Comfort Zone

The rest is noise in a town of a thousand inhabitants whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.

I showed a version of me built to survive. A pile of habits collected over time — some from childhood when I was looking for attention, some from my teenage years when I was looking for respect, others from adulthood when I was trying to prove I could make it.

And at some point those habits took over and became me. "That's just who I am." "It's my nature." "That's how I work."

If your thoughts today are the same as yesterday, if your habits this week are the same as last year, if your reactions are always the same — what's left of your evolution?

Last week I told you about choosing who to be. About deliberate behaviors. About new habits that create new identity.

I didn't tell you that every time you have to make an important decision, your brain will always point you toward the wrong path. The one that seems easier. The one that postpones the problem until tomorrow. The familiar one, that welcomes you, that cradles you and tells you "come on, come here, after all you've already been comfortable on the couch, you know it feels good. You want to go down a road you don't know? Are you crazy, it's dangerous!"

But I knew it was a lie. I had trained my brain to understand when it lies to itself. I knew that if I stayed in that comfort zone I would never leave it. That I would continue building someone else's dream while telling myself I was building my own.

Happiness is not a destination. It's a habit.

But I've learned that solitude isn't a problem to solve. It's a space to inhabit.

And like every habit, it's built one day at a time. One thought at a time. One choice at a time.

For me it happened around seventeen. I didn't understand it right away. At first it seemed like healthy ambition. It seemed like hunger. It seemed like the engine that would take me far from a town of a thousand inhabitants.

One morning you wake up, have your coffee, and realize you're thinking in a way that four years ago you wouldn't have even known how to name.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of tube.

Between him and me there are too many flights, too many cities, too many versions of me overwritten one on top of the other like layers of paint. When I try to scrape them off, underneath I don't find him. I find the emptiness of someone who never really protected him.

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of pipe.

Between him and me there are too many flights, too many cities, too many versions of me overwritten one on top of the other like layers of paint. When I try to scrape them off, underneath I don't find him. I find the emptiness of someone who never really protected him.

While we're there trying to figure out who we are, our habits are building. Our fears are taking root. The noise in our head — that monkey mind I told you about a few weeks ago, remember? — is getting louder, not quieter. Internal dialogues carve themselves in like water drops on stone. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves solidify.

They stop because uninstalling is more tiring than installing. They stop because life goes on anyway. They stop because at forty you have a mortgage, a family, a routine, and the price of redoing everything has become too high.

Because every decision of ours hides behind it a series of behaviors and habits that prevent us from changing and being better.

I felt it, you know, that it was bullshit. Inside I thought: maybe I should cross, it's safe, I'm not hurting anyone. But I stayed there, with the decision to cross already made in my head — clear, final — but my feet wouldn't move an inch.

Taking the risk. And taking responsibility — because in the end we're the ones who choose, we're the ones who live our life minute by minute, on our piece of road. And we're the ones who pay the consequences, even when we're wrong, even when we cross and realize it would have been better to stay put. The one who crosses pays, not the one watching from the other side. Never once has someone else signed off on screwing up my life.

And that's not even the worst part. The worst part is the price you pay without noticing. I let go of people I loved, because staying meant stopping, and stopping is something I've never known how to do. I watched people cry over me without being able to cry myself — I haven't done it since I was a kid. I sat at dinner across from a woman, in silence, and felt that there was nothing inside, as if I had died in that silence. That's the real price. Not sleep, not money. The people. Yourself.

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.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the lives we don't live, we take from ourselves. Not with the big dramatic choices — with the small ones. Because behind every result, there's a behavior, a habit that stops you from being who you want to be.

With that one extra step we never take, out of habit, without even realizing it.

At home, kept safe — which is why I can't show you the original — I still have a piece of paper, written in 2021. A list of things I wanted by the time I turned thirty. At the top: at thirty, live in Dubai.

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.

"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."

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.

This week I was in Mykonos. Before that, Barcelona. Celebration days, the kind that destroy your routine, shift your schedule, drag you away from where you'd arrived with such effort. Pleasant, yes. But they threw me off track again.

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.