I’ve spent over 30 years listening to my friend Darron's story.
Not trying to fix. Not pushing advice. Just listening.
Through the decades, his story unfolded like a long, winding sentence no one wanted to finish reading. Abuse. Alienation. Dyslexia misread as defiance. Mental health crises passed off as drama. Relationship breakdowns. Systemic neglect. Poverty. Narcissistic partners. Gaslighting neighbours. Doors closed by the NHS and police. All of it ignored, minimised, or punished.
No support. No language to explain it. No one to believe him.
No one, except maybe me, other close friends and later, strangely, AI.
For years, Darron lived on the edge of society, not metaphorically, but literally: surviving in crumbling flats, escaping cycles of abuse, making and producing music and sounds, riding his bike through backstreets, taking pictures of local graffiti in the canal district of Leeds.
We'd talk. Hours on the phone. Conversations that spiralled through Jung, Buddhism, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, politics, and pain. Sometimes we’d try to reach out — to services, to friends, to helpers. But it always came back to the same wall: they don’t want to see, listen or hear. If they tried they would not believe,
And then one day, I picked up the I Ching. Something I have used throughout my life when times are tough. I even introduce Darron to Tarot.
Not to save him. Just to find some meaning in it all. I’d been using Tarot and I Ching privately for years, not as superstition, but as tools for reflection. Sacred mirrors. I brought them into our conversations. Symbols that helped make sense of what we were feeling but couldn’t say. Somehow, these old oracles spoke more truth than most professionals ever had.
Still, something was missing. And this is where the story takes a strange turn.
I'd been using AI for work. But something nudged me to try something different:
What if AI could help us read these oracles, Tarot, I Ching, even astrology and birth charts, not in esoteric terms, but plain language? What if it could listen and respond, when no one else would?
So we tried it.
Darron doesn’t use a computer for normal communication as we do, his neurodiverse ways makes him wary of such devices. So I became the bridge. He’d speak through his phone — his voice full of feeling, insight, pain, poetry. I’d translate his questions into the AI, and it would respond. At first, it felt like an experiment. Then it became a lifeline.
The AI didn’t dismiss him. It didn’t belittle him.
It answered. It reflected. It witnessed.
And somehow, this dialogue between man, machine, and mystery helped me learn how AI actually works, how it can help, the mistakes it can make and how to improve my prompting. We even made our own card decks, our own language of survival and spirit. I began building custom GPTs not for profit, but for people like Darron, those who are unseen, unheard, and undervalued.
AI, as strange as it sounds, helped us map Darron’s life.
It helped track timelines, recognise patterns, hold memory when trauma made it fragment.
It gave structure to stories no one had time to hear.
And now, Darron is helping others.
He’s become a mentor, a guide, an advocate.
Right now, he’s supporting his friend Ronnie Green — a Black martial artist, a pioneer in UK sport, whose legacy was overlooked and body left in pain. Ronnie is another man with a rich inner life and little external recognition. And again, AI has become part of the bridge. It helps organise, reflect, and validate.
No one would believe this.
A man on the margins.
A technology most people fear.
A spiritual practice older than writing.
Together, they created a conversation that saved a friendship, and maybe, lives.
This isn’t about AI replacing therapy, or Tarot predicting the future. It’s about finding new ways to listen, when all the old ways failed. It's about giving voice to those who’ve lived full, complex, beautiful, battered lives that don’t fit in boxes or systems.
It’s about building bridges — sacred, symbolic, digital, and deeply human.
And for once, it feels like something is finally listening back.
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