Why I Wrote Fatima’s Alchemy During Five Years of Silence.

Why This Book Was Written in Silence

There is a story near the end of Fatima’s Alchemy that almost wasn’t included.

Story 158, The Work I Didn’t Do, appears at first to be about the opportunities I declined while writing the book. Design work. Business offers. Familiar paths that promised financial security but quietly asked me to become someone I was no longer.

When I wrote it, I thought that was the story.

Looking back now, I realise it was revealing something much deeper.

It wasn’t simply about the work I refused.

It was about what I chose to protect.

When I began writing Fatima’s Alchemy, I made a decision that puzzled many people. I disappeared. From the outside it looked as though I had stopped creating. In truth, I had never been more devoted to the creative process.

Those years were not years of absence.

They were years of listening.

We often imagine creativity as an act of expression. We celebrate the finished work, the published book, the exhibition, the business or the idea brought into the world.

Yet I have come to believe that authentic creation begins somewhere else.

It begins with protection.

A seed is not strengthened by being unearthed each day to see whether it has begun to grow. Its first requirement is shelter. Only then can it become what it already carries within itself.

Perhaps creative work is no different.

We often encourage people to share ideas early, gather opinions, seek feedback and refine through collaboration. There is wisdom in that approach.

But there is another kind of work that asks for something entirely different.

It asks to remain untouched until it has discovered its own voice.

Fatima’s Alchemy was that kind of work.

Had I invited a chorus of opinions into its earliest beginnings, I do not think the advice would necessarily have been wrong. I simply think the book would have become something different. Every suggestion, however generous, asks a work to move slightly towards someone else’s understanding before it has fully discovered its own.

Creation is fragile before it becomes coherent.

It has not yet developed the strength to distinguish guidance from interference.

So silence became the wall around the garden.

Not to keep people out.

But to give something living the space to become whole before the world began touching it.

That choice came with a cost.

For years I appeared absent. People assumed I had stepped away from my work, even though I was quietly writing, painting, observing, listening, and saying no to opportunities that no longer fit the life I was becoming.

The most important work I was doing could not yet be seen because it had not yet become complete.

This is why Story 158 now feels different to me.

It is no longer simply about the work I didn’t do.

It is about the voices I chose not to follow.

The expectations I quietly laid down.

The invitations to become more marketable, more immediate or more acceptable.

In many ways, the work I did not do became just as important as the work I completed.

That observation has stayed with me.

We often measure a finished work by what appears on the page. Rarely do we consider everything that had to remain absent for those pages to exist. The conversations declined. The compromises refused. The distractions surrendered. The identities released. The silence protected.

These unseen choices become part of the finished work, even though they leave no visible trace.

Every authentic creation carries an invisible architecture.

The visible work is only the final expression of countless unseen decisions.

Looking back now through the lens of A Way of Seeing, I understand that I was never simply writing a book.

I was learning a way of creating.

One that trusted rhythm over urgency.

Integrity over approval.

Listening over performance.

That lesson extends far beyond Fatima’s Alchemy.

It has become part of my philosophy.

Not everything should be shared while it is still becoming.

Some things require the dignity of silence before they are ready for conversation.

Perhaps this is true not only of books.

Perhaps it is true of people.

There are seasons in which we quietly become someone the world has not yet met. From the outside, very little appears to be happening. Yet beneath the surface, roots are deepening. Identity is taking shape. A voice is becoming unmistakably its own.

Only later does the world encounter what was always growing in silence.

Perhaps that is what Story 158 was trying to teach me all along.

The work I didn’t do was never merely about what I declined.

It was about creating the conditions in which the work I was truly called to do could finally emerge.

🌹 The Rose Behind the Wall 🌹

Once, there was a rose that refused the open fields. She turned from the sunlit meadows where other blossoms swayed and chose instead to grow behind high, unyielding stone walls⁠—hidden from wandering eyes and careless hands.

The flowers beyond whispered among themselves:

“Why does she hide? Why shun the warmth and gaze of the world? Why not bloom where she can be praised, compared, and guided?”

But the rose knew. To bloom too soon was to be plucked, pruned, and judged—her tender petals torn before they had even learned their own fragrance.

So she grew in silence. Her roots drank from secret streams. Her buds swelled quietly in the shadows, unseen, untouched. Seasons drifted by. To the fields beyond, she seemed absent—dormant, forgotten.

Yet behind the walls, a quiet alchemy unfolded. Petal by petal, she bloomed in her own time, her own rhythm, untouched by any hand that might claim or reshape her.

Then one day, the walls crumbled. And there she was—

Not timid, not frail, but whole. Her fragrance intact, her bloom unbroken, her truth undiluted.

The other flowers gasped:

“Where did you come from? How did you bloom so fully, all at once?”

And the rose whispered:

“I had to grow where no one could touch me. Only then could I offer the fragrance that was always mine.”

Delahrose Roobie Myer

Writer • Author of Fatima’s Alchemy

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A Way of Seeing.

The Medium Changes. The Philosophy Never Does.