They Stole My Cover. Then They Denied It. Here’s What Happened Next

Someone crosses a line, denies it happened, and you're left carrying the weight of it on your own. If that's familiar, you already know where this is going.

You know the facts. You've turned them over enough times. What's harder to pin down is why the whole thing is still sitting in you, taking up space it has no right to anymore.

This is for that part of you.

There's a particular kind of sting that comes not from being wronged, but from being wronged and then looked in the eye and told it didn't happen.

A while back, someone close to me replicated the cover of my book, Light Walks: How to Walk with Angels, almost exactly. I want to be specific, because the details matter. Side by side, the images were pixel for pixel identical. The number of rays from the sun. The positioning of the wings. The trees. The only difference: the angel wings had been coloured white.

That cover wasn't a five-minute idea. Light Walks took a year to write, start to finished manuscript. My other book, The Changey-Sizey Lion, took five years. Eight major rewrites. Two professional editors. My dad as a test reader, more than once. That's what it actually costs to get a book finished, not a flash of inspiration but a long, unglamorous stretch of rewriting and doubting and starting again. The image on the front of Light Walks came out of that same process, dozens of concepts and revisions and conversations about what the book actually needed to say before it even had a face. What was copied wasn't a picture. It was the outer edge of an entire period of creative work, the part you can screenshot, without any of the part you can't.

I'm not the first person to use rainbow feathers in art or branding. I know that. But my brand, my marketing, my energy all run directly from what I create. This wasn't a coincidence of theme. This was my work.

So I said something. What followed was a conversation about what an extraordinary coincidence it was that we'd arrived at the same image. It never once landed on the real problem.

Let's be honest about the maths of it. Two people do not independently land on the same sun, the same number of rays, the same wing position, the same trees, arranged the same way, by chance so that the images match pixel by pixel. There's a zero percent chance of that happening on its own. So the conversation did what these conversations always do. First it was a coincidence. Then she wasn't sure what I meant, playing dumb long enough to see if I'd drop it. Then, when neither of those held, it became the AI's fault, as if a machine had reached into her account and generated my cover for her without her ever looking at mine. Every explanation except the true one.

When I finally asked her to take it down, the conversation flipped entirely, away from the cover, away from the copying, onto everything except the actual issue. Suddenly I was the one who'd been copying her. She should have listened to her spirit guides weeks ago, apparently, when they told her to say something about me. Boy, had she “learnt her lesson”.

It was those words that jolted me into reality and laughed.

I've seen enough by now to recognise what I was looking at. It had the shape of a narcissistic pattern in full flight, the redirect, the reversal, the sudden rewriting of who had wronged who. What picked up on it first wasn't logic. It was soul speak, the kind of intuitive reading you develop through Umana teacher training, the part of you that hears what's underneath the words before your mind catches up and explains it.

I was the mirror. And what she saw reflected back wasn't me. It was herself, and she couldn't stand to look at it.

That was the moment I understood: this was my lesson, not hers. And the most useful thing I could do was end the conversation before it got any more absurd.

I wasn't getting an apology. An explanation. Anything. And somewhere in that moment, I found that was okay.

Here's the part that's harder to admit: she got away with it. There was no editor to answer to, no publisher, no one holding her accountable for what she'd done. She could deny it, twist it around, and walk away from the conversation exactly as she'd entered it. That's the quiet unfairness underneath all of this. Some people never have to answer for what they do, and waiting for the universe or karma or their own conscience to make them is its own kind of holding pattern.

I'd walked into that conversation expecting something, an acknowledgment, a version of events that matched what had actually happened, some small gesture that would let me close the book on it. When none of that came, I had to ask myself what closure actually meant to me. I'd always assumed it was something someone else handed you. Turns out it isn't. It's something you build, on your own, with or without their cooperation.

What surprised me wasn't the copying. It was what happened inside me afterwards. I'd been reading The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, and something in it had already been working on me: the realisation of where I'd tied my peace. I'd handed my calm over to someone else's honesty, made my own resolution dependent on a person who had already shown me clearly they weren't going to give it.

That's the subtler trap, isn't it? Not the original hurt, but the waiting. The quiet belief that if we explain it clearly enough, the other person will eventually come around.

They often don't. And holding on to the hope that they will can cost us far more than the original wound ever did.

This person spoke openly about spirituality. She led her own online podcast, positioned herself as an authority on awareness and integrity. And yet when the moment came to actually put those words into practice, the ego wouldn't let her. What showed up instead was deflection and accusation. There's nothing like watching that up close to burn away any remaining idealism. You stop theorising and start seeing.

At some point I had to ask myself honestly: what do I want more, their admission or my freedom? Because righteousness can be its own kind of cage.

Releasing it didn't mean pretending it never happened. My work is mine. Someone can replicate the surface of what you create. They cannot replicate where it comes from. They can copy the form. They cannot become the source.

This is the real work. Not the confrontation. Not the argument. Not waiting for someone else to hand you closure. It's learning to bring your energy back to yourself so cleanly that other people's choices stop having the power to derail you.

When you do that work on your own consciousness, scenarios like this don't disappear. But they move through you differently. Faster. With less residue. You see what's happening, you hold your ground, and you don't lose yourself in the process.

This is the part Singer writes about better than anyone. In The Untethered Soul, he describes most of us as living with a lifetime of half-processed moments stored inside us, energy from old hurts that never finished moving through, sitting there, tightening every time something similar happens again. His argument isn't that you should suppress what you feel or pretend the moment didn't sting. It's the opposite. Feel it fully, let it move, and stop closing around it the second it arrives. The closing is what turns a single moment into years of carrying.

I could have closed around this one. I had every reason to. Instead I let it move. I felt the anger, the disbelief, the strange grief of watching someone talk about integrity while doing the opposite of it, and I let all of it pass through instead of locking it into another shelf in my chest. What was left afterwards wasn't numbness. It was room. Space where the resentment would have lived if I'd let it settle in.

This is also, honestly, the practical use of the work I've spent years training in. Pellowah, Umana, Diamond Point Activation, they're all different doorways into the same skill, raising your own state of consciousness so life doesn't land on you with the same weight it used to. It doesn't happen overnight, and it isn't a technique you apply in the moment like a plaster. It's more like a muscle you build over years of practice, on yourself and with the people you work alongside. The more you live inside that expanded awareness, the less any single moment, even one as blunt as this, has the power to knock you off centre. What used to take months to move through can move through in a day.

That's what I help people build.

If something in this is landing, if there's a moment you're still carrying, still waiting on someone else to make right, that's exactly where this work begins. Through Pellowah, Umana, and Diamond Point Activation, I help people move that stored energy through and out, so the weight of it stops shaping how you show up in your own life. Not by forcing you to forgive before you're ready, and not by pretending it didn't happen. By raising your own state of consciousness until the moment simply doesn't have the same grip on you anymore.

You don't need their apology to move forward. You just need to stop waiting for it.

If this resonated, I'd love for you to explore working together.