Uncovered Part I. Soul
A Homecoming Within. Art as Alignment. Collaboration as Communion
In my previous post, I shared a piece from one of the opening essays in Uncovered Part II: Body - the chapter that started it all.
“I never planned Uncovered. I was just trying to survive.”
Part II. Body was a mirror - cracked, but honest. A breaking point where truth finally surfaced.
The kind I was once too afraid to say out loud. The highs that felt like escape. The damage that followed. The seduction. The shame. Steroids. Sex. Addiction. I laid everything bare - not to provoke, but to be free. It was a story of transformation, but not the kind you post as a side-by-side. This was the messy middle - the part where I lost my grip: on control, on identity, on who I thought I was supposed to be. Where the performance falls apart, and all that’s left is whatever truth you’re still willing to claim. That’s what Body was: the unraveling. The place where I didn’t know if I was breaking down or breaking through. By the time I reached The Seafarer, it was clear - the mirror never held the full story. It only skimmed the surface. The body was a vessel, not the destination. What truly moved me, changed me, lived deeper. Beneath muscle. Beneath memory...
…In the soul - where nothing is hidden and nothing needs to be.
“The Uncovered project was never about transformation you can see - it’s about the kind you feel…”
For the past 10 months I’ve been working on Uncovered Part I. Soul. This part has asked more of me than anything I’ve written before.
It will be the most intimate, the most emotional, the most spiritual chapter of the project. It’s a homecoming.
While Body focused on how experience shaped the surface - the scars, the weight, the image - Soul will explore how it cracked something open on the inside. Some of the same events will reappear - but not as stories I’m retelling, and not as broad themes. I’ll go deeper… Not “this is what happened” - but “this is what it did to me.” Not just what I survived - but what it awakened. Not how I changed - but how something deeper was born.
This chapter will cover my spiritual awakening. Not the Instagram version. The real one.
“The one that stripped me bare. The one that left me in pieces. The one that showed me who I am - when everything and everyone else falls away.”
Between 2019 and 2024, I kept losing myself - again and again.
I met the darkest parts of me - not just fear, confusion, rage, loneliness, and obsession… but also the envy I didn’t want to admit I had. The self-hate I kept hidden under ambition. The need to be chosen. The hunger for validation that never seemed to fill. I disappeared into people. Into fantasies. Into versions of myself that weren’t real - just to feel something.
and I would rather suffer in silence than ask for help.
But those parts - the rage, the shame, the obsession, the need - weren’t enemies. They were signals. They were the parts I never gave space to. The ones I judged, ignored, buried. There were days I moved through the world like a ghost - functioning, smiling, posting - but disconnected from everything that once made me feel alive. My body was still here, but I was somewhere far behind it. There were nights I couldn’t sleep because my mind wouldn’t stop looping - overthinking, replaying scenes I never got closure from. The journal pages filled at 3 a.m. - with brutal honesty and confessions I wouldn’t dare say out loud.
Part I: Soul will tell the story of thoughts I once judged myself for having - the unkind ones, the obsessive ones, the ones that made me wonder if something was wrong with me.
“The contradictions. The longing. The guilt. The emotional loops that ran deep in my wiring. Soul will hold the moments I gaslit myself into silence… and the slow journey back to truth…“
The nights I almost spoke up but didn’t. The truths I buried under “it’s not a big deal.” The times I abandoned myself to be loved. It’s only recently I’ve found the courage to claim those truths - not just to write them, but to own them. Not because they’re beautiful or wise, but because they’re mine… Because without them, I’m just another image holding itself together.
Some things I’ve been through didn’t make me stronger. Some of them just hurt. Some of them still echo.
And that’s okay. Soul isn’t about pretending the work is done - it’s about admitting I’m still in it. That I’ve stopped trying to "get over it" and instead learned how to live with it. To breathe alongside it.
This chapter feels different - so it had to look different too. I thought it would be a solo journey. But as I turned inward, I found myself opening to a new kind of creative exchange - one rooted in trust, depth, and quiet alignment.
I feel truly humbled to be collaborating with brilliant artist Georg Meyer-Wiel - not only on Uncovered Part I. Soul
…but also on a special visual offering that marks the first step of this creative union. I’ve always believed we don’t meet people by accident. Every meaningful connection arrives in divine timing. When Georg and I crossed paths last October, it wasn’t about trying to “make something cool.” It was about saying something real. For me personally…
…this isn’t just collaboration - it’s spiritual alignment.
This union marks the beginning of a new phase for Uncovered - one that turns inward. Georg is working from a blend of sources: the images Dima Bocharov and I created for Body, and a collection of other photographs from over the years - intimate, emotional, imperfect, honest.
Together with Georg, we’re building something that’s more than a book or a product…
it’s a layered experience of what it means to be human.
The first expression of this collaboration is a visual series called “Five Layers of Flash” - born from the emotional archetypes of Uncovered: Part II. Body, and reimagined through Georg’s vision. I’ll share more about that very soon. But for now, just know - this union begins where it always had to: with Soul.
Georg’s work came into my life not with noise, but with gravity. And from that moment, everything shifted.
Georg Meyer-Wiel in his studio, London, 2025
He’s a German-born, London-based artist whose drawings, paintings, and performance-based works are known for their intense emotional energy. His figures are fluid, raw, expressive - they move even when standing still. They feel like motion held mid-breath. There’s something haunting and alive in the way he renders the body - not as an object, but as a channel. A threshold between the physical and the spiritual. His work isn’t just visual. It vibrates. It lingers.
From the moment I saw it, I knew. This was someone who saw the body the way I felt it - not just as muscle and shape, but as memory, tension, surrender. As memory made flesh. As story. And deeper than that - I felt he would understand the language of Soul.
His illustrations will live within the pages of Uncovered Part I. Soiul, not to decorate the words - but to expand them.
To stretch the emotional field. To make the invisible visible. His art doesn’t explain the story - it deepens it. It breathes where the words exhale. It holds space where language can’t.
The Uncovered project has always lived in the space between dualities - the seen and unseen.
The body and the spirit. The image… and the invisible truth pulsing beneath it. And If Part II: Body was the mirror, Part I: Soul is the echo. Not what was shown - but what was felt. This book will be less about revealing - more about remembering. Not in a way that drags the past forward, but in a way that reclaims it - with tenderness and truth.
“Because there is no full self-awareness without the unseen parts. No freedom without the wounds we carry with us. No light without honoring the dark it had to rise from.”
Uncovered: Soul is the moment you sit with yourself, no armor, no filter - and finally hear the story that’s been waiting inside your chest to be told. The one you’ve edited out for years. The one that still flickers when you’re alone at night and wondering if it was ever real. This isn’t a polished narrative. It’s raw memory. Shadow work - stitched into story.
We all carry stories we’ve never said out loud - not because they weren’t true, but because they hurt too much to name.
This is me naming them. Holding them. Letting them go. Because some stories aren’t meant to stay buried. They’re meant to bring us home…