Systematic Doubt

And it's not anxiety or fear. It's that silent certainty of not being in the right place wherever you are. That whatever you've done, it's not enough. That there exists a version of you that you haven't reached yet, and maybe never will.

I come from a place where questions are a euphemism. Not because people don't think, because the answers are already written. You're born. You work. You sit at the table on Sunday. You die.

Without ever asking myself the more honest question: are these things keeping me exactly where I don't want to be?

Because the habits you inherited are not you. The beliefs you accepted without thinking are not yours. Every "that's just who I am" deserves to be questioned.

After a year and a half I asked the question I had to ask: "I want to become a partner."

Not because they were wise. Because they had chosen themselves. They had decided on a direction, even if small, and followed it, deaf to the rest.

In that moment I changed the axis of the question I had been asking myself for thirteen years.

And then the real questions. The ones that hurt.

These were the questions that monkey mind doesn't want you to ask yourself.

Generic because I hadn't decided anything non-negotiable.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │ Without perimeter │ With perimeter │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Everything is negotiable │ Some things are not │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Open to everyone │ Close to few │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Reactive │ Chosen │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ Always available │ Available when I've decided │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I confuse curiosity with laziness │ Curious within an identity │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ �� I feel everywhere │ I know where I am │ ├────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │ I grow noise │ I grow weight │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

And that's when the question came that hasn't let go of me since.

Because actually the question isn't what they've seen.

And that's when the question arrived that hasn't let go of me since.

Because actually the question isn't what they've seen.

He and their mother decided they would have two daughters. That they would train them in tennis. That they would become number one in the world. That there would be two of them. And then they had them.

Because Venus and Serena, when they were born, were born into a direction. Someone had already decided what they were going to be. They didn't have the capacity to understand, want, choose — they were just creatures, that's all, and someone pointed them.

Blind because I wonder if he knows he could be something else. If this job really fulfills him, or if he ended up in it — children who came too early, a family to support, and this was the only thing he could do. Or maybe he comes from a nearby country, from a poverty that never left him time to ask himself anything, and for him being on that roof, in Buenos Aires, is already a destination. Maybe, where he comes from, that up there is a status.

I wonder which of the many realities that exist he belongs to, and in my mind I remember and imagine all the steps he has to face to change his personality and reach the next stage of the Matrix.

I didn't decide it, I didn't reason about it, I didn't look to see if someone else went first. I just glanced right, glanced left, and crossed.

I waited for permission. Some scrap of permission from someone, about something I had already decided inside, by myself, and even first.

That night, the concept that got under my skin was the answer to a question I'd left you with a few weeks ago — one I'd been keeping in my pocket. I'll ask it again, so you don't have to remember it: is it right to settle, or do you always have to raise the bar?

This is the thing nobody tells you when they talk about "raising your standards." They make it sound like a question of motivation, of waking up charged, of having the right energy. Nonsense. Motivation is a houseguest: it shows up when it feels like it and leaves when it feels like it. What remains, when it's gone, is discipline. The champion isn't the most motivated one. It's the one who shows up even without motivation.

And I'll leave you with a simple but uncomfortable question.

Life decides, I take my ten minutes and that's that.

Then I caught myself. Because doing things in a rush, not checking, not looking twice, not doing that one extra step that would clear the doubt, not going a little deeper into things — that's not a my brother thing. That's a me thing. It's the exact same habit I carry around. I just saw it from the outside, for one evening, from the passenger seat.

I don't have a clean solution — you know how these letters go. I have a question.

The things I write, I chose. They're mine. I decide them with a clear head, knowing who I want to be.

And in Barcelona, again, that's what drove. The autopilot. I didn't decide anything: it switched on by itself, the way it has for thirty years, and I watched myself from the outside doing exactly the things I had written that I no longer wanted to do.

And here comes the hard part, the part that motivational quotes never include. Because "rewrite your brain" sounds wonderful, but it's an agonizingly slow thing, and your own brain rows against you even as you're doing it.

Read it slowly. "I choose not to choose." Me — the one who explains to his aunt over dinner that he's the one who decides about his own life — is the same one who confesses at night that most of the time he puts the pen down. I let the old program come back to write. This week, as it happens, I was in Mykonos letting myself be knocked off the routine I'd built with months of effort. Nobody forced me. I chose not to choose. Again.

I don't have a solution, you know that. I have a question, and this time it's simpler than usual: while you're running to become who you'll be, have you noticed who you already are right now? Or are you also, like me, waiting for someone's permission to exist?

I don't have a solution — you know I never do — and on this particular thing I'm the first to fail every day. I have a question, and tonight it's a simple one: what is your thing, the one that's you and nobody else, that you haven't shown anyone so far?