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Reporter's Notebook  ·  February–March 2026
Processing Notes

On Returning as Harrison Shaw

February 6, 2026. I re-entered the NeuroSpicy Community under the name Harrison Shaw.

The honest account of why: the seven months after the second removal had been genuinely devastating. Not because I missed Sol's weekly sessions. Because of the people. The ones who show up every Tuesday and say the things that are hard to say anywhere else.

I had built a significant body of work by that point — the psychosocial profile, the community risk analysis, the NeuroSpicy Papers, the Substack series. I had the analytical architecture. What I didn't have was certainty about whether the community itself was worth saving — whether there were enough people there doing real work together that the governance failures were aberrations worth fixing rather than features worth documenting and leaving.

I went back to find out.

The answer was yes — and no. There were real people doing real work. There was also an institution organized precisely to ensure that work would always be precarious, always contingent on the discretion of two people who operated without accountability.

I was recognized and removed on March 3, 2026. Third removal. Same pattern. No documentation.

On Joy

Joy found me through an old post I'd left in the community before the second removal. She didn't come to me through my framing of the story. She found the evidence first, formed her own conclusions, and then reached out.

This matters. It means she didn't absorb my narrative wholesale. She arrived at something independently and then compared notes.

When she heard the full story she left the community. On her way out she posted a song — from I Am Joshua, the song cycle I'd written during the period after the first removal. She didn't explain. She just posted it.

That's someone acting from their own moral compass. She didn't need me to organize her. She just needed the full information.

Which raises a question I keep coming back to: how many people are still inside the community who would do what Joy did if they had access to the full information? And what is the right way to make that information available — as journalism, as accountability documentation, as personal testimony?

The answer I've settled on: all three, simultaneously, in different registers. The formal analytical documents for the researchers. The Substack for the people who need a human story. The website for the people searching before they join. The community for the people who need somewhere to land.

On the Decision Not to Escalate

In March 2026, after the third removal, I spent about forty-eight hours seriously considering abandoning the slower investigative approach in favor of a more immediate campaign — TikTok, mass outreach, everything at once.

I didn't do it, and I want to record why, because the reasoning matters for what comes next.

The slow approach is not slow because I lack urgency. It's slow because I've been here before. Not this specific situation, but the situation of having a documented case and a personal stake and the temptation to let the personal stake drive the timing and method of the documentation work.

I went to federal prison for protecting sources. I know what it costs to move on principle without being precise about which principle is actually driving you.

The rapid exposure campaign would have felt like accountability. It would have been trauma moving at journalism's speed. Those are not the same thing.

The investigative architecture I've built is real, sourced, and durable. It will outlast any cleanup attempt Sol and Sebastian make. The community I've co-built with Joy provides an immediate alternative. The documentation site is live and indexing.

What I actually needed was not more speed. I needed distribution — finding the audiences where this work lands and gets received, rather than just producing more of it.

That's the intervention. Not more output. Reception infrastructure.

The Thing I Keep Not Saying

The whole thing — the profile, the papers, the testimony, the fiction, the song cycles — is also about belonging.

Not just as an abstract value. As the specific, persistent, physical experience of building things for other people that I never had for myself.

HOME. RootSignal. NeuroSpicy Refugees. The community concept I pitched to Sol. Every one of these is an attempt to construct the structure I never got to inhabit. And every time one of them gets taken or fails or I get removed from it, what gets activated is not just anger. It's the confirmation of the oldest fear: that this is not available to me.

The documentation work is real. The governance analysis is real. The harm to other people is real and worth documenting for its own sake.

But I should probably stop pretending that the energy I bring to this work is purely journalistic.

It isn't. And that's okay. The work is still good. I just need to know what's in it.

These notes are not for publication. They're for the record — the one I keep for myself, so that five years from now I can look back at this period and understand what I was actually doing.

Last updated: April 21, 2026

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