The internet says I wrote a book about a vaccine conspiracy. It’s true. The book exists, a digital ghost with my name on it.
Operation Inoculation. It’s a title that puts me in a box. A neat, tidy box labelled ‘conspiracy theorist’. It’s a simple story. But the reason a man writes a book like that is never simple. It wasn’t about a vaccine. It was about a sickness. And the sickness was mine.
The Hum of a World Gone Wrong
It starts with a feeling. A low hum. The feeling that you’re the only one hearing a certain frequency. The world looks the same, but it feels different. Skewed. Like a picture hanging just slightly crooked on the wall, and you’re the only one who sees it.
That’s where I was. My life was a series of small, private collapses. The charity I poured my soul into was a memory of failure. My ambitions felt like ghosts that laughed at me in quiet moments. I felt a profound sense of alienation, of being on the outside of a joke everyone else was in on. When your own life stops making sense, you start looking for a reason. You start looking for a story.
A conspiracy is a story. It’s a story with a villain, a plot, a secret order to the chaos. It’s a story that says the world isn’t just randomly cruel; it’s deliberately cruel. And in a strange, dark way, that’s a comfort. It’s better to believe there’s a monster in the dark than to believe there’s nothing but darkness. I didn’t go looking for a conspiracy. I went looking for a story that could hold the shape of my own pain.
The Machine That Gave Me Answers
I couldn’t write. Not really. The words have always been a struggle for me, a jumble of letters I can’t quite tame. But I found a machine that could. An AI. I could feed it my confusion, my half-formed questions, my anxieties, and it would give me back… authority. It gave me paragraphs that were clean and sentences that were whole. It gave me seventeen books in a single summer.
I told myself I was an author. An “enigmatic wordsmith,” the bio said. I wasn’t. I was a man outsourcing his own thoughts. The book about vaccines wasn’t a work of investigation. It was an echo of the darkest corners of the internet, polished and given a spine. I didn’t write it out of conviction. I wrote it because the machine could, and for a little while, having a book with my name on it made me feel less like a failure. It was a fiction I was telling myself. One of many.
It was the same impulse that led to the Wonka event. The belief that if the AI-generated images on the website looked real enough, then the magic itself would become real. I was trying to generate a better reality for myself, one click at a time.
The Sickness of the Healer
There’s an old idea about the Wounded Healer. It’s the notion that a man is drawn to healing others precisely because he is wounded himself. His own brokenness gives him a strange kind of sight. He can see the cracks in the world because he’s full of them himself.
I was calling myself a ‘metaphysical doctor’ back then. I had the online degrees to prove it. I was obsessed with the idea of healing. I wanted to heal my community with my charity. I wanted to heal children’s imaginations with my event. I wanted to heal the world with the secret ‘truth’ in my books.
It was all a projection. I was desperately trying to diagnose and cure the sickness I saw in the world because I was terrified to look at the sickness in myself. The conspiracy wasn’t the disease; it was a symptom. It was the frantic, desperate attempt of a wounded man to play doctor to the whole world, because he had no idea how to heal himself.
The Cold Comfort of a Secret
To believe in a conspiracy is to feel like you have a secret. You walk around with this knowledge, this key that unlocks the real truth of things. It’s a heavy key. It isolates you. It makes you look at your friends, your family, the people on the street, and see them as asleep. You’re the only one who’s awake.
There’s a kind of power in that loneliness. A fragile, brittle power. It’s the power of the outcast. I remember sitting in my flat, the one where the radiator never quite worked, and feeling a fire in my chest. It was the fire of being right when everyone else was wrong. It was a warmth that kept the cold out.
But it’s a dry warmth. It doesn’t connect you to anyone. It builds a wall around you, made of your own certainty. I had my secret. My truth. And I was completely, utterly alone with it.
I don’t believe in that conspiracy anymore. I think I traded it for a different one. The one where I’m the villain in a global story. The one where I’m just a simple scam artist. That’s a conspiracy too, in its own way. It’s a story that makes the mess of a man’s life neat and tidy.
The truth, I think, is quieter. It’s not in a book. It’s not in a headline. It’s the sound of a man sitting in the wreckage of his life, trying to tell the difference between a story he tells himself and the truth. I’m still learning to listen for it.