From psychiatric hospitals and mental rabbit holes deeper than light can reach, to porn addiction, blackmail, years of pretending to be both other people and myself, alongside a rediscovery of the deceptive love of stories, my résumé is an ink-stained one at best.

Stuck inside myself as well as four mustard-coloured walls, I attempted to dedicate myself to the classics, to the narratives that our world adores, respects, and is ruled by. Books - novels and non-fiction - and movies - old, new, and experimental - I read and watched and read and watched and read and watched and…

I found nothing but stories of stories, how ‘great’ writers and people were always prefaced or forwarded by academics, self-proclaimed experts, historians, or other novelists, the original writer’s essence flowing to the one who writes about them, adding an air of authority to whatever they said. They became powerful and respected — simply by association. Simply by telling stories they believed to be true.

Then, I looked toward myself. A victim of people with Munchausen’s By-Proxy - and I saw it: how a story someone tells you and asserts ‘this is you’ becomes your reality.

By extension, the industries of psychology, psychiatry, and academia fell into this category of storytellers. I became disillusioned with it, with self-proclaimed figureheads telling us this is how the world is — and us all accepting it. Psychology, for all its beauty, is a story experts tell of how our minds work, simply to sustain their own expertise. Kings told stories of their God-appointed powers. The same applies here and there.

But: what if you could control this for yourself? To step outside, view yourself from new angles, to craft a narrative you want to live by? A skin you wanted to step into? An Identity you intentionally labelled as ‘I’?

I practice this each and every day. I’ve changed my name, reinvented myself, slowly, ongoingly… I live the methods that I teach.

A good question: am I just another charlatan? Just another snake-oil seller trying to get you to ‘manifest your destiny’?

Perhaps.

But, worst come to worst, I can teach you to be one too.

And as times change and ideas shift, you’ll see how life is a series of stories, and you can tell and sell yourself in whatever way sustains and satisfies you.

Be warned: there’s an equal chance that the story of stories I’m proposing is a story.

But: doesn’t that just prove me right?