They say the darkest part of the night is just before the dawn, but for a while there, I wasn't sure the sun was ever coming back up.

I’m going to be straight with you: this is the scariest and most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. I’m opening up about a mental health crisis that took me right to the edge—scarily close to a final exit. I'm talking about a state of total "decoherence," where the weave of my world didn't just fray; it felt like it had completely disintegrated. In our Māori worldview, we might call this a heavy season in Te Kore—the Great Void. But as Reverend Māori Marsden taught us, Te Kore isn't just "nothingness"; it is the realm of raw potentiality.

Growing up with a Pākehā mum who held onto a very specific, strongly colonised religious view, my scientific mind was always at war. I want to be clear—I love my mum deeply. She did the absolute best with what she’d been given, and she always did it with a pure heart. 

To me, spirituality looked like fairy tales—nice stories for Sunday mornings, but nothing that stood up to the rigour of 'real' data or the 'hard' world of business and physics. I experienced a strain of neoliberalism and imperial theology that had weaponised the spirit, turning it into a tool for control or relegating it to a building you visit once a week.