Identity

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.

As a kid I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes and olives. Not to buy myself something. To get away. I didn't know where but I knew my place wasn't there.

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.

Failures don't disappear when you stop talking about them. They're carved into the psyche. You feel them every time you look in the mirror and know that the version you show the world never matches the one you live with inside.

And there's no greater failure than the one you feel toward yourself. In your own self, in your own mind, in your own silence.

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.

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

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.

Every result worth achieving required doing things I didn't feel like doing. It required becoming someone I wasn't yet.

For years I thought I would be happy when. When I had enough money. When I had the right company. When I found the right person. When I reached the right place.

They taught you that happiness is having. Having more, doing more, being more.

Meditating means one thing only: disconnecting from the noise and listening to yourself.

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

Not because they're more motivated. Because they start to feel that future version as a real person they have a debt to.

I hadn't had a vision. I had just changed the person I compared myself to. And that person was no longer in that room.

August 10, 2024 — "I'm finding myself, I'm centering myself. I'm becoming the man I want to be."

It wasn't to check. It was to avoid being.

I personally have tried to silence it in every way over the years.