The thing I would have wanted

For most of my life, I did not know how to feel well.

The particulars, as they usually do, started young. I was a child with a loving family, but somewhere quite early on I began to feel out of place. The joy that other children seemed to find in ordinary things was harder for me to reach. Social settings became something to endure rather than enjoy. Being the centre of attention, even briefly, was something I dreaded. Underneath the surface of what looked like an ordinary childhood, I was already carrying loneliness, low self-esteem, and the beginnings of what I would later learn to call depression.

The distractions we choose

I coped in the ways that children cope. Video games for hours on end. Music through headphones. Food as comfort. The distractions worked, at least in the way distractions do, which is to fill the time when feeling well is not available.

By my late teens and early twenties, the video games had been replaced by alcohol. The freedom of young adulthood combined with a taste for the particular kind of relief that alcohol offers, and the mix quickly became something I depended on more than I understood at the time. It was fun, and it was becoming necessary, and I could not always tell which was which.

The cycle

After university the future looked bleaker in the cold light of day, and after my first failed relationship, everything came to a head. Depression, which had been present as a background hum, took on a shape I could not carry. What followed was roughly ten years of a cycle I could describe now but did not have the language for then.

Antidepressants, on and off. Therapy of various kinds, sometimes mindfulness, sometimes CBT, with varying success. Some therapists were exceptional and quietly changed the trajectory of my life. Others were less helpful, for reasons that were sometimes about them and sometimes about me not being ready to receive what they were offering. Alcohol became a more destructive force than a supportive one. My weight fluctuated. Relationships collapsed. Isolation grew.

There were dead-end jobs. There was ongoing money strain, which has its own compounding effect on mental health that people who have not experienced it often do not appreciate. And there were nights when I could not see a way forward. With love and support from my family and friends, and with more luck than I probably deserved, I survived.

With love and support from my family and friends, and with more luck than I probably deserved, I survived.

Small habits, in aggregate

Over time, and I want to be honest that it was over a long time, I began to develop habits that worked. Not miracle cures. Not the sudden clarity that self-help books promise. Just small habits that, in aggregate, changed how I felt.

Steady exercise, taken up not because I loved it but because I had noticed I felt marginally better on the days I moved. My first sustained period without alcohol, which followed a rock-bottom moment I do not need to describe here. Learning to play guitar, a hobby I had wanted for years and finally sat with. Time in nature, which I noticed did something to my nervous system that no amount of talking about my feelings had done. Prioritising the people in my life who added rather than subtracted from how I felt.

The antidepressants stopped being the first thing I reached for. Therapy started to work in ways it had not before. I began pursuing professional qualifications that opened up work I actually wanted.

The process was not linear. It never is. There were setbacks, backslides, and long stretches where the gains I had made felt like they had been lost. But the direction of travel was different. Something was accumulating.

What was accumulating was insight

The insights themselves were not groundbreaking. They were simple truths that most people would already recognise, phrased in ways I had probably heard many times before. That exercise, done consistently, is one of the most reliable interventions for low mood. That alcohol, despite its reputation as a sleep aid, actually blocks REM sleep and leaves you less rested than the drink you skipped would have. That however good the film or series, hours of passive watching are hours you are not spending on the things that reliably make you feel more human.

None of it was new. What was different was that I was finally ready to receive it. The insights had to find me at moments when I could hear them, and often that meant I had to have heard the same message five or ten or twenty times before it landed. The brain is remarkably good at deflecting information that would require change, at manufacturing small justifications for the behaviours that do not serve us. Insight is the thing that eventually breaks through the deflection. Not once, but slowly, and usually only after enough painful experience that the deflection stops working.

The idea, in Bali

By my mid-thirties I had built what I now think of as a personal playbook. A set of behaviours and small habits and rules of engagement with my own mind that let me manage depression rather than eliminate it. The depression was still there, sometimes. But it was something I could work with, rather than something that worked on me.

The idea for Morrígan arrived while I was doing yoga in Ubud. It was a Bali cliché, and I know how it reads, but it happened the way it happened. I was in the middle of a class, trying to keep up with the increasingly ambitious shapes the instructor was asking us to make, surrounded by trees with monkeys moving through the branches above us. It was silly and lovely and I felt an unexpected, overwhelming sense of gratitude.

Then my mind wandered, as it does, and I thought about how genuinely absurd it was that I was there. For years I had wanted to be nowhere at all. And here I was, on the other side of the world, in a forest with monkeys, feeling content.

For years I had wanted to be nowhere at all. And here I was, on the other side of the world, in a forest with monkeys, feeling content.

A mirror, not a coach

I started to think about all the things that had changed. The behavioural shifts that had accumulated. The playbook I now carried for managing my own mental health. The specific things I had eventually learned about exercise, about alcohol, about nutrition, about who to spend time with.

And I thought about the loop that had produced all of it. The slow, painful, decade-long process of receiving the same insights over and over again until they landed. What if you could compress that loop? What if, instead of ten years of pain and broken relationships and money lost to substances and years spent in work I did not want, someone could receive those same insights more quickly, in a way they could actually hear?

Not by being told. Told does not work. Told is what therapists have been doing for decades, with mixed results, because the brain deflects being told.

But maybe by being shown their own patterns. A mirror, not a coach. A reflection of their own behaviour, back to them, with just enough context to make the pattern legible. Not judged. Not moralised at. Not gamified into a wellness performance. Just observed, quietly, week after week, until the observation finds them at the moment they are finally ready to receive it.

What Morrígan is for

And when they were ready, small suggestions. Not lists of interventions to overwhelm someone who is already overwhelmed. A ladder of small behavioural changes that they could climb one rung at a time from wherever they were currently standing.

That was the idea, in the middle of a yoga class in Bali. That is still the idea now.

Morrígan is my attempt to build the thing I would have wanted twenty years ago. Not a therapist. Not a meditation app. Not a mood tracker. Something quieter than all of those. A companion for the six pillars that carry most of how you feel, week after week, that reads your patterns back to you and helps you build your own playbook, one small shift at a time.

MVP in September 2026, almost a year to the day after that class in Ubud.

If any of this reaches you at a moment when it lands, I hope you will try it. And if it does not land yet, that is also fine. It will still be here when you are ready.

Alexander