When the Brain Lies

My mother would say: "stop playing grown-up games." It was her way of saying don't hurt yourself. The world is like this. Accept it.

These letters are born for those who still believe. For those who despite everything are sure it's possible. For all those who keep searching, door after door.

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.

If you strip away everything — the habits you didn't choose, the beliefs you accepted wholesale, the tension of being who you think you should be — and focus your energy on what you truly want, you become energy. And where to channel it is yours alone to decide.

The brain lies. The brain wants to survive, not grow.

The brain is programmed to always choose the second. To push away pain. To avoid immediate conflict. To survive, not to grow.

I've always been afraid of being alone. My greatest strength is independence, but it implies my greatest weakness: being alone.

When you're alone, memories resurface. That person. That missed opportunity. That gesture you didn't make. And your brain tells you that you should be sad.

"I don't believe in myself, so I always have to prove things to others to make them true."

And that's exactly how you survive as a child. You look at who knows and you learn. You look at who has and you understand that infinite possibilities exist. Without comparison, no learning. No culture. No progress. Just absorbing.

October 24, 2021 — "My greatest strength is independence, but it implies my greatest weakness: being alone."

Because monkey mind plays only one game. Chaos. The more noise it produces, the less time you have to ask yourself why. It's its perfect trick. It keeps you busy suffocating it, so you never go to see where it comes from.

┌────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │ 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 │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

There's no absolutely right column. But for those who grow up in a life of too many possibilities, too many flights, too many people, too many tables, the right column is a form of survival.

And in those ten minutes something happened to me that hadn't happened in a while: I realized my brain had nothing to do.

And this thing, seen from someone like me, is almost more alien than a language I don't understand.

And in those ten minutes something happened to me that hadn't happened in a while: I noticed that my brain had nothing to do.

And this thing, seen by someone like me, is almost more alien than a language I don't understand.

Those children too, in some way, are little Williams. Maybe without a written plan, but with direction anyway: in the village, everyone knows what they'll do when they grow up, because everyone does it, because their father does it, because their mother does it, because it's in the air.

The more I grow, the more I start to suspect something else.

Exactly where I wanted to get twenty seconds earlier — except I got there later, and I got there because he told me to. Not me.

That's the thing that drove me crazy. Not the traffic light. The fact that I have the brain to understand by myself what's right for me — I have it, it works, I know how to do the analysis — and then I outsource to the first stranger who passes the job of giving me the green light. As if my decision, alone, wasn't worth enough. As if I always needed someone else's signature at the bottom of the page to say "ok, you can go."

Except this time I did something different. I left the phone alone and opened the Kindle. I was reading a book — one of those motivational books, personal growth, self-help, call it whatever you want.

(I know what you're thinking, because I used to think the same thing: nonsense. Guys telling you to believe in yourself and that you'll get rich. You half-read them and half feel ashamed for reading them.)

There's a lie they tell you as a child, with a smile, convinced they're protecting you.

I wrote it one evening in Dublin, at dinner, alone, after closing an incredible month that ten years earlier I would have thought impossible:

The comfortable lie — the one society tells — is that the lives we miss are taken from us by chance. The train, bad luck, the fork in the road. It's convenient, because the blame stays outside.

Because some choices you don't make out of distraction: you make them to confirm who you've already decided to be (or who you've been led to believe you are).

I like seeing how the brain, pushed into a corner, stops going around in circles and gets straight to the point.

The lie we've been told is that one day you arrive. You put the suitcase down. You finally become who you wanted to be, and you stay there, satisfied.

See the trick? I place my power out there. Among others. In relationships, in the middle, when I light up the room. A power on my own I don't grant myself. Alone, still, in silence, with no one to win over, I don't feel strong: I feel small. I need others to tell me I'm worth something, otherwise I don't believe it myself.

Because my default mode is the second one. I'm always on. Always scanning: who's in the room, how am I coming across, do they like me, am I holding the evening together, am I performing. Even when I'm "having fun," the system is on alert — except I call the alert energy, I call it being on top of things, I call it my gift. And the safe shore, for my body — do you know which one it is? It's not the new one, the healthy one, the shore of the still Stefano. It's the old one. The Stefano who drinks and lights up the room — my body has known him for thirty years: there, however bad things get, it knows exactly how to survive. The other shore — the sober one, quiet, who doesn't need to win anyone over — is unknown territory, and a body on alert treats unknown territory as a threat. So it keeps me on this side. Even when I'm miserable on this side, it keeps me here, because it's the only place it knows.

At some point my cousin tells us about her very recent trip to New York. Her eyes light up. She says she'd like to go live there, maybe. And my aunt, with that rough affection of someone who wants to protect you, replies with something I've heard a thousand times in my life: "sure, but someone who comes from a small town has to accept certain things. How are you going to go live in New York?"

Yes. I brainwashed myself. That's exactly what I did.

I've spent my life wanting to improve myself. Grow, evolve, change, have more, become. The last few letters I've written you are about nothing else: changing who carries the suitcase, rewiring the brain, deciding to become someone else. I still believe in all of it, by the way. I'm not taking anything back.

And I know what steals it from me every time. Comparison. Measuring yourself against others — it eats you alive. I've talked to you about this before, and I don't want to do it again, because the lesson "don't compare yourself" is something everyone knows and no one applies, myself included.

One clarification I'll keep for myself though, otherwise I feel like a snake-oil salesman. "Observing" in physics doesn't mean there's some guy watching and reality snaps to attention: it means there's an instrument interacting, a measurement taking place.