Week 16 of 54 — The Autopilot

Last week I closed the letter by telling you that the only thing that really moves is the person carrying the suitcase. That everything else you can change indefinitely and stay exactly the same.

Beautiful. Beautifully written.

Then I spent three days recovering at home, picked up the suitcase — the same one — and left for Barcelona. And I carried it just like always. With the same identical Stefano inside.

I went for work, even though "work" is a strong word: I went to be with people, to meet others, to spend a few days together. Networking, the sharp ones call it.

And I felt great. Really great.

And terrible. On the exact same days. At the exact same moment.

First let me tell you something that's relevant, even if it doesn't seem like it at first. Lately I've been reading a book — one of those books about the body, the nervous system, stuff I usually eye with suspicion, you know how I feel about a certain kind of fluff. Except one thing inside it split me in two, and I can't shake it loose.

It says, in essence, this. The distance between who you are today and who you want to become isn't measured in miles. It's measured in nanometers. Twenty nanometers: the space between one neuron and the next, the exact point where a thought passes. Or doesn't. A ridiculous, invisible gap. And yet sometimes it feels like an endless journey.

That tiny gap is a bridge. On one shore stands who you are right now. On the other, who you want to be. And here's the part that floored me: if your body doesn't trust that bridge to hold, it won't let you cross. Full stop. Not with a new thought, not with good intentions, not with discipline, not with yet another well-worded resolution. If the body doesn't feel safe, you stay on this side. And it keeps you there by force.

Because — the book explains — the body has two modes. One is where it feels safe: rest, long breath, guard down. It's only inside that mode that a new thought can take hold, that a new version of you can put down roots. The other is survival mode: alarm, danger scanner always on, all your energy thrown into monitoring what could go wrong. And in that mode, no bridges get crossed. You don't have the strength: you're using all of it to defend yourself. The trouble is that modern life, with all the stress we carry around, almost always leaves us stuck there, on high alert, without even realizing it.

And I see this — all of it — in my own life.

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.

Hold onto that story of the bridge and the two modes. It's the key to everything that follows.

Because in Barcelona, I stayed on this side of the bridge the whole week. Planted there with both feet.

To be around those people, I bring out a very specific Stefano. The charming one. Energy through the roof, takes everyone to the right restaurant, orders, drinks, holds the evening together, makes people laugh, fills the silences. Top-tier Stefano — the one you meet and think, "what a force this guy is." And let me tell you something uncomfortable: I don't get dragged into these nights. I'm the one who creates them. There's a part of me that wants them and builds them, even while I'm saying I'd rather stay home.

I'm very good at it, by the way. It's always been my strongest move.

The problem is that Stefano is exactly the one I'm trying to erase.

And I've known this for a while. Let me show you the Stefano who writes at night, when he doesn't have to impress anyone. Late 2021, I'd jotted this down:

▎ I've spent my whole existence doing these things. Go to dinner, meet people, chat, party, be charming, make an impression, they follow you, they worship you. And you're always there, alone.

— November 27, 2021

There it is. That's the whole story. The man who lights up the room, with loneliness trailing behind him like a shadow. In Barcelona I was in the middle of twenty people laughing, and the more they laughed the more I felt that specific emptiness: I'm doing great, and I'm alone as a dog. Both things at once. Immersed in the beauty of company, inside a profound solitude.

Because in the meantime, I had made another decision. And I'd written it down. I want to stop drinking, almost entirely. I want the clean life, the clear head, the straight days. I'd even started, and I was genuinely doing well. I'd put it down in black and white exactly like this:

"No smoking, no alcohol, no pointless expenditure of energy, no pointless people, no pointless habits. Just me. And that's how I understood I want to live."

Just me. I had understood it. I had written it down.

And in Barcelona I did the exact opposite, for seven days straight.

Here's the part that hurt the most.

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

The things I do, on the other hand — I didn't choose them. They're the sum of thirty years — dinners, nights out, a way of being in the world that my body absorbed piece by piece without ever asking my permission. Over that stuff I've never had full control. I just found it on me one day, and that was that.

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.

I'd already mentioned it to you once — the alcohol, the nights that never ended, the diets started and abandoned — the monkey mind jumping from one thing to the next. It's the same beast. I know the script by heart: you go out, you spend, you drink, you stay out late, and you ruin the next day; the routine you'd been building crumbles in a single evening. I've been writing this down for years. And for years I've been doing it again exactly the same.

There it is. The bridge from the book, in the flesh. My body, in Barcelona, did what it's always known how to do: it brought me back to the shore it knows, and pinned me there. Not because I don't know where I want to go — I know perfectly well, I wrote it down in black and white. But because it, on the other side, still doesn't believe it.

I won't let you finish with "and so I understood, and now I'm changing." You know it doesn't work like that.

The only honest thing is that it's neither half full nor half empty. It's that the glass, slowly — really slowly, very slowly — is filling up. I know I'm moving in that direction. But it's suffering after suffering, because you're going against all your natural ways of being. And the only way I've found is the hard way: taking them one by one, the automatic behaviors, dismantling them piece by piece, and reassembling them differently. One at a time. For years. Just knowing that is something. But knowing it isn't doing it.

And then there's the real real thing. The one I only understood when I got back, and it's the reason I always fall back there.

My problem at the root isn't the drinking. It's not the nights out.

It's something that, again, I'd written down years ago — but proudly, as if it were my superpower:

▎ I don't move the way other people move. I move through people's energy. That's my power, to unite groups and always feel good.

— May 2023

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.

And it's all connected, do you see? The body on alert, the need to light up the room, the inability to stay still on my own — they're the same thing. My nervous system learned that danger is fought by making everyone love you. That you survive by conquering. And as long as that's true, every time I write who I want to become alone, then a week in Barcelona comes along and my body sends me back into the crowd to look for proof that I matter. And what I'd written falls apart. Every time.

I'd even asked myself this, two years ago, in the middle of the night, and I never answered it: how do you become yourself in the middle of other people?

I still don't know. But it's become my question, and this time I'm handing it straight to you: that person you've written you want to become — that chosen, yours, real version — why can't you become them? Because you don't know how? Or because, underneath it all, your body is still afraid to cross, and would rather keep you on the shore it knows, in the middle of others, even if it's a tight fit?

I, for the first time, have seen which shore is my safe shore. And I've understood why my body holds onto it. It's not a great victory, I know. But before, I couldn't even see the bridge. Now I can see it whole. Crossing it is another letter — and I'm afraid, quite a few more.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the sixteenth. Best, Stefano.

Ah — the last time I'd been to Barcelona, a year ago, I was alone. "Alone, as always," I'd written that evening, "in a restaurant eating a pizza." This time there were twenty of us. And I felt worse. Do the math yourself, on where you are and who you're with.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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