It started with a poem.

1998. A classroom. A girl who had never lost anyone wrote about grief so completely that a classmate read it and cried. Not from sadness, but from recognition. From the relief of being understood. There were others too, curious eyes moving across the page, but she was the only one who cried. She nodded at certain points, tears quietly falling, and when she finally looked up, she said it was beautiful.

Then she asked me who I had lost.

I remember how several heads turned toward me at once. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about lying. I thought about pretending it was too painful to speak about, which would have been its own kind of lie. What I didn’t want to do was reveal my secret. Because the truth was that I had lost no one. I had written that poem by disappearing so completely into an imagined world, into the grief of someone who didn’t exist, that the feeling had become indistinguishable from lived experience. To say that out loud would have made it sound like a fabrication. And I didn’t want her to feel foolish for crying over something imagined.

Except that it wasn’t false.

Her grief was real. Her recognition of it was real. The connection between us, across the distance of an experience I had never lived, was real.

Thankfully, the conversation moved on before I had to answer. But I never forgot that moment, not because of what was said, but because of what I understood in the silence. That imagination, when it goes deep enough, doesn’t imitate truth. It becomes it. And that the most profound connections between people don’t always require shared experience. Sometimes they require someone willing to be so completely absorbed in another world that the line between the imagined and lived dissolves, and what emerges carries the weight of truth.

That understanding began long before the poem. A childhood spent watching those around me. Hypervigilant without yet knowing the word for it. Reading faces, rooms, silences, tensions. Paying attention to what was never said out loud. When my world looked different from everyone else’s, I became a student of worlds. I was endlessly curious about why people are the way they are, why some families fracture while others hold together, why some people bend and others break, why we do what we do, what any of it actually means. I had no language for it then, just the looking itself: quiet, constant, instinctive. 

At eighteen, when it came time to choose a Bachelor’s degree, my parents wanted me to study law. Practical. Prestigious. Safe. I considered psychology. Even then, the human mind pulled at me. But at eighteen it felt too abstract. All theory and framework, no heartbeat. I wasn’t ready to sit with concepts. I wanted lives.

By then, I had already discovered what literature could do. Not merely entertain or educate, but transport. Books opened doors into lives so different from my own that stepping through them felt like arriving in another world. The Odyssey. Waiting for Godot. Midnight’s Children. Heart of Darkness. Each one opened a door to what it meant to be human.

So I chose literature, not knowing I was choosing the gentler door into the same room.

Because woven quietly into the edges of literary study were Freud and Jung, the unconscious slipping into the space between stanzas and symbols, and the human mind revealing itself through metaphor instead of diagnosis. It was psychology with a pulse. And for the first time, that way of seeing, the one that had been quietly developing in me since childhood, found a home here, in the space between the pages, where other worlds waited to be consumed and understood.

Literature gave me something else too: recognition. Reading about diaspora, about the experience of being from everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, of carrying multiple worlds inside me without fully belonging to any of them, I recognised myself with startling clarity. Not in a mirror, but on a page. The relief of that recognition, of finally being precisely seen and understood, never left me. 

Then came the workplace. More than two decades of it. And if literature was the window, the workplace became the laboratory: human behaviour stripped raw by pressure, ambition, conflict, grief, fear, joy. People revealing themselves most honestly when the stakes were high enough. The same curiosity I carried since childhood followed me into every meeting room, every negotiation, every difficult conversation. I watched insecurity disguise itself as control, kindness survive impossible circumstances, vulnerability appear unexpectedly in moments of collapse. The questions never changed. Why do people do what they do? Why do some bend and others break?

But slowly, over time, something changed. There was less space for people, for truth, and I felt myself shrinking with it. So I turned toward what I had quietly been doing all along. Counselling, formally this time. But I wanted more than emotional understanding. I wanted intellectual depth. I nearly settled for a traditional path, all theory and framework, but I wanted not just theory, but also integration. Then I discovered the intersection of psychology and neuroscience. What a remarkable pairing!

Neuroscience does what pure theory sometimes cannot. It makes the abstract concrete. It gives the question of why we do what we do, not just a framework, but a biology. And when science began articulating what lived experience had always hinted at, the recognition was immediate. There it was again: that familiar feeling of finding truth beneath the surface.

As this continues to unfold for me, one thing has become undeniable: I’ve always been on this one road. Every fork bent, inevitably, toward the same obsession. Understanding what it means to be human. Through literature, work, psychology, neuroscience, and lived experience. Through grief, humour, contradiction, longing, identity, and the fragile architecture of being alive.

All of it led here. The Rainbow of Madness.

Where the beauty of life and the grotesque weight of its tragedies inextricably converge, not as opposites to be resolved, but as the same truth seen from different angles, embraced unapologetically. A living, moving space, never static, never finished, always becoming: because that is the nature of understanding itself, and the nature of each of us. And somewhere along the way, that lifelong way of seeing acquired a name.

The Lucid Eye.

A brilliant paradox or a terrible joke because the eye is actually the least lucid thing about us! It’s the brain doing all the real seeing. But perhaps that’s exactly the point: humour opens the door, and depth is what waits inside.

As Salman Rushdie has long understood, to truly know another person, you must swallow their world whole. Not observe it safely from a distance, but take it all in and allow it to become part of you, to change you from the inside in ways that cannot be undone. That is what books can do when we surrender to them fully.

And that is what Rainbow of Madness seeks to do through the Lucid Eye. To move through both the dark and the luminous with equal curiosity, examining the full complexity of being alive – all of it, not just the comfortable parts – with candour, rigour, and the occasional burst of humour. Gathering worlds. Weaving them together with lived experience, literature, psychology and neuroscience. Then handing them back, illuminated from within, so you can sit with what you find and remember what you have always already known.

This is where it begins.

You are not alone. There are billions of us, each carrying a universe within ourselves. Each vastly unique yet intricately entwined. Each on a road that was, inevitably, leading here: where the looking softens into finding.