Personal Growth

It's not meant for you, really it's not meant for anyone. I've been writing this kind of stuff for years, in places where no one knows me, at tables where no one sits with me, in cities I change before I can call them home.

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.

It was "the beginning" that was the drug. That feeling of newness and magic of being able to be or go anywhere you want. An evolution that I still didn't understand the exit signal, the escape.

But it wasn't true. I hadn't chosen any of it. I had only inherited it, piece by piece, without ever stopping to ask: do I still need this? Does it make me better? Does it take me where I want to go?

I wrote in my journal: "I always thought others were better than me. That they had something more. That they were more capable, more attractive, more performing."

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.

But it wasn't the growth that changed me. It was the awareness of something I had never seen before.

The brain is programmed to always choose the second. To push away pain. To avoid immediate conflict. To survive, not to grow.

The brain doesn't understand this. The brain only sees today. Only sees the immediate pain to avoid. It doesn't see that postponed pain changes your body, makes you bitter, keeps you sulking repeating "nothing lucky ever happens to me."

Then I understood something that changed everything: I wasn't unhappy because of what I was missing. I was unhappy because of how my mind worked.

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

It seems like little. But after a month, something changes. You start to see your patterns. You start to recognize when you're reacting instead of choosing. You start to put space between what happens and how you respond.

Wanting to be accepted by those I considered better than me.

And that's exactly how you survive as a child. You look at who knows and you learn. You look at who has and you understand that infinite possibilities exist. Without comparison, no learning. No culture. No progress. Just absorbing.

When everything changed I was in Bali, years later, traveling, alone, in a place where no one knew me.

And like everything else, the key result exists only in knowing how to change your point of view.

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

Fifty-four attempts to become better. 54letter.com