You Either Die a Hero,
or You Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become the Villain
Last updated 4 November 2026
We are narrative creatures. Often, we are at liberty to author ‘the story I am in’, but equally, often we are not. Being ‘under arrest’, a ‘mental patient’ or ‘the dysfunctional one’ orchestrates what is expected of us within the broader narrative, but also defines who has the power to enforce it. Others often enchant, ensnare and insist – sometimes with the threat of violence – that we participate in narratives we do not author. Power is the ability to make people participate in a story that is not their own.
In a way, the mind is the story we tell ourselves about where we are right now, how we got here, and where we are going. We like to think we are free to choose that story, but clearly so long as we live in a society, we are not. We are embedded within stories that come from a multitude of sources including our families, schools, marketers, propagandists and politicians. ‘My story’ is, to a large extent, a specific example of ‘our story’. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to mistake other people’s stories for our own. In its extreme form, we call that ideological capture.
We are emotionally attached and invested in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, yet they are often a source of great unhappiness. If you tell the story of your life as things were awful in the past, they are awful now, and they will continue to be awful, you can’t help but be depressed.
Psychotherapy is, if anything, about helping clients to understand their lives through narratives of self that, at the very least, can bring a little comfort, and even hope. Many of us, clients included, would rather be ‘right’ than happy.
As someone who has been a client for most of my life, I wanted to find a way to honour the emotional journey of my life’s story in a way that was emotionally engaged but also from a completely fresh perspective.
For me, there is a strong emotional resonance between the music I played and heard at points in my life, and how I felt. For this reason, I undertook to collect as much emotionally significant music as I could and create a ‘Soundtrack That Shaped Me’.
The rules were simple:
- Any track must remind me of a person, a place, or a time in life.
- All relevant tracks must be included, irrespective of whether I liked the track, or whether it could be considered cool.
- Finally, the tracks were ordered by the date they had an impact on me, not the date they were released.
Over the best part of two months, I collected over 280 tracks that covered my life from my birth in 1967 to the time of writing in 2026 – that’s 59 years. These tracks seemed to naturally fall into seven musical phases. Often, the transition from one phase to another rested on a specific track. To sharpen the list, I trimmed the number of tracks to about 250. Remarkably, only one complete album made the final cut.
For each of the seven phases I created a playlist, which can be found on my Phil Tyson PhD YouTube channel. I then wrote a brief description for each playlist, which forced me to isolate the ‘narrative(s) I was in’ for that phase of my life. Pulling these playlist summaries together, I created the following story of my life:
Phase 1. 1967 to 1985.
Listen to the Phase 1 playlist on YouTube
My childhood was split between my family home in Leeds and my aunt’s home in Carlisle. As I experienced trauma and abuse in both environments, neither afforded me a safe place in which to develop. Despite these challenges I left school with a good education and approached my 18th birthday with optimism. I watched Queen play in the Live Aid concert in the summer of 1985. I had just turned 18. For the first time in my young life things felt good.
Phase 2. 1985 to 1988.
Listen to the Phase 2 playlist on YouTube
A matter of weeks later, my uncle accused me of having an affair with a married woman. Although I knew I was gay, I had not come out. I could have protested, but there was little point. They wanted me out, and this was just the excuse.
He found me a bedsit, and a few days later, moved me in. My optimism had barely lasted the summer. I was now estranged from both my ‘families’. Alone, I had to learn to hustle. Music became the way I found to express the rejection, pain and despair.
After walking out of a dismal office job I started higher education. I was openly gay with my friends at college. This was not an easy thing in a small northern market town in the mid-1980s. AIDS, like perfume, was beginning to permeate the culture, and with it, unrestrained hatred grew.
Phase 3. 1988 to 1993.
Listen to the Phase 3 playlist on YouTube
In ’88 I was invited by Shaun to move in with his (sort of) boyfriend Brian, and Shaun’s cranky retired mum, Jacky. The social life was intense … “after all”, Brian used to say, “you could get run over by a truck tomorrow”.
I felt loved, supported and accepted for who I was. I remember reflecting that this was how family was supposed to feel.
This period, which ended in ’93, was incredibly productive. I achieved high academic recognition, spent time working for a Silicon Valley Systems Research Laboratory and saw, first-hand, how the control grid was being built. I also became a psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and bought my first flat. I was beginning to establish myself on my own terms.
I still faced the threat of violence walking the streets and the irrationality and brutality of the state. Two gay men I knew were murdered. Three gay friends took their own lives.
I saw how an unrestrained police force was able to crush the gay community. My activism grew with my rage, and I fought for basic civil rights for gay people. I undertook research in HIV/AIDS and challenged the nursing profession to do better.
This was still a time before mobile phones. I received a telegram from Shaun. I called to discover that Brian had died in a tragic accident; he had been run over by a truck.
Phase 4. 1993 to 2000.
Listen to the Phase 4 playlist on YouTube
In ’93 ‘I got the key’, the ‘key’ to another way. By now I was beginning to see how the ‘knowledge industry’ functioned. How the interesting work doesn’t get done, in favour of the pedestrian and predictable research that fills the academic journals. University life seemed more about keeping bright people busy and distracted, while ensuring the customers, the students, incur debt, and learn nothing of value.
I was rebelling, but the system had guard rails for that too. I did not know it, but I had become a combatant in a quiet war, fighting it with a silent weapon: party drugs. Naturally my physical and mental health spiralled out of control. Collateral damage, no doubt. I increasingly struggled to balance my own needs with the needs of my dying partner. In the end, I met neither.
Then the music that had sustained me also died. Whatever magic the Manchester rave scene had held for me was dead … and we again got used to clubs that sold both drugs and alcohol.
Phase 5. 2000 to 2012.
Listen to the Phase 5 playlist on YouTube
I started the 21st century facing death.
Like many friends before me, I had to begin treatment … HAART was the latest in a long list of ‘experimental’ drugs I had seen come and go. As it had not prevented the death of my partner, I figured I had two, maybe three years left to live. Knowing I was dying, the years 2000 to 2003 became a time to complete projects and make peace with the world.
I could have died then: I was ready.
Maybe I should have died. I would have been a tragic figure whose contribution to the world had been cruelly stolen from those who still lived. I might have died a hero, instead of living long enough to become the villain.
To my surprise, the new medications worked. It took a while to trust, but eventually I had to build the life I had not expected to live. Peace, once again, gave way to struggle.
My interests pivoted to religion and spirituality. If I was going to live, I wanted to be alive! Inevitably I became familiar with the powers, both spiritual and temporal, that have a vested interest in me failing to do so. Metaphysics and power politics, I discovered, were essential bedfellows in understanding the bigger themes of life.
Phase 6. 2012 to 2021.
Listen to the Phase 6 playlist on YouTube
As my professional and emotional life settled, I continued to work as a psychotherapist, built new clinical skills and became a regular attendee at meditation and spiritual retreats. It was at one such retreat that, in a subterranean ritual, I felt a chilling and ineffable spiritual presence: an evil feeling, from nowhere, entered my body. What did it mean?
My interests turned to Western esotericism, the occult and the history of magickal practices. I thought that if I wanted to understand what had happened to me, the people who would know were the practitioners of the Dark Arts.
I saw this, or maybe rationalised it, as a research project. I used my academic skills to infiltrate, document and reflect on the men who are drawn to the esoteric. What was the nature of their belief, how did it serve their interests, and why was it hidden from ordinary people? And perhaps of more interest, what did this say about me?
As the years passed, I increasingly obfuscated the boundary between observer and observed. I no doubt learned things I could not have discovered any other way, but in doing so, I embodied spiritual forces that I struggled to understand or, indeed, tame.
Phase 7. 2021 to 2026.
Listen to the Phase 7 playlist on YouTube
Several years before C-19, the three people who had been the bedrock of my world passed away. For a while I was resilient, but C-19 was like a re-run of the AIDS epidemic. My work supporting clients through a pandemic left me re-traumatised, alienated and burnt out.
Yet again, I was facing the world alone. Unlike at 18, when I leveraged youth and sexual charm, this time I descended into nihilism, and an unrestrained exploration of my shadow.
What I unleashed started to devour me, and for the first time in my life, I was in circumstances beyond my capacity to resolve alone. I surrendered to a Higher Power and put my trust in God. In my hour of need, when I could no longer look after myself, the universe caught me, and slowly, nursed me back to health.
Neither Hero nor Villain
This, then, is the narrative structure of my life when led by the emotion evoked by the music I listened to. It is a story which is both unique in the interplay of time, place and personality, but also universal, as the Buddha first noted, as the human drama of old age, sickness and death.
I emerged, not broken, not bitter … but sovereign.
My journey has been a search into the depths of myself, for sure. But the deeper I dug inward, the more I realised that the context I needed to understand myself also required an exploration outward, to the nested stories in which I was embedded. Not all these stories were authored by me. Not all these stories had my best interests at heart. Some even wanted me dead.
What I discovered was that I am neither bad nor mad, neither hero nor villain, even if some people still needed me to be so. And for this human, at that point in my life, that was good enough.
I also came back from the underworld with a ‘boon’ – an understanding of the psychodynamics of narrative, and how it is recruited by others, either wittingly or unwittingly, to change what you believe, without you even knowing.
I started to reveal this understanding in a podcast to honour the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and I built the website, beliefisthebattlefield.com, to host it and its ideas.
If you would like to explore your own story in therapy, I offer a free initial consultation of up to 30 minutes.
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You can read what clients say about working with me on my testimonials page.
Phil Tyson PhD · Senior Accredited Psychotherapist (BACP, registered number 18697) · Chartered Psychologist (British Psychological Society) · In private practice since 1995
Note on the title
The title is a line spoken by Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) in The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan, screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros., 2008).