Essay: The Position of Both Saviours and Witches

On losing one’s spark but finding a particular kind of magic that only arrives on the backs of men named Alan.

At the beginning of this year, I made a vision board.

It was by no means a serious thing, literally just a collage of pretty pictures I had “save-image-as'd” directly off of Pinterest. Think (or see below if you’re feeling lazy): women drawing or journaling their morning pages on white linen sheets because they have self-discipline, clean feet, and infinite time; coffees that look good simply because someone else made them; hands covered in paint and stacks of books I had no intention of reading (the act of wanting to was enough). My vision board embodied what Bo Burnham warns against (but I was born in the early 90s, so it’s not my fault, it’s my birthright). This year I wanted to draw more. Write more. Be chic and go to art galleries unironically. Take more photos but not just using my phone. Touch grass, literally and figuratively. I wanted to “refuse to lose my whimsy.”

I proudly made it my background on the second screen I use when I’m in the office, which felt like a worthy attempt at commitment at the time. A visual incantation. Because if you look at the vision board enough, that vision board comes true, right? I’m pretty sure that’s how manifestation works. Don’t you just stare at it until reality concedes?

I haven’t looked at it in weeks. Partly because I’ve been avoiding the office because I don’t want to drive and partly because the office requires a version of me that I’ve been struggling to muster up authentically (the one with the sunny disposition that remembers how to engage in pleasantries and uses the toilet with the door closed). No one is asking me to be sunny. I know this as an ✧˖*intellectual*˖✧ (note to self: remember to insert that one Winnie the Pooh meme where he’s fancy). But my body doesn’t know, and my body has been the one in control.

I started 2026 with what I can probably best describe as ‘aggressive hope’.

I’d crashed pretty hard at the end of 2025 (the kind of burnout that only announces itself through an ER trip two days before a 34th birthday by a doctor with better things to do and leaves you straining to remember how to actually want things). So I did what I needed to do to claw back a sense of agency during the Christmas holiday: I watched three full seasons of Grey’s Anatomy in the span of two weeks, danced drunkenly in our living room on New Year’s, and then I built a system. A small one. I sat with pages of reflection questions generated by my one custom project, fondly called the ‘Tis Mahal’, in ChatGPT (I have since cancelled my subscription because Sam Altman is a dickhead in ways I could no longer ignore). I named the various chapters. I wrote out intentions with pillars and operating rules and success markers, because my brain is usually game for just about anything if it’s packaged as a well-structured framework (especially one neatly organised in Notion).

My mantra for the year was “I will succeed because I am insane”. I even posted an aesthetically pleasing, motivational-poster-style image here on Substack as a note. It was half-joke, half-battle cry, and it resonated with more people than I expected. Over the course of a month, it had over 150,000 impressions, over ten thousand likes, over two thousand restacks, which are the kind of numbers that make you think maybe your unhinged thoughts are more universal than you assumed. I felt intoxicatingly seen.

That was January. It is now May. I can confirm that insanity is persisting. Success? Not so much.

I don’t mean for this next bit to sound angsty or dramatic. The year hasn’t been a total catastrophe (for me personally in my own personal life), but it’s been a dimming. Like, you’re technically still functioning (albeit not executively), but the lights are low and fading, and nothing quite reaches the parts of you that used to care about the silly things. I hadn’t written anything for myself since November. I stopped drawing. I stopped building the strange little AI projects and unnecessary automations that made me feel like I was tapping into something larger than myself simply by doing things that no one asked for, just to see if I could. The creative count for 2026 sits at approximately zero. In the span of six months. Half a year of my spark being misplaced (it does feel a little too dramatic to say it was outright extinguished).

On bridges and their trolls

There is a trade I made. I’d probably do it again in a similar situation, but I still want to be up front about what it cost.

About six weeks ago, I was a little too honest with my psychiatrist and got started on a new kind of antidepressant (while I said this jokingly, I want to make it very clear that I do believe one should always be honest with one’s psychiatrist). I was feeling sorry for myself that I needed it in the first place. Then this new, delightfully hard-to-swallow pill that my psychiatrist prescribed to address the various mental activities I’d been white-knuckling for months (like the increasingly steady stream of concerningly darkening thoughts and the daily trek through rapidly rising mental quicksand) started working. Now, I’m no stranger to sampling the vast offerings courtesy of Big Pharma and its compatriots. But this was one of the first times I was acutely aware of the shifting of feelings that it was formulated to shift, in the way that it was formulated to shift them.

About three weeks in, the darkness already started lifting. Not all at once, but very slowly. Room by mental room. It’s still not yet gone, but there’s progress. This was (and is) a good thing.

But, as is often the case with these pharmaceutical bridge trolls, they require an exchange. And instead of a riddle, what was being demanded of me were my sacred hours between 3 and 6 am.

(The new pills also make me sensationally constipated, but that’s perhaps for another day, another essay?)

If you don’t know me, missing out on a lack of sleep during those pre-dawn hours might not sound like much (or it might sound insane in a way that’s stupider than my silly mantra, or it might even sound a little too ‘woe-is-me’ because similar things have demanded much worse from many others). But if you do know me, you’ll understand that it’s a room in my house where I’m my most at-peace self. Between 3 and 6 in the morning, when the world is still dark and I’m alone in my thoughts with soft light (from a single lamp only!! overhead lighting can fuck right off), noise-cancelling earphones playing ‘Beats to think to’, and the company of whatever I’m hyper-fixating on at the time. That’s where my flow lives. That’s where writing happens, where illustrations become more than just lines, where silly things get designed and built, and where my monotropic brain locks onto something interesting for the sake of it and goes so deep that time stops mattering. Those hours between 3 and 6 am are my brain’s creative island. They’re my nervous system’s mother tongue.

If you’ve ever taken quetiapine, you might be familiar with its pronounced sedative effect (I’ve read it doesn’t happen to everyone or not necessarily so intensely). For now though, I’m one of the lethargic fools for whom the early hours have become unattainable. I sleep through them with vigour. I wake disgustingly groggy, much later than I’d like (we’ve gotten into a habit where my husband has to phone me just before 9am while on his way to work, just to make sure I’m awake before my team’s morning stand-up). But by then, the day is already way too bright and too populated with notifications and expectations to allow for the kind of thinking I do best. The kind that regulates me. I’m hoping this will get better as my body adjusts (because I’ve heard that it might eventually). But in the meantime I’m living inside an equation where this pill that gave me a renewed willingness to partake in the magic of existence also relocated a version of myself (not necessarily a favourite version, but definitely in the top 3) to a place I can’t currently access.

I am not complaining. I’m not ungrateful. I am sitting inside a liminal space and noticing that it isn’t tethered to any one direction completely. I know it isn’t supposed to be.

You can call me Al

This past Monday, on an ordinary evening with nothing wildly special about it (apart from the fact that our cat has firmly accepted the fate of winter and is now insisting on nap-trapping me every opportunity she gets). My productive Instagram scrolling session was interrupted by a (very welcome) FaceTime from one of my best friends, Katy. She lives in Portland. She sometimes calls me on her morning commute, and I get to stare up and out of her car’s sunroof, nestled somewhere in the front centre console (it’s a new car whose inside I haven’t seen, so I can’t be sure of my exact placement). She mentioned that a few people in her circle have been getting heavily into something called ‘Human Design’ (it’s not just a Portland thing, I checked). I’d never heard of it. She’d done her chart, she said, and had been using AI to analyse and figure out what it all meant.

Are you serious? Where do I sign up? I LOVE this kind of thing.

Note: I wanted to add an image of that meme that shows the gutter from ‘It’ where the clown himself beckons someone like me, and the lure is literally just an opportunity for introspection, but looking at the Google Image search results freaked me out too much, so I had to stop.

Now, I’m not lured in because I particularly believe in any of it (in fact, the overall vibe of modern-day or olden-day ‘spirituality’ just doesn’t seem to click in my brain, and that’s the most diplomatic way I’m willing to put it), but because I love the architecture of self-knowledge systems. The way elaborate scaffolding gets built around the question of who you are. Personality tests, astrology, tarot, and enneagrams: I don’t need any of them to be real or true. I just need them to be interesting.

I obviously got my chart done within minutes of our call ending. And by ‘I got my chart done’, I mean I added my date and place of birth into the first website that popped up in the search results, where they give you a PDF of your chart for free (they do make you pay for their app if you want to make any sense of the chart, though). Paying $14.99 for an unfamiliar AI chatbot to read me my chart via their niche wellness-aesthetic-style app wasn’t quite my vibe. So I fed it into Claude instead. What Opus 4.7 produced included hundreds of lines of markdown with comprehensive explanations about my energy type and my decision-making authority (spoiler alert: it’s not splenic), my gates and my incarnation cross, etc. All of it was delivered in a way that made me wonder, is this an actual Human Design thing, or is Claude taking the piss? I honestly couldn’t care less either way.

Most of it was exactly what you’d expect: accurate enough to feel weirdly personal but also juuuuust generic enough to apply to anyone who’s ever had a feeling. But then there were these moments (golden threads of strangeness weaving their way through the analysis) that caught me off guard. Definitely not because they were profound in the way the system might have intended, but because they were so excruciatingly specific in their absurdity that I was practically riddled with glee.

I’m nothing if not An Immediate Googler of Things™. I’m actually pretty sure it’s one of the hallmarks of someone my age because uncovering a fact or titbit through a quick search on the go is one of the sweeter dopamine hits we’re privy to (yet deep inside I yearn for the days before this was possible at all because life was simpler and I was eight).

Anyway. Human Design was created in 1987 by a man named Alan Robert Krakower. An ex-advertising executive from Montreal. He was living in Ibiza at the time (of course he was) and described receiving the entire system during an eight-day mystical transmission from what he called “the Voice” (of course he did). He later changed his name to Ra Uru Hu, which is the kind of thing that is worthy of its own case study, and spent the rest of his life teaching this system with an earnestness and specificity that is awe-inspiring, regardless of whether you think it’s real or not (I promise I’m not being sarcastic).

I need to be very clear: I am not here to poke fun at anyone who finds genuine value in any aspect of Human Design. There are people who orient their lives around it and feel more grounded for having done so, and I respect that. I understand the pull of a system that says ‘here’s who you are, here’s how you work, and here’s what you need’ (especially when the world keeps insisting you should work differently than you do). There’s comfort in being told your wiring is intentional and that your uniqueness has a blueprint.

I think the biggest thing that makes me unable to fully lock in, and that I simply cannot get past, is the fact that this man’s name was Alan. And the whole thing has the exact energy of something one can only conceive during a trip (pun intended?) in Ibiza in the eighties that went further than anyone probably expected. The depth to which his concept goes (the gates, the channels, the quarters of civilisation, the specific dietary recommendations based on your chart) is wild. I’m obsessed by his sheer commitment to the bit. I’d like to think that I’m capable of something similar in my lifetime (but more on that later).

What I didn’t expect when I started going through my chart (properly, not just skimming, even though the main driver behind that was to highlight the especially funny parts to send back to Katy) was that something in the thirty-one-page document (THIRTY-ONE, ffs!) would catch me off guard. It wasn’t belief, and it was definitely not conversion (I, too, would need a trip to Ibiza to reach that point). This was something much smaller and much more startling.

I perked up.

For the first time in many moons, the thing in me that used to lean toward curiosity with an ease that I so foolishly took for granted, gave a very feeble, barely perceptible flutter. The topic was just absurd enough (again, no offence intended) and just whimsical enough that it bypassed all the defences my brain had been running. The part of me that evaluates everything for worthiness, forever tasked with asking is this productive, is this impressive, does this count, do I matter, couldn’t reject something that arrived wearing the suit of a man named Alan. It softly slipped past the gatekeeper because the gatekeeper didn’t take it seriously (in the gatekeeper’s defence, can you name an Alan that you take seriously? Can you name two?).

And in that unguarded space, I started finding things in my chart that I couldn’t quite laugh away.

Now boarding at Gate 46

There’s a gate in my chart called ‘Gate 46’ (I don’t have time to explain what a gate is and where it fits in, sorry). It’s the Gate of Love of the Body. It sits in the G centre (my mind went there too), which is apparently the identity and direction centre, and its energy is described as being about being in a body, being in a life, and trusting that being here matters.

It’s hard to stay snarky when you suddenly feel your heart catch in your throat.

I wasn’t moved because it sounded revelatory but because it named something I do believe (deeply). It’s one of those things I’ve never quite been able to articulate to anyone without becoming embarrassingly overcome with some sort of emotion because my thinking brain has no logical foundation to anchor to, and my feeling brain knows it doesn’t need one. I believe that being here matters. It has to. But every time I try to express it as such, I feel ambushed by the finiteness of it all. This one single life I didn’t ask to be born into, with a body I didn’t choose (and often I wish I could exchange for a different model that has a better capacity for retaining ferritin) and with this consciousness that showed up uninvited and will one day leave without asking too.

Let’s be honest. The world we’re in, however fleetingly, mostly sucks. Objectively. Respectfully.

Yet magic exists anyway.

We get to experience moments that make this whole obscure arrangement worth it, knowing that it ends. And even then.

Gate 46 also describes the experience of feeling out of sync with your own life when energy isn’t being honoured. When you push your body, ignore its signals, and treat it as separate from your real self. “Out of sync with my own life” is about as precise a description of the first chunk of this year as I could have written myself. Except I didn’t write it. A framework invented by a white dude named Alan did (I don’t foresee myself letting go of the Alan thing anytime soon, sorry).

On having problems with authority

My Human Design authority is something called “Self-Projected”, which is one of the rarer types according to the internet. Apparently I have a defined G centre (stop!) connected directly to my throat centre (seriously, stop!), and the only way the G centre’s information surfaces is by travelling up through the throat and out as speech. My truth has to be spoken out loud before I can know it. I hear myself say something, and my body recognises whether it rings true or false. The recognition is somatic. Alignment or flatness, expansion or contraction.

I am still negotiating with myself about how much of this I’m willing to get on board with, and it’s not because the idea itself is unappealing.

The concept that my truth lives somewhere pre-verbal and needs to be spoken before I can access it is actually (annoyingly) resonant with how I usually process things anyway. I don’t think ‘out loud’, but I do talk to those close to me about my decisions or ideas. And not always because I want their opinion (sorry, guys), but because hearing myself say these things out loud rearranges them into an order that my brain can’t adequately produce on its own. I’ve been doing this without knowing there was a made-up system that would one day validate it with a fancy yet confusing diagram.

The problem is everything else the system implies. That I should talk to myself. Out loud. Alone. For the purpose of self-knowledge. Gross.

I cringe at the thought of hearing my own voice without the context of an actual, active listener. I would rather make myself blind by staring directly into the sun than record a 30-second voice note to an acquaintance. And god forbid I make a mistake and have to re-record with the same level of performative enthusiasm as though the first take’s energy could just be manufactured again and again on command?! No. Even if I identified as a monkey, this is not a circus. And even on days where it feels like too much effort, I’d much prefer talking to others. Apart from people, the only other being I’d willingly discuss worldly worries with, without the burden of social performance, is my cat. And while she’s supportive in her own condescending way, speaking to her has unfortunately never once indicated whether my G centre was telling the truth.

But then I wondered if writing counts. I wondered if writing these essays and putting them on Substack could be some kind of throat-centre activity? If putting words on a page and then reading them back (in my mind) and feeling the weight of them (figuring out if they are right or not) could be the literary version of the mechanism my chart is describing.

Because if so, this essay might be the most on-brand thing I’ve done all year. And if it isn’t, then I’ll just make it so.

Who’s going to stop me? Alan? Didn’t think so.

On “saviours and witches” making sense

My profile, according to the chart, is 5/1. Either “The Heretic Investigator” or “The Challenge Solver”, depending on which flavour of drama you prefer.

The ‘5 line’ is the part people see: the projected-upon problem-solver, the one others look at and immediately decide has answers. People form impressions of you that have little to do with who you actually are. They project a saviour fantasy, and then either deify you when you deliver or turn on you when you don’t.

This is where the title of this essay comes from. It was one line, buried in the explanation of the 5 line’s “karmic risk” or whatever, and when I read it, I had to pause to stare into the ether for roughly 10 minutes: it’s the position of both saviours and witches.

[Please insert your profanity of choice here] (I can’t add mine because I’ve already used up the allotment of the socially acceptable ‘fucks’ I think I’m allowed to use in an essay).

I wish I’d thought of that first.

That snippet (that has no business sounding so cool) names a particular exhaustion of being someone people project onto. The person who’s supposed to know what to do (LOL). When the powers that be were dishing out resting bitch faces to all the other beautiful millennial divas who are now in their mid-thirties and increasingly suspicious of symptoms that might overlap with perimenopause, I was handed a face that apparently (according to Alan) advertises competence, whether I feel it or not. Another delightful bonus is the speed at which those projections I never asked for can turn sour when I don’t deliver what was never mine to promise.

The ‘1 line’ sits underneath this. It’s the investigator or the private foundation. The part of me that needs to know before acting, that researches too much, chronically overthinks, and that won’t feel safe in a position until I’ve built solid ground beneath it. Those are all valid things to want. My chart says the 5 and the 1 are in tension because the world keeps demanding solutions (5), but the part of me that produces them (1) needs time and depth and study. Coincidentally, the kind that only really happens during those flow hours that now elude me. The pressure to deliver versus the need to actually earn the delivery.

I don’t know if the I Ching hexagram system that produced this categorisation has any more validity than the many personality quizzes that float around online. I’ll have to check. But I know that reading it felt like being described by someone who’d been watching from a slightly uncomfortable distance (I don’t like being perceived).

On continuing to commit to the bit

What I know: Human Design is a system that was invented by a man who changed his name to Ra Uru Hu after an experience in Ibiza that I’m willing to call “mystical”. It synthesises the I Ching, Western astrology, the Kabbalah, the Hindu chakra system, and quantum physics, which is a sentence that should by all rights collapse under its own weight but somehow doesn’t. It is not scientifically validated (same). It is, by any reasonable measure, a spectacular act of creative world-building by someone from a creative background with an extraordinary commitment to specificity (and, again, to the bit).

And yet, it made me want to do things again.

Definitely not because I think my gates and channels are cosmically ordained or because I believe ‘eating in bustling markets will help me better absorb nutrients’. But because it was strange and specific and wild enough to reach a part of me that months of silence, a carefully constructed intentions framework, and a white-woman-flavoured vision board could not. My earnest plans with their pillars and success markers couldn’t get me here (despite my pure heart and selfless wants). But a pseudo-spiritual system from 1987 could. It could by simply by being weird. By being just delusional enough to speak to the version of me that still believes I can do anything if I’m interested or curious enough.

During the post-chart-analysis conversation where I was explaining to my (poor) husband all of this with an almost obnoxious sense of enthusiasm, I stated, “I could be the next Ra Ra Woo Woo”. Translation: I feel like I have it in me to come up with something equally as wild as what Alan built. Not a cult or anything sinister, just something innocent and strange and mine, built with the same bizarre and delightfully unhinged specificity and the same refusal to be embarrassed by the scope of it. Maybe I just need one or two super mild and non-destructive but still creatively stimulating hypomanic episodes? Or at the very least, I need the universe to re-grant me access to the 3 to 6 am shift. The pre-dawn flow states will be my Ibiza.

What I won’t share here is that after calling myself the next Ra Ra Woo Woo, I invited my (poor) husband to watch me probably gag while drinking my mood stabiliser (it’s a large and awful pill with an unnecessary powdery residue that my body strives to reject, not to be confused with the new, equally large and awful pill that makes me unable to keep my eyes open). Reader, I did gag, but just because that’s what happens eight out of ten times. The irony of declaring myself a future spiritual leader and then immediately gagging on the medication that keeps me stable enough not to is not lost on me. May it never be.

Rest in peace, Alan

I’m not stupid enough to publicly claim that my proverbial spark is back. It probably isn’t. Definitely not in the way it was before the dimming. But something flickered. And for the first time in a good long time, I felt the itch to create something. To sit with an idea long enough for it to become a piece of writing (I’m almost 14 hours into writing this as we speak). I feel the itch to send words through whatever centre they need to travel through and see if they ring true on the other side.

Even a small flicker, after months of nothing, is not nothing.

I’m still adjusting to new medication. I still struggle to keep my eyes open before 9am most days (on a few others I maybe just give up and sleep till almost noon). The vision board I made is still there, on the second screen I haven’t looked at in almost two weeks because driving to an office does require one’s eyes to be fully open (for safety reasons). I kept my mantra as my laptop’s desktop background, though. It also lives on as a note here on Substack (and still gets a like or restack every now and then).

And somewhere in a chart that a guy once called Alan channelled from the cosmos, there’s a gate that says being in this body, in this life, is itself meaningful.

So for as long as insanity persists, so will I.