When I began writing seriously a few years ago, I imagined it as a process of exploration and articulation — a way of deepening my understanding and gathering my life experience into a coherent body of work. I assumed clarity would accumulate, that the more I wrote, the more solid and recognisable my worldview would become.

What has actually happened is almost the opposite.

Writing has turned out to be an emptying out rather than a building up. As I write about what I discover in my lived experience, it feels less like adding layers of insight and more like shedding what has quietly accumulated over time. Not uncovering something hidden so much as allowing something to leave.

There is a strange consequence to this. As the words come, something is released — and once released, it no longer belongs to me. I forget it. When I return to pieces I’ve written, I often don’t recognise them as mine. The ideas don’t feel owned or defended; they feel finished, spent, gone.

I had assumed writing would sharpen what I know. Instead, it keeps confronting me with how little I do.

The image that comes to mind is a blackboard filled with symbols — diagrams, equations, fragments of meaning — slowly being erased. Not violently, not all at once, but steadily. Each piece of writing clears a little more space. What remains is not certainty, but availability.

This has become more pronounced through my participation in the Between-Us groups. Although I helped organise them, I no longer experience myself as a facilitator in any meaningful sense. Whatever authority or orientation I thought that role provided is steadily being stripped away. The same process that is working on the participants is working on me.

What seems to be dissolving is not identity in any dramatic or theatrical way, but something subtler: the need to be someone in the room. The impulse to occupy a function. The reflex to justify my presence through contribution, insight, or guidance. In the absence of those roles, there is nowhere to stand — and no one left to perform.

This kind of responsibility turns out to require a quiet renunciation: letting go of authorship, of control, of the idea that transformation is something one does rather than something one is subject to. What remains is participation without privilege — being shaped by the same forces, exposed in the same way.

I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Brazil, where Robert De Niro’s character becomes so entangled in loose papers and debris that he’s almost indistinguishable from what surrounds him. When the wind finally lifts it all away, he disappears with it — not defeated, but unlocatable.

I don’t imagine this process ending in disappearance. It feels more like becoming increasingly empty in a way that makes presence possible — less a vanishing than a clearing. What remains is not a self, but a capacity: an openness that doesn’t need to be maintained or defended.

Writing no longer feels like self-expression or even understanding. It feels like consent — to being hollowed out just enough that something other than me can speak, act, and meet the world, without needing a someone left behind to claim it.