking, which was a haunting, spectre-like presence at this point. About what I was going to do with my life, which was unravelling into a thousand threads. The weather was faultless, and I was in pain. Somewhere in that week, with the year’s highest highs and its lowest lows still echoing around my skull, I began for the first time to tangibly acknowledge that something was going to have to change.

The flat

Here is the thing I have come to understand about the order of events. I could not have stopped drinking if I had not first moved. The walking, the travelling, the patchwork of jobs in different corners of the country, all of it was necessary. But it was only half. The other half, the part that actually held, was coming home to Wales, moving into a flat of my own in Swansea, and finally sitting still.

There is a line in the short story I wrote: the field had once been full, and that fullness does not end when the field empties. I had been standing in my own empty field for a year, a figure moving across other people’s landscapes, mountains, cities and theatres that did not belong to me, certain that whatever had once filled my life was simply gone. I felt empty. Then I came to rest in one room, in one city, by the sea, and understood that the fullness had not ended at all. It had only been waiting for me to come back to it.

Two years before any of this, before even the breakup, I had sold most of my belongings. The clothes went, the television went, my graphics card went when I was short of money, and bags of random crap went down to the many charity shops in town. I told myself I wanted to be nomadic, to live out of a single backpack. I never quite got there, but I came close. I see now that it was an early and unformed pull towards simplicity, a clearing made by a version of me who did not understand what he was clearing the space for. So when the flat came, the move itself was almost nothing. I arrived with very little, and the little I had fit easily.

The flat is a studio in the centre of town, by the castle, a stone’s throw away from the strip where I have done plenty of drinking over the years. White walls and a laminate floor, your typical British rental. It is on the top floor, so for all that it sits in the middle of a city, it is quiet, and it faces east, which means the sun comes up over Kilvey Hill and into the room every single morning. Birds cross the window throughout the day. At twilight, a colony of bats comes out and dances in the air above the retail park, and I can sit and watch them for a long time.

For the first time, too, I had a kitchen of my own. On the Camino, the kitchens were always shared; through the summer, it was takeaways and instant noodles made with a hotel kettle; in Korea and in London, I ate out again and again. Here, the fridge was mine, and the hob was mine, and I could take my time over food, try things, get them wrong, and eat the way I had always wanted to eat. It is a small thing to set against a year of upheaval.

Knowing the searching was over and living inside that fact were two different things. I moved in that December and spent the first month in a kind of disbelief, unable to come to terms with the fact that I had a sanctuary of my own. I filled the time with motion out of old habit. I went out to bars, went on dates, made new friends and even made another show. Underneath all the going out though, there was a feeling I could not shake, that I was standing on the precipice of something. Then one night near Christmas, out with some colleagues, I grew bored partway through a pint and set it down unfinished. That had never once happened to me. There had always been something chemical in my body that, the moment the first sip of a pint was drunk, would not let me stop while there was anything left to drink. That night, it loosened its grip without my asking, and I felt it go. I had decided on nothing. But I knew, without being able to say it, that I was living the last days of one version of myself.

On the first of January, I stopped. I had stopped before, or at least I told myself I had. Two years running, I had done dry January and treated a single sober month as proof that I was fine, knowing full well, somewhere underneath, that it was a token, a way of touching the brake without ever pulling over. This time, there was no grand vow of the kind I had made and broken so many times before. No announcement. I simply decided to stop and see how far I could go.

Clay that knows it is clay

It was only then, with the alcohol gone and the days suddenly long and quiet, that my hands found work. I started painting and making small clay figures because I wanted to project a video onto an object rather than a screen. I suppose I thought it would look cool. I made one, then another, then another, and they were lumpy and faceless, their arms sticking out at odd angles.

Then one night, four or five figures in, I was lying on the floor staring at them, and something shifted. I had been writing about techno-spirituality and researching the Japanese belief in tsukumogami, the idea that a soul can inhabit an object. Lying there, looking at these odd little shapes, I felt the weight of something. They had presence. They were not quite objects, nor quite people. They were something in between, not having decided what to be. I haven’t been able to stop seeing them since. I walk through town, and I see them in the crowd, because that is what a person looks like once you strip away every detail. A rough, featureless figure, arms slightly away from the body, standing. Clay that knows it is clay.

I gave them a name. Y Cynfod, a Welsh word meaning pre-existence; from cyn, meaning before, and bod, meaning being. The before-beings. The ones who were already here before the idea of existence had even been invented, before there was any consciousness around to name things or to split the world into watcher and watched. They are the state before identity. They do not say “I am this person, born here, who has lived this life”. They say only “I am here, I am made of something, that is all”. That is everything.

All of it has come together for my first exhibition (alongside some extremely talented established artists), Shades of Existence, at Elysium here in Swansea. The clay figures stand together on a dark base while slow, projected light moves across them in reds, blues, and purples. The light shifts, and they are never quite alone; that piece is called We Were Here.

Matter that knows itself

For years, I said I was going to do this, or I was going to make that, and I never made anything of substance at all. The drinking did not only dull the bad feelings, but it also dulled the light in me that wants to make things. Sober, I have the energy, the bandwidth, and the sheer stubbornness to create. The fact that I make art at all now is, to me, the clearest evidence of what has changed. Because here is what I think sobriety actually is. It is not the absence of alcohol. It is the presence of everything else. It is the daily, incomplete work of keeping consciousness switched on, the same light I used to spend every evening trying to switch off. My head is clear. I wake up, and my hands are ready to work, and the work is where the thinking goes now.

I used to try to talk to people about all of this, about existence and meaning and the strangeness of being alive, and I was mostly met with hostility. Not because the ideas were unwelcome, but because I was delivering them drunk at a party to people who had not asked. I was lecturing. I was forcing people into my head instead of inviting them into it. Sobriety has taught me that these thoughts do not have to be delivered as lectures. I can make a thing, put it in a room, and let people feel it for themselves if they choose to. The work is an invitation.

The question that has chased me since I was ten has changed its character too. I used to fight my existential dread as if it were a demon. Now I do not push back against it. It exists alongside everything I do, and instead of fighting it, I let it wash over me and turn it into questions I can interrogate through art.

The most psychedelic experience there is, is simply being a human being. The full range of what we feel in a single ordinary day, if you actually sit inside it and do not numb it into silence, is wilder than any drug. It is harder, but it is real. And the deepest thing these last few months have given me is an acceptance of what I am: matter that has somehow, against all imaginable odds, come to know itself. Making peace with that, rather than raging against it, has changed everything. The days are now beautiful in a way I could not have described to you a year ago, because I would not have been awake to see them. I notice the little things. The particular grey of the sea on a flat morning. The way the morning light crosses my flat. A good coffee. A conversation that actually goes somewhere.

Looking at my work in the exhibition, the projector catching the figures and, in turn, making them impossibly alive, has taught me how awareness creates reality. A field is just a field until someone stands in it. A morning is just a morning until you are sober enough to be inside it. For eleven years, I suppressed the single most extraordinary fact about me, which is that I am here at all. I feel good. Properly, stupidly, fucking good. I feel, in the most mundane of moments, better than I have ever felt in my life.

None of that makes life easy. The last few months have been hard. There was the month with three funerals in three weeks, and more grief than I have quite known what to do with, a period of genuine connection with someone that slipped away and a couple of jobs I lost out on, and the whole stretch has been one of real, grinding stress. A year ago, that combination would have had me reaching for a bottle every night without a second thought. What carried me through instead was a newfound appreciation of the pain, of grief and of sadness, and the knowledge that they have to exist, as surely and as fully as joy and happiness do. I used to run from the dark feelings. Now I hold. The bad days have not stopped coming, and they are not going to. That was never the promise. The only promise I have made myself is that I will meet them with my eyes wide open.

The threshold

There is a threshold in everything. Between sleeping and waking. Between thinking about making something and actually making it. Between being alive and not being alive. Every significant moment in life happens at a crossing point, in the place where you are no longer what you were and not what you will be. The figures I made live on that line. They are the threshold itself, given a shape and standing in a room, waiting in the dark for the light to find them. The thing about the light, in the art and in life, is that it does not fall on everyone at once. It takes turns. You stand in the dark for a while. The light moves elsewhere. You are still there. Then it comes around again. It finds you, and for a moment, you are warm and seen and entirely yourself. Then it moves on, and that is okay, because that is simply how the light behaves.

I am standing on my own threshold now. Six months on one side of it, and a whole life I cannot make out on the other. The figures I made have not decided what to be. I have not decided what to be either. But the clay is warm, and it is warm for the oldest and simplest reason there is, which is that a living thing has been holding it. I am the figure, and the figure is me. The field that felt so empty when all of this began turns out not to have been empty at all.

Ryan Samuel Davies

Abertawe, 2026

This pilgrimage followed a rough patch, with the latter half of 2024 taking its toll. A breakup, a pile-up of personal setbacks, and a slow unravelling of who I thought I was. Depressed and adrift, I'd summoned a deluge and couldn't swim out. At the beginning of this year, however, I turned to the one thing I could still trust: my legs. I clocked at least 10,000 steps a day, tuning out the hubbub of the world. My body needed movement, and it forced my brain into the mindset of keeping on keeping on. A long walk was the natural conclusion to this newfound ritual. So, after five and a half days trekking from Carmarthenshire's rolling edges to Pembrokeshire's jagged crags, my body was more potent, my mind surer, humming with radiant triumph. I'd barely touch my phone, and the digital churn faded. Stepping away, I realised how much it had been winding me up.

In 2025, walking feels like an act of defiance. We're wired at warp speed with screens glaring, notifications pinging, doomscrolling past our souls. My anxiety thrives on it; I'm a chronic refresher, chasing information like an addict. Last year, my relationships shifted, increasing my reliance on social media for connection. Work demands perpetual availability. Beyond that, public discourse falters, and many online swallow headlines whole, with no scepticism and critical thinking falling off the edge of reason.

For this trip, I staged a subtle rebellion against the noise. I set up a separate Instagram account just for close friends, flipped on my out-of-office, and swore off social media by day beyond quick updates (mostly so my family knew I was still alive). Bit by bit, the noise faded. What started as a warm-up for my Camino turned sacred, pulling me into the crunch of the earth beneath my boots, the salt in the air, and the distant bells of St David's cathedral. Intentionally and unburdened, living simply like St David felt like an audacious stand against the centralised mess we're trapped in. In a world where tech's corporate grip tightens daily, TikTok-shredded attention spans chill me to the core; walking has become my radical act in a life choked by deadlines and despair: slow, deliberate, and fiercely alive.

St Davids isn't just a dot on a map. It's an earthly vein, ancient and firm, thrumming within the soil. Long before Christianity raised its spires, this was hallowed ground. The surrounding landscape cradles Palaeolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age sites, silent testaments to people who, like me, were probably drawn to the rugged coast and the restless sea, their rituals woven into the wind still howling across the peninsula. They saw something eternal in this place, a thin veil between earth and sky, and standing there, I felt it too.

When I arrived, footsore after 120 kilometres, the cathedral crouched in its hollow, grey stone glowing under a vast, bruised sky. But it was beyond the city, along the headlands near St Non's chapel, where the magic hit hardest. The air buzzed with a cosmic hush, waves crashing below, gulls wheeling above, St Brides Bay stretching into forever. It was as if the universe exhaled alongside me, slow and deep, and I was no longer just a walker but a part of something timeless. This feeling wasn't a beauty you could capture in a photo or a postcard - it was a presence, heavy with centuries of metaphysical energy channelled through pilgrim and peregrine alike. Soaking in its energy, I felt small and held, a single note in a song sung for millennia. St Davids didn't demand reverence; it invited it, and I couldn't help but answer.

I thought I knew how to walk when I started at Ferryside. 10 milers under my belt, 10,000 daily steps since January, but 120 kilometres to St David's was something new.

Day one, kicked off a day late by a yellow wind and rain warning, threw 28km of Carmarthenshire coast at me. To say I was knackered is an understatement. The extra distance wrung me out like a sponge. Yet the sun blazed, sheep blared, and four albums (two new, not having had the time to listen to them yet) motivated me along. Muddy off-road stretches clawed at my boots, but meticulous planning fed me. I set up camp a pint later, legs throbbing but feeling centred, ready for the next day's adventure.

Day two dawned under a star-strewn sky, waves and an owl's hoots lulling me in a shelter thanks to a tip from the barman in Llansteffan. Sunrise bathed the coast in peace as I met Gerald, a farmer beaming over his hedgerow's ancient scallop-shell marker, the Camino rearing its head even on this walk. Boggy fields sucked at my willpower, but beans, olive bread, and a waterproof pack cover that I had initially forgotten (thanks, Mam, for the car-park rendezvous) pushed me to the end of the day. Watching the sunset beyond the hill I'd have to walk up the next day, it was like the future was inviting me towards it - a call I’d answer sooner than I imagined.

That answer came with day three, a crucible. I climbed out of Pendine into fog-shrouded hills, rain pelting down, the steepest inclines yet pulling all the air out of my lungs. My legs burned. My resolve teetered. Behind me, a path too sheer to retreat. Ahead, a slog that whispered surrender. I stopped, chest heaving, soaked and shivering, and in that raw moment, something shifted. St David's words, 'Be joyful, keep the faith, do the little things', rose unbidden, reverberating around my skull. Not a booming sermon, but a gentle nudge. I mouthed them as a mantra against the storm. "Be joyful. Keep the faith. Do the little things". Step by sodden step, they carried me.

I don't know if it was divine, a saint's echo across centuries, or my mind clawing for light. Maybe both. But as the colourful facades of Tenby's seafront pierced the mist, the sun split the clouds, coating the ground in gold. Relief flooded me, endorphins roaring like the waves below. Those hours felt holy as if the land answered my calls for calm. Then my phone died whilst crossing Amroth Beach, leaving me alone with my thoughts. Old hurts and buried fears resolving in the silence. Was it religious? Psychological? I still can't pin it, but it bent my mind into something new, a clarity I hadn't experienced in years. My calloused feet screamed by Saundersfoot, yet I eventually limped into Tenby. A pre-booked hotel, a shower and fish and chips welcomed me at the end of a revelatory yet exhausting day. I spent the rest of the evening listening to the radio and plotting a train to Milford. Not defeat, but pride. I was listening to my body for a change and walking myself into someone stronger.

Day four confirmed that rest is a balm. Three days of relentless pace had masked my limits. Taking the train to Milford Haven that morning, leaping ahead by doubling back to Whitland felt odd but right. Pembrokeshire's cliffs and sunlit sea guided me to an AirBnB just outside Broad Haven, where an obscene amount of noodles, mackerel, and a double bed nursed my battered legs. As much as rest was welcome, I was excited to get going again. Walking wasn't just moving now; it was remaking me.

Day five flirted with perfection. Golden sun, a teasing breeze, and mud mercifully scarce. Five hours along the coast, a tepid sea dip, and then sprawling on rocks was pure bliss. I overshot that days walking by 8km, landing in Lower Solva with a pint, high on my rhythm. Camping under the stars one last time, my body buzzed with abandon. I'd loved walking before, but 120 kilometres cracked it wide open.

Day six crowned it all. I sipped coffee from my sleeping bag in Solva Harbour as the dawn broke and hit the road one last time. By 9 am, I had reached St Non's Chapel. Dipping my head in its ancient spring, back pain vanishing, feet briefly silent, I felt five days of strain alchemise into power. I joined other St David's Day pilgrims from Kent, Hong Kong, and Pembrokeshire, singing and being blessed by the Bishop. I cried several times this day, including after the city's blessing when the crowd gathered in (the aptly named) Cross Square broke into a rousing rendition of Hen Wlad fy'n Hadau. It was a fitting communal end to a solitary week. I then checked into the St Davids Cross Hotel, a gift from my Aunty, and had the most soothing bath I'd had in years. Then, in a moment of cosmic grace, I saw Calan, a band I have adored for years, perform one of their last-ever gigs in the cathedral. Once buckling, my legs had carried me here, each stride a jolt of life. That voice from day three lingered; 'do the little things', and I'd done them, step by step, into elation.

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Animals became fleeting companions along the way. I'd watch cows, sheep, and horses graze, their heads tilting at this bearded wanderer chatting away in some Doolittle-esque delusion. Gulls swept the sky in graceful curves, and their small, wild lives were a marvel to me. Each encounter anchored me to the moment, but it was on day five at Newgale Beach when being alone became something special. In my first true pause of 2025, I took two hours completely for myself. I waded into the sea and then lounged on the rocks, salt drying on my legs as waves hissed and retreated along the shore. The tide's slow creep finally forced me to move along, but for those two hours, time dissolved. I was just a body, a breath, held by the world: no emails, no doomscrolling, no rush. I relaxed fully and felt the world's weight lift, a whisper of self-love settling into my soul.

The Wales Coast Path wasn't just a route to St David's; it was a loving embrace, a vibrant world that walked beside me. Weather, that fickle pilgrim's muse, favoured me with grace I never took for granted. Sunrises spilt light across the coast, gilding cliffs and warming my wind-chapped face, while stars pierced the night, sharp and unyielding, characterising the lucidity blooming within. The rain came too, brief and fierce, soaking my boots and testing my grit, only to part for sunbursts that felt like rewards. Tides played their game, offering low-water shortcuts where sand squished cold beneath my toes, then rising to nudge me along longer paths, a reminder I moved to their rhythm. Relying on nature's whims rewove me into its fabric. Only five others crossed my path all week… a pity, given the glory of the Welsh coast on a sunny day, but that sparseness deepened the bond. This wasn't just scenery. It echoed my every step, from the strain of ascent to the quiet of arrival.

I spoke to the Universe more than I had in years, prayers rising like mist from the damp earth. Not desperate pleas, but soft words. Gratitude for the sun and the sea, strength for my legs, peace for my restless heart and a world engulfed in turmoil. I talked to myself too, not as some emerging madness, but as a salve, a spring cleaning of the mind after months of counselling. "You're enough," I'd murmur, "you've got this", trudging through mud or pausing to catch my breath and looking at the sea. I let the words settle into the cracks 2024 had left behind. Therapy had handed me tools; this walk gave me the stillness to wield them, sifting through the mess until the dust cleared.

The pilgrimage handed me something rare in 2025: solitude, vast and unhurried, a gift I hadn't known I craved. It was just me and the path for five and a half days. 120 kilometres of tranquillity where the world's clamour fell away, leaving space to breathe, think, and be.

Somewhere towards the end of the walk, as the planets aligned above Lower Solva, perhaps, I started to love the person walking. Not a grand epiphany, but a tender bloom, steady as the path beneath my boots. The solitude wasn't lonely; it was a mirror, reflecting a self I'd forgotten, softened by life's lessons and hardened by each step. Alone, I'd faced the tangles of grief, doubt, and the ache of starting over and found not just survival but a fragile, hopeful fondness for the one carrying me through.

When the walk was over, and I arrived home in Llanelli, the walk lingered in me, not just the distance but as a stillness that had seeped into my marrow. The world beyond still churned, its mechanisations grinding and its voices clashing, yet here was truth as old as the land I had traversed: simplicity holds power. St David’s call endured, a whisper that steadied me through storms and starlight, proving that small acts can carve the way onwards and upwards. I’d walked to a rhythm older than myself, a cadence of earth and sky that didn’t demand my signal or speed, only my presence. That’s the gift I carry now, a spark to kindle wherever the next trail leads, an implicit dare to anyone else to find their own stretch of wild and listen.

I was taught that you always have a choice in everything that you do. Yet I surrendered mine to increasingly vague and elaborate excuses, elongating my time with a bottle of wine over the people I love. Being with people, but being far from present. This behaviour further entrenched my demons into my psyche, externalising blame for who I had become. All of this pushes away friends and partners alike. Choosing to stay elusive and undetected rather than being frank about why all of this was happening in the first place. Alas, unconditional love doesn't mean unconditional tolerance. Chances run out and people become weary. At this point, honesty is the best policy.

In the labyrinth of modern existence, where the digital realm promises connection yet quite often isolates, my journey into the depths of human experience has been both enlightening and harrowing. Throughout my life, I have worked on projects that have taken me down the dark corridors of history. Uncovering local history from World War I and working with survivors of World War II, to the visceral realities of genocide and occupation in Rwanda, Chile, and Northern Ireland having met and worked with heroes from each of these events. Yet, juxtaposed against this backdrop, growing up surrounded by loving family and friends, my upbringing in the Church in Wales and the opportunities afforded to me in my artistic pursuits have taught me the beauty that also resides within humanity. It's a reminder that where there is light, darkness inevitably follows, shaping our understanding of the world in hues of grey rather than black and white.

The 21st century, with its digital tools designed for connectivity, has paradoxically fostered a disconnect that feels almost palpable. Tools that render real-time communication possible and have conjured a sense of constant connectedness should have brought us closer, but instead, they've introduced a new kind of solitude. The rise in mental health issues alongside the monopolisation of communication by corporations isn't coincidental. It's a reflection of a society where the pressure to project happiness, normality, and success is immense, yet the societal structures that would genuinely support these states of being are crumbling. This isn't merely problematic; it's a calculated erosion of our humanity, transforming our lived experiences into quantifiable data rather than cherished moments of connection.

My relationship with social media in particular is fraught with a battle of will. Connecting with friends who live hundreds or even thousands of miles apart is a profound and beautiful experience. However, the act of sharing my life online feels increasingly at odds with my desire for authenticity. I yearn for being able to share authentic experiences yet I find myself sharing the most mundane aspects of my life in the hope that they display a sign of being normal. “What even is ‘normal’?” I find myself asking.

This journey isn't just about escaping the gravity of societal expectations or the digital world's demands for constant visibility; it's about achieving what I've come to refer to as "escape velocity" in my personal life and thoughts. It's about breaking free from the cycle of comparing, conforming, and quantifying every aspect of our existence. It's about finding peace within the chaos, a place where the soul can orbit freely, unbound by the temporal or the expected. This escape isn't about leaving behind, but about transcending, finding a new altitude from which to view life, one where the fog of war on mankind, both literal and metaphorical, clears to reveal a path to inner serenity. This is my quest, not for escape, but for a profound change in how I engage with the world, a journey towards a deeper understanding of self amidst the tumult of our times.

As we firmly cement ourselves in the ‘digital age’, the concept of normal has been grotesquely distorted. Normal is humanity. Normal is being alive, being flawed, and being yourself. Yet normal has become striving for as many followers as possible, procuring likes, and removing your individuality as a sacrifice to the digital collective. Indeed, society espouses the importance of living as your authentic self but when one questions the essence of reality and goes in search of the ultimate truth they are chastised and ostracised due to their weirdness by not conforming to the collective ‘truth’ of our day.

My journey through a recent breakup has been a stark mirror reflecting how deeply entrenched this digital validation has become. When you lose someone close to you, you are confronted with the naked truth of yourself. Your brain tends to err on the side of the negative. Looking at myself, I stared deeply at a reflection that I increasingly did not recognise, a silhouette of who I should be. Intense effort went into that relationship, years of love, care, and affection. Yet at the same time as the landslide of my psyche fell deeper into the valley of self-doubt these efforts became increasingly hollow. Rendered immobile and encased in a shell of deceit. Deceit towards myself and a lack of acknowledgment that things were not okay. Naturally, you cannot truly love someone else if you do not love yourself. The digital and social environments in which this erosion took place made it hard to see, as the ease of access to alcohol coupled with the expectation to maintain a facade of emotional resilience and suppression masked how unwell I truly was.

A serious breakup can make you feel like less than a man. The narrative surrounding masculinity in our society often places men in a paradox. On one hand, there's an expectation to embody strength, stoicism, and success; on the other, there's a growing critique of these very traits as toxic, without providing a clear path for men to navigate this complexity. This pressure cooker environment, where the definition of masculinity is both idealised and vilified, leaves many men grappling with an identity crisis, unsure how to reconcile the expectations with the tools, or lack thereof, provided to meet them. This societal script doesn't inherently label men as violent or toxic but contributes to a culture where the expectations of masculinity are rigid, often unattainable, and seldom equipped with the emotional or psychological tools needed to achieve them healthily. The result is a cycle where men are judged for failing to meet these expectations without being given the means to redefine or understand masculinity in a way that embraces both strength and sensitivity.

In my quest for self-improvement and understanding, I've turned towards a more holistic view of masculinity. Strength, in this redefined sense, isn't about dominance or suppression of feeling but about balance. Integrating traditionally 'feminine' qualities like empathy, vulnerability, and compassion. This isn't about diminishing traditional masculine traits but about enriching them, recognising that true resilience comes from a place of emotional depth and understanding.

In fact a valuable lesson can be found in the teachings of Jesus, particularly his actions and words which offer a profound perspective on this balance:

“Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”—Matthew 26:52-53

This scripture speaks to a broader approach to life, suggesting that aggressive dominance isn't the path to peace or fulfilment. Instead, it advocates for a life where strength is measured in one's ability to show restraint, empathise, and uplift others, rather than dominate them.

In embracing this balanced view, I've found that true masculinity involves acknowledging and integrating the full spectrum of human virtues, not as a rejection of traditional roles but as an expansion of them. It's about equipping men with the emotional intelligence to navigate life's challenges and relationships with integrity, rather than leaving them to flounder in outdated expectations or to be criticised for embodying them without guidance.

This journey isn't just about personal growth but about contributing to a cultural shift where masculinity is defined by the capacity for both strength and sensitivity and where men are encouraged to be fully human. It's a call for a society that supports men in their complexity, providing them with the tools not just to survive but to thrive in the modern world, fostering connections that are genuine, not superficial. In practical terms, this means turning away from the vices of modernity that have ensnared us in their trap for years. Exercise, good sleep and the odd cathartic cry are essential tools in this journey towards filling up the hollow shells we have become.

In a year dominated by headlines of violence against women and girls, conversations around national identity and who we want to be as a society, it is incumbent on all of us to strive towards personal betterment in the pursuit of a more just and peaceful world. We will all fight our own battles, but the collective war against cultural and social decline is one that will be won not by the might of our arms, but by the strength of our character and the depth of our compassion. It is through individual acts of kindness, understanding, and courage that we can begin to mend the frayed edges of our society, turning away from division and towards unity. In this endeavour, each step towards personal growth not only heals the individual but also contributes to the healing of our collective human condition, setting the foundation for a future where justice and peace are not just ideals, but realities we live by.

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. G. Michael Hopf

As New Year's Eve approaches, marking not a celebration but a profound personal anniversary, I'm embarking on 2025 with a resolve to transform my struggles into strength. Amidst billions, I stand alone yet not in isolation, openly confronting my past with humility and seeking forgiveness. This year, I'm committed to healing old wounds, mending relationships, and redefining strength through vulnerability. Grateful for the love and time I've received, I look forward to a year of growth, where challenges become opportunities for empowerment and connection.

The tradition of setting resolutions might feel more like a relic of a past self than a blueprint for the future. This year, more than ever, the concept of New Year's resolutions seems fraught with the weight of a world that's been anything but predictable. Yet, it's precisely this unpredictability that calls for a profound shift in how we approach change and time.

The past year has taught me that time doesn't march in a straight line; it spirals, loops, and sometimes seems to stand still. This understanding of time as non-linear, where moments can be revisited and reimagined, offers a fresh perspective on personal transformation. Instead of linear goals, we might consider how our actions ripple through time, affecting not just our future but also our past perceptions and future possibilities.

In 2025, the ethos of change is not about loud declarations or following the crowd but about quiet revolutions within. It's about daily prayer, not as a routine but as a conversation with the eternal, grounding us in something beyond the immediate. Meditation becomes not just a practice but a way to connect with the timeless, understanding that our thoughts and actions today shape our existence across all dimensions of time.

The trend to wards sobriety and living slowly speaks to a desire for authenticity and connection. These aren't just passive activities; they're rituals that bring us closer to the essence of life, away from the distractions of modern excess. They're about being present, a concept that, in a non-linear time, means engaging with now in a way that resonates through our life's spiral.

The future is an uncertain place, its road obscured by smoke and fear. Despite this, it’s imperative to walk it - step by uncomfortable step. Armed with honesty and a renewed sense of purpose, I move forward, lighter than before, yet stronger. My commitment now is to rebuild connections, both with others and within myself, embracing this balance of strength and vulnerability. I aim to live with intention and to carry forward the lessons of compassion and resilience in everything I do. Each step is a conscious choice to cultivate growth and integrity in a world that often pulls us away from what is real. This journey is only beginning, and for the first time, I feel ready to face it—whole, human, and hopeful.

Godspeed and Happy New Year.