Why I’m building Pala.
When I was a child I used to wake before everyone else in the house and lie in the shower. Not for a few minutes. For hours, sometimes, until I heard the others moving about.
I didn’t have a word for it then. I do now. It was the one room where nothing could reach me.
The pain in that house was emotional, not physical, which is a distinction that matters less than people think. I’m not going to set out the details, partly because they belong to other people as well as to me, and partly because they aren’t really the point. What it left me with is the point. It left me with shame, and a very quiet voice that had made up its mind about what I was worth long before I had any say in the matter.
By my late teens I was drinking heavily and smoking a lot of weed. This didn’t feel like a problem. All my friends were doing the same thing, and for a long time it looked like nothing more than what everybody was doing.
But somewhere along the way it stopped being what I did and became what I needed. Stress arrived, and I smoked. Anxiety arrived, and I smoked.
I was twenty-four when it became undeniable. The anxiety got bad enough that I stopped going in to work, and being absent cost me the job. My partner and I had to move back in with my mum. I very nearly lost that relationship too.
What I remember most clearly from that time is not the smoking. It’s how personal everything felt. A man cut me up on the roundabout and it was aimed at me. Someone was short with me at work and it meant something about me. The car broke down and I couldn’t cope with it. The workload got heavy and I couldn’t cope with that either.
I was the victim of the traffic. I was the victim of a colleague’s bad morning. I was the victim of a flat battery. Every small thing in the world had been arranged, apparently, to happen to me.
Then I found out my son was on the way, and I stopped. Completely, immediately, no great struggle about it. He was born the year I turned twenty-five.
For a while it looked like the whole thing was solved. I got a good job. We moved out of my mum’s and bought a house. I functioned. I would have told you, honestly, that I had turned my life around.
I hadn’t. By twenty-nine I was back in the same habits without ever really having decided to be. It happened quietly, the way those things do, and by the time I noticed I was already there.
The night it ended I had a severe panic attack.
I went and stood in the shower. A different house, a different life, but the same place I had always gone.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a story like this usually reaches for something enormous, and it wasn’t enormous. It was very quiet. Standing there, I noticed that there was something in me that was watching all of it, the fear, the shame, the whole account of who I was and what had been done to me, and that it was not any of those things. It hadn’t been damaged. It had been there the whole time, including twenty-odd years earlier, when I was small and hiding in a shower in another house entirely.
I have not smoked since. Not once, and not with any great effort, because the thing I was reaching for isn’t where I thought it was.
Here is what took me longer to understand, and it is the only part of this I’d insist on.
When my son was born, what actually changed was that I was present. A newborn will do that to you. There isn’t room for a story about the past when someone that small needs you now.
But I didn’t know that was what was working. I thought I had fixed something. So when life became ordinary again, the presence quietly drained away, and I never noticed it going. The old beliefs walked back in and I didn’t question them, because I had no idea anything had left.
I didn’t fall back into old habits. I fell out of the present moment, and the habits came back to fill the space.
That’s the whole thing. Presence that arrives by accident through crisis, through a birth, through a moment of grace cannot be relied on, because you can lose it without knowing you had it. It has to become something you return to on purpose. Repeatedly. Whether or not you feel like it. That is the difference between an experience and a practice, and it is the difference between the man I was at twenty-five and the man writing this.
I want to be honest about two things, because the version of this story with the honesty removed is the version I don’t trust.
The first is that the damage was real. It happened, it left an impression, and presence is not a way of pretending otherwise. I’ve come to believe that people who cause harm are usually acting out of their own pain, and I’ve found that genuinely freeing but it doesn’t unmake a single thing that was done. Both are true at once. What changed for me is that I no longer carry it as an identity. It’s something that happened. It isn’t who I am.
The second is that it isn’t finished. I am thirty-five now, and I have been practising presence, meditation, mostly, and a lot of catching myself for about six years. There are still bad days. The practice doesn’t make life pleasant. What it does is make the old identity impossible to slip back into without noticing, which turns out to be everything, because noticing is the only place any of this was ever won.
Pala came out of this.
Not as a cure for anything, it isn’t, and I’d distrust anyone who told you otherwise. It’s a small band on your wrist with no screen and no app. It taps, and you breathe with it, and for a few minutes you are here rather than somewhere in 1998 or somewhere in next week.
That’s all it does. It’s a way of returning on purpose, so that presence stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you can find your way back to.
I couldn’t think my way out. Nobody argued me into it and no book did it either though I’d read the books, and they only meant anything afterwards. Something had to interrupt the loop first, and then everything else had somewhere to land.
That’s what we’re building. A quiet interruption. It won’t tell you who you are.
You can notice that for yourself.