One Year Later

One year ago today, I pressed publish on the very first Innerverse article.

I didn’t have a strategy.

I didn’t have a business plan.

I didn’t even know if anyone would read it.

To be fair, I was fairly confident I would. Beyond that, the outlook was... uncertain.

I simply had this stubborn feeling that humanity had been given a remarkably poor instruction manual for being human.

We have maps of the stars.

We have field guides for birds.

We have a periodic table for the building blocks of the universe.

But when it came to heartbreak, burnout, loneliness, finding ourselves, losing ourselves, or trying to explain why someone can miss a person who’s still alive... the collective advice often seemed to be:

“Try not to cry at work.”

Surely, we could do a little better than that.

So, I started writing. One article became another. Then another.

Before I knew it, we’d spent an entire year wandering through love, burnout, being misunderstood, letting go, becoming ourselves, outgrowing people, and all the wonderfully complicated experiences that make us human.

And something unexpected happened.

People kept showing up.

Some of you have been here since the very beginning.

Some stumbled in by accident and, for reasons known only to you and the mysterious forces governing the internet, you decided to stay.

Many of you have shared stories, questions and perspectives that have genuinely changed how I think.

One of you wrote an incredibly Innerverse song that I sing almost daily (thanks Cory).

And one of you somehow turned a photo of my chicken soup prep into a global Innerverse food empire designed to support good writing (thanks Leslie Paul Oosten).

I still haven’t fully processed that.

Looking back, I don’t think we’ve actually spent the past year learning about the human experience.

I think we’ve been learning how to notice it.

We’ve discovered the moments we struggle to explain are often the ones we all recognise.

• The fear of being misunderstood is surprisingly universal.

• Burnout can disguise itself as laziness.

• Loving quietly is still loving.

• Sometimes the hardest person to stop abandoning is ourselves.

• Curiosity usually gets us further than certainty.

• Two opposite feelings can exist at the same time without the universe collapsing.

• And giving an experience language doesn’t make it smaller. It makes us feel a little less alone inside it.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve discovered that every one of us is walking around experiencing an Innerverse that nobody else can fully see.

That thought still amazes me.

Well, if Year One was about pointing at our emotions...

Perhaps Year Two is about:

• Going one layer deeper.

• About looking for patterns.

• Giving some structure to the things we usually experience as messy, contradictory and difficult to explain.

• Asking not only what am I feeling? but what might be happening underneath it.

• Why certain emotions appear together.

• Why some seem to change into others.

• Why the same emotional patterns can surface in completely different parts of our lives.

• And whether our inner worlds might be a little more understandable than we sometimes assume.

We’re still going to tell stories with a dash of humour and sarcasm.

We’re still going to wander into heartbreak, love, loneliness, identity, burnout and all the other strange corners of being human.

But we’re also going to start studying what we find there.

Which means Innerverse is getting something it probably should have had from the beginning:

The Academy of Emotional Sciences.

A place for curiosity, observation and the slightly ridiculous idea that perhaps our inner lives deserve to be studied with the same wonder we bring to everything else.

(Don’t worry. There won’t be a final exam).

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for disagreeing with me from time to time.

Thank you for sharing pieces of your own Innerverse.

Year One taught us to notice it.

Year Two, we’re going to look closer.

Welcome to the Academy.

Welcome to Year Two.