Sunday, 26 July 2026

Holding the Megaphone: A Decade of Alchemical Gold and Confessional Exorcisms



Holding the Megaphone: A Decade of Alchemical Gold and Confessional Exorcisms by Omar Cherif, One Lucky Soul


Over a ten-month stretch in 2016, I wrote four list-articles that a psychologist friend later described as deeply “confessional”. Starting with Things I Never Told Anyone, I felt an urgent, unexplainable need to finally clear my chest of those hidden anomalies — so I did. I was residing in Venice Beach, L.A. at the time, operating under a sense of ultimate personal freedom when those confessions were transmitted into the ether. It felt like an exorcism of sorts. 

A decade later today, I look back at my 39-year-old self and reflect. Why did I write those deeply personal, unfiltered lists? How did they affect me then, and how did they shape the person I am today? Were guilt and shame secretly part of the equation, or was it the ultimate bid for liberation?

Let us dive right into it.


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For the uninitiated, or those who want to review the original raw data before reading this post-mortem, you can explore the classified archive here:

✵ Part I: Things I Never Told Anyone

✵ Part II: More Things I Never (Really) Told Anyone

✵ Part III: Even More Things I Never (Really) Told Anyone

✵ Part IV: Some of My First Times


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The Venice Beach Crucible


To be able to properly dissect this period of my life, we have to go back to the few years that led to that point—when I left it all behind in Egypt at 33 and relocated to Canada to start a new, cleaner chapter. There, it was a time of healing from the toxic lifestyle I had led in Egypt for years. It was also a time of rediscovering my passions: Writing and photography. It was art, and connecting with nature, that effectively helped my recovery. For Creativity Shall Set You Free. 

When writing gave me a voice during that emotional sobriety phase, I came to one sobering realisation: I can either hide my past, my darkness, my demons — like most people — or own my past, befriend my darkness, and Dance with my Demons. There was no third option. Well, you know what I chose.

As I began to open up, I noticed how shame cannot survive a public dissection; that you can humiliate the darkness by making it hilarious. You also become whole by integrating the shadow — rather than masking it, running away from it, or “leaving it in the past.” And once it is out of the system, it has no power over you. That’s the ultimate liberation from all the baggage.

What allowed me to openly share such raw vulnerability in 2016 — about cupping my hands while peeing in the shower or the first time I plugged a medicine up the popo for research purposes — was being in Venice Beach. 

The physical distance from Cairo and the freedom of L.A. allowed the default mode network to drop. When there is no performance for a rigid society you grew up in, because you’re entirely alone on a different continent of the New World, the hidden and the deep naturally bubble up to be processed.



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Humiliating the Shadow — The Exorcism Mechanism
















One Lucky Soul came into being as a simple, playful outlet to finally speak my truth. As recently shared in The Healing Powers of Storytelling: A Personal Experience Opus-Dopus, it was my own experimental, avant-garde palette — a laboratory of sorts where I am my own guinea pig. What comes to mind is the Greek word Meraki: The soul, creativity, or love put into something; the essence of oneself put into that which they enjoy doing. 

Through that outlet, I volunteered to dissect myself and my humanity before the world as a way to truly Know Thyself. Publishing the “unspeakable” and the “unutterable” — whether in those four articles or elsewhere — completely strips the shadow of its power. You can’t be blackmailed by your past if you are the one holding the megaphone.



— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —

“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.”
― Annette Messager

— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —— ☙ ❊ ❧ —


Another factor that accelerated this liberation and integration was the English language. English is technically my third language — after Arabic and French — but when I became a writer, it was all in English. This shift meant dropping the default networks that you inherit from your society and your parents through the mother tongue. In the reserved Egyptian and Arabic culture, taboo topics are not spoken about directly or clearly; the culture relies heavily on euphemisms and beating around the bush. When I switched to English, I was completely liberated from that weight. It makes more sense now that I went full Ba-zonga by openly writing about sexuality and drugs along with my most intimate anomalies.


The science behind this is fascinating: our mother tongue is wired directly into the amygdala — the brain’s primitive fear and shame centre. It is the language where our earliest social conditioning and boundaries were branded into us. A second or third language, however, is routed through the logical prefrontal cortex. It provides a natural psychological distance. English gave me a cognitive buffer; it stripped the taboos of their inherited emotional alarm systems. It allowed me to dissect the most volatile parts of my history with the cold precision of a surgeon and the playful freedom of a child, entirely unbothered by the limiting cultural whispers of “ayb” and “7aram” — even somewhat whimsically irreverent. It was time to break free, and it was my 30s, so I was no longer that young; I had enough lived experience to be able to integrate it all and become whole.


Speaking of which, while conjuring some of my truest confessions, I often imagine my parents shuddering upon reading. I picture an old schoolmate or someone rather traditional I once worked with checking my insides through a glowing screen inside some mundane office cubicle somewhere in Cairo — tilting their head in absolute disbelief, but also with undeniable amusement.



I knew this level of truth was the exact opposite of the perfectly curated, sterile appearances people put online. It was raw, it was unique, and it broke the simulation. One Lucky Soul was and still is The Glitch. Funnily enough, whenever I get those sudden glimpses of potential readers squirming, I know I’m hitting the Alchemical Gold.

So, how did that whimsically irreverent exorcism shape the person standing here today?


Simple: It bought my absolute freedom.


When you spend your late 30s voluntarily handing over your deepest, weirdest, and darkest vulnerabilities to the public ether, you stop running. You realise that the terrifying monster in the closet was just a puppet made of old social conditioning. By letting those lists breathe on OLS, I signed my own permanent release form from the global rat race of keeping up appearances.


Today, looking at 49 next month — uttered with the slight defensive twitch of a woman entering menopause, pffff — I sit by the Mediterranean breeze, or the Red Sea in Dahab, with two cats and a djembe, carrying zero hidden luggage. Unencumbered, I don’t have to look over my shoulder or worry about who thinks I’m an “insensitive dick”. The confessional era cleared out the internal wreckage so that the simple, unconditioned storyteller could finally take the wheel. It truly was a cathartic exorcism, and dare I say, it had to happen to become who I am today.


It turns out that the ultimate bid for liberation worked. By daring to look into the mirror and publishing exactly what I saw, I didn’t just survive the past — I owned and integrated it.


The experience of overcoming suffering endows us with a certain appreciation and sensitivity toward life, along with a healthy dose of empowerment. And those who have walked through the fire of their own hell and survived it tend to leave sparks of light wherever they go.


While in those 2016 lists I was dissecting my own inner being and raw humanity, in this next upcoming piece, I am putting an entire global superpower on the couch.
Stay tuned for: Universal Healing: Reflections from the Ten-Year American Trip.


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“I am in you and I am you. No one can understand this until he has lost his mind.”
— Rumi


✵ The Primal Psychonaut Field Research


 

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