In Beyond the Veil, you revisit the events of your life not to polish it into an inspirational story, but to understand what all those experiences made you. Did the title refer first to your spiritual experiences, or does it also describe the distance between memory and reality?

The title first came to me through the spiritual experiences in the book. Those experiences were really what started the writing in the first place. I was trying to trace things backwards and understand how I had arrived at that point in my life, and at the time I was writing only for myself. I was not planning to publish anything, and certainly was not setting out to write a memoir about my personal life. I am a very private person, so that idea would probably have made me uncomfortable from the beginning.

As I kept writing, though, the title began to fit much more than the spiritual side of the story. Looking back meant uncovering things I had not fully understood at the time, seeing people and events differently, and recognising patterns that had nothing to do with anything spiritual. The “veil” gradually became whatever stood between what I thought I understood then and what I could see more clearly years later.

By the time my family encouraged me to turn what I had written into a memoir, the title had been in my head for so long that it felt inseparable from the story. I later realised, rather embarrassingly, that I had never properly researched how widely the title had already been used. But even knowing that, I do not think I would have changed it. By then, Beyond the Veil felt less like a title I had chosen and more like the name the story had grown into.

You write openly about recklessness, anger, violence, pride, and impulsive decisions. How difficult was it to portray the younger version of yourself without either excusing or condemning him?

I think one of the difficulties was accepting that understanding why I behaved a certain way does not automatically excuse the behaviour. We are all human. We make mistakes, have moments of weakness, and carry histories that affect how we act and react. Looking back, I could often see what had led me to a particular moment much more clearly than I could when I was living through it, but that did not mean I could simply absolve myself because there was an explanation.

There were things I revisited and felt embarrassed or ashamed by. There were others where, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still felt my reaction had been justified. I did not want to force everything into one category simply because I was older and looking back. What mattered more was being willing to own what I had done, apologise where I believed I owed one, and recognise where I could have handled something differently.

The memoir is also only a fraction of a life. There are plenty of moments I regret that never appear in the book, not because they do not matter, but because they did not belong to the larger story I was trying to tell. If I had included every mistake, every argument and every person I may have hurt along the way, it would have been a very different and much longer book. The fact that some of those moments are not in the memoir does not remove my responsibility for them or for any apology I may still owe.

I also do not want to pretend that recognising those patterns means I have somehow finished changing. I still react badly sometimes. The difference is that I am much more aware of it now. I tend to catch myself sooner, question what is driving the reaction, and try to stop it before it takes over. For me, that is probably the real difference between condemning the younger version of myself and learning from him. I do not need to hate who I was to recognise where I was wrong.

The memoir moves across several countries, yet home increasingly becomes connected with Adam rather than geography. When did you recognize that shift?

I do not think I recognised the shift while I was living it. I noticed it much later, while writing and especially while reading back through the memoir. When you revisit your own life in that much detail, you do not simply remember what happened. A lot of the emotion returns with it, whether anger, sadness, loneliness, a sense of injustice, or happiness. You almost step back into those moments for a while.

What struck me was that, after Adam was born, so many of the memories that carried the strongest sense of happiness were simply the ones where he was there. It did not really matter which country we were in. I could picture his face in those moments and immediately remember how they felt. Before he was born, I do not think I understood that I could love or need another person in quite that way.

What made that realisation even stranger was that I had never planned how Beyond the Veil would end. By the time I reached the final chapter, I was no longer reconstructing memories in the same way. I had reached the present, so I was simply writing what I felt after looking back over everything. I did not know where those thoughts were going, and somehow they led to Adam. The ending emerged from that realisation rather than from anything I had planned in advance. I did not write towards it or know it was coming. The writing took me there.

That realisation has stayed with me. At this point, I no longer care very much where home is on a map. If Adam is beside me and he is happy, I am home.

Do you consider yourself healed? Or has your understanding of healing moved away from the idea of being permanently finished with the past?

I am not sure I think of healing as a point you permanently arrive at anymore. Even physically, I cannot say with certainty that I am “healed”. Some of the physical pain I lived with for years has now been absent for quite some time, but I have experienced long periods of relief before, so I am still cautious about calling anything permanent.

What has changed is the way I understand what I was carrying. I have come to believe that some of what I was carrying physically may have been connected, at least in part, to everything I was carrying emotionally and mentally. Writing forced me to revisit those experiences, understand them differently, and put into words things I had held inside for years. I cannot know whether that has anything to do with the physical change, but I do know that understanding myself has removed some of the weight I had been carrying.

So I no longer think healing necessarily means becoming permanently untouched by the past. Some things may disappear. Some may return. Others simply lose the power they once had over you. For me, healing now feels less like erasing what happened and more like understanding it well enough that I do not have to carry all of it in the same way.