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Liam Wakefield, Horsham (2026)

14/04/2026

After leaving my practice in London on Friday, I slingshot my way to Italy, and until Monday’s flight home I let myself surrender to the beauty of creativity in its most unapologetic form. Embracing the poetry of life and the essence of humanness in a way that could only be met with appreciation. I was in awe.

It was a stunning writing trip to Rome for a dear friend’s birthday, but also a much-needed reconnection to myself.

Pages filled in worn notebooks. Thoughts half-formed, then suddenly clear. Feelings that didn’t need explaining, only space. Conversations that wandered, deepened, and stayed with you long after they ended.

Good music drifting through dimly lit streets, the sound of my boots striking cobbled paths quietly announcing my presence. Wine that slowed time just enough to let the moments breathe. Food that reminded me how simple pleasure can be when you are actually present for it.

And somewhere in all of it, a quiet correction. A part of me that had felt stuck, lost, or slightly out of reach began to return. Not through force, but through allowing. A gentle reclamation.

A reminder that life is rarely found in the big, defining moments we chase, but in the ones we almost overlook.

In the passing glance.
The contemplative pause.
The sentence that lands.
The laugh that lingers.
A moment, fully felt.

Rome has a way of doing that. Not changing you, but bringing you back.

A return to something steadier. Something quieter.
A return to the real… carrying something new within it.

15/03/2026

As a child, I could never settle long enough to study.

There was always a lingering shadow in the silence. A fear that the survival state I lived in could not be rested, not even briefly, or the terror beneath it would rise and engulf me.

That kind of hypervigilance makes education feel impossible.

I failed at school. It was something told to me, and something I told myself, again and again. Liam, you’re stupid. I failed to listen the way I was expected to listen. To learn the way I was expected to learn. And the result was a quiet conviction that success in anything requiring intelligence was out of reach for damaged kids like me.

The army felt like the only route for the lost and damned. Better than the slow internal war of a creative life with no ground beneath it, which at the time seems my only other option.

Over time, an identity formed around the wound. I was someone who feared learning. Someone who wasn’t, and couldn’t be, studious. Because to sit in silence and try to focus meant facing whatever arrived there. And so much arrived. Wave after wave of paralysing fear, inferiority, shame, annihilation.

I had dropped out of schools, colleges, and university programmes, even in adulthood I carried this, to the point I abandoned scholarships, wrote myself off more times than I can count, always at the mercy of that lingering self-doubt. But persistence goes deeper than endurance. To sit quietly with a book, to stay present with difficulty rather than flee it, that has become one of my greatest strengths. Not only for the joy it brings, but because it is proof. A private victory for the boy who believed he couldn’t.

Much of my life’s work now begins in places like this.

A quiet corner. A book. An idea, a theory. A mind wrestling with the complex, sometimes abyssal questions that occupy the deeper spaces of being human.

A place I once fled from. Now one I linger in. A place of quiet contemplation, constructing ideas and building them into a life that once seemed unimaginable.

We are capable of so much, we just have to grant ourselves permission to face what holds us back.

16/02/2026

Paris ’26

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
— Albert Camus

From London to Paris, between the bustle of two busy practices, life paused long enough to breathe. With wine, food, books, cafés, and cold winter walks along the sleek, rain-dark streets of the Latin Quarter, life was lived and memories were made.

Time slipped by. The plane landed. And once again I found myself sitting opposite a patient, exhaling with the quiet, tired satisfaction of a weekend well spent.

In reflection, as I go back over pictures, moments, and mental notes. I recognise the magnitude of such opportunities in experiencing life. How fortunate I am to walk alongside the ghosts of my artistic inspirations, the writers, thinkers, lovers, conjurors of the brilliant and the absurd, the beautiful and the damned. I am left stirred, with a sharpened appetite to return the inspiration I have gained.

In the profundity of life’s little moments we are called to see how beautiful each scene truly is. From rupture to intimacy, from distance to understanding, life is constantly asking us to pay attention. It is in the quiet exchanges, the shared glances, the difficult conversations and the unguarded laughter that something sacred reveals itself. Not in the grand gestures, but in the noticing.

Life is beautiful, not only in its colour, but in the darker shades we so often turn away from, where meaning waits for those willing to look.

Henry Miller wrote, “When spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.”
This weekend was bitterly cold, the kind that settles deep into the bones, and yet even in winter there was something humbling about it. When I return, perhaps in spring, I too will allow myself to be softened into paradise.

Until then… À bientôt

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