Fear

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.

That tension you feel in your chest, the one you don't know how to name, the one I talked about in the first letter — it's not stress. It's not anxiety. It's the distance between who you are and who you pretend to be. And the more that distance grows, the louder the noise it produces.

There's a precise moment when everything changes. Not when you understand what's wrong. You already know that. It changes when you decide that the old you isn't coming with you anymore. When you leave him there, with his habits, his fears, his excuses. And you start walking alone toward someone who doesn't exist yet but who you already feel inside. From that moment the game becomes something else. It becomes beautiful. Hard, but beautiful. Because the struggle finally has meaning. And like everything worth having, it takes practice

Not because fear is a good indicator. But because fear tells you where your comfort zone is located. And your comfort zone is the exact place you need to exit from.

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.

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

Maybe I didn't lose him to build. Maybe I lost him because staying still scared me too much.

Maybe I didn't lose him to build. Maybe I lost him because staying still scared me too much.

There's something that's never said enough about that story, and that the movie tells without fear.

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.

▎ If tomorrow everything falls apart, everything gets rebuilt. And that doesn't scare me.

That time, from here, I didn't bring the suitcase home. From Budapest I flew straight to Dubai — documents, residency, medical checks. The real move. I was changing countries at twenty-nine years old, and I was scared in a way I'm a little embarrassed to admit now.

But today, years later, I remembered the real feelings I was hiding from myself three years ago. I had just launched the company and already had twenty people on the team. And I was scared. A lot.

And it never worked. The suitcase changed, the clothes changed, and at the end of the day I was always the same. Same hunger, same fear, same emptiness in the room with the lights off.

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.

And here I want to tell you something that almost scares me to admit.

There's a quote that almost everyone knows and almost everyone gets wrong. It says that our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate: it's that we are powerful beyond measure. That it's our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.

Because the real fear isn't that people will boo. The real fear is that it works. That you pull it off. That the thing that is you takes up space, and that by taking up space it takes air away from someone else. How many times have you kept yourself small so someone else wouldn't feel wrong? Me, a lot. And I told myself a good story about it too — I called it humility.

And are you keeping it in the drawer because you're afraid you won't be good enough, or because you're afraid you will be?