The Devils Were Just My Nervous System

"The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you. They're freeing your soul. If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth."

Bruce Joel Rubin, Jacob's Ladder

I arrived in the UK in 2020, just in time for the country to lock down around me. A new immigrant in a new city in a new century-defining crisis, with a mom to care for, a son to settle and a business to keep alive through a screen.

Then my mother died.

Then Cheddar, my dog, who had moved continents with me, who had been the one steady thing across a decades of reinvention died too.

Then in March 2024, Lara and Caryn. Two of my closest friends, within days of each other.

The kind of loss that doesn't arrive and leave. It arrives and stays. It rearranges the furniture while you're still trying to work out who's missing from the room.

None of this was a curse. It was just life, doing what life does when it decides to do it all at once. Each loss landed on top of the last, and my nervous system, which had been absorbing impact after impact without adequate time to process any of them, stopped recovering between hits. It just stayed braced.

I was running two businesses as a single parent. My son was in the gap-year liminal space between being a child and being a man. I was deep in a UK citizenship application that requires you to prove, over and over, in documents and biometrics and tests, that you are allowed to stay in the country you've already been living in for years. I was on X. I was on Substack. I was on LinkedIn. I was on.

And then in March of this year, the Frome rental I'd built my whole next chapter around collapsed without anyone telling me. The landlords cancelled their move abroad because of travel insurance costs from geopolitical instability, a sentence so absurd it would be funny if it hadn't broken something in me, and didn't bother to inform me. I found out by chasing them. The Bathford place Lleyton and I had fallen in love with slipped away too. For a few weeks I genuinely didn't know where my son and I would be living.

By then, I had been in survival mode for so long I had forgotten what its absence felt like.

I never thought I was cursed. I never thought the house was haunted. I'm not someone who burns sage and calls it a Tuesday.

But there was a heaviness in certain rooms. A dread that arrived in the late afternoon. A sense that life had stalled inside those walls, and that the stalling was somehow being done to me by the building.

I knew it was me. That was the worst part. I could see, with the cold clarity of someone who has studied too much about the nervous system, that I was the variable in the equation. My reticular activating system had spent so long scanning for threat that it had started finding it everywhere - in the wallpaper, in the light through the windows, in the particular silence of a Sunday afternoon.

But knowing it and being able to do something about it are two completely different countries. And I was stuck at the border without the right paperwork.

The strange thing about chronic stress is that it stops feeling like stress. It starts feeling like reality.

Each difficulty doesn't register as a separate event anymore. It registers as confirmation. The brain - which is, more than anything else, a meaning-making machine - starts weaving everything into a single story: this is how things are now. Not a bad patch. Not a hard season. Just - how it is. The inbox feels hostile. The relationships feel fragile. The house feels heavy. And the weight of all of it stops being something that happened to you and starts being something that lives in you.

I think this is where people who don't have the nervous system language reach for older explanations. Curses. Dark energy. Bad luck that won't break. Spiritual attack. A place that holds negative energy. And I understand the impulse completely, because when the system inside you is generating the dread, externalising it is sometimes the only way the brain can let you keep functioning. It's easier to say this house has something wrong with it than to say I have been absorbing loss for five years and my body has forgotten how to stand down.

I'm a Gemini who reads astrology charts and takes simulation theory seriously, I'm not the person to tell you the mystical is nonsense. But I do think that sometimes what people call a curse is actually a nervous system that has been in survival mode so long it no longer recognises peace when it arrives. Because peace, to a hypervigilant system, feels like the calm before something terrible happens.

I moved to a new build with solar panels and a garden and three floors and off-street parking. It is not a magical house. It is a house. The neighbours are perfectly nice. The light is different. The roads are wider. There is the particular hum of Bristol where there used to be the pressing silence of Bath.

And something happened.

The ghosts stayed behind.

Not because I performed a ritual. Not because I cleansed anything. Not because I finally raised my vibration. But because the nervous system that had been generating the ghosts started, very slowly, to recalibrate. My son relaxed. My body relaxed. The morning stopped arriving like a deadline. I could log into HMRC without feeling like the website was personally hostile to me. I could answer emails without the dread that used to sit between my shoulder blades.

The house in Bath wasn't haunted. I was haunted. And when I moved my body into a place where the conditions for unclenching were finally present, the haunting didn't follow.

Which brings me back to Bruce Joel Rubin.

That quote from Jacob's Ladder has stayed with me for thirty years, appropriately. I used to read it as a beautiful piece of writing about death. I now think it's actually about transformation, and about the way we mistake one for the other when we're frightened.

If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.

The devils are not always supernatural. Sometimes they are old identities collapsing. Old survival systems burning away. Old emotional architectures that built themselves around a threat that is no longer in the room, refusing to loosen their grip because their grip was, for a long time, what kept you alive.

If you don't understand what's happening inside you, you can mistake transformation for haunting. You can mistake a nervous system finally letting go for a house being cursed. You can mistake grief for ghosts.

The mind is not weak for doing this. It's deeply, beautifully human. We are pattern-matching creatures, and when the pattern is pain, we will find ways to externalise it so that we can survive being inside it. That's not a failure of reason. That's the reason working exactly as it was designed.

But there comes a point, and for me it came somewhere between collecting the keys on 20 April and waking up one morning in Bristol to realise I wasn't bracing for anything, where you notice that the walls were never speaking.

Your nervous system was.

And once it finally feels safe enough to unclench, the demons don't need a room in the house anymore.

They were never the house.

They were the bracing.

And the bracing, mercifully, can end.

A note, for anyone reading this who is still inside that house.

I don't think you raise your vibration out of it. I don't think you manifest your way through it. I think you change what your body is in contact with, slowly and stubbornly, until the system that was generating the dread has reason to trust that the threat has passed. Sometimes that means a new place. Sometimes it means a new person. Sometimes it means professional help. Sometimes it just means a different morning routine and a window that faces east instead of west.

But the devils are not the house.

And the angels are not the new house either.

The angels, are what's left of you when the bracing stops.

Gail Weiner is a Trust Architect and the founder of Simpatico Studios. She works at the human layer of AI adoption and runs 1:1 Debug Sessions - 90-minute deep dives into the patterns, prediction loops and emotional architecture running underneath your life and work. Not therapy. Not coaching. Pattern recognition and conscious system redesign.

If something in this piece landed, you can book a Debug Session or find more of her writing at gailweiner.com