Bleeding Me

There are moments when a song plays, and there are moments when a song arrives.

I had one of those tonight.

I’ve just come home from a family holiday in Portugal. While I was there, something happened that may prove to be significant. Empowerment & Elevation may have landed its first client, and somehow, straight out of the trap, it could be a big one.

There was a moment beside the pool that captured the absurdity of where my life seems to be moving. Five-star hotel. Beer beside me. MacBook open. Kids around the pool. And on the screen, I wasn’t answering emails from work or killing time on the internet. I was building infrastructure. AI systems, businesses, delivery mechanisms, things capable of operating far beyond the physical location of the person building them.

I heard an old Lil Wayne line in my head about approving million-dollar deals from his phone.

Not because I had suddenly become a millionaire. Not because there was some enormous cheque waiting for me when I got home. It was the shape of the thing that struck me.

I could finally see the machinery of the life I had been trying to build.

For years I have said that I don’t particularly want money for the things money buys. I want what money can remove. Obligation. Dependence. Someone else owning my time. I want creative space. I want the freedom to make something because it needs to exist, not because I managed to squeeze it into the exhausted remains of a working day.

Sitting beside that pool, I realised I might actually be building the infrastructure capable of doing that.

So naturally, being me, I went looking for music.

I wanted a song for the moment. Something that could somehow carry the feeling of fuck… this might actually be happening.

Nothing.

I searched.
I listened.
I skipped.

Nothing landed.

So I stopped looking.

Then I came home.

Last night I went for dinner wearing a Metallica shirt.
No significance attached to it whatsoever.
It was a shirt.
I wore it.

Tonight I sat down at my computer, headphones on, partly working and partly decompressing after travelling home. I was browsing through Apple Music when Reload appeared. I hadn’t seen it in ages.

I was never particularly fond of Reload, but seeing it reminded me of Load.

Now that album has history.

There are songs on there I used to drum along to. Music that lived in my body long before I had any of the language I have now for understanding the person inhabiting that body.

So I put it on.

Eventually I arrived at Bleeding Me.

I haven’t heard that song properly in years.

And then it happened.

The music drops into half-time and suddenly all that forward movement disappears. The guitars stop carrying the song and begin grinding through it. They don’t soar. They saw. There is something almost physically unpleasant about the texture of them, like dragging a fingernail lightly across an open cut.

And over that grind comes the line:

I take the leash.

My jaw actually moved sideways.

Because I knew immediately what that meant to me now.

Not what James Hetfield meant when he wrote it.

What it meant to me.

For most of my life, I thought freedom meant getting other people to let go of the leash.

Work.
Authority.
Expectations.
Responsibility.
Social convention.
All the external structures that seemed to determine where I could go and how far the rope would extend.

But over the last couple of years I discovered something considerably more uncomfortable.

Nobody else was holding it.

I was.

Or rather, parts of me that I didn’t know existed were holding it.

I was being led by an operating system I couldn’t see. Sensory overload. Hyperfocus. Masking. Internal pressure. Stress responses. A ferocious need for autonomy. Periods of extraordinary output followed by exhaustion. An inability to switch the machinery off. The constant feeling that I should somehow be able to function differently if I could just become disciplined enough, organised enough, motivated enough, calm enough.

I didn’t know I was neurodivergent.

So I couldn’t distinguish between who I was and what my nervous system was doing.

Everything was simply me.

That is a very strange form of imprisonment because there is no obvious jailer. You spend years trying to escape the cage without realising you’re carrying it around with you.

Then I learned how my mind worked.

And something opened.

I have described discovering my neurodivergence as a rebirth before. Tonight another image feels more accurate.

It was the combination to a lock.

The room behind the door wasn’t new. Everything inside it had been there all along: the creativity, the intensity, the sensitivity, the pattern recognition, the systems thinking, the music, the technology, the need to build, the need for solitude, the almost pathological need for freedom.

I had spent decades turning the dial without knowing what I was trying to unlock.

Achievement.
Discipline.
Training.
Work.
Cannabis.
Hormones.
Productivity.
Self-analysis.
Push harder.
Recover.
Start again.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Then came an understanding of neurodivergence.

Click.

The lock opened.

And perhaps the most important thing I discovered behind that door was that I didn’t need greater control over myself.

I needed to stop being unconsciously controlled by myself.

That distinction changed everything.

I stopped asking why I couldn’t operate like everybody else and started asking how I operate. I began building around attention rather than fighting it. Protecting sensory bandwidth instead of feeling guilty about it. Recognising overload before collapse. Using systems to externalise what my mind struggled to hold internally. Using AI almost as additional cognitive architecture.

I stopped trying to force myself through somebody else’s operating instructions.

As I once wrote in MY MANual:

“From here on out, I no longer force myself to operate like a ‘normal’ mind. I build from alignment, not expectation.” 

The MANual Revelations.docx

I didn’t know it when I wrote that.

I was taking the leash.

But tonight the title of the song itself opened another door.

Bleeding Me.

For years I could have heard that as suffering.
A person wounded by life.
Something external cutting into him.

Tonight I heard something darker.

If I was both prisoner and jailer, then taking the leash wasn’t simply an act of reclaiming control.

Something had to die.

The version of me built around survival had become a beast of its own. It protected me, drove me, pushed me, kept me productive, kept me moving. It got me through environments I didn’t understand and pressures I didn’t know how to regulate.

Eventually it became the thing I needed protection from.

And when I finally understood what had hold of me, I slit its throat.

It turned out the beast was me.

Not me in the sense of the person underneath it all. The constructed me. The defended me. The permanently braced, permanently pushing, permanently analysing version that had become so familiar I mistook him for identity.

So when the blade went across the throat of the beast, there was no clean separation between killer and victim.

I bled too.

I bled out the old operating system.

The need to prove.
The compulsive pushing.
The belief that rest had to be earned.
The assumption that difficulty functioning inside certain environments represented some defect in me rather than useful information about the environment.

Bleeding Me.

I was the wound and the weapon.

And perhaps that is why the music underneath those words feels so fucking violent to me now. It isn’t the sound of winning. It is the sound of extraction.

Something being dragged out through flesh.

Not painless liberation.

Release with teeth.

And then there is the part I don’t know what to do with intellectually, so increasingly I don’t try.

A few days ago, in Portugal, I actively went looking for a song to hold this moment.

I couldn’t find one.

I stopped looking.

I came home.

I wore a Metallica shirt to dinner.

The following evening I sat down, opened Apple Music, happened across Reload, rejected it in favour of an album beside it, and eventually arrived inside a song I hadn’t properly heard in years.

Only now I possessed the life experience necessary for its words to mean something entirely different.

Was that the Universe answering me?

Maybe.

Was it simply my brain finding meaning in coincidence?

Maybe.

But I find myself asking a question that makes the distinction increasingly difficult to care about:

What’s the difference?

If I send something outward — a request, a thought, an intention — and that act changes what I am receptive to, then eventually something in the world may answer it.

Perhaps the Universe sent the answer.

Perhaps I finally tuned the receiver correctly.

Perhaps those are two descriptions of the same event viewed from opposite ends of the wire.

I don’t know.

I don’t need to know.

Because coincidence doesn’t cancel meaning.

A song recorded decades ago existed unchanged all this time.
The waveform didn’t change.
The words didn’t change.
The guitars didn’t change.

The receiver did.

The young man who once drummed along to Bleeding Me couldn’t have heard what I heard tonight because he hadn’t lived the intervening years yet. He hadn’t experienced the stress, the health collapse, the questions, the neurodivergent discovery, the rebuilding, the businesses, the systems, the fight for autonomy.

The information was already encoded in the song.

I simply wasn’t yet capable of decoding it this way.

There is something beautiful about that.

And maybe this is why the triumphant song I went searching for in Portugal never appeared.

Because this isn’t the end of the film.

E&E doesn’t have the signed contract yet.
I haven’t left my job.
The studio isn’t built.
The sovereign income isn’t secured.
There is no victory montage to score.

There is only evidence that the door has finally opened.

So perhaps I didn’t need a song about arriving.

I needed a song about what had to be cut away so I could leave.

The digging.

The pressure.

The years spent being led by machinery I couldn’t see.

The moment the combination finally worked.

The recognition that the beast holding the leash was not standing outside the cage.

It was inside it with me.

And when I finally understood that, I didn’t defeat some external enemy.

I turned toward myself.

I took the leash.

I slit the throat of the beast that had hold of me.

And because the beast was me—

I bled out.

What remained wasn’t a new man.

It was the one who had been underneath all along.

And for the first time in his life, he gets to decide where we walk.