The Idea

The kettle had just gone off in the kitchen, and I was on the sofa waiting for my chai, half in the conversation and half out of it. My cousin stepped out to take a call, and before the door was even shut properly, the room turned.

She never stays in touch to see how we are.
She doesn’t even cook for her husband.
She’s the reason they don’t have children.

You know this scene. And if you’re honest, you’ve probably taken part in it.

I have too.

One comment lands and you add one of your own.

I sat there that day feeling like I was having an allergic reaction to the whole thing, itching to get out of the room. So I left.

But on the way home I kept thinking about something that bothered me more than what had been said about my cousin.

I’d said something too.

And I couldn’t work out why.

The Science

Gossip feels good. There’s a reason for that.

Brain imaging studies show that sharing information about someone else triggers a release of dopamine, which is the same chemical the brain releases when you eat something you love or hear good news.

But there’s more going on here.

Research shows that gossip activates both the brain’s reward centre and its stress centre simultaneously. While the dopamine is firing, your amygdala — which is the part of the brain that scans for threat — becomes overactive. At the same time, your prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for clear thinking and focus, starts to lose efficiency.

You get the hit of pleasure and the cost of arousal at the same time. Which is why a long gossip session can leave you feeling strangely drained, even though it felt good while it was happening.

And then there’s the hidden consequence of what you’re doing to yourself.

When you regularly speak negatively about people, you’re actually training your brain to look for what’s wrong first. Not only in others, but in yourself too. You literally become someone who sees all people as a threat.

And here’s the part most people don’t talk about. Gossip is the most memorable type of information the brain encounters, more memorable than facts. Brown University found that the brain’s approach to spreading gossip resembles the same algorithms that drive viral content on social media.

When someone hands you a negative story about a person, your brain stores it deeply and your instinct is to pass it on.

Which is kind of like how a virus works.

Where It Shows Up

At a coffee catchup with a friend that starts as a check-in but quickly turns into an hour about someone else entirely. You try to offer a new perspective. But they don’t really want advice, they just want to vent. The conversation gets louder and more charged. By the time you leave, you’re drained and promise yourself to not see them again for some time.

On the train home after a productive day at work, you overhear two colleagues who are not so quietly talking about their day and complaining about a particular person. You shake your head and pop your headphones in, frustrated that they’re investing their time badmouthing someone instead of talking about something they were thankful for.

And then there’s the family group chat, or the phone call that starts with “did you hear about so and so?” This conversation is the worst kind because it pulls the person apart in what should be a safe space - family. By the end of the call you’ve been handed the same story, the same judgment, the same way of seeing that person.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of dopamine is the fact that we’re living within a social virus.

We think gossiping is harmless, but words are not just sounds. They carry the energy of the person speaking them.

That energy gets passed on — to the friend at the coffee table, the colleague on the train, the family member on the phone — and with it a dose of criticism gets transferred to an unsuspecting brain.

The more you repeat it, the more you harm them. They go home seeing the world a little more negatively.

And so it spreads, one conversation at a time, like an epidemic.

The person being talked about doesn’t even know the conversations are happening.

But you do.

Do better, the brains in this world are relying on it.

The Idea

The night before I flew to London, I packed a red panda in my carry-on. His name was Rem Rem, and he had long weighted arms, round ears, and a smile that wasn’t going to disappear because of bumps in the air.

I’d brought him because I was a nervous flyer and I’d read that deep pressure therapy was good at promoting calmness. After a run of turbulent flights around Australia and New Zealand, I was desperate enough to try anything.

I’m going to look ridiculous, but this will be a fun experiment.

Rem Rem had extra-long weighted arms designed to wrap around you. The idea was that the weight of these across my body would mimic the feeling of being held - like receiving a hug.

Every time the plane went up on take-off, my stomach would drop and I’d spend the rest of the flight hyper sensitive to the smallest bump in the air. It had happened enough times now that I started dreading things from the moment I booked a holiday.

I boarded the flight to London already drained from it all, Rem Rem’s arms sitting across my shoulders.

A few hours in, the turbulence hit. The plane shook, the lockers rattled, but instead of gripping the armrest, I looked down at Rem Rem.

He was still smiling, still calm.

The panic I’d been bracing for didn’t arrive.

The Science

Your body is covered in tiny sensors found within your skin, muscles, joints, and inner ear, that track movement, pressure, and vibration. They’re called mechanoreceptors and they feed your brain a constant stream of information about where you are and what's happening around you.

For a regular flyer, the brain registers take-off, the tiny movements of the airframe, the shift in altitude, as unremarkable. But for anxious flyers who are already on edge, something different happens. The same data gets read as urgent instead.

The stomach drop felt on take-off gets interpreted by the nervous system as a warning, rather than a routine part of flying. When turbulence starts, the inner ear and eyes send the brain conflicting information, telling it the body is feeling movement that the eyes can’t account for.

The brain reads that conflict as threat, which is why it’s so frightening even when you know the plane is fine.

Deep pressure works through the same system but tells your body the opposite story. When even weight is applied across your body, the tiny sensors activate the vagus nerve. This is a long nerve that travels from the base of your brain through your chest and into your gut. It’s responsible for regulating your heart rate, your breathing, and how your body responds to stress.

Its activation pulls you out of fight-or-flight and into rest-and-recover. Your cortisol drops and you stop treating everything around you as a threat.

The weight of Rem Rem’s arms feel like a hug from a loved on, reassuring the body:

I’ve got you, you’re safe, I’m still here

During turbulence it gives your nervous system something solid to hold whilst everything else feels uncertain - and it works.

Where It Shows Up

You may have heard of weighted blankets that work on the same principle. First developed for children with sensory processing differences, they offer steady pressure across the body throughout the night. People who use them regularly report lower cortisol and better sleep.

The weighted blanket market is projected to reach $3.82B by 2035 - something airlines should pay attention to.

The hugs you receive from people work the same way - but only if they last long enough. Researchers have found that a hug needs to hold for around 20 seconds for it to be registered as safety, rather than touch. A proper hug held long enough will visibly soften you, causing your shoulders to drop and breathing to slow down.

There’s even a small wave of adult-sized swaddle sleeping bags on the market now. Fully grown adults are tucking themselves into something that mimics being tightly wrapped. It sounds a little silly. But it works for the same reason everything else here works.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of fear on a flight is a body that doesn’t believe what it’s being told.

You can know logically that the plane is fine. Pilots fly through worse conditions, and i’m told that you’re statistically safer on a plane than in a car. But none of this information reaches the part of you that’s afraid, in the moment you’re afraid.

That’s because fear doesn’t live in the part of the brain that listens to facts. It lives in the part that listens to sensation.

Which is why my beautiful red panda with weighted arms did something a thousand reassurances couldn’t do. It gave my nervous system the one thing it actually trusted - the feeling of being held.

The next time you’re scared and the facts aren’t landing, stop reasoning with yourself. Find something to hold you instead.

Meet Ari, a character who will appear in Subtextt when the science calls for it. This is her first story.

Her morning begins in a meeting about electron shuttling, a technique that moves a single electron through a silicon chip. She ends up inside one, passing through quantum wells that show her something she wasn’t expecting to find.

Ari had not meant to leave the meeting

She had been sitting at the long table on the seventh floor, her notebook open, her pen in her hand, watching Dr. Ling draw a diagram on the whiteboard of something extremely small.

The diagram showed a row of tiny dots inside a silicon chip, connected by a long thin corridor, and Dr. Ling was explaining how a single electron could be moved from one dot to the next. Carrying a piece of quantum information with it as it travelled.

“We call it shuttling,” Dr. Ling said.

Ari wrote the word in her notebook.

Then, without any warning whatsoever, she was gone.

The Ride

She was sitting on something.

It was small and round and warm and it hummed. She looked down at it. It was glowing a faint blue-white and vibrating at a frequency she could feel in her back teeth.

It was an electron.

Well, she thought. That’s new.

The electron didn’t wait for her to have any further thoughts on the matter. The corridor ahead of them lit up, and they shot forward at a speed that made her grab onto the electron with both hands and hold on very tightly indeed.

The walls blurred, the ceiling disappeared, and her hair streamed behind her. There was no sound except the hum, which was now radiating from her in all directions.

Ahead of them, at the end of the corridor, something glowed.

It was red.

The Red Well

The electron dropped into the first well and stopped suddenly.

Ari looked around.

The space was vast, but she wasn’t.

The walls pulsed with a deep red light. She took a step to the left, the red darkened. She stepped back, it brightened. She did this three more times because it was satisfying.

Then she saw them.

Every version of herself she had ever been was standing in the red light looking back at her. She couldn’t count how many there were, but it must have been many thousands.

She noticed one sitting in the corner of a room, a baby who wasn’t yet walking. Another with a woman she didn't recognise, who took both her hands and said she had needed to hear that. And one at a table by the ocean, writing fast, filling pages.

Ari looked at the one writing. It collapsed immediately.

She looked at the one at the conference.

Gone.

She looked at the baby in the corner. The red light was pulsing faster.

She reached toward her.

Before she could touch her, the electron shot forward. The red light and every Ari in it disappeared at once.

The Orange Well

She had arrived at the second well with her arm still reaching. Ari quickly put her arm down before anyone noticed.

She looked up.

This well was full of light. It had thousands of tiny points, darting and turning, forming shapes and patterns, then dissolving before she knew what they were. They moved like swooping starlings, as if one mind was controlling all of them at the same time. She turned slowly on the spot watching them, mesmerised.

Each one was making its own decisions, and yet all of them together made something that took her breath away.

She had seen this before, she thought. It was like the way a conversation moved around a table without anyone guiding where it should go.

Nobody in control. And yet…this.

The orange light wheeled and turned above her head.

The electron tapped her foot.

It was time to move on.

The Yellow Well

Ari arrived into the third well and looked down.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing, the floor was the night sky.

Stars stretched beneath her feet in every direction, tiny and brilliant against the dark. She walked on the stars, half expecting to fall through. But she didn’t.

Then she saw it. There was a pattern in the stars, and it was Dr Ling’s diagram. Every dot exactly as he had shown it.

She stood there for a moment, looking down at the universe. She felt very, very small indeed.

The electron tapped her foot again.

They moved.

The Blue-Violet Well

The final well was different. Ari knew it immediately.

This one held still.

A deep blue-violet quiet that felt full.

Ari climbed off the electron and crouched beside it. She had been riding it for so long she had assumed it was solid.

It’s made of waves.

She reached toward it and found no surface. Just patterns of energy moving in every direction and spreading into the space around it.

She remembered something Dr. Ling had said once, half to himself.

At the smallest scales, the universe stops being a collection of objects. It becomes a collection of relationships.

Then the well began to show her things.

The red well first. All those versions of herself, still shimmering. The choices she’d made in each version had all been hers. Every single one of them. Which meant she had similarly assembled this particular version of her life without knowing it.

That’s a bit alarming.

The red well faded.

The orange appeared. The points of light were swooping together. She found herself among them, a single point threaded to everyone who had shaped her and everyone she had shaped in return. Her sisters. Her friends. The teacher who had said something once, that she still thought about.

Every one of them had changed her. And she had also changed every one of them. Without any of them realising it.

The orange dissolved.

Now the yellow. Stars above and below, revealing the same shapes at every scale. The universe, it turned out, did not invent different rules for different sizes of things. What governed an electron governed a galaxy. And if it governed a galaxy, it governed everything in between.

Including her.

Ari sat beside the electron and thought about this.

She had assembled herself from choices. She was woven into a pattern far larger than herself. And the same rules that applied to the electron applied to her too.

Which meant she wasn’t solid either.

She looked at the waves. She was more like them than she had known.

It was a very good thought.

Then she smiled. And climbed back on. The corridor lit up, showing the way back home. Each well glowing as she passed through.

The Return

Ari blinked.

She was back at the long table on the seventh floor. Her notebook open, her pen in hand.

Dr. Ling was still drawing on the whiteboard.

“…and so the electron arrives here,” he was saying, tapping the final dot.

"You cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string. The electron carries everything it has passed through with it. That is the point."

Ari looked down at her notebook.

She had written one word.

Shuttling.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of wonder is something Ari didn’t expect to learn from a silicon chip. She is not a fixed thing moving through life, but a form of the relationships between everything she has passed through.

Nothing lived is ever truly left behind, it travels with you.

The Idea

Every morning I give gratitude for another day. It’s another chance to learn something new and to make some small difference to someone else. I light incense to cleanse my mind, a ghee lamp to give me clarity, and listen to calming music.

One morning, I was in the middle of it when I heard screeching coming from outside.

It was panicked, coming from the balcony. I looked through the glass doors to see what was going on. It was a rainbow lorikeet, screeching loudly and looking around lost and confused.

Head down, then up, then left, then right. It could hear its companion but couldn’t see it. The screeching got louder, more frantic. It flew to the left, and then toward me, then back to the left, trying to work out where its other half was. Until it finally figured out it was on the balcony upstairs, and just like that it was gone.

I stood there for a moment, fascinated by what I had just seen.

It felt familiar. Almost exactly what I do when I can’t find my husband, although I don’t think he appreciates my screeches ;)

I’d always thought that the need to find the one person whose presence settles everything was just love between two people.

Turns out love is not uniquely human at all.

The Science

What sounds like screeching is actually a specific sound rainbow lorikeets make to locate their companion, when they can’t see them. You can think of it like a signature sound, the same way you’d recognise a specific person’s voice in a noisy room.

Lorikeets pick up new sounds throughout their lives from the birds and environment around them, adding to the range of calls they can make. So the sounds they produce keep changing and growing. This had always puzzled scientists because if their voices keep changing, how do they recognise each other?

In 2023, researchers at the Max Planck Institute found the answer studying monk parakeets - another parrot species. Even though a bird’s call changes throughout its life, its voice always sounds like itself.

That consistent underlying tone, unique to each bird, is what allows them to find each other across distance and noise. It's called a voice print.

It’s the same way you’d recognise your best friend’s voice whether she or he is laughing, whispering, or singing. Something about it always stays the same because your brains learn the sound of the people you love and maps it permanently.

That morning the lorikeets used a distress call that only they could understand, and listened out for each other. That’s quite intimate, because in a way their voice prints - or calls - were serving one another.

Stay with me here.

• When they were moving through trees, calling let the other know I’m here, stay near me.

• When they were in danger, calling warned the other and said I will keep you safe.

• When one flew off and they were separated, calling comforted the other and said I will find you.

So the voice print was in service of the relationship, and not just for survival.

It said,

I am here. Are you still there?

Come this way.

Don’t lose me. I won’t lose you.

It’s love at its simplest. The repeated act of recognising each other.

Where It Shows Up

In a healthy partnership between two people who constantly check in on one another, so they know they are emotionally safe. They recognise when something is off before the other has said a word, and show up to the distress call. In times of despair, they take the lead and say follow me. It’s something most of us forget to do, almost always distracted by our own needs that we totally miss it.

It shows up in the relationships you have with your siblings and parents, who hear something shift in your voice and already know something is up. So they rally together to show up and make sure you don’t feel alone.

And it comes up at work, when a colleague notices you’ve gone quiet, and can see you’re feeling unsafe, so steps in. These people are your work lorikeets, because they pay enough attention to recognise others.

In each case, someone learned the sound of you. And didn't stop listening.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of fascination is an important lesson that came from the most unlikely messenger, a lost lorikeet.

It called for its companion without hesitation. And it didn’t stop until it found it.

There are people in your life who have been doing the same thing. Learning the sound of you. Calling out to find you. It may be a partner, it may be family, it may be a colleague.

Whoever it is, the people who learn the sound of you often don’t know the effect they have.

Tell them today.

The Idea

I almost walked right past it.

A light projection hovered above the water at Vivid Sydney. I didn’t quite know what I was looking at, so I sat down and waited to see what would happen.

The longer I watched, the more it pulled me in.

It moved through space, showing planets, stars, and geometric patterns that shifted and folded until it arrived at a black hole.

It was at this point, staring at a portal-shaped pattern of light that looked like something out of Dr Strange, that a question I’ve been carrying my whole life surfaced again.

If I can watch time passing, what part of me is doing the watching?

The Science

Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2020. He has spent decades studying the relationship between the brain, consciousness and the physical world. And what he concluded is this.

The brain produces many things. But it does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is simply awareness, the part of you that experiences, feels, and knows that you exist. And awareness cannot be simulated or replicated, not by a computer, not by technology, not by anything science can currently explain.

Therefore, consciousness isn’t contained inside the brain. It exists beyond it.
And if it exists beyond the brain, it isn't limited by the body either.

If this is true, then we don’t begin at birth, or end at death. We may be timeless.

Which brings me to time.

Most physicists believe that past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Not one after the other, but all at once. It’s called the block universe, that states every moment you have ever lived, and every moment you haven’t lived yet already exists.

Your mind processes these moments one piece at a time because it has to.
If everything arrived all at once, it would be impossible to make sense of them. So it puts them into a sequence instead - what is past, present, and future.

But that's not strictly how time works, it’s just how the mind carries it.

If time isn’t the straight line your mind makes it, and if consciousness exists beyond your body, then the question of whether you have always existed becomes a very real one.

Not the person you are, but the awareness that sits behind everything you think and feel and know. Does that part of you really have a beginning and end? Maybe it was here long before this life, and will continue long after it.

Where It Shows Up

You may have watched Quantum Leap, a show from 1989 that follows a physicist whose consciousness gets pulled out of his body and sent back in time, leaping into different people's lives across different moments in history. Decades later the same idea showed up in The OA on Netflix, where a woman has near death experiences and discovers she can move between dimensions, existing outside the rules of time and the body entirely.

You may have had that feeling of having been somewhere before, when you know you haven't. Charles Dickens explored déjà vu in his 1850 novel David Copperfield as a feeling, he said, of having been here before in a remote time. Of knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if you suddenly remembered it.

Scientists have studied it and found that the experience is real, because it can be measured. What they haven't found is a complete explanation for where it comes from. But the possibility that it's a trace of a life already lived hasn’t been ruled out.

You may have seen YouTube videos about near death experiences. They all describe the same thing, that time stops existing and people seeing every moment of their life all at once. They share an overwhelming sense of love and connection to everything and everyone. And may be experiencing time the way the block universe says it actually is.

And then there are those visitations from friends and family members who have passed away. You know this if it’s happened to you. They don’t feel like ordinary dreams, they are lucid, calm, and strangely certain, as if a loved one has stepped through the distance death creates to let you know they are okay.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of your life moving in one direction is an idea that changes everything. The mind is turning time into a straight line, but your consciousness is never bound by it.

And because it isn’t, it moves through a timeline that never stops.

From inside the line that the mind creates, everything looks final.
Outside of it, nothing is.

The Idea

It’s 5:30am and I’m at Bondi Beach, cuddled up with my husband, waiting for the sunrise. Around us, dotted along the sand, are others who have come to do the same.

There’s something ritualistic about this, which I love. A community of people have shown up to watch the sky turn golden.

But as I’m sitting here, I feel a sense of shame. Because while I’m waiting, there are lots of people already moving. Runners on the beach, swimmers moving in the early swell. And closest to us, a yoga group, stretching in near silence as the light begins to come in.

There’s a simple philosophy behind what I’m watching. Rise with the sun. Move with its energy. Because the early morning carries the highest vibration of the day, and these people know it. They are in sync with something most of us sleep through - including me - well, except for today.

My eyes stay on the yoga group. The way they stretch deliberately is like they’re greeting every part of themselves before the day starts.

And it reminds me of something I’d read about ants.

The Science

In 1953, a Cambridge-trained entomologist named Derek Wragge Morley published a book called The Ant World. He had been studying ants since he was fourteen, and what he documented about their waking behaviour is, in his own words, a very human-like ritual.

When an ant wakes, it stretches every part of its body before it moves. Scientists have a word for this - pandiculation. It's the involuntary urge to stretch on waking. Humans do it. Dogs do it. And as it turns out, so do ants.

After the stretching comes what Wragge Morley calls a prolonged grooming. The ant systematically cleans its antennae, head, and body before it does anything else. Only after both are done does it get started with its day.

There’s a reason for all of this. An ant finds its way through the world almost entirely through its antennae, picking up chemical signals that tell it where to go, what to eat, and who to trust. If those antennae are dirty from sleep, the ant is essentially operating blind. The grooming fixes that, and the stretching wakes the muscles up. Neither step gets skipped.

Similarly, humans have known this for thousands of years. Ayurvedic medicine, which is an ancient Indian approach to health and wellbeing that predates modern medicine, has been recommending the same morning sequence: to stretch and move when you wake up, then cleanse the body before the day begins.

The practice is called Dinacharya. The ant does it in minutes, for humans it’s takes a bit longer. But the principle is the same: move first, then clean the body, then begin your day.

Where It Shows Up

A friend told me that her cat does this every single morning - stretching every part of its body when it wakes up. She’d never thought about why. Most people who have pets will have seen the same.

If you’ve stayed at a wellness hotel, you might have signed up to a morning yoga session which is almost always the first thing on the schedule. It’s always at sunrise, before breakfast, and before you do anything else.

And whilst yoga has become a modern fitness trend, it’s actually rooted in Hatha yoga, the physical practice that most modern yoga descends from. It was never designed as exercise, but a preparation ritual used by Hindus and Buddhists as a way of waking the body up before meditation.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of the stretch is the truth that we are just like ants.

The pull you feel to lengthen and reach before you get out of bed is something your body wants to do. The ant knows it, the cat knows it, and history knows it.

Somewhere along the way, we gave our innate wisdom on stretching away to the fitness industry, confusing it for something done at the gym, or a yoga class.

But that’s not what it is. It never was.

Stretching is intimately connected to who we are, with the natural world, done universally.

Before you reach for your phone tomorrow morning, let the stretch happen. The ants will be doing it, so you're in good company.

The Idea

This happened a long time ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

It’s 3am and I’m awake.

Anxiety has pulled me out of sleep again. I’m lying in the dark going over and over what I’m going to say tomorrow.

Just stay calm. Say the right things. Don’t answer back. It’ll be fine.

I’ve been saying that to myself for a year now.

He appeared to have it all. Charismatic, visionary, the kind of person who walked into a room and immediately owned it. Everyone admired him. I admired him, it’s why I’d joined his team, and I trusted he would open doors for me.

If only I’d known it would turn out like this. His fists slamming the table. I couldn’t think straight. Frozen. Told I was wrong, told I didn't listen, told that I was too special to behave like this.

Did that just cross a line?

I was so consumed by anxiety that I couldn’t pick myself up. I stopped speaking up at work and at home too.

The Niki who always spoke her mind was on the floor, along with her confidence.

For a long time I thought the whole thing was my fault. But I was wrong.

Everything changed when I stopped asking what was wrong with me, and started wondering what had happened to him.

The Science

Picture the moment as it unfolded.

I’ve said something. Maybe given a different perspective that didn’t fit with his. You know the kind of thing that gets shared in meetings all the time.

But he reacted immediately. I saw him tighten up, and then the disproportionate anger came in fast. His fists came down on the table, again, and again. His voice filled the whole room - direct, accusatory, threatening.

I did what I had done so many times before, I went small and said nothing.

Please God, let it be over soon.

He tells me to leave, so I get out of there quickly.

He’s alone now.

He picks up his phone almost immediately and calls someone who will listen. As he speaks, he needs to hear that he was right. That what he said was reasonable and that I must be the problem.

There's something in science that helps explain this moment.

Every human brain has a system whose only job is to keep you alive. It scans your environment constantly looking for anything that might be a threat. When it detects danger, it moves fast, flooding the body with stress hormones. This shuts down rational thought, and takes over completely.

Neuroscientists call this an amygdala hijack — the moment the brain’s threat detection system overrides rational thought entirely. It happens in seconds, before the conscious mind has caught up. And it looks, from the outside, exactly like anger.

In most people, another part of the brain will step in quickly to reason clearly, find empathy, and offer perspective. It will say: this is just a meeting, you’re safe, stand down.

But when someone has spent years, maybe a lifetime, learning that their position in the room is the thing keeping them safe the threat response runs the show.

And what comes out isn’t leadership. Let me repeat that, what comes out isn’t leadership. It’s someone who was never taught that a difference of opinion doesn’t mean danger.

The phone call ends. The feeling settles in him, for now.

He doesn’t know that nothing has actually been resolved. He doesn’t know he’ll need to make the same call to his friend tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

He doesn’t even know that the anger in the room was his fear dressed up as authority.

He just knows he needed to hear that he was right.

Where It Shows Up

You know this person.

It might be a boss who takes credit for your ideas at the same time as dismissing them. Or a partner who needs to say the last word. Or a friend who leaves you minimised in every conversation and you can’t quite put your finger on why.

What makes this so hard to see in the moment is that these people are often extraordinarily compelling on the surface. Charming, decisive, magnetic.

But the gap between the public version and the private one is precisely the point. They perform confidence. It’s how their fear stays hidden, even from themselves.

What they do to you in those moments has nothing to do with who you are, because it is actually about them.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being shut down is someone else’s fear looking for a place to go.

There’s a principle in physics that says energy cannot be created or destroyed — it can only move from one place to another. His anxiety became my 3am. His fear became my self-doubt. His instability became my silence.

I didn’t create any of that. I just absorbed it.

He taught me something I really needed to learn: finding humility instead of bitterness in an unbearable situation — because that was the only part of it that was mine to choose.

Humility doesn’t excuse what happened, but it helped in understanding that the energy being transferred to me wasn’t mine to hold onto. And just like that, after years of pain, I let it go.

I didn’t know that while I was lying awake at 3am, rehearsing my survival. But I know it now.

And if you’re lying awake right now rehearsing yours — I want you to know it too.

Someone else’s inability to regulate themselves is not evidence that you are too much, too wrong, or too difficult.

It is evidence that their fear needed somewhere to go.

If you can get to this place, gratitude and freedom can begin.

The Idea

I didn’t expect silence to be so loud.

When I moved to Sydney I had left a career, a city, and a version of myself. I knew it was the right call, a choice I’d made with both eyes open. I stepped off the plane ready for a fresh start. Genuinely ready. And then, well, nothing happened.

For the first month I let myself settle in. And then, the panic set in.

Omg, what have I done? Did I just make the biggest mistake of my life?

I wasn’t sure, so I did what I always do when things feel uncertain. I defaulted to work. I went on a mission to understand the job market - the landscape, the equivalent title of my previous role, the pay bandings, and where my skills might fit in. I told myself I was taking practical steps, but if I’m honest, I was looking for myself in a job title. And it wasn’t there.

Working in deep tech had given me a lot of purpose and belonging, but now without it, I didn’t quite know who I was.

So I kept moving. Applications, introductions, threads with no replies. I kept showing up every day as if effort alone could fast-forward the process. What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t stuck because I wasn’t trying hard enough. I was stuck because I hadn’t yet understood what the pause was actually for.

It took an octopus to explain it to me.

The Science

An octopus has three hearts.

Wait, what? How wasn’t I taught this in school?

Yes, three hearts. Two smaller ones handle the background work of keeping it alive — pushing blood through its gills, ticking away without any effort from the octopus at all. And one main heart that does everything else, things like powering its brain, arms, and decisions.

For most of its life, the octopus moves slowly and deliberately across the seafloor. Swimming is reserved for moments of genuine threat, and every time it does, something has to give. Its main heart stops. Not slows, it actually stops.

The pressure of high-speed movement is so intense that the heart simply cannot beat. The harder it pushes forward, the more its main heart shuts down.

So the octopus does the most logical thing. It walks instead, because walking is the only mode that keeps all three hearts beating. It gives itself the reset it needs before it moves again with any real force.

We are not so different. You cannot run on panic mode and build the next version of yourself at the same time. Something has to slow down first.

Really slow down.

Where It Shows Up

You can feel this in the gaps between chapters in your life, whether you chose them or not.

The months after a relationship ends, before you know who you are without it. The stretch between leaving one job and finding the next one that fits what you want to do next. The quiet after a house move, a sudden loss of a loved one, any decision that was right and still cost something real.

We’re hard on ourselves in these pauses, calling them stalling. We treat them as proof that something is missing — drive, direction, a certainty other people seem to carry easily. We try to force the next thing, and when it doesn’t come we push harder, the way the octopus would if it kept trying to sprint with a heart that had already stopped.

A pause is not the absence of progress. It’s the condition for it.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being stuck is a reset that’s already underway.

About six months into the new start, I sent an email to a contact I’d received from a SXSW mentor. It felt so small against the size of the silence I was sitting in.

I fully expected no response but received a reply immediately. We spoke and she posted my resume out to her network, and Mel Kramer (my hero) grabbed me with both arms. A few days later I interviewed and was offered a role that broke any career ceiling I had reached before.

What followed became Diraq, Subtextt, and moments that slowly started to feel like me again. The next version.

None of it was reachable before the pause had run its course. My main heart had needed the stillness to reset before it could power anything new.

If you’re in a pause right now, let me reassure you that it won’t last forever. The question isn’t how to end it faster, but what you can do inside it to get ready for what comes next.

The Idea

I’ve noticed that I function best when my body and mind are in rhythm. Over the past few years, meditation has become a daily way to tune myself into the day.

What started as an experiment quickly produced results I’d only heard about but never quite believed. My heartbeat, breath, and focus settled into a natural rhythm and everything became clearer and lighter. And my energy slowly began to flow more efficiently.

The Science

Engineers have spent decades trying to solve a problem your body solved long ago. How do you hold energy steady instead of burning through it?

The answer, in both cases, is rhythm.

Think about a child on a playground swing. Push at random times and the swing jerks around, wasting energy. Push at exactly the right moment, just as it reaches the top of its arc, and it climbs higher and higher with almost no effort at all.

Inside your phone is a tiny component called a dielectric resonator, a material engineered to vibrate at one precise frequency. When it hits that frequency, it holds and amplifies energy instead of wasting it. It’s why your signal stays clear instead of drifting.

Your body is doing the same thing.

When your heartbeat, breath, and attention fall into alignment, you stop fighting yourself. The same principle that keeps your phone signal steady is what moves you from scattered and reactive to calm and deliberate.

If you run or walk regularly, you will have experienced this. It’s when your breath, stride, and heartbeat find each other and it stops feeling like effort. Your lungs are in sync with your legs, and your heart isn’t racing ahead. Everything is pulling in the same direction.

Scientists call this state coherence. And your heart is the one leading it.

Your heart is running the show

Research from HeartMath shows that when this state of coherence takes hold, something measurable happens. Your stress hormones decrease, thinking becomes clearer, and your body shifts into a calmer more recovered state almost automatically.

This is why it’s nearly impossible to think clearly when your heart is racing, and surprisingly easy to find focus when your breathing is steady. Your brain takes its timing cues from your heart, not the other way around.

Where It Shows Up

You feel this the moment a piece of music instantly shifts your mood. It’s why a few slow, deliberate breaths can pull you out of a spiral. And why some mornings you wake up already in flow, while other days feel like you’re pushing through mud from the moment you open your eyes.

The difference between those days is often rhythm - whether your heartbeat, breath, and attention are working together or against each other.

Some simple practices that support coherence include slow breathing at around five to six breaths per minute, walking or swimming, and meditation. None of these are complicated. They’re just ways of giving your body the right conditions to find itself.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of exhaustion, of scattered days and effort that goes nowhere - there’s usually a rhythm problem, not a motivation problem.

You aren’t a collection of random parts running on autopilot. You’re a sophisticated biological system that works best when its rhythms aligns, just like that dielectric resonator in your phone, hitting its perfect note.

The solution isn’t to push harder. It’s to find the timing of the swing, and let the momentum build from there.

The Idea

In 1972, the dictator Idi Amin expelled the Asian community from Uganda. My parents were among them. They lost everything. Their home, their businesses, many of their belongings, and were forced to start life again in another country.

What’s interesting is that they never framed it as a tragedy. They just got on with things. Their determination, focus, and refusal to be defeated by circumstances that would have broken most people is what I watched across my entire childhood.

I absorbed it. And their story became a part of me.

When the chance came to move to Sydney, I can’t lie that I wasn’t scared. But underneath my fear was this undeniable truth that it was all going to be ok because my parents had shown me how to do it.

It took me a while to understand that had a scientific explanation.

The Science

Think about watching someone bite into a lemon. Your mouth waters, you wince slightly. Nobody bit your tongue, but your brain responded as if they did.

That’s because your brain doesn’t cleanly separate what you observe from what you experience - it participates instead. It does this through a system of brain cells called mirror neurons, which fire when you do something and also when you watch someone else do it. Your brain records and rehearses both.

Scientists stumbled onto this accidentally in the 1990s when they noticed that monkeys watching a researcher reach for food had the same brain activity as monkeys actually reaching for food. Nothing moved, but the brain responded as if it had.

What’s fascinating is that mirror neurons also read intentions. They fire not only when we see someone do something, but also when we understand what they’re trying to do. Which is part of why we can sense when someone means well, even before they’ve said a word.

The science is still evolving, researchers continue to debate exactly how much mirror neurons explain human behaviour. But what’s well documented is the observable effect that we are wired to absorb the people around us far more deeply than we realise.

Where It Shows Up

This happens more than we pay attention to.

When a friend leaves a stable career to start something of her own, you watch her navigate the fear, the uncertainty, the slow build. Somewhere along the way your brain files it all away, not as her experience, but as evidence of survival.

It happens when someone close to you goes through a painful breakup. The kind that unravels their whole life as they knew it. You watch them fall apart, being lower than low, and then slowly finding their way back to themselves. You’re not just a bystander, you’re taking notes the entire time so that if heartbreak ever finds you, you already know the way through.

The closer you’ve watched someone over time, the deeper that goes. It stops being something you know intellectually and starts being something you innately feel.

Spend enough time with someone and you start to mirror their body language, their speech patterns, even their emotional state. Their calm becomes your calm. And their resilience starts to become yours too.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of being alone in what you’re going through, someone close to you has already walked this path. You just haven’t looked.

My parents didn’t know they were passing something on to me. They were just trying to survive. But while they did, my brain was scribbling notes so when the moment came that I needed them, I already knew what to do.

The stories of resilience we need are rarely as far away as we think. We don’t have to look to influencers, entrepreneurs, or people with a platform. The permission to see our own lives differently is usually already sitting right beside us, in the people whose lives have been running alongside ours.

Take a pause today and think about who that person is for you. A parent, a friend, a colleague, a neighbour. Someone who moved through something hard and kept going anyway. Write a sentence about what they showed you that you’ve been carrying without realising it.

And then ask yourself this: when people look back at your story, what would they say about how you moved through difficulty? What would they be grateful to have witnessed in you? Share them in the comments - I’d love to see them.

The Idea

I was talking to my therapist about this sudden urge I get to leave when I’m around certain people. You know the feeling? You’re at dinner, everything seems fine on the surface, but something feels off, and suddenly you’re looking for the door.

I used to think it was because I’m an introvert. But it turns out something else is actually going on. Something deeper that my body is picking up on before my mind has even registered it. It turns out I’m eavesdropping on a conversation happening between my gut and my past.

Once Upon A Time

To understand this, let me start where it begins.

Imagine a little girl who learned early on that her voice was best turned down. In a home that was too loud because the adults were too stressed, she worked out that the safest way to be good was to be invisible.

Sitting quietly in the corner became her superpower. Whenever her environment felt unsafe, her nervous system took over and physically pulled her into herself, creating a tight knot in her stomach. It was a physical shield that let her go unnoticed, and it became her most reliable protector.

Fast forward a few decades. She walks into a room and her gut instantly starts scanning. She picks up on a specific energy that mirrors something from her past, and that same familiar knot forms, warning her to stay quiet, and stay unseen.

She has every right to take up space in that room, but her biology is still trying to protect a version of her that no longer needs to hide.

The Science

There’s a system running in the background that’s constantly scanning her environment for threats, because it’s learned early on that staying alert is the safest way to be.

It’s called the Enteric Nervous System, or ENS. It’s a complex network of around hundred million nerve cells lining the gut, communicating constantly with the brain. Scientists sometimes call it the second brain, because it processes and responds to emotional experience in its own right.

The ENS doesn’t store memories the way your mind does, it stores feelings. It tags certain physical sensations to specific emotional experiences, and once that connection is made, it doesn’t easily let go. Her brain tagged that tight feeling in her stomach as a safety signal long ago. And even though she’s an adult now, the system keeps responding the same way, using old signals to try to keep her safe.

It doesn’t stop to ask whether the threat is still real. It only knows that it once was.

Where It Shows Up

This is one of the most human things you can go through.

Research into somatic memory, which describes the way the body stores emotional experience, suggests that the gut’s responses can be triggered by sensory cues that bear only a passing resemblance to the original experience. It could be a tone of voice, a particular kind of silence, or the way someone moves when they’re annoyed. These micro-signals bypass conscious thought entirely, landing in the body before the mind has had a chance to assess them.

This is why you can walk into a room, feel immediately uncomfortable, and have absolutely no rational explanation for it. Your ENS has already run the pattern match and sounded the alarm, before you’ve even finished saying hello.

Therapists working with somatic approaches, like EMDR, work specifically with this layer of memory. Not by talking about what happened, but by helping the nervous system learn that the old signal no longer means what it once did. It’s slow work, because you’re not changing a thought. You’re trying to update a physical response that’s been rehearsed for years.

The Subtextt

Beneath the urge to leave is your body trying to tell you something.
The trick is knowing how to listen to it.

Rumi wrote about this eight centuries before science had a name for it. He wrote that the human being is a guest house, and that every morning a new feeling arrives at the door. He said to welcome them all, even the difficult ones, because each one has been sent as a guide.

That urge to leave the room before you know why - that’s a guest that arrived before you could think. Your gut got there first. And the most useful thing you can do isn’t to leave, or to push the feeling down, but to pause long enough to ask what it came to tell you.

The Idea

You know that moment when a perfectly good conversation suddenly turns? You’re not even sure what was said, but you can feel the tension rising. It turns out, you may be about to enter a subatomic standoff.

The Science

Every single thing in the universe belongs to one of two families: the Bosons or the Fermions. You can basically think of the difference between them as the universe’s law of personal space, otherwise known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle which governs exactly how particles occupy a room. Some are perfectly happy to pile in together, while others flat-out refuse to share their spot.

Bosons

Think of the Boson as the subatomic version of that person who just thrives in a team. In their world, the secret to success is total cooperation. Unlike the atoms that make up a solid wall, Bosons have no problem overlapping with one another. In fact, you can pack an infinite number of them into the same tiny space and they’ll happily coexist in the exact same state. They never feel crowded, so there’s no limit on how many friends can join the party.

You experience this every time you feel the sun on your face. The particles crowd together, layering up and doubling their strength - transforming scattered rays of light into the warmth we feel from the sun. The Bosons know instinctively that they can achieve more by sharing the same space.

Fermions

If Bosons are the life of the party, Fermions are the particles that demand their own personal space. They are the loners of the universe, and they make up the actual matter of our world, including the electrons in your own body.

They follow a strict rule where no two Fermions can occupy the exact same spot at the same time. If you try to force them together, they push back with an immense, invisible pressure. It’s so powerful that it actually stops dying stars from collapsing under their own weight. Think about that for a moment, the sheer force of billions of particles simply refusing to budge is what holds the universe together.

You feel this same resistance every time you’re in a room where the atmosphere has shifted, but you can’t quite figure out why. Something invisible has changed. That’s the Fermion effect in action, and unlike the stars, when it happens between people it rarely holds anything together. More often than not, it just pushes them apart.

Where It Shows Up

Coming back to that conversation. It could be that one or both of you are behaving exactly like stubborn Fermions. Remember, these particles refuse to share their spot, so they naturally repel anything that tries to crowd them.

You are no different. When you and another person are too similar in the same moment, you are essentially trying to occupy the same mental space at the exact same time. Whether you are both trying to take the lead, or you have both dug your heels in on a point, you end up pushing each other away.

There isn’t enough room in the universe for both of you to be right in that exact same spot.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling of friction, there is something far less personal going on than it seems. Two similar energies - yes- but not two enemies.

The next time you feel that friction starting to build, remember you have a choice. You can stay solid, by acting like a stubborn Fermion with your guard up, or you can choose to channel your inner Boson.

In that moment, you have the choice to stop being a brick wall and start becoming more like that shared flow of light we see in the sun.

And instead of fighting to defend your spot, take a breath, soften yourself, and intentionally make room for the other person’s energy. You’ll be surprised how quickly the tension evaporates when you stop being an obstacle and start sharing the space.

The Idea

It’s a bit odd when you stop and think about it. We go about our lives assuming we’re seeing everything as it is, that what’s in front of us is what’s really there. The more I sat with that idea, the crazier it seemed. What if we’re not actually seeing the world as it is? What if what we see has already been shaped for us?

It turns out, it has.

The Science

Your brain is an expert editor. Every day it trims the shaky moments and smooths out the glitches so you never notice them. Reality, as you experience it, is polished and seamless - because your brain insists on it.

Your eyes are constantly darting around, making tiny jumps called saccades three or four times every second. During each jump, your brain briefly shuts off the incoming visual signal, a trick called saccadic masking. Each blackout lasts only a fraction of a second. But add them all up across a day and it amounts to roughly 40 minutes of visual information that you never get to see.

This means the world you experience isn’t exactly what’s out there. It’s the version your mind has chosen for you.

Try It Out

Look in the mirror and shift your eyes quickly from one side to the other. You’ll see your eyes jump between positions, but you won’t see the movement itself. The edit is invisible, even though you’re looking for it.

You’ve seen this same trick applied elsewhere. It’s exactly what your phone does when it stabilises a shaky video, smoothing in motion in real time so the result feels steady. Your brain has been doing this naturally, constantly, your entire life. a

By the time you go to bed tonight, it will have quietly erased the equivalent of about 40 minutes of blurry, unstable footage.

Why Your Brain Does It

Without this editing, the constant motion of your eyes would make you dizzy, disoriented, and nauseous. Saccadic masking is your brain’s built-in stabiliser, choosing your comfort over completeness, every second of every day.

Where It Shows Up

Scientists are beginning to work out how to read the brains raw footage before the edits kick in. Early experiments by Jack Gallant showed that by scanning brain activity while someone watches images, you can reconstruct a rough version of what they are seeing - it’s blurry, but recognisable.

More recent work using AI has pushed this further, with researchers able to match brain activity to the exact image a person was looking at.

The goal isn’t purely curiosity. It could help eventually help people who can’t communicate verbally, or give us a much deeper understanding of how perception works. But even most advanced reconstructions aren’t capturing raw reality yet.

The Subtextt

Beneath the pressure to understand everything is the simple truth that you were never designed to. We live in a world that constantly demands more information, more clarity, more understanding. But the brain disagrees. It edits, removes, and simplifies to protect you.

The Idea

Social media is full of advice on setting boundaries. It’s the latest self-help trend but honestly it has always felt a little ungrounded to me. So I went looking for something more solid.

It turns out there’s a principle in physics that explains exactly why closing doors makes us more powerful. And it’s called quantum confinement.

The Science

Quantum confinement is a rule that explains what happens when you take energy and give it nowhere to run. And it proves something counter intuitive - that when you restrict a space, the energy inside it becomes significantly more powerful.

Scientists use this principle to create quantum dots. These are tiny particles, like electrons, that behave like precise light sources. Normally, an electron has so much room to move that its energy scatters in every direction. It's unfocused, diffused, and not particularly useful to anyone.

So scientists trap that electron in a tiny box. With nowhere to go, the energy has no choice but to concentrate. The pressure inside builds until something remarkable happens, the particle begins to glow in a specific, brilliant colour. Restriction transforms it.

Precision Is Restriction

That concentrated glow isn’t a side effect, it’s the entire point. The colours emitted by quantum dots are so exact and controllable that they’re used in QLED televisions and medical imaging technology. The signal only becomes useful when the energy stops being available everywhere and starts being directed somewhere specific.

In physics, restriction isn’t a limitation. It’s how you make something brilliant.

Where It Shows Up

Think about those days when you’ve said yes to everything. You’ve responded to every notification, jumped into every meeting, and absorbed everyone else’s urgency as your own. By 6pm you’re completely drained, yet you haven’t moved the dial on anything that matters. Your energy was available everywhere, so it wasn’t powerful anywhere.

Now compare that to a day when you protect a two-hour block for deep work. When you decide to say not now to interruptions. You finish that day feeling clear and accomplished, not because you did more but because you chose to contain your energy rather than letting it scatter.

Same person. Same hours. Completely different outcome.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling that you need boundaries because they’re trending, is the reality that they are a functional tool to help you be your best and keep you there.

Most advice on boundaries treats them like walls - designed to keep people out, but through the lens of physics, a boundary is something else entirely. It’s a container to keep your power in.

The goal becomes more about giving your energy somewhere specific to go, than simply protecting your peace.

The Idea

I love Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, it’s one of my favourite sci-fi novels about how a civilisation unravels completely when their world plunges into darkness for the first time.

On planet Kalgash, six suns keep the world in constant daylight. So when an eclipse plunges the world into shadow for the first time in over two millennia, the people don’t just panic. They come apart.

The Science

This story isn’t about the darkness itself, but the idea that it was unfamiliar. The people of Kalgash were destroyed by the shock of seeing the night sky and its stars for the first time.

It’s an ironic reversal of how we tend to think about things here on Earth. We worry about not having enough sunny days, but what if every day was constant sunshine?

Day 1: The Sun Doesn’t Set

The first thing that you’d notice is how long the day feels. With no shift in daylight to tell your brain it’s time wind down, you keep going a bit longer than you should.

You feel oddly energetic at times, starting projects at 2am without meaning to. That’s your cortisol elevated because your brain can’t locate the end of the day. And without darkness, your brain doesn’t know when to begin releasing melatonin, the hormone that responds to shadow and eases you toward sleep.

So you lie in bed waiting to feel tired, eventually falling into a shallow sleep that’s easily broken by the smallest sound. You wake unrefreshed and do it all again.

Day 30: Profiting From Light

A month in, the problem has a consumer market.

It starts small. Blackout blinds sell out first, followed by smart lighting systems that promise to restore your night by dimming your home in carefully timed stages. Offices roll out the same systems, softening light in the late afternoon to help you wind down.

Artificial night becomes a subscription feature. Your phone, lights, and laptop all shift together to coordinate something your body might accept as an ending to the day.

Pharma move in quickly, first with melatonin patches, then IV treatments for people who need more lasting results. Clinics open promising deep sleep restoration in controlled environments where light, temperature and sound are all carefully managed to help you sleep.

Somnus AI underpin it all. They start by launching wearables that track your light exposure, your sleep patterns, how often you wake, how long it takes you to fall asleep, how your focus drops across the day. It pulls it all together into a single personalised model that predicts when you should be winding down, even if you don’t feel it yet. Over time it stops suggesting and starts deciding.

In some cities, it goes further. AI systems begin controlling infrastructure by reducing public lighting in residential areas at set hours, limiting digital billboards, dimming transport hubs.

Darkness becomes something that has to be produced. And your sleep becomes something you have to optimise and pay for.

Day 90: Governments Step In

Three months in, time as you know it has changed.

Living in constant light has altered your body’s natural ability to keep time. Coherent thought is harder to hold onto. Your focus doesn’t stay where you put it. Conversations have lost their sharpness. Cortisol rises at odd hours. And your body temperature, which normally drops at night to help you sleep, has lost its rhythm entirely.

People start calling it a pandemic, because no one is unaffected.

Governments step in once productivity starts falling. Guidance becomes policy. Homes are required to install certified blackout systems, and buildings have enforced night modes that can’t be overridden. Public health campaigns push the idea of protected dark hours as a basic human necessity.

But most of this runs through Somnus AI, who already have the data. The same systems people adopted a month earlier are now feeding into national policy. Your light exposure, your sleep patterns, your focus levels are all being tracked, and quietly standardised.

It helps a little. Some people report better sleep, but something has shifted permanently, and the cumulative exhaustion of months without real darkness has left a mark that optimisation alone can’t fix.

Day 365: The Long Unravelling

A year in, the effects are no longer just physical.

The loss of natural rhythm has done something subtler - it has flattened time itself. Without the punctuation of night, days blur into each other. People struggle to remember what happened yesterday versus last week. The emotional processing that happens during deep sleep has been quietly disrupted for twelve months.

Some people describe it as a persistent strangeness. A growing sense that something is slightly off, and has been for a long time.

Kalgash, it turns out, wasn’t so far from home after all.

Where It Shows Up

Although this sounds like a very cool Black Mirror episode, this isn’t entirely speculative. In regions of our planet where the sun barely sets for months, like Antarctica, Norway, and northern Finland, studies have shown that adults genuinely struggle to sleep, concentrate, and regulate their moods without natural darkness.

Melatonin production drops measurably. Rates of anxiety and depression rise. The body, deprived of its most fundamental cue, begins to lose its timing in ways that compound over weeks and months.

The research suggests it doesn’t take long. A few weeks of disrupted light exposure is enough to affect cognitive performance and emotional regulation in otherwise healthy adults. The body is more dependent on darkness than most of us ever think to notice.

The Subtextt

Beneath the feeling that nothing happens when you sleep, is the fact that your body is doing its most important work. The dark deserves more care than we give it for this reason alone.

The night is when everything slows down enough to process the day. To rest, to reset, to file away what happened. Without that contrast and natural pause, you lose something entirely essential.

The Idea

A few years ago I moved to Sydney and fell apart.

Everything that had defined me — my career, my income, my sense of purpose — vanished almost overnight. I spent months walking the city under a heavy low, wondering if what I was feeling was something I could fix. Or delete.

That question led me to the edge of genetic science, where researchers are asking the same thing.

Gene editing is a technology that cuts and rewrites biological instructions in your DNA, and it’s already changed medicine, offering a single treatment for sickle cell disease and a potential cure for inherited blindness. The science is extraordinary.

But some researchers want to go further. They want to edit out depression. And the closer you look at that idea, the more complicated it gets.

The Science

Gene Editing uses a guide molecule to locate a specific sequence in your DNA and acts like a pair of molecular scissors - cutting out or replacing that section of code.

But while you can cut and paste a fix for a blood cell, the mind is a different beast entirely. Our moods aren't usually the result of one broken gene, they’re a living reaction to our environment.

This is where epigenetics comes in. While your genetic code is fixed, the way those genes actually behave is constantly changing. Chemical markers sit on the surface of your DNA like a control system, switching specific genes on or off based on your environment, your experiences, and stress levels.

A major life event, like moving to a new country, can cause these markers to shift, locking a low mood setting in place and suppressing the brain’s natural ability to balance itself.

Researchers at institutions including the NIH and companies like CRISPR Therapeutics are lab testing gene editing approaches that could one day offer an alternative to traditional antidepressants. Moving away from masking symptoms with a pill toward something more permanent.

The goal is to reactivate the suppressed genes rather than simply manage them.

Where It Shows Up

Feeling low is natural, and it’s a vital survival tool.

A low mood shifts your mind into a kind of diagnostic mode. It slows you down, narrows your focus, and forces you to pay attention to what isn’t working. Without it, you might stay in harmful or painful situations, because the internal signal telling you something is wrong would never sound.

This isn’t a new idea. Thinkers like Socrates and Plato argued that a life without struggle would be a life without true understanding. They believed our internal conflicts and emotional trials are the labour pains of the soul, necessary for giving birth to wisdom. Suffering, in their view, wasn’t something to be escaped. It was something to be moved through.

You only have to look at what suffering has produced to understand what we would be trading off. The blues was born from pain so concentrated it needed a new musical form to hold it. Jazz emerged from the same. Shakespeare’s greatest works, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, are all studies in human anguish. Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone, their most enduring work came directly from the depths of their own experience. These were people who showed us that suffering and greatness were the same thing.

By removing low moods we wouldn’t just remove pain, we’d remove critical information that pain carries.

The Subtextt

Beneath the desire to feel better is something worth listening to first.

One of the most profound qualities we have as humans is the ability to translate pain into something beautiful. A low mood is a message, and like all messages it deserves to be read before it’s deleted.

By editing our ability to do that entirely, our lives might seem more comfortable. But how long would that comfort last once we realised we had deleted the very depths of ourselves.

After six months of living on opposite sides of the world, I was finally on my way to join my husband in Sydney. Saying goodbye to London was heartbreaking, but I’d had twelve hours on a flight to pull myself together. By the time I landed in Singapore I was feeling more like myself.

The hard part is over. Just one more flight.

Changi airport didn’t disappoint. I went to all the spots friends had told me about - the magnificent Jewel, the calming butterfly garden, the cacti haven. I was excited now, between something that had ended and something that was about to begin.

When the gate was announced I made my way to security. No food or water allowed.

But I still have a banana in my hand. Don’t throw it in the bin, someone will want it.

So I offered it to the first person walking past. She smiled and said no thank you, so I handed it to the security guard and went through.

At the gate, everything was going smoothly. People were waiting to board when the announcement came.

BA009 has been cancelled due to unforeseen staffing shortages.

OMG what!

I’d never had a cancelled flight before. So I did what anyone would do, I phoned a friend. My husband reminded me how fortunate I was to have a night in one of the safest countries in the world.

Maybe I was lucky?

So I booked myself onto the next British Airways flight the following evening and headed to a hotel to rest.

The next morning, someone approached my table at breakfast and asked if she could join me. It took me a second to recognise her.

It was the woman I had offered the banana to.

It’s you!

We spent the entire morning together, walking around Singapore, getting to know each other. She told me about her life as a writer, originally from Sydney but now based in Europe, where she ran writing retreats. She had been on her way to Sydney for a Prime Ministers Award when the flight was cancelled.

She had done the very thing I was trying to do - she had bet on herself.

I couldn’t believe it. Writing was something I had wanted to take seriously for years. I’d always enjoyed it, and I was good at it. But just like most people, I’d let that important detail about myself get buried under routine and bills.

My creativity had been reignited when I wrote a design fiction blog about space technologies for work, and I knew then that writing was where I needed to be. And yet I hadn’t committed to it.

But here I was, at the most transitional point in my life, sitting across from a successful woman who had done exactly that.

And that stayed with me.

When I arrived in Sydney, everything slowed down. After the pace of London, there was a lot of quiet which I wasn’t used to. It was like coming down from decades of stress and expectation, something that allowed me to finally hear my own thoughts about my own life.

The first six months were beyond tough. No job, no income, friends and family were far away.

But I kept thinking about that morning in Singapore. The banana, the cancelled flight, the delay that gave me a morning with a stranger. Those things happening together, in that sequence, felt like something worth paying attention to.

Maybe it wasn’t random.

I was at the start of something new, more open than I had ever been. Ready to get out there and make a difference in whatever way I could.

That was the subtext of the whole experience.

The banana started a conversation. The cancelled flight bought me a morning I wasn’t supposed to have. And what happened in that time gave me the push I’d needed to stop hesitating.

It taught me to look more closely at what’s really going on beneath the surface of things.

That’s what this blog is. And how it started.

Thank you for being here, it means more than you know.