Hi! I'm Teyah. :D
If I had to describe myself in only three ways, it would be as follows. Oldest daughter. Definitely an introvert. Creative at heart: pottery, basket weaving, sewing, jewelry making, things I can touch and shape with my hands. These letters have me practicing watercolor against my will, which is either growth or a personal vendetta. I haven't decided yet. I've lived in six states, never quite felt like I fit neatly into any of them, and have spent most of my life quietly convinced that reality is stranger and larger than the version being handed to us.
I spent the last few years in management consulting before I decided that succeeding at something misaligned was its own kind of failure. So I left in pursuit of something more honest.
It started with a research proposal I was writing on neural activity in meditators and its relationship to perceptual sensitivity. And in that process I stumbled into a body of academic literature on consciousness that I couldn't pull myself out of. I realized that this well of knowledge was sometimes annoyingly difficult to get access to, and may be somewhat difficult to digest for anyone without a research background. I now work as a research assistant on a study examining out of body experience heterogeneity.
What I keep finding is that the evidence is far more compelling and peculiar than the mainstream conversation around it suggests. And that the gap between what the research actually says and what most people have access to is far too enormous for my liking.
The name Tempest came first. It was a nickname given to me by a friend and coworker during the years we spent inside corporate America. A tempest is a storm. The kind that disrupts what was settled and leaves the landscape rearranged. It felt right for what I was trying to build: something that unsettles before it illuminates.
The Rabbit came from two places at once. Alice's white rabbit, who appears without warning and vanishes down a hole before you've decided whether to follow. And the white rabbit from The Matrix, the one that, if you choose to follow it, leads you out of the comfortable and into the true. As I'm sure many of you know, in both stories the rabbit is not the destination, but rather the invitation. The moment before you decide how far you're willing to go.
Together in my mind they became Tempest & the Rabbit. The storm and the guide; the disruption and the curiosity that follows it.
Still following? Now, the mail club that lives inside that world is called The Curiouser, borrowed from Alice herself, from the moment her wonder grew so large it broke her grammar. Curiouser and curiouser, she said, because more curious wasn't enough. I thought that felt like the right name for a series of letters about consciousness, where every answer opens onto a deeper question and the only honest response to what the research reveals is to lean further in.
I make this for the people who have always noticed what others walk past. The skeptical and the seeking. The ones who feel it in their body before they have words for it.
If that's you, you're in the right place.