10 Aug 2026 6 min read

How to Find Your Purpose

First, I’m gonna start in a slightly different place than usual. I’m gonna show you where the weekly mind-map comes from and why.

Usually, around Friday, I start to get an idea, leading from last week’s newsletter. That idea populates the 8-stations. This week I did not get an idea, cos peace fucks with your creativity. Well, it has with mine. Joke. It has just taken me in a different direction.

Sunday morning, I still have nothing running through my head. Then Maria Popova’s Marginalian: arrives. An article about play interests me.

Newton, reflected on his deathbed: 'I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore.'

Maria Popova: 'We play games with the mind and call them science, play games with the spirit and call them art, play games with the heart and mistake them for love.

Bernard Suits: 'Life itself may be, in the end, a game — not a closed game, the goal of which is winning (for the goal of life is death), but an open game, the goal of which is playing.'

I write play in station 1.
Her second article harrow interests me, I write harrow in station 2.
Her rabbit hole takes me to Nick Cave who mentions amelioration, A book I wanted to write.
Crossing the bridge has been stuck in my head for days.
I write a fantastic pitch this week, if it comes off it changes everything.
The bus is an entirely new world of lost souls.
My conversations give me a clue about who I would be in a prehistoric cave system.
I leave 8 open to receive an answer.

So my mind-map station words I must picture and go where the picture leads are:

Play. Fallen Angel. Protagonist.
Harrow. Cross hatch. Theme.
Amelioration. Mask. Hidden.
Crossing the bridge. Crescent moon. Cycle.
How to find your purpose. Black/white. Change.
The bus. The World. Emotional climate.
Who would I be in a cave system? Ghost. Past meets the present.
What is the sword?

Play takes me to my childhood home, and Angie at the door, turning up like Toni Morrison’s Beloved to take her vengeance. Knowing or unknowing. And my life of beautiful toys, a three-wheeler trike that I drive up the street to drop my mum and dad off at the Robin Hood when they can still play at being in love is smothered by the shame they feel looking in the face of the abandoned 16-year-old. And the scratchy towels begin. As all they sweep under the surface, surfaces and lifts the joy and floats it away.

Guiding the harrowing sorrow in, that keeps them afloat in their separate wheelie bins. Harrow: farm tool with sharp blades or teeth pulled over ploughed land to break up lumps of dirt and make the soil ready for more sorrow to be sown.

2013 when I move to my flat in Whalley Range, and I have no direction I want to write a book, a memoir, called the Amelioration of Miss Amelia Samuels, claiming my dad’s second name. That talks about everything I have talked about in this ongoing newsletter. But I’m not who I am now and I don’t know how to do it. It is hidden from me. I don’t know I will have to excavate a half-caste nightclub; wear a ballgown, claim the entire plantation to claim my dad; and exorcise half-caste ghosts with 8’ x 8’ 8-station mind-maps — to unearth, sift, name the material.

Crossing the bridge is a beautiful image I harvest when writing about crossing the canyon a few newsletters ago. Look at the tiny little image of me at station 4, crossing from 3 — wanting to write a book — to 5 — pitching that book and its accompaniments generated by 8-stations and 12-words.

The Bookling: The Difference Between a Greengrocer and a Nightclub (Full MS, ~60pp)

If flowers cannot live without the Big Bang, this highly visual bookling is the direct consequence of an evolutionary universe. The project is fully written, having been successfully serialised via my newsletter, and is structured around a unique artistic sequence:

The Architecture: Each chapter opens immediately with a visual 8-station mind-map drawn in my 13 x 21 cm Moleskine. This generates my chapter title; a tangible object; its 12 associations (12-words); and the consequential narrative written in 20 minutes. A voyage of discovery for me and the reader. Left unedited to preserve raw psychological friction and direct muscle memory.
The Interplay: The text explores my tragic teenage relationship alongside my recent friction with major cultural institutions attempting to harvest my four-year excavation of the Reno—the iconic Moss Side nightclub of my youth.
Visual Elements: The book also weaves in high-resolution photography documenting my installations: 2024 Factory International (In the Ruins of the Big House). 2025 HOME (My Mum Is White).

2. The Origin Memoir: My Mum Is White (Full MS, ~200pp)

This full-length narrative provides the deep structural history that generates the bookling. The book does not follow a traditional narrative timeline; instead, it evolves as a cosmic, structural accretion over 22 chapters:

Chapters 1–8: The ritual repetition of the 12-word technique—a 'wax-on, wax-off' process—to evolve the initial universe.
Chapter 9: Gathers the dust. Examines the cosmic gas.
Chapter 10: Teaches the reader exactly how to build an 8-station mind-map.
Chapters 11–13: Repeating the 8-station maps to ignite first-, second-, and third-generation stars, using the 12-word matrix to evolve the star our planet will orbit.
Chapters 14–17: Mind-mapping the surrounding cosmic dust, using the 12 words to accrete it into pebbles, then boulders.
Chapters 18–20: The boulders accrete into the solid planet of our inner world,
Chapter 21: Where life finally takes hold.
Chapter 22: The introduction—written at the very end—serving as a profound summary of the entire cosmic journey we have just survived.

3. The Snail-Mail Club (Creative Partnership)

To extend this universe into the physical world, I want to partner with ** on a limited subscription club for ~500 readers. At £15/month (including postage), members will receive beautifully curated, printed writing prompts, map templates, and artistic materials in the mail, teaching them how to execute 8-stations and 12-words to reach their inner world, and find their purpose. An exclusive community. A reliable recurring revenue stream for me and you.

Most weekdays I have a meeting in the morning. Go out around 1pm. Walk to town and the sea, listening to a non-fiction book. Go to one of my 3 fav cafes to be creative. Get the bus back. The last 4 times I meet this Irish woman coming back for cleaning. We strike up a kind of friendship cos when I hear her accent, I say, ‘My mum is Irish.’ Her eyes flash. The journey takes 8 minutes. In the first journey she tells me about her bad back. The other woman in the seat beside her is so starved of attention she almost climbs on her bad back to tell us her ailments. We have to give the floor to her. In the second journey she tells me about it’s either her or the drink to her Spanish husband. He chooses the drink. Goes to live with his Spanish sister. Almost kills the Spanish sister in a black out. Gives up the drink for 3 years. Goes back on the drink recently. Her eyes flash with incomprehension at how much she has just revealed. The 3^rd journey she sits at the back. She has already told me she does this when she doesn’t want to talk to anyone. The fourth journey, she’s back at the front, pats the seat next to her, tells how she gets in trouble recently for preventing a pushing-in American woman from boarding the bus first, and the woman saying how dare you. ‘How dare you is the key,’ I say. She agrees. I tell her about my mum and her internal IRA affiliations and her hate of injustice cos of oppression and how she once saved Mrs Connelly with skin the colour of margarine from a beating by the hand of drunken Mr Connelly. Her eyes flash. We are in a world she recognises. £15 is not a lot for her, or the attention starved back climber to fork out to have this connection, to have this outlet, to get advised to do yoga for her bad back, and not resist it, but admit that when she can be bothered to do Pilates it does make a difference.

This leads me to think about who I would be in a cave system. If we were at the beginning of humanity and we live in caves what would my skill be? Why would I be useful? How would I earn my keep? My ghost. The question I have been pondering for many years — the fucking use of art?

Drawing the mind-map, I realise I am the safety net for those who want to cross the bridge.

You, the readers of my newsletter, have been my safety net. You have never dropped below 59% opens. It has been as high as 78% opens. And only a tiny amount have unsubscribed, for real reasons. By consistently turning up, by not losing interest, you keep me feeling consistently valued and wanting to show up to please you.

I shed a tear as I thank you for crossing the bridge with me. xxx

See you next week.