Mercury Retrograde or Meta Renegade?

It's been a while since I wrote you something this honest, and the last time I did, I called it The Quiet Months.

These ones were not quiet.

The new phone lasted about four hours.

I'd just landed. New country, new SIM, clean slate. I sent one WhatsApp message. One. "Hey mate, we made it."

Instant ban.

Not a warning. Not a "please verify it's you." A ban, on a brand-new number, for the crime of saying hello to a friend.

I sat there and laughed, because at that point what else is there.

If you've been wondering where I disappeared to, this is the piece where I tell you. And underneath the funny part, there's a harder year, and one thing I learned in it that I think might be the most useful thing I can hand you all year.

The year the machines decided I wasn't allowed to work

Here's the short version of the last 12 months.

Instagram banned me.

Facebook locked me out entirely.

The ad account got shut down with no explanation and no human anywhere to ask.

YouTube quietly stopped letting me post, and then, just this month, just as quietly, let me back in, which means my brother Stef and I finally get to release the podcast we've been sitting on from February. Soon.

The CRM wouldn't let me send an email or publish a word for weeks.

The ManyChat flows refused to fire.

The whole AI system I've been building stalled at every turn.

The internet kept telling me it was Mercury Retrograde. Blame the planets.

But Mercury doesn't run Meta's trust and safety team.

This wasn't retrograde.

This was renegade.

A whole ecosystem of platforms deciding, on my behalf, that I'd have to fight for the right to do the one thing I'm actually here to do.

Great fun. Truly. (It was not great fun.)

I kept fixing my reception when the problem was where I stood

Here's the thing I kept doing. The thing I think most of us do.

I kept trying to fix my reception.

Appeal the ban. Re-verify the account. Restart the phone.

Stand by the window waving the device around like a man on a hilltop trying to catch one bar of signal.

Never once stopping to ask whether the problem was the phone, or the place I was standing.

Hold that image. I'm coming back to it, because it turned out to be the whole point.

Under the static, it was a heavier year than a few banned apps

The locked accounts were only the noise on the surface.

Underneath it, this was a much harder year than a handful of blocked apps.

It has been a year since we lost Henke. If you knew him, you knew.

If you didn't, all you need to know is that life has been quieter than it should be.

In February, Samantha and I miscarried and lost our baby.

And I've been cut off from my family since the book came out.

Which meant I couldn't wish my sister a happy 40th last month.

Or my nephew a happy 5th yesterday.

In two weeks my dad turns 75, and I don't get to say it to him either.

I'm not writing any of that for sympathy. I'm writing it because I know some of you are carrying your own version: the losses you don't post, the calls you can't make, the birthdays that pass in a silence you never chose.

I spoke to all of it more fully over on the IG feed this week.

Here I'll just say the plain thing: it was a lot to hold at once.

My nervous system wasn't broken. I was living inside a car alarm

And then there was Peru itself.

I love what Peru gave us. But by the end, my body was on its knees.

Since November I've averaged around three hours of sleep a night. Some nights less.

Not because I hadn't done my own work. Because of where I was standing.

Constant noise. Drunk voices in the street at 10pm every night. Two days before we left, I woke at 3:30am to a full brass band marching past the house. A brass f&*king band. At half three in the morning. You could not make it up.

I fell in the river and lost my iPhone.

Every single day was a wrestle for an internet signal or electricity that actually held.

The house never caught natural light, so it stayed freezing, heaters running from morning to night.

My sleep got so broken, and the room above the main road so loud, that Samantha and I ended up in separate beds just to get through the nights, which does something to two people, however solid they are, however completely they both understand why.

My nervous system wasn't fried because I was failing at my own methodology.

It was fried because I had been living inside a car alarm for eight months.

That distinction matters more than almost anything else I could tell you, and it's exactly what I'm opening up this Friday.

I'm running our epic masterclass, Heal Your Anxiety, and it goes underneath the symptom to the root most people never connect the racing heart to. Friday, 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific. Live and the replay only stays up 48 hours.

If your body has been running an alarm it can't switch off, come and sit in it with me: trystedsoul.com/heal-your-anxiety

The tests aren't fewer here. There's just a better system to move through them

Then we came to San Diego.

And I noticed something I want to put straight into your hands, because I think it's the most useful thing I've learned all year.

The tests didn't get smaller. Grief is still grief. The old patterns still knock on the door.

Being around grounded, conscious, genuinely successful people does not make you immune to a single bit of it.

But there is infrastructure here. There is community. There are people who have done their own work and can hold yours while you move through it. My brother Stef. A couple of friends who've quietly become family. People I get to sit across from and be completely myself with.

The tests aren't fewer. There is just a better system to move through them.

So here is the least fashionable thing I will write all year.

Before you decide you're failing. Before you diagnose yourself with some fresh piece of old trauma. Before you spiral trying to work out why the old patterns are back, do not discount the sheer power of your environment.

Sometimes the pattern isn't yours to heal. Sometimes you are simply standing in the wrong valley, with no signal, in a place that does not match your values or your vision.

You can have full bars of inner work and still get nothing through, if the ground you're standing on won't carry it.

Why I build what I build

This, by the way, is the entire reason I build what I build.

The bridge I keep talking about, the reason I'm putting AI to work behind the healing, is exactly this. Infrastructure and community, so that the people who carry real work don't have to fight their environment just to do it. So the healer stays in the room with the human, and the machine handles the static. The wave is coming for this field whether we like it or not, and I would rather the people with real lineage be the ones standing on solid ground when it breaks. That new home is @spark_legacy_ai, if you want to follow it early.

Samantha is grieving Peru too, in her own way. Not the noise. The ceremonies. The people she got to sit with and hold. With her US citizenship and everything she carries, she is building something new: a 12-week program I'm going to let her tell you about herself very soon. It is going to be special. She's at @theinnerarrival if you want to be there when she opens it.

And Stef and I have that podcast, finally cleared to release.

So the static is clearing. The signal is coming back. Turns out I just had to change where I was standing.

If you're standing somewhere that keeps costing you your sleep and calling it your fault, read that last line again.

Three doors, if you want them:

This Friday, the free masterclass, Heal Your Anxiety, for the body that can't switch the alarm off: www.trystedsoul.com/heal-your-anxiety

Next Friday, the workshop Heal His Rejection, if you sense the root runs back to your father: www.trystedsoul.com/heal-his-rejection

And if you're ready to build a life and a business that stops costing you your nervous system, the discovery call is where we start - book here.

Change where you're standing.

Mark