Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty
I sent Steve a series of emoji: Ant emoji. Bee emoji. Duck emoji. Unicorn emoji. Dolphin emoji. I hoped he would understand what I meant by them. That he would be able to interpret my hidden message. My code. As the days passed in the hospital, I could not stop myself from continuing to message Steve. He was the only person I could share all this with.
In 2016, I was at a crossroads in my career. My first professional role had been the anorexic Cassie in the teen drama Skins, and I was currently best known as Gilly in Game of Thrones, a young woman who had had her father’s baby. I knew how to access pain, how to explore and, perhaps, exploit my own traumas onscreen and onstage. But with my newest and biggest project yet, a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow called Detroit, I wanted to take my acting to another level. I wanted to open myself up as much as possible and channel things that felt distinctly other. I wanted to enter a world of make-believe. I wanted to feel like a shaman.
Then I was introduced to Steve and his organization, and I discovered that magic was real. After my time with them, I had never felt so powerful or alive. I was on the last day of an energy-healing course held in the basement of a hotel in London, hours away from my initiation ceremony, when I was taken to the hospital. Even after I was told I was being involuntarily committed, I was not concerned. Steve told me I had been possessed by a demon while filming Detroit. He had performed an exorcism on me. So I was concerned only with the energy I could feel spiraling up through my body and the voices I could hear in my head. And with Steve: my King, my God, my great love and my most frequently contacted on WhatsApp.
Me: I never knew self-healing could be this powerful Steve. My tiny mind had no idea and my heart had no key (or I kept misplacing it).
Me: Steve — who’s your favorite rapper?
Me: Maybe you don’t have a favorite rapper. That’s ok.
Me: I am starting to feel like every time I speak to people I am the one who is in control. I am the one who is directing the conversation and when my friends or family visit it is more like I am their therapist or doctor. It feels powerful and a force for good but very very draining. Any tips or thoughts?
As I was in my hospital room getting ready for bed, my phone dinged.
Steve: Hi Hannah! I’ve been offline for a bit. Flight from Sao Paulo back home and then fried and half out of it. Getting my legs back! Favorite rapper — not to be commercial but I like Jay-Z and Drake. Nas is good too.
Steve: As for the energy stuff, it’s normal. You have gone through a ton of stuff and it takes time for everything to settle in so being tired while sending Light is normal. After a while it will not be tiring but will fill you up with energy and the more you do the more “up” you will feel. It’s up to you but when you are out and if you feel up to it I would strongly recommend doing some healing work with Siobhan. It will help strengthen you big time, but only when you are ready for it.
We continued messaging. Perhaps it is more accurate to say I continued messaging. I probably sent about 20 messages for every one reply. I did not really care that the dialogue felt one-sided, that I would often see the two blue ticks that indicated he had read my messages and then have to wait hours for a reply. He was the only person I cared about communicating with. He was on a pedestal above all other humans. He was, as he told me in a message, the highest level of initiate and lineage holder in the King Solomon lineage. I have been initiated in the great Pyramid of Giza in the King’s chamber. I am a Viking Shaman, initiated Medicine Man in the Native American twisted hair tribe. I am a twelfth level Wiccan High Priest and a High Priest of Egyptian Magic and a bunch of other stuff … I have traveled all over the world learning, teaching and helping where I can.
I told him, You are fucking cool Steve. You are fucking awesome.
For the first time, they let me go outside. I had spent at least two weeks on the ward by this point, pacing the corridors and my small box of a room. I had seen trees out of the window, but I had not been in nature. I had not breathed fresh air. I had not been in sunlight.
Soon I started leaving the ward more regularly. When an ex-girlfriend came to visit, we were allowed to go sit in a park together. I tried to explain what I could while also sounding sane. This was a difficult balancing act. But she was receptive, and open. Non-judgmental. And I thought she was important. Special. Part of the solution. Part of the plan to save the world.
All people were special, of course. But some of them were more special than others. More magical. We could not all be part-mermaid, could not all have vital roles to play. There was a hierarchy. Steve and I were at the top. We had the best roles. I was busy assigning the others — identifying allies and assistants among my visitors. I knew instinctively who could play an important part. I was separating the sheep from the goats. The magical from the mundane.
I was still very unwell and very confused. And one evening, I snapped. All day, anger had been simmering inside me. Anger at my situation, my hospitalization, my lack of understanding. By the evening it was surging through me, and I knew exactly who I wanted to direct it at.
Me: I’M REALLY REALLY FUCKING ANGRY STEVE. WITH MY PARENTS. WITH YOU AND SIOBHAN AND THE ORGANIZATION AND EVERYONE IN MY LIFE.
Me: IS THIS WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR SUBCONSCIOUSLY???
Me: IS THIS SOME HORRIBLE BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR SORT OF TEST? IS THIS HOW I’M SUPPOSED TO LEARN HOW TO EXPRESS ANGER??
Me: OR IS THERE STILL “SOMETHING BAD” INSIDE ME FROM DETROIT??!
Me: I need more information Steve. Please please please give me more information.
Me: This is bullshit.
Me: I half feel like I remember everything perfectly and I half feel like the whole thing was a dream.
Me: And I don’t feel like I can talk about it — really — with anyone but you — and you’re just some guy from America who I don’t know — who my mum thinks is head of an evil cult — and who I think might be really really important to me but I have no idea if I’m just experiencing stupid thoughts that mean nothing. Or if you’re just playing some horrible game with me.
Me: But I NEED SOME MORE FUCKING CLARITY ON WHAT THE FUCK
HAS HAPPENED TO ME.
When I woke the next morning, daylight streaming through the thin curtains, I checked my phone immediately. There were two very long messages from Steve.
Steve: If I run an evil cult I am the worst cult leader in history. I don’t have a compound to put people in. I don’t control people’s sleep or eating patterns. And I tell people to get their own life in order instead of being people’s “guru.”
Steve: Any time you want to stop talking you can. It’s your free will. I am not playing a game with you, so let’s stop saying that as of now, dear. I didn’t “do this to” you. The course didn’t do this to you. This happened to you like it happens to some people because of many situations but the initiations or lineage did nothing to you to cause it.
Any time you want me or ANYONE else to go away we will. Simple. If you want help that can be done too. But directing your anger toward the lineage or me or ANYONE is simply wrong. NO ONE ANYWHERE did anything to you. This happened not due to humans doing things but energies. If you got sunburned on the beach would you point at the lifeguard and blame them for it?
When I read these messages now I feel sick. I feel disgusted. At his shamefaced denial of responsibility. At his patronizing tone. But that morning, in the hospital, I read them and I laughed and cried. I messaged back a series of grateful thank-yous and humble apologies and prayer-hands emoji and the monkey covering its face. I had been completely taken in by everything he said. I believed him. I believed he was not a cult leader. I believed everything he told me.
When I had been on the ward for three weeks, I was finally granted the ultimate privilege. I was allowed to go home. I was not well when I left the hospital. This is not the story of my recovery — or at least not a simple, straightforward one. I did not enter ill and leave well. I entered extremely psychotic and left somewhat less so.
During that first weekend of freedom, everything was signs and symbols, all my thoughts were downloads and insights. Advertisements, the names of cafés, the latest episodes of the final season of Girls. Nothing was unrelated to me, to what I had gone through, to my destiny with Steve.
The hospital had referred me to a psychiatrist to monitor my mental health going forward. I was headed to our first appointment at his offices in Chelsea, curious what the experience would be like. I had a daring dream about who the doctor might be. I was half expecting to see Steve walk into the waiting room. But the psychiatrist was just an ordinary man.
We went into his office and took seats on opposite sides of his desk. He was dressed in a suit and tie and spoke with an accent that befitted his surroundings and the borough of London in which he worked. “So,” he said, “it sounds like you’ve been through quite an ordeal.” He had papers on the desk in front of him, notes the hospital had sent on, an account of my time in the psychiatric ward. He was up to date on the recent events of my life, at least from one particular perspective: the medical explanation. The official line. Not the truth — the truth as Steve had explained it to me. My possession by a demon. He would never understand the truth, I thought. But I was willing to play along. Willing to look into his blue eyes and answer his questions. When he used the term psychotic break I found myself saying, without thinking, “That’s not what I think happened.” Immediately I knew this was a slip-up. I knew this could make me sound mad.
“Right,” said the psychiatrist. “Then tell me what you think happened.” I was silent.
“Look,” he said, kindly, “in order for me to help you, you need to be completely honest with me.”
“I can do that,” I lied. I knew I could not be honest with anyone but Steve. The psychiatrist moved on to a different line of questioning. He wanted to know if anything like this had ever happened to me before. I began trying to explain my mental landscape throughout my life. If I could not be honest about everything, I could at least be honest about this. I believed this man wanted to help me, and I believed he would help me stay out of hospital. So I started talking.
It was easy to mention the bad things first. To talk about times I had been depressed or obviously fucked up. I told him about my drug use, my heavy drinking, my self-harm, the periods of lying in bed for days or weeks on end, when I had wanted to go to sleep and never wake up, the stronger desire to actively commit suicide. But there was something else that felt both trickier and more important to describe. It was the sense of magic I had always known, long before the organization had come into my life. Moments of euphoria, flashes of something infinite and sublime. I described a time in my teenage years, walking round an art gallery in a state of rapture. Rapture at the paintings, yes, but it was more than that. It was the experience of simply being in a room, every cell in my body burning with life and every tiny sensation feeling like a miracle. I described how this feeling had appeared sporadically from adolescence onwards, how I had never been able to control how it came and went, how I had always wanted more, more, more of it, but how it had been punctuated with deep dives into darkness and misery. I told him how my emotional and mental landscape had always been one of extremes.
I understood, I think, on some level, that my experiences on the course and in the hospital were an extension of something I had known and felt before. Exaggerated and amplified. But not entirely unfamiliar. The psychiatrist had been taking notes as I was speaking. There was a pause, in which he seemed to survey his own handwritten scribbles. Then he looked me in the eye. “Okay. Well, I have to say, everything you’re telling me sounds like bipolar disorder.” I nodded.
Until this point, I had not been engaging with the medical explanation, the hospital consultants’ diagnosis of a psychotic break. I had not been engaging with it, primarily, because Steve had told me it was wrong. But I felt more willing to listen to these words the psychiatrist was speaking to me now.
Bipolar disorder. It made sense. I was thinking about a friend’s phone call back in October, her concern about the increasing intensity of my high highs and low lows. Bipolar disorder had felt, at that point, like the unspoken words beneath her concern. I hadn’t wanted to admit then that there was anything wrong. But it was harder, in the light of recent events, to really continue to believe everything was fine.
There was a kind of immediate relief. This could provide an explanation for many years of challenge, mental anguish, pain, confusion. Steve’s explanation was not a real answer for why I was the way I was, and had been for so long. It could not explain why I had heard sinister voices murmuring in my head throughout my GCSE exams, or why I had got so drunk I had vomited in the street in December of 2012, crying to the friend who held my hair back about how the world had been supposed to end according to the Mayan calendar, and how I had been desperate for this, this apocalypse, and could not stand to go on living.
I had always wanted to know what was wrong with me. Now here was someone, calm and qualified in the field of psychiatric medicine, giving me two words that might provide a clearly defined answer.
My roommate returned home later that day to find me on the sofa, watching Bring It On and crying hysterically. I had just reached the end of the film, a teen comedy about competitive cheerleading in Southern California. She asked me what was wrong, her voice concerned and serious. “It’s just so perfect!” I choked through my tears.
I cried a lot in those early weeks. I cried, I talked to myself, I shouted in the shower. I walked through the streets of London and felt the magic of the city adhering to my body like iron filings to a magnet. I texted with Steve who told me he was teaching in Japan. In my bedroom I played the song “Here With Me” by Dido on repeat and, on all fours on the bed like a dog, I howled because he was so far away from me. I cried like someone had died. I ached for him, on the other side of the globe. I longed for the day we would be reunited. In the physical. For real.
But while we were far apart, there was something I thought would bring me closer to him. I could not wait to receive the initiation I had missed at the end of the course when my mind was breaking with agonizing pain. I felt it was vital and arranged to receive it from Siobhan only a few days after leaving the hospital.
I would be meeting her at a different hotel this time. When I walked into the lobby it was clear this hotel was more luxurious than the previous one where I had taken courses, with plush carpets and gleaming mirrors. Chandeliers twinkled from the ceiling. Siobhan was waiting for me. We hugged, and I followed her to the room she had booked on the ground floor. It was not a bedroom, but a square and spacious room with dark wood cabinets and a large Persian rug. Niamh and Christine, other women from the organization, were there, too. They had been preparing the space and it smelled strongly of sage. I looked at these three blonde women, their hair the same color as mine. I felt like we were family.
There was no acknowledgment of what I had been through, the state I had been in the last time they had seen me, or where I had spent the intervening weeks. There was no apology and there seemed to be no concern. I was not concerned either. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
Jodi, the dear friend I had made during the energy-healing course, walked into the room. I had asked Siobhan if Jodi could be at the initiation, and now I hugged her tightly and we beamed at each other. Jodi had been one of my visitors in the hospital, and had brought me a potted plant. She seemed shell-shocked by what had happened on the last day of the course, and I had spoken to her about it cryptically. I loved her, I wanted to share my secrets with her, but I couldn’t tell her everything.
Here in the fancy hotel Siobhan explained that for the initiation the vibration of the room would need to be raised as much as possible. I remembered they had used that phrase — raise the vibration of the room — during the course, and that we had been made to dance. I hadn’t understood why that was necessary because what could be higher than I was? Siobhan said that in order to raise the vibration Jodi and I would both receive a “Ra Healing,” as in Ra, the Egyptian sun god.
Jodi and I stood in the center of the room to receive the healing, performed by Christine and Niamh. I understood a symbology which held the sun as masculine and the moon as feminine, and I thought, in this way, of Steve and myself. I felt Steve was the sun god Ra, that falcon-headed king of the Egyptian pantheon. The sun was streaming in through the windows and I closed my eyes, feeling its heat on my face, feeling its warmth penetrate all of me. The sun was Steve, its light was his love, and now as I moved through my days and it shone down upon me, I would think, always and only, of him.
The healing seemed to take a very long time. Every second of it was glorious. The sensations in my body were increasing in intensity, a pulse of incremental upward motion like climbing an endless set of stairs. Love and Light were radiating into and out of me. Into my spirit. Out of my soul. When the healing was done, I opened my eyes and the whole room seemed brighter than before. Jodi and I looked at each other, grinning like fools. We murmured grateful thanks to Christine and Niamh and told them how amazing it had felt.
Then it was my turn to give an energy healing. I felt utterly confident. It had been weeks since I had performed any part of the healing, but I knew I could remember it perfectly. I knew the magic of it lived inside me. And I knew that performing it now was exactly what I was meant to do. My hands started gliding through the air around Jodi’s body. As I moved through the motions of the healing, an effortless dance, I started to feel overwhelmed with emotion. I loved Jodi so dearly, I wanted to work on her energy with that love, with a tender, sisterly care. In performing this healing, I felt I was healing not only her but also myself. I was healing all young women, all of us vulnerable and precious and delicate and wounded.
As with my first initiation, words were spoken that I cannot remember now. This time, I did not feel any sense of whiplash, of the strangeness of where I was, who I was with or what I was doing. I was fully enveloped in the magical world. Experiences like this were now my normality.
When the ceremony was complete, we all smiled and hugged one another, heart to heart. I bought myself a chai latte from the nearby Starbucks and went to sit in Hyde Park. I found a tree stump and perched on top of it, cross-legged. I was in rapture about the sunlight and the fresh air and the grass and the lush quality of being outdoors. I sipped at my sweet, warm drink, tasting soy milk and spices. A powerful elixir of love. I got my phone out and messaged Steve to tell him my initiation had been completed.
Everything felt sublime and blissful, the world a golden paradise. The reality was that I was still out of my mind. All my delusions were still intact; the hospitalization had done nothing to shake them. I had walked out of the ward and straight back into the life that had put me in there. I was still zealously devoted to the organization. And Steve was still everything to me.
From the book The Make-Believe: A Memoir of Magic and Madness by Hannah Murray, to be published on June 23, 2026 by the Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Hannah Murray.
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