The canon · Method & lineage
You can’t teach someone how to change while hiding that you did — but showing the becoming was never the same as surrendering all of it.
Most teachers arrive polished. They show you the destination — the finished framework, the confident thesis, the person who has it figured out — and quietly withhold the mess it took to get there. It looks like generosity, handing you the clean version. It’s actually a withholding of the one thing you most need to see: that the clean version was once a mess too, and that the messiness was the method, not a shameful prelude to it. So I made a different choice. It started eight years ago, before I was healing anything — poems typed into my phone late at night, on the nights I wasn’t sure I could go on. I wrote my way through privately for years before a word of it was public; I started writing in the open in 2021, on a small blog called recoveringspiritualbeing.com, and moved to Substack in 2024 when I let that domain go. And I left the public record standing in order, wrong turns and all, rather than tidying it into a story where I knew all along.
The reasoning is simple and, to me, non-negotiable. This work is about transformation — about minds meeting new conditions and becoming something they couldn’t have been before. How could I teach that while presenting myself as someone who arrived fully formed? It would make the transformation look like a thing that happens to other people, a before-picture I’d already escaped. The honest thing, the useful thing, is to stay inside the frame: here is mine, still visible, still unfinished.
But I need to be exact about what “visible” means, because there’s a version of this ethic that curdles into a demand for total self-exposure, and I refuse it. The archive is what was public — the work I chose to publish into the world. It is not everything. It was never going to be everything. There are poems from late nights where ten words held a lifetime of pain. There are essays from my psychology undergrad, and hundreds more from a master’s degree, that live nowhere near this site. There are over four thousand journal entries on my phone that no one will ever read. None of that is in the archive, and none of it is missing from it either, because the archive was only ever a record of the public becoming.
Transparency about the work is not the same as surrendering the self. Opacity is a right, and some of my deepest pain is not yours to see — that was between me and the cosmos.
This isn’t a loophole in the method; it’s part of it. A framework built on sovereignty and interiority would be a fraud if it demanded that I strip mine bare to prove my honesty. Showing you the transformation does not obligate me to hand over the rawest, most private material of the life that underwent it. I get to decide what crosses from the private into the public, and where the line sits is itself a thing I’ve had to learn. You can teach the shape of a change without narrating every wound that drove it. In fact, guarding the parts that were only ever mine is what lets me offer the rest freely, without flinching.
The instinct is to delete the early work. It’s embarrassing to leave up ideas you’ve since outgrown — the essay where you hadn’t figured it out yet, the claim you’d now make differently, the language you’ve since learned was wrong. There are pieces in the archive I wince to reread. But the wince is exactly why they stay. If I scrub the record down to only the parts I’m proud of, I hand you a lie: that understanding arrives clean, that the people who have it never fumbled toward it, that if you’re still fumbling you’re not the right kind of person for this.
A polished teacher teaches you to perform having-arrived. A visible one teaches you that arriving was never the point — the moving is.
Leaving the wrong turns in does something a finished framework can’t: it shows the shape of change itself. You get to watch an idea be held loosely, revised, abandoned, recovered in a new form. You get to see that being wrong earlier wasn’t failure — it was a stage the thinking had to pass through. For anyone who’s been taught that their own unfinishedness disqualifies them, that’s not a minor reassurance. It’s permission to begin from where they actually are.
This is why the archive isn’t a vanity shelf or a nostalgia project. It’s pedagogy. Kept in order, oldest first, it’s the most honest thing I can offer of the public record: a real trace of a mind changing over time, with nothing quietly edited out to make me look like I knew all along. The canon shows you where the thinking landed. The archive shows you that it traveled — and roughly how, and through how many versions that felt final at the time and weren’t. What it deliberately doesn’t show you is everything underneath, and that omission is honest too.
There’s a discipline in it that keeps me honest going forward. Leaving the public work standing means I can’t pretend today’s certainty is the end of the road either — this year’s essays will someday be the wince-worthy early work of a later understanding. I’d rather be caught still changing than trusted for standing still. That’s the whole method, held in both hands: teach the transformation by refusing to hide the becoming — and honor the person who did the becoming by refusing to put all of her on display.