It was fourteen years ago and I was in the midst of change. Six months earlier, I had been ejected “karmically” from my life as sound editor in the film industry in London. I had to return to my home town in the north of England to stay with my parents, a difficult task. So in those first months of 2007, I escaped to do some voluntary work with the Iona community in Scotland. It was to be a first step on a longer voyage; that May I took the coach to the south of France to volunteer with the buddhist monks at Nalanda monastery near Lavour, then later that September I started working with the L’Arche community. But nothing turned out as planned.

The karmic kick which pushed me out of London and my old life was caused by a kind of mental breakdown. Writing became the means to go through those turbulent times, and in my return to my parents home I started to write a response to a question that had arisen during the premier acute phase of this mental crisis: what is my responsibility? That itinerant year gave me a voyage of reflection alongside the physical journey. Firstly, the difficult life with my parents was a kind of psychological immersion into my youth and the remembrance of an unloved child. This mirrored my dive into the depths of the question of what I should do.

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My voyage on the path of an itinerant volunteer was also a support to this writing project. With my first steps I was lucky to be able to stay several months with a liberal Christian community as it traversed the Easter celebration, and in the following step, stay with the Buddhists. All this gave me fruitful exchanges for my reflection. After six months I had found a position where I thought I might be able to stay for a longer period and perhaps even become fluent in French. In September I arrived at the L’Arche community in Beauvais, north of Paris. L’Arche is a catholic organisation where volunteers live in community with young people with special needs to aide them in their daily life. At the start I felt welcomed, but soon after the presentation of my documents, particularly my birth certificate, this became complicated. That simple act of showing my birth certificate, and so revealing my transgender status, did not go down well with the management. To cut a long story short, there was no question of me being able to stay and fulfil the role in the community; they told me it was too complicated for them to make a decision at that moment, so after a month I would have to go. I still have the bitter taste when I think of it; the most striking example of discrimination that I have suffered to date has been given by the hands of christians — it’s not a paradox, it is simply hypocrisy.

It was then the end of my voyage as I didn’t have enough money to stay in France and so I returned to England. This was the end of a chapter for me, I had finished the first draft of my writing project, and more important, I had found my voice.

On my return to the UK I found a little job in the neighbouring town which gave me the opportunity to exit the closed sphere of my aged parent’s. Its not worth going into more detail here, except to say that in one way it was really helpful to me that I could live nearby to them in what was to be the last ten years of their life. I was healing that, to some extent, I could repair a relationship that had become too damaged.

Ten years later I had worked on the ideas given birth in that initial volume, written by hand in a notebook — it had become in some ways a real text. However I was not at all satisfied with the result, nor with the lack of feedback from the handful of friends I had invited to read it. During that period I had also tried to work the ideas into the artistic domaine. But one of the things that had always concerned me with the text was its naive level of philosophy; either I should attempt real philosophy or I should stay on the artistic path. But even with my attempts to work at the artistic level, a domaine I knew well — having a bachelor degree from Goldsmiths’ — I found that nevertheless I still had need to deepen my philosophical ideas more. If I could be more clear at the level of ideas, the artistic work would perhaps also become more precise and more evocative.