Difficult Choices

I never could. Not out of courage, but out of inability.

For those who know life can be hard, difficult, but despite everything are still here. Under a wonderful sky made of possibilities waiting to be seized.

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.

You can slow down, sure. But don't stop. Momentum isn't lost from one hit. It's lost when you choose not to get back up.

Every morning I started doing something simple. I get up, and before doing anything else, I ask myself: who do I choose to be today?

Do you know what compound interest is? It works like this: every difficult choice you make today doesn't pay you back just once — it multiplies. Today's pain becomes tomorrow's competence, which becomes the day after's advantage, which becomes an unbridgeable distance between you and those who chose the easy path. Those who postpone pay interest. Those who act collect it.

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!"

And every time you choose that path, you'll wake up six months later in the same place as before. With the same hunger. With the same distance from what you want to become.

Last week I told you about the price no one wants to pay. About difficult roads, compound interest, anguish as an investment.

And when you start listening to yourself, you discover things you don't like. You discover that most of your thoughts are fears disguised as reasoning. That your emotions are automatic responses, not choices. That your unhappiness doesn't depend on what happens to you, but on how you interpret it.

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

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.

The second: "am I making this decision for that version of me, or for someone else who isn't even in this room?"

And that's how that information goes from being information to paths to follow. From knowledge to practical actions that guide you toward your future version. And that's how suffering transforms into a map that gives you a great advantage on the path.

Because it's one thing to make wrong choices at 15, another at 20, and a completely different story at 25.

There are decisions and mistakes that can weigh on you for years.

Whatever happens, you can choose how to read it. You can choose what to focus on about that event, and how to react.

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 │ └────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

All the people I see not achieving, myself included, for years, did the opposite. They dispersed in the name of openness. They confused themselves in the name of freedom. They refused to choose in the name of not missing anything.

There was no decision to make. There was no email to answer. There wasn't even a ready metaphor to write about in this letter.

So it's natural that they're still, it's a choice they never had to make, they don't even know they can make it.

There was no decision to make. There was no email to answer. There wasn't even a ready metaphor to write in this letter.

So it's natural that they're still, it's a choice they've never had to make, they don't even know they can make it.

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.

I took a flight from India to Italy, two hours of switching luggage at the airport like doing grocery shopping, then another flight to Brazil. On the plane, when I can't sleep, I don't watch random movies. I choose. And that night I chose King Richard.

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.

With anyone who does those jobs that, whether you want it or not, have nothing noble about them — except the pain and sacrifice of what they hide.

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 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.

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

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).

On the clock, sure. But stop for a second. In those ten minutes we drove down streets we never would have taken. We saw things we wouldn't have seen. We avoided a car, an intersection, maybe trouble. Maybe we avoided something worse. Even just my mind: ten minutes before I was one person, ten minutes after I was another, with different thoughts, different choices.

This isn't bar-room philosophy. It's that every micro-choice, every single second, sends you into one life and erases another. It's just that the lives you don't live, you can't see. And so you think they don't exist.

It's become my way of making decisions. Practically all of them.

That decision too, I made in five seconds. It just took me nine years to actually make it happen.

For all this time, I tried to change the suitcase. I bought bigger ones, nicer ones, the kind people turn to look at in airports. I changed the clothes inside, made them cost more. I changed cities, beds, all those identical white ceilings. I changed everything that could be changed out there, convinced that eventually, by changing enough stuff, I'd finally feel ready to unpack it — that suitcase.

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:

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.

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.

The point isn't that I brainwashed myself and my cousin didn't. The point is that we both did. She just didn't choose it.

None of us chose the parents we got. No one chose what country to be born in, what school to attend, what phrases to hear repeated at the dinner table for twenty years. "Dreams stay in the drawer." "Be content." "Someone like us can't do certain things." You didn't choose those words — they started drilling them into you when you were too young to defend yourself. And after hearing them over and over, you believed them. They became your own voice.

▎ I'm jealous of those who find their path. I'm jealous of those who live by certainties. I'm jealous of those who are sure that choice will be the right one for them.

A video crossed my path the other day. One of those you scroll past and then go back to.

Three times "I'm jealous." Me. The one who's now explaining to you that you're already someone, that you shouldn't compare yourself. Three times, in black and white, envy for those who have a path. I haven't recovered from anything. I'm writing this to you while I'm still doing it.