They say I wrote conspiracy books. Seventeen of them, apparently, all birthed in a single summer. The titles sound like something from a bargain bin at a forgotten airport bookstore.
The Biohazard Protocol. The Memory Trap. Operation Inoculation. The label they stick on you for that is ‘conspiracy theorist’. It’s a tidy box. It suggests a man in a dark room with maps and bits of string, connecting dots no one else can see.
The truth is less cinematic. The room wasn’t dark, it was just my flat. And I wasn’t connecting dots. I was just trying to feel like I existed.
The Author Who Couldn’t Write
I have always wanted to be a person who writes books. An author. The word itself feels solid. It has weight. It’s a title that says you have something to say, that you’ve wrestled with ideas and pinned them to the page. I wanted that weight. But the wrestling part… that’s where I always failed.
I’m dyslexic. The words, they swim. Letters swap places. The bridge between the thought in my head and the sentence on the screen is a rickety, treacherous thing. For years, it was a source of deep, quiet shame. So I found a shortcut. A machine that could build the bridge for me.
I fed it ideas, fragments, whispers of stories. And it gave me back chapters. Paragraphs. Full, complete books. I told myself I was the author. The “enigmatic wordsmith from the bustling streets of Glasgow,” as the bio I probably had the machine write for me said. I told myself the AI was just a tool, like a spellchecker, to fix my grammar and spelling. But it was more than that. It was a ghostwriter. And I was its willing host. I didn’t do it for the money; I think I made pennies. I did it for the feeling of seeing my name on a cover. For the brief, hollow illusion of being the man I wished I was.
A Fever Dream of ‘Truth’
One of those books was about vaccine conspiracies. It’s the one they always point to. See? He’s one of them. And I can’t deny it. The book exists. But it wasn’t born from conviction. It was born from confusion.
The world had stopped making sense to me. There was a disconnect, a static hum between me and everyone else. I felt like I was picking up on signals no one else heard, seeing patterns in the noise. It’s a strange, lonely feeling. You start looking for answers, for a story that makes the chaos feel like it has a secret order. You fall down rabbit holes. You read things in the dark corners of the internet. You start to believe that maybe, just maybe, you’re the one who sees the real truth.
It wasn’t a political stance. It was a psychological one. It was the symptom of a mind that felt broken and was looking for a reason why. The book was an artifact of that fever. A transcript of a period of my life when I felt so alienated from reality that the most outlandish stories felt more plausible than the quiet, terrifying truth: that the problem wasn’t the world. The problem was me.
The Library of the Wounded Healer
Around the same time, I was calling myself a ‘metaphysical doctor’. I had qualifications from online universities, dozens of them. I was building a library of knowledge, not just with the books I was ‘writing’, but with the titles I was collecting for myself. I was trying to become a healer.
There’s an idea, I think it comes from a man named Carl Jung, called the Wounded Healer. It’s the idea that a person is drawn to healing others because they are, themselves, wounded. Their own pain gives them the power to understand the pain of others. I read that and it felt like a lightning bolt. It felt like me.
I was wounded. Deeply. And all of it—the charity work, the online degrees, the AI books—it was all part of a desperate attempt to heal myself by pretending I had the power to heal everyone else. The books weren’t meant to be a doctrine. They were meant to be a shield. If I was an author, a doctor, a man with answers, then I didn’t have to be the broken, confused man who didn’t know how to fix his own life. The conspiracy books were just the most obvious prescription I wrote for myself. A way to explain a world that hurt me.
The Man Who Lived in a Story
The AI books. The Wonka event. The grand, collapsing ambitions. They were all stories. Fictions I wrote with my life. I wasn’t just writing conspiracy books; I was living a conspiracy. A conspiracy of one. The belief that if I just created a convincing enough story, a compelling enough character for myself, then maybe it would become real.
I was the author. I was the philanthropist. I was the visionary events planner. I was the man who understood the secret workings of the world.
Each of these roles was a chapter. Each failure was a plot twist I didn’t see coming. The books are just the most literal evidence of it. They are the pages of a story about a man trying to write himself into existence. A man so lost in his own fictions that he couldn’t see the line between a dream and a lie.
I can’t un-write those books. They are out there, floating in the digital ether, with my name on them. They are ghosts. But they are not the whole story. They are the ramblings of a man who was profoundly lost. I am still lost, I think. But I am trying, now, to stop writing fiction. I am trying to tell the truth. Even if it’s just the story of my own confusion, my own flaws. It’s a harder story to write. But I have to believe it’s the only one worth telling.