Updates

Today, as I sit at my writing desk, I feel something I’ve longed for my entire life: a genuine sense of connection with my readers. For the first time, I have a growing list of...

Something has been gnawing at me ever since my recent release from the mental health clinic. A quiet tapping at the back of my mind, reminding me that I had missed something—...

There is nothing on this spinning rock we call a planet that grows as slowly, painfully, and stubbornly as an author. The only attention you attract early on isn’t praise or...

Too often, the very places built to protect us do the opposite.

Corporate environments lecture endlessly about “well-being” while executives hurl verbal assaults like deranged...

Part III — The Oppressors

There is a certain kind of bully—an abuser—that people like me tend to attract.
I call them the Oppressors.

Many have asked me whether these individuals...

Part II: The Power We Give Away, and How We Take It Back

By Iwan Ross

There are two kinds of people in this world: the bullies, and the recipients of their cruelty. Yet despite...

Part I: The Wounds They Smell

by Iwan Ross

Since my release from the mental health clinic a little more than a month ago, a voice has been gnawing at the back of my mind. At...

Today, something unexpected happened.

Something small, silly, ordinary… and yet strangely profound.

My wife summoned me to the shops — the kind of summons where you immediately...

People like me often leave ourselves wide open for hurt. I’ve heard the terms — sucker for punishment, glutton for abuse, why does he keep going back? But when I say “people...

What losing everything taught me about work, writing, and listening to myself

Less than a year ago, I sat in this very chair, staring blankly at my computer screen, my mind...

A little less than a year ago, I lost my job because of mental illness.

Like many desperate people, I turned to social media.

Social platforms thrive on desperation the way wolves...

A while back, something strange began happening outside our home. Children kept gathering in front of our gate — riding their bikes in circles, whispering to one another,...

how the experience reshaped me — and the quiet adjustments that saved my life

Before we talk about what I’ve learned, we must first acknowledge the world I was released from. I...

and the quiet truth I uncovered on the night everything made sense

During my time in hospital — and in the weeks after I was released — not a single person, not even the ones...

By Iwan Ross

I turned fifty-five inside a mental health clinic.

My wife, ever the comedian in the darkness, called it “pyp en pyptig” — a playful Afrikaans twist that made both...

A breakdown, a blackout… and the strangest homecoming I never asked for.

I don’t remember deciding to stop functioning.

My wife tells me I sat up in bed—eyes open, breathing...

During the three weeks I took off for my mental health, my psychiatrist told me she had no problem with me writing.
And so… I wrote.

It wasn’t work.
It wasn’t pressure.
It was ...

Today was my first day back at work after a three-week break to recover from a mental health breakdown — or an “episode,” or a “condition,” or whatever polite name we give the...

Tomorrow I return to work after three weeks of stepping back for my mental health.

Three weeks of trying to stitch myself together again — slowly, gently, honestly.

And yet here...

Some stories we choose to write.

Others choose us.

Long before I drafted my first book, long before Elm Brook Manor or The Sandman’s Mark, there was a story unfolding quietly...