I’ve been walking through fire since I was a child, though for many years, I didn’t know it. I only knew that something inside me felt unsafe, unwanted, unseen. I was born into a world where love came with conditions and chaos was normal. My family home was not a place of comfort. It was a place of survival.

By the time I was old enough to understand anything, I’d already seen too much. My mother was drowning in her own pain and turned to alcohol to keep herself afloat. My brother and sister were deep in the grip of heroin addiction. My father had left by the time I was three. What was left was me, a little boy absorbing the unspoken grief of an entire house. I grew up surrounded by conflict, addiction, neglect, and emotional absence. There were arguments, screaming matches, broken glass, doors slammed shut. And in the middle of it all, I was just trying to find safety.

My earliest coping mechanism was to disappear.

I became quiet, observant, careful. I kept the peace at all costs. I learned to make myself small so I wouldn’t become another burden. I locked myself in my room with headphones on, playing music loud enough to drown out the yelling. I became hyper-attuned to everyone’s emotions, scanning the room, walking on eggshells, making sure I was never the reason things got worse. I carried the emotional load of a family in crisis before I even had the words for it.

That’s where it began,  the people-pleasing, the caretaking, the self-abandonment. On a psychological level, I became what is known as the "parentified child" - someone who takes on adult emotional responsibilities far too young. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It was survival.

I didn’t cry much. I didn’t speak up. I became strong, or at least that’s how it looked. Inside, I was scared, lonely, and aching for a kind of love and presence I couldn’t find. I internalised everything. I convinced myself that my needs didn’t matter, that asking for help would only push people further away. And when I did feel emotions, they often felt too big, like they might swallow me whole. So I buried them.

As I entered my teens, my internal pain started looking for release. At 15, I turned to cocaine. At first it was just on weekends, but it quickly became a lifeline. A way to feel something, or nothing at all. I began to seek relief through every escape I could find: drugs, alcohol, sex, intensity, chaos, anything that could take me out of my body, out of the numbness. I got lost in addictions, in dysfunctional relationships, in patterns that mimicked the very pain I’d grown up with. My nervous system was wired for survival, for fight, flight, freeze, and I didn’t know how to come down.

 I wasn’t living. I was reacting. 

I chased spiritual highs too, anything that promised transcendence. I got caught in illusions, in fantasies of awakening, in trying to become someone I wasn’t. I chased visions, spirit guides, tools, techniques, teachers, thinking the answer was always out there. But no matter what I found, the ache inside remained.

It wasn’t until I stopped seeking and began sitting - truly sitting - with myself that everything started to change.

 I began to turn inward. 

My healing wasn’t clean or linear. It was brutal. It required me to dismantle everything I thought I was, every mask, every defence, every identity I had built to survive. I had to sit in the silence. I had to stop running. And I had to feel.

For nearly a decade now, I’ve been walking that path with integrity and devotion. I’ve drunk Ayahuasca many, many times, not to escape but to remember. I’ve worked with Bufo, Kambo, Yopo, Rapè. I’ve dieted with Amazonian tribes. I’ve studied psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, trauma release, and nervous system regulation. I’ve wept, screamed, broken, emptied. I’ve seen the parts of me I once rejected, the angry one, the numb one, the scared child, the addict, and I’ve learned how to hold them.

 The biggest lesson? Nothing is broken. 

All those patterns, the addiction, the avoidance, the perfectionism, the overgiving, the emotional shutdown, they were never flaws. They were intelligent responses to overwhelming pain. They were how I survived a world that didn’t know how to love me gently.

And they can change. That’s what I want people to know. That’s what I live for.

The We Project was born from that knowing. It’s not a brand. It’s not a product. It’s a mirror of my own becoming. A reflection of what happens when we stop fighting ourselves and begin listening - deeply, tenderly, truthfully.

I’ve now held space for thousands of people in deep ceremony, private sessions, and group integration. And I don’t stand above them. I walk with them. I’ve lived the pain. I still feel it. But I meet it differently now , from presence, not panic. From stillness, not strategy. From silence, not seeking.

This isn’t a story of brokenness. It’s a story of returning.

It’s not just pain. It’s my becoming.

And if you’re reading this, maybe it’s yours too.