There was a stretch of time when the words just wouldn’t come.
Or rather, I couldn’t afford to write.
Not financially. Not spiritually. Not neurologically.
I was in my dad’s basement.
Not in some poetic, “return to the roots” kind of way.
I was there because my apartment had burned down and I had no insurance.
I had no money.
No home.
No plan.
No partner.
No way to explain what the hell had just happened.
I had been erased.
By a woman I built a life with — who, with zero warning, ended our marriage, locked me out, and rewrote the entire story of who I was.
She lied about me to my own family. She made herself the protagonist. It was a strategic erasure.
Easier to believe the respectable teacher-mom with a nice narrative arc than the single dad who had just quit wealth management and refused to lie for a living.
🚨Let’s Back Up.
I didn’t just quit a job. I quit the whole performance.
The suit, the sales pitch, the “we’ve made it” bullshit.
I could feel it poisoning me.
Selling people dreams you don’t believe in is a slow form of soul-suicide.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
My wife didn’t see a broken man waking up — she saw a liability.
She had to go back to work.
She was embarrassed.
She wanted the image, not the reality.
So she secretly replaced me.
With another teacher. One whose wife had just died of cancer. And before the dust even settled, they were married.
New house.
New story.
New reality — funded by life insurance checks and the collective willful blindness of everyone who chose a comfortable lie over an uncomfortable truth.
I was the one discarded.
Labeled. Whispers of ‘going crazy’.
Mental breakdown.
“Dangerous!”
Not because I was — but because it was convenient.
🧠 Meanwhile, I Didn’t Know I Was Autistic
I was in crisis.
I was weeping constantly, literally ripping my hair out while pacing around my apartment living room in circles.
I couldn’t regulate, couldn’t function, couldn’t sleep without seeing my kids’ faces and knowing I’d just been systemically removed from 80% of their lives.
I was handed a few diagnoses.
None of them were accurate.
Just pills.
Lots of them.
Four to nine at a time — antipsychotics, antidepressants, anti-anxiety cocktails that made me irritable, tired, emotionally scrambled.
I tried to stay upright on COVID checks, Doordashing when I could, renting out my apartment as an Airbnb when the kids weren’t with me — sleeping in my car or the woods to save money.
Let that sink in.
I was sleeping in the woods while my ex basked in suburbia, praised for being ‘a strong mother’.
✝️ Then the Fire. Then the Basement. Then the Silence.
The fire stripped everything away.
The rest of my possessions. My home.
What was left was a basement, a broken MacBook, and Jung’s Red Book staring back at me like a prophecy I hadn’t yet lived through.
That book didn’t save me.
But it did haunt me.
Carl Jung said his most important writings weren’t academic — they were the divine compulsions he scribbled down during his spiritual unraveling. The moments he had to write or be consumed.
He understood something I was starting to feel:
That what breaks you doesn’t always kill you.
Sometimes it births something bigger.
But it might take years before you’re ready to speak.
🧨 So Why Didn’t I Write Until Now?
Because I was busy trying to stay alive!
Because I was getting criminalized for being poor,
punished for not performing,
and tranquilized for showing emotion.
Because I was crawling through the wreckage of a life I had loved, built, and lost.
Because writing would’ve meant remembering — and remembering meant collapsing.
Because nobody was listening.
Because everyone believed the version of the story that made their dinner party less awkward.
Because it’s easier to believe in a mother’s pain than a father’s extinction.
But the silence eventually became louder than the grief.
It started to feel like betrayal.
And that’s when the words returned…
💡Who This Is For
If you’ve ever been erased and replaced…
If you’ve ever been gaslit by an entire system because you didn’t make capitalism money or emotional sense…
If you’ve ever found yourself in a basement, holding your breath under the weight of divine compulsion…
This series is for you.
💬 Final Confession:
“Some revolutions begin with bullets.
Mine began in the woods, on antipsychotics, sleeping in a car while my children lived in a stranger’s castle.”
I’m not writing to be understood.
I’m writing to remember.
I’m writing because silence is how they win —
and I already lost too much to shut up now.
Support the Gospel / Light the Blunt
Books by NiKO SEKoYa
(because the essays weren’t enough)
Last King of the 20th Century
“Suburban madness, holy jokes.”
Read it here !Detroit. Jesus. Punk.
“This isn’t a memoir of sanitized faith. It’s the good news told with scrapes and scars.
🌐Find me elsewhere (non-toxic platforms):
Mastodon: mastodon.art/@nikosekoya
Bluesky: @nikosekoya.bsky.social
This is good shit. Thanks NiKO!