I’d fall to my death…

Get stabbed…

Or something would kill me.

And I’d wake up terrified.

…

But the strange thing was…

When I was awake, I tried my best not to think about death.

I didn’t want to imagine myself dying.

I didn’t want to imagine my parents dying.

I just wanted to forget that one day, all of this would end.

…

But then I started wondering…

What if I didn’t have to die?

What if I could live forever?

I’d have unlimited time to play the piano, read books, fall in love, travel the world…

And I’d never have to worry about running out of time.

Sounds wonderful.

…

But would living forever actually make my life more meaningful?

If the fact that life ends makes everything meaningless, would removing the ending make everything meaningful?

Imagine the year is 2500, almost 500 years into the future. And humans have developed a substance that if consumed, will grant immortality. Not the type where all damage, pain and suffering is removed—just the part where we won’t die of old age. The body ceases to decay and the body will stay as youthful as the time you were granted immortality.

Now, it would probably be only for the very wealthy, the demand would be through the roof and the supply would be limited.

In a way, I tried to become rich so I could help retire my mother from her 9-5 job. But maybe becoming rich in the future would become a major goal, not only to escape poverty but to have endless time to live a very, very long and meaningful life.

But would that actually make me happy? If I were offered to buy it would I actually do it?

Why do we want immortality?

As I woke up from my nightmares I hated the thought of dying. I often think about how I’m going to die, and usually how it may be painful. No matter what I will die, and it scares me to think about being an old person. Being incapable.

But I think the real reason we want immortality is that it grants safety against that. The hope that once we become immortal we will become enlightened, become happy, and truly live a life of purpose (A long ass life).

So now that I can live forever… what’s the first thing I should do now? Work on a 200 year-long project? Maybe explore every country on earth? Perhaps explore the entirety of our solar systems and it’s planets. No, maybe I can find the cure for cancer.

Would it be feasible for me to want to have bigger goals since those sound like extremely fulfilling experiences and packed with meaning? Even though today, I barely have goals for the next 20-30 years.

There will be some people who may spend thousands of years studying one area of knowledge, another who travels across the universe. Things that would be impossible without immortality, and I think that is an extraordinary thing.

Being immortal would make me more committed to greater and more meaningful goals that would probably not be feasible in the current human realm of time.

This leads me to another point, what would we want to do with our lives and what happens if we stop working?

Does immortality mean less or more work?

Now I did bring up that only the rich will be able to become immortal. But does that mean that every single immortal being will need to continue working to support their continued existence. Or will another entity provide for them? Perhaps resources will be abundant in the future thanks to robots and AI handling the products market.

So, let’s say hypothetically that you don’t need to work. Would some people resort to being more lazy? Delay their goals to tomorrow because they have all the time in the world.

I already think I have all the time in the world, so how would procrastinating affect the immortal man?

…

I think that what may happen is some people will buy immortality in the hopes that they can live in peace and relaxation for the rest of their lives… and THAT would make them happy and fulfilled. And whenever they try to do some incredibly huge project that sounds grandiose and spectacular—it will be easier to procrastinate it because the experience of time doesn’t change even though we’re immortal.

How committed would we be to a 100-year goal? That is almost impossible to think off. All I know is that the mindset required to stay committed will only come from a small few. And that the majority of the already rich and immortal beings will become “less productive”

But what does being less productive mean? If we end up finding things to do that are subjectively fulfilling but to others, not.

Maybe it’s better instead to have the same projects as a normal human life? The experience of time relative to an immortal life is too grand and too uncertain to fill out most of the time. So maybe instead of looking for some insane goal all the time. We can start using that time to explore parts of what we enjoy and are passionate about. What can we actually do with all this time?

For most people though I think that initially after getting the serum they will think… what now?

Instant gratification, endless entertainment, sexual gratification and everything in between. Now is the time to indulge because I’ve finally worked toward the goal of achieving immortality.

The dangerous part of immortality might not be immortality itself, it may be that we think immortality is the end goal. And everything after is meant to be a reward.

I will tell you exactly what I mean…

…

I’m 12 years old and my mother comes home from yet another work shift…

she left the house when it was dark, and she’s back again at dark…

I hear her opening the door as I run down from my room to her…

She says hello to me, and I can see she’s exhausted. Her back and legs hurt a lot too. So I take off her jacket and kiss her…

Mother, when I’m 18. I promise you will never have to work again!

My mother must’ve been wondering: How the hell will he do that?

But of course she smiled.

…

After working endlessly for many months in the hopes of making my YouTube business work, I end up dropping out of high school…

and one day I come home and tell my mother:

Mother, you don’t have to work.

She tells me excitedly:

Oh my god Alex, are you serious?!

Thank you

Seeing her smile that day was the best thing in my life.

I almost forgot that I wasn’t working for the money… I was working to retire my mother. That was my goal.

…

A few years later I finish yet another YouTube video…

ah, I have nothing to do now until the next deadline.

I open up YouTube shorts, and start scrolling…

I watch endless movies…

I was basically living just to maintain the lifestyle I had.

And I never realized that the goal I had achieved was over… I thought the goal of retiring my mother meant I could just relax afterwards.
It took me a few years to realize the goal itself was great, but that my life afterwards had just become a way to pass time…
to maintain the goal I had completed years ago.

And I think the same thing may happen to a lot of people who achieve immortality. Heck even if I were to get it. I would not immediately go ahead with my 100 year plan. I would probably take the serum, go home and then think: What now?

Maybe immortality can be the greatest thing ever, but I suspect a lot more things could go wrong, than right.

An immortal and mortal life.

From my own perspective even though I’m 21-years old. I found that accepting the fact that I was going to die, made me somewhat more fulfilled and eager to get up to do stuff. The fact that I have limited time means that it became harder to just procrastinate and “waste time”

And that if I were to attain immortality, I may wake up one day when I’m 1000 years-old and think what now.

A lot of friends and family who did not take the immortality pill, they will have died. And unless every immortal man has children, which would be another issue of itself… I think that improving the mind and the perception of life will be critical to avoiding a meaningless immortal life.

The worst would be to live for 5000 years thinking that you haven’t been living for the past 4500 years.

Yet there are also people today who are old who feel like the last time they really lived was in their youth.

Maybe it isn’t entirely an age or time problem… maybe it’s the fact that we feel like we’re living life even though we’re not. No matter how long that is.

Because we have a limited amount of things we can do now, I think it makes things easier to enjoy in the present, while when we’re immortal every single thing we do may lead to bigger questions about ones existence.

I honestly do think that suicide may be an issue in the future for these people, not because they feel like they haven’t achieved enough, but because there may be nothing else they feel the need to achieve. A man who is 500 years-old may take his own life because he is genuinely “done”. And there may of course be people who thought immortality would make them happy, when in reality there life became more meaningless, and they will take their own life.

It will vary from person-to-person I heavily believe. Just like how different each life is today. But the problem of removing the ending of life is, how do we determine when the end is? Or will some live millions of years into the future and feel completely fine?

When I was younger, I was terrified that my life would end.

But years later, when I finally had the freedom to live the life I’d been working toward…

I didn’t know what to do with it.

…

And I wonder whether immortality would actually change that.

Maybe it would give me thousands of years to discover things I can’t even imagine today.

Or maybe I’d spend thousands of years waiting to start.

I honestly don’t know.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether my problem was ever really that I didn’t have enough time.

Maybe I was expecting time itself to tell me what to do with it.

as I’m walking towards the toilet stall all is fine, until suddenly:

I look down at my pants

Oh no! I’ve peed myself

I look around and there’s nobody around, I don’t know what to do…

I don’t remember what happened next, but I think since my mother worked at the same kindergarten I went too, she came and helped me clean up everything.

But from that point onward, I never peed myself at school again.

It led me to wonder…
Did that one humiliating experience teach me something that years of potty training hadn't?

I’m sitting down on the piano and I’m trying to learn Liebestraum (Love Dream) on the piano.

It’s the hardest piece I’ve ever practiced and I’m about to give up. I practice and I just can’t see myself completing it.

so eventually, I just give up…

I quit.

I hate it all.

That piece wasn’t that good anyway.

…

I’m sitting down at the piano the next day, trying to look for something new to practice…

Hmm, none of these pieces really seem fun.

You know what, fuck it.

Let me just try a little bit of Liebestraum, let me just practice one step at a time.

A few days later…

I manage to learn the hardest part of the piece.

I aggressively clap my hands as I jump up.

I slowly learn the steps by repeating the same piano chords over and over. So that by heart I learn to not do the wrong thing.

With the piano, I could hear when something sounded wrong. And each time, I could try to correct it.

But with the toilet accident, I only remember getting it wrong once.

So why do some things take hundreds of mistakes to learn, while others seem to change after a single experience?

When babies learn to walk they have to repeatedly fall. On average they take about 2,368 steps and 17 falls per hour.

But the infants didn’t suddenly decide on the first fall that they couldn’t walk…

they simply stood up, kept moving and gaining experience.

They weren’t necessarily learning a lesson from every fall.

They were gaining experience with every attempt.

And gradually, something that once seemed almost impossible became something they could do without even thinking.

Yet, I’ve had another experience where I made the same mistake consciously for years without ever really learning…

I’m taking food during school lunch, there’s as always a lot of food. But again I look at the amount of food that my friends put on their plate.

I don’t want to take a tiny bit of food, I want to eat like them.

So instead, I take many potatoes. When I literally hate potatoes so much I even threw up once trying to eat potatoes during school lunch.

I’m sitting down to eat.

The rest of the boys are chowing down on their food…

I look at mine…

take a bit here and there…

play around with it a bit…

And then I sneakily put a tissue on top of the food so it’s not really viable as to how much food I will be throwing away.

As I’m by the lunch ladies at the garbage cans…

I look at them and try to see when they’re looking away…

OH, now!

I throw out a whole meal which could feed another kid.

And yet I did this, day after day…

month after month…

year after year…

A decade.

My whole time in school I almost always took too much food to fit in.

For years, I could make the same mistake without changing anything.

But sometimes, one tiny mistake was enough to change how I saw myself.

I’m 14 years old sitting in class during a math test…

And as I’m done with it, I hand it in to the teacher. But I know I got one question wrong.

So instead of letting it go and being satisfied with my great test. I talk to my teacher…

Teacher, I know what the correct answer is! I should’ve gotten it right!

And as he looks at me, he says:

Yes Alex, I understand you know the correct answer.

Yess, I know I got the wrong answer, but now he will know that I’m really smart!

…

Years later, I’m sitting down in high school and I’m taking a test…

I literally don’t know anything about this Pythagoras theorem.

My head is pounding…

the test is halfway in, years ago I would’ve handed in the test early because I was so confident I got everything right…

now, I’m walking up towards the teacher…

almost trying to hold my tears in, as I hand in the test early.

…

As I’m sitting on the train crying…

I’m not really thinking about the Pythagorean theorem anymore.

I’m thinking about myself.

Why am I so stupid?

Why can’t I understand something everyone else seems to understand?

…

But looking back, something seems strange.

When I played the piano, I could make the same mistake 50 times…

and every time I’d simply try again.

Oh, wrong note.

Let’s try that again.

But when I got something wrong in mathematics…

I didn’t just think I got the answer wrong.

I thought there was something wrong with me.

…

And then I think about all those potatoes I threw away at school.

I knew perfectly well that I was taking too much food.

But I kept doing it. Because apparently looking like I ate as much as my friends mattered more to me than correcting the mistake.

And then there’s me peeing my pants in kindergarten…

I don’t actually know whether that one embarrassing experience taught me something.

Maybe I simply got older and developed better bladder control.

Maybe it made me pay more attention.

I don’t know.

…

But what’s strange is how differently I responded to all these experiences.

With the piano, I kept correcting my mistakes.

With the food, I kept repeating them.

And with mathematics…

I started using my mistakes to explain who I was.

I wasn’t just learning what I did wrong. I was learning to think I was wrong.

…

I wonder how differently I would’ve seen myself growing up…

if I had treated my mistakes in life the same way I treated them on the piano.

Something I could learn from.

Rather than something that defined me.

because I was afraid my girlfriend would find the chat on my phone…

not because I was cheating on her…

but because I was afraid of her finding out I had been using ChatGPT to talk to her for the past few weeks…

and I never realized, that I had become so dependent on AI, I eventually became afraid of talking to her without it.

…

I’m texting my girlfriend after her work shift… and she seems to be doing alright. But all of the sudden she says:

Alex, what do you mean by that?

Uhh, what? Did she not understand what I said?

Hmm wait what is she thinking? Wait, I use ChatGPT for work and such… would it work here?
Okay, let me quickly paste the last few messages into ChatGPT, and see what she really means…

CHATGPT MESSAGE

Ahh, okay so that’s the underlying pattern, so I take the respond AI handed to me…

and I send it.

She seems to understand it… and she doesn’t notice.

But eventually, I don’t just use ChatGPT to understand her once in a while. We continue to talk but our conversations are starting to end in misunderstandings.

It feels like we’re speaking the same language, yet we’re speaking from worlds apart. I don’t understand how to talk to her, yet we’ve been talking just fine for months.

…

I’m texting my girlfriend after she has gotten of work…

and I’m just trying to be as safe as possible, whatever I text should just be easy because I know she may be a bit agitated.

Okay, it works.

Except… all of these texts, are sent through ChatGPT. I’m literally just talking to ChatGPT, and whatever my girlfriend sends back I use as feedback.

But it’s almost nearing the weekend and I’m about to meet her up. Completely normal, I just meet up with her and have a great time.

Except now I’m thinking:

Wait, how do I talk to her?

What if I say something wrong?

How do I use AI in real life? Nono she will notice.

I literally hid ChatGPT on my phone, and the conversation I renamed to “ “ (Blank) because if my girlfriend we’re to take my phone, at least she wouldn’t find out about it.

…

I’m hanging around with my girlfriend and everything seems to be fine. We’re having fun just going out and enjoying activities together in the city…

but another time I’m picking her up in my car, and she tells me:

Alex, sometimes I just feel like I’m talking to a stone wall. I feel so alone in this relationship

Wait what? I’ve literally been listening to her this whole time…

and then I realize…

she’s been talking about her problems and her life for the most part. I’ve just been listening, thinking that’s good communication. But I never really talked about myself…

I mean, my problems aren’t as bad as hers? Why would she need to know about that. As long as I’m the positive light I can help her…

One time she told me:

You know it’s like you think the world is all sunshine and rainbows

…

As we’re sitting in the car… I tell her all of this:

Yeah, you’re right. Honestly I never really talked about my problems to anyone. I never opened up because I thought it wasn’t so important. But now I realize, you can’t relate to me, unless I talk about my problems and how I really feel.

We start to cry together and we enjoy our date together…

we finally understand each other…

I’m on vacation in South Africa…

and my girlfriend and I argue over text messages again…

Instead of just having a normal argument, I take my time like it’s a goddamn chess match…

COPY her message

PASTE into ChatGPT

COPY & PASTE send to her

Okay, all is good for now. Let me just maintain like this until we meet up again in real life once I’m back…

If I respond spontaneously, she might disagree with me and then she will dislike me more…

as long as I say stuff she wants to hear things will stay the same… and I can continue without any arguments.

…

but eventually we argue again and…

And eventually, we broke up.

And I don’t know if the relationship would’ve survived if I hadn’t used ChatGPT.

But I do know that I still never really learned to fully express how I actually felt.

So even though my responses with AI we’re good, she never knew what I was thinking underneath all the messages…

Why was I so afraid of disagreement?

I always smile whenever I talked to somebody and they disagreed with what I had to say. I would simply agree with them and let them know that I mean no harm, I agree with you (even if I internally disagreed). Because I never wanted anyone to ever dislike me, which meant never getting people to become angry with me.
With my girlfriend, I would never really argue with her… it was more like if I said something that she might disagree with, I immediately apologized and let her know I meant no harm.

I was with my sister a few days ago and I really didn’t like the way she talked to our parents. So I was fighting hard internally, to try to just not say anything about it. I would actually have to confront her and disagree with her. But eventually we’re in the car together and I bring up her very passive-aggressive behavior.

I still brought it up in a way to where I really tried to understand her, but she told me details about the story which I never really had been told before. For the first time I told her I think you we’re wrong in the conversation.

She wanted me to clarify what I meant, and instead of using ChatGPT in real time, I just said exactly what I felt, and she opened up more. And I ended up learning about the whole story, where I actually could fully understand her behavior and the way she acted.

I feel like we bonded more than ever, even though I thought it would be the worst thing ever. I thought that disagreement was just a way for people to start arguing with each other, a way for them to yell at each other and get “all their feelings out”. I thought it was so immature.

A few months earlier was on vacation with my best friend. And he loves to drink and be very sociable. And I thought oh my god I’m going to have to follow him and all.
We end up going to a bar, and every time anybody including my best friend asks me if I want a drink, or if I drink. I say no.

When my best friend wanted to stay out later than usual I said, I’m going home. I was very firm with my decisions, because honestly I knew I would hate myself if I forced myself to say yes to something I really didn’t want to do. And what I found out is that my best friend actually respected it… he knew my boundaries and I knew his.
I didn’t say no to him the whole vacation like a party-popper. But I danced all night long in a night club, because even though I thought I hated night clubs… I just went without any alcohol and had the greatest time ever.

After my trip to Poland with my best friend, we never felt closer. It felt exactly like the conversation I had with my sister, even though I supposedly disagreed multiple times. I felt like we had a better understanding of each other, and an actual honest ground where we knew we could say what we thought, even though the other person might “dislike” me for it.

And I quickly realized that I was afraid of disagreeing with somebody, because I thought it would lead to endless arguments, further misunderstanding and pain. And while that can still happen, I found that mature disagreement can lead to the relationship becoming closer.
And what I did with my girlfriend prevented all of that. We couldn’t have the volatile arguments where we got all of our feelings out, and misunderstood each other even further. But I also never let us have disagreements where she could understand me, and me her—even better. And I actually think that disagreements is the start of love.

I misunderstood what love really meant, even though I loved my family and girlfriend. I didn’t really understand that love is something I had to maintain.

Is being loved the same as loving?

I loved the honeymoon phase of my relationship with my girlfriend. We would constantly go out on dates, tell each other what we loved about us and just be together all the time.

But eventually as the months pass by, we start to settle back down into our own lives. And once that happened I felt so lonely, I couldn’t hang around with her as much because she got a new job. And so I would just look forward to the weekends.

Eventually the only thing I did was maintain my work so I could wait to hang out with her. So we went from spending almost all of our time together, to now most of the time texting. As she started to face more problems in life, I started to just listen up more and tell her how it would all be alright.

She would really tell me how she felt, and I tried my best to tell her ways of fixing her situation. In a way I thought that was real love, I tell her it’s all going to be good and give her practical advice for solving her life. And it wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t want advice all the time. She wanted me to actually understand the situation she was in, she wanted me to tell her that it’s okay to feel that way in that problem.

If I’m brutally honest I didn’t really care much about her life situation, because I thought it was mostly her problem. I could only give her advice but she would deal with it eventually right?
I told her an infinite amount of times:

I Love you 😍 It will all be alright.

Because I just wanted to let her know I was there and I truly loved her. Underneath though I was just waiting for the weekend so I could meet up with her, so we could hang out and kiss and whatnot.

I really loved the feeling of being loved. And I wanted time to simply pass so we could spend time together again, and I used ChatGPT to safely navigate time without having to actually tell her how I felt. Because I thought if every time I disagreed with her, she would dislike me more, it would lead to a higher chance of a breakup. So logically the less arguments and disagreements we have the more she likes me?

I really like Scott Peck’s (Author of The Road Less Traveled) interpretation of what love is. And the difference between cathexis and love. To love something is to spiritually grow it to become the best it can be, while cathexis is an investment of mental energy into something. What I think is that I cathected my girlfriend more than I loved her, I spent a lot of energy communicating with her, really trying to understand her and making sure she felt loved.
But to truly love something, I don’t only have to emotionally invest in her, I have to actually help her grow as a person. I have to tell her things she might not want to her about her life and way of thinking that will hurt. It will make her disagree with me and it may lead to arguments, but the change will allow her to grow and navigate her own journey much better.

Now, I don’t think that the only part of a relationship is to simply do everything in your power to grow, grow and grow. There has to be regular moments without any change, just living in the present and enjoying each others company.
But I really don’t think I cared too much about the growth for my girlfriend insofar as to maintain the relationship I had with her. And one of the crucial steps of loving a person is to say something that they may dislike, but which is honest. It can lead to things going shit. But I never allowed myself to really help her by truly expressing how I felt.

And in a way, by me not really loving her in that way, me just wanting to continue the relationship because I liked the idea of having a girlfriend. It meant I was spending all my time just investing energy to maintain without growing myself. I wasn’t really growing much as a person as well, I wasn’t improving my work. I felt like I really didn’t need to go to the gym as much, and my hobbies just faded away. I felt like the only thing I need is to talk to my girlfriend and hang out with her. I still think love is simply being in each others presence, listening without offering advice, and just giving your genuine time and attention to them. But the way I was doing it was more of a selfish means to get what I want, more than the best of what she needed.

For example she once talked about her problems and I’m sitting in her bed… and as she’s talking I’m going, “Oh and you did that—”. I would predict her next sentence thinking I’m listening to her to my best capacity. She goes “Yeah, yeah”. And after doing this for so many times she eventually goes. “Alex, could you please just let me talk?”. Oh, I thought I was listening. But she really just wanted someone there to just listen without me having to predict what she says all the time.

I “love” Scott Peck’s definition of a relationship. Both partners are at the base of a mountain, and in most relationships the man is the one who climbs to the peak of the mountain, whereas the woman is usually the one maintaining the camp. Both people need to climb up mountain, and where the nurture and growth happens is when they both go down the mountain to the mountain base camp, where they talk about their experiences about life, about their goals. And then they support each other through the problems.

I would say my girlfriend was at a point climbing towards the mountain, while I was just trying to stay at the camp and help her from there. I had achieved everything I wanted from my work and life so I really only needed a relationship, so instead of trying to grow myself… I decided to only try to help her like a “teacher”. Like I’m somehow at the top and you’re coming to me, while in reality I wasn’t really trying to get her to the top of the mountain, I wanted her to stay at the camp with me… so we could kiss and hang around forever and ever.

So I just wanted a girlfriend who understood me and loved me, yet she felt so alone and like I wasn’t there to empathize with her. We spoke the same language yet could understand each other. I think one part of me not communicating properly is because I had lost a half of me…

Why did I think my girlfriend would complete me?

as I grew up I was smiling all the time, really feeling what other people we’re going through and generally just being a happy little kid. There’s nothing unusual about this. But as I grew up and went through primary school and through puberty, something changed. I’m a boy and I need to act like one. I act like I have my shit together, I never cry because only little pussies cry. And I don’t want to look like girl in front of people. I’m supposed to be strong, even though I’m the smallest kid in class.

When my sister or mother would cry, I literally was too afraid to comfort them physically, I would just stand over them uncomfortably. I never told people my problems because I’m supposed to look strong in front of everyone. So when people asked about my day I said “Good” and that was about it. I never really told anyone I felt bad or not okay.

I didn’t think much about it until I realized that I had started losing my function to empathize. Carl Jung calls the suppressed feminine part of a man, the anima. And in women, the animus. And in this case when I looked for a girlfriend I unconsciously looked for someone who was a bit more feminine, a bit more empathetic. In a way a lot like my mother, I looked for someone like my mother in a woman.

That’s why a really masculine man may be attracted to a very feminine woman. Or vice-versa.

So when I met my girlfriend I loved how human she felt, she really wanted to be with me and I could really feel her. It felt absolutely great. And yet when it came time to actually talk about my feelings and empathize with her, I simply couldn’t.

I wanted somebody who understood and could empathize with me, yet I had actively suppressed that part of me.

And I thought that there may be something wrong or different with her. Like we may be a bit too different. And this is not to say that the relationship may have worked out if I learnt about all of this.

I think I still loved my girlfriend, but I became too dependent on the feelings I wanted to maintain, that I wasn’t willing to work on improving anything.

What does it actually mean to find your other half?

I now think that great communication in a relationship comes from understanding, and I don’t think it comes mainly from listening and understanding the other partner.
I think it comes from re-integrating the part of us that we lost growing up. By nature as children we already relate a lot to the same gender as our parents. So we pick up a lot from the opposite gender parent. I really loved my mom and was a lot like her. Usually boys are more empathetic than girls, but lose that function as society corrects what it really mans to be a man.

It doesn’t mean that a really feminine woman now has to become more of a man. I think it simply means not being afraid of using ways of thinking and understanding parts of us that we may have lost, especially as a child. The way of thinking holistically and empathetically as a woman is just as integral and important as thinking analytically and focused like a man.

I never really understood “Improve yourself” when people talked about becoming the best version of themselves in order to attract the best mate. But now I think it means to be in a constant state of growth, and in a state of understanding of yourself, upon where two healthy individuals can get together, integrated as two individuals. Instead of trying to complement each other which may lead to a lot of misunderstandings.

There is a bird called the Jian bird where it has one wing, and it needs the wing of the opposite gender to complete each other and fly off. I thought it meant that no matter what qualities we had as different people, we would simply fix them by having our other partner fill in the gaps. However I found that the qualities which the other person had that I lacked, was a way to halt the relationship because I needed to develop it within myself.

A true relationship, whether it is romance or platonic. Can only fly off once both individuals realize that they are both independent and unique, and through understanding the other person—because they understand themselves can they honestly give the best love and advice to grow together. That the relationship doesn’t need both people to become dependent on each other, because we are all climbing our own mountains.

I read from Think and Grow Rich that the best scientists and people had a great relationship beside them. Because they truly make the person want to grow. And in my relationship I don’t think that was the case, I still wanted to grow for her… but I misunderstood what it meant to really love, I couldn’t grow myself because I was living to spend time with her. And in that time I didn’t want any disagreements or arguments because I wanted things to stay the same, so we hopefully wouldn’t break up.

And I could never realize why I couldn’t understand and help my girlfriend in the best way possible, as her other wing. Because I hadn’t found my other wing within myself, I projected the image of it in my girlfriend, and never realized that I couldn’t hear her words… because I lost them within myself. It was only through actively trying to empathize with people more, really talking about my own problems sometimes as well as their own… telling them honestly that their situation is shit and that I don’t know what I would’ve done in it. Or if I have an idea I tell them to their face honestly even if they may not like it. I still sometimes hold back and don’t say anything… because it is a lot of work and pain to actually build upon a relation. But now, I think I know what it means to love someone, understand others by drawing out what I had lost growing up… and learning to actually talk in my own words, without using fucking ChatGPT.

We’re going around saying goodbye to our classmates… but, I can’t wait to go back home.

Because this time when I go home…

I will never see these people again.

^…

I’m at home after the final ever day of school, and so summer vacation begins…

but I decide to take a year off, to focus on growing a YouTube channel.

During this time I move outside the city where I grew up…

I go onto all my contacts, SnapChat and Instagram…

and I delete Everyone.

My best friend from literal childhood?

Gone.

My online friends whom I could be myself around?

Gone…

And then I delete the social media themselves…

I’m invincible.

Alexander, can I please have $5?

My friend asks me…

I mean sure, I like helping people and I’m sure he needs it.

Thank you, Alex!

Then… not so long after:

Alex, Can I have $20?

…

I mean, it’s not that much. And he’s my best friend right? If I say no maybe he will dislike me…

okay, let me give him this much.

Great, thanks brother!

…

Alex, I really need more money… can you send me?

I mean it’s been too many times now, I feel like I’m being a bit too kind if I say yes.

Okay, let me say no. Simply tell him I don’t have it or I can’t…

But I’ve never said no to almost anyone. And what will happen if I can’t send him anything? Will he get angry? Will he stop being my friend?

So, instead of simply saying no and setting boundaries.

I delete him.

No more messages…

no more problems…

and no need to say anything.

…

When I’m playing video games online, instead of saying my opinion when somebody disagrees with me or crosses a boundary…

I stay completely quiet. And I block or delete them.

When I’m in school and somebody says something I don’t quite like… I simply smile and pretend to agree with whatever they’re saying… because I couldn’t just delete people from school, if I block someone here they will literally confront me.

Finally, no more school, no more people that I need to talk too…

I don’t need to pretend to agree with them…

or feel bad whenever somebody disagrees with me…

and, now I have more time to just focus on my work, YouTube.

…

A few months pass by…

I start having dreams about school…

the times I laughed with my friends, the times we did mischievous things in class, and when we played sports together.

Why am I dreaming about this? I don’t care about all of that.

But then I think about the fact that… I’ve basically not spoken to anyone since I left school…

I only have my family…

and that’s it.

…

I finish work for the day, and instead of talking to a friend… I go on YouTube shorts and just waste time.

I don’t have any notifications, not much different than when I was in school, but now I’m incapable of sending a notification…

Every once in a while I’m thinking:

Damn, okay but I have a fresh start… let me download Yubo.

It’s an app where you can talk to strangers, and get friends. So I download and start swiping on people…

…

sigh

not really anyone here with personality? I feel so different to everyone here, let me delete it. Who needs friends?

It’s been almost 3 years since I deleted all my friends…

I’m basically just sitting indoors, never really going outside except to the gym…

I don’t need any friends…

I managed to build up my YouTube channel, and I have more money than I know what to do with…

Yet, I feel a bit empty…

I download Hinge and start swiping for girls, I need a girlfriend.

She will make me more fulfilled than any friend.

…

weeks pass by… and I open my dating app.

0 matches.

Why am I so ugly? I can’t even get a girlfriend.

I DELETE THE APP.

…

I don’t know…

why am I so empty?

I had everything I thought I needed, a successful online business, money and the freedom to not need to talk to anyone. But somewhere along the way I completely forgot that I could miss having friends…

but I was too afraid of ever having to confront them…

or pretend to be someone I’m not around them…

or convincing myself it’s too much time to spend with friends, even though I could literally say no if I was busy.

I’m on Discord and I look at my messages list…

These are from years ago…

damn I used to chat a lot.

I look up one of my best friends that I used to play all the time with.

Should I message him?

…

I ended up talking to him for an hour on the voice call…

how long has it been since I really talked to someone?

The conversation was quite ordinary but…

It just felt good.

After that I end up talking to a few more people, and I start going out a bit more…

I’m still thinking:

Isn’t this a waste of time? I could be making money with all this time.

I need to stop thinking that all time is valuable for is money…

the most priceless times I’ve spent, were the times just hanging around people…

I go to Poland with one of my best friends, I’m thinking:

This will be great but… how will I say no to drinking? To go out to activities I don’t want too?

So we’re in a bar and as I’m ordering drinks, I simply say I want a Red Bull…

Oh you don’t drink?

A guy we just met there says…

Oh no, I don’t drink no.

Here we go… he’s probably going to think I’m a wimp or something

Ah respect, respect.

Hmm, did he say that with a genuine look? But damn, nothing happened. I simply said how I really felt and… I’m fine.

…

My friend wants to stay out longer after a great night. But I’m thinking of ending it.

So I tell him:

Sorry, I’m so tired, I will go home brother.

He says:

Ah come on Alex, just a bit longer?

After I say no genuinely again, he respects it… and I do my own thing.

…

I said no more times to my best friend than anybody else during my trip to Poland. I thought he would think of me as a turnoff, yet I feel like our friendship grew closer than ever.

I thought deleting all my friends would save me time, hassle, and my self-esteem.

And for a while…

It did.

Nobody could ask me for money.

Nobody could disagree with me.

Nobody could reject me.

But…

Nobody could laugh with me either.

Nobody could invite me somewhere.

Nobody could become closer to me.

Because I’d made sure there was nobody left.

…

Looking back, I don’t think I actually hated being around people.

I hated how I felt around them.

I was so afraid of disappointing someone, making them angry, or being disliked…

that instead of learning how to deal with those feelings…

I removed the people who could cause them.

And I called that freedom.

…

But the problem was never that I had friends.

It was that I didn’t know how to be myself around them.

I thought I had to agree with everyone.

Say yes to everything.

And put everyone else’s feelings before my own.

But when I finally started saying no…

I realized something.

The people who genuinely cared about me didn’t suddenly stop caring.

And the ones who couldn’t respect my boundaries?

Well…

Maybe we weren’t meant to be friends.

…

I still love spending time alone.

I still love working on YouTube.

And sometimes I’d genuinely rather stay home than go out.

But now I can make that choice without feeling like I have to cut everyone out of my life.

Because I don’t need to agree with someone to enjoy their company.

I don’t need to say yes to be a good friend.

And I don’t need to disappear just because a conversation might be uncomfortable.

…

For years, I thought having nobody around meant nobody could hurt me.

But I never realized…

I was also making sure nobody could get close to me.

but I don’t want to leave my warm and cozy bed…

I have been going to school a lot recently, I can take a sick day off right?

…

ALEX! Are you coming? We need to leave.

My father opens my door and sees me laying in bed…

Sorry, my stomach hurts…

My dad understands…

so as he closes the door, I lay in bed with a smile...

Finally, I can just rest.

I hear the front door closing…

and immediately…

I JUMP UP AND GET ON MY COMPUTER

I can finally just rest and play video games.

…

another day I’m laying in bed after school…

my father is about to come knocking on my door, because I have football practice in the cold evening…

but I don’t want to go today… I feel tired.

So my dad opens my door:

Alex, are you coming to football practice?

I already knew what to say I heard him coming.

Sorry, I don’t feel so well…

My dad understands.

So he closes the door, and immediately…

I HOP UP AND GAME

…

My dad knocks on my door…

and QUICKLY OPENS IT.

I look at him.

He looks at me…

with his eyes glaring down at me…

his expression when he looks at me sitting almost naked on my computer.

He closes the door.

…

WHY, WHY DID I GO UP TO MY COMPUTER.

I should have just stayed in bed and pretended to be sick.

I feel so bad that I can’t be on my computer anymore, even though he wouldn’t do anything about it…

I just want to go back to bed now… maybe he will think I’m really sick if he comes in one more time?

…

Now my dad knows that I lied.

but I didn’t think that:

Oh, sorry dad I’m just too tired today.

was a good enough excuse…

nobody could argue with being sick.

…

I’m laying in bed again and I feel too tired to go.

Sorry dad, I don’t feel so good.

But this time, I pretended to cough a little bit more…

maybe sniff my noise a bit…

because my dad already found out how I acted when I lied.

Instead of learning to tell the truth…

I learnt to act sicker.

I’m sitting in class during a test…

and I can’t get any of the answers down on the test sheet,

Am I just that stupid?

Why can’t I just think?

My head hurts soo much.

I get up during the middle of the test and just hand it in early…

I leave almost crying as I’m ready to get on the bus…

…

Alex, are you okay? I have some pills if you have a headache?

My classmate tells me on the bus… my god I want to say yes.

but then I think…

Wait, nono I don’t want to be a bother, or seem weak.

I’m fine.

She will come running up to me when I’m back in school and ask all kinds of questions.

So instead I say:

No, I’m fine. Thank you

I look away from her out the window and keep a totally straight face…

When I didn’t want to go to school…

I pretended I was sick.

Because I didn’t think being tired was a good enough reason to stay home.

But when I actually was sick…

I pretended I was fine.

Because I didn’t want someone to worry about me or think I was weak.

…

When I wanted to stay home, I pretended to be sick.

And when I was sick, I pretended to be fine.

one of them comes up to me and says:

This is your Instagram right? Why are you called Blacklegend1379?

And I answer:

Umm, because it sounds cool?

and they say…

But… but you’re black? Don’t you get it?

…

Wait…

Ohh is that what being “black” means?

I never thought about it that way

I’m mixed but up until then I hadn’t really thought about myself as black or white…

I was just me.

We all laugh about it afterwards, they were mostly curious.

Looking back at this a decade later…

that tiny moment feels a lot stranger to me now.

I’m at home and we have guests coming over…

my mother greets them by saying:

Hello, hello! Welcome in welcome in!

I’m hiding behind my mother like there’s a monster in front of me haha…

Oh Alex, he’s just a bit shy! He will warm up!

I want to talk to them but…

It takes a minute for me to warm up to new people, but they seem nice!

Although I’m shy…

and then with my friends I’m always the quietest kid whenever we meet some other kids our age…

I let my friends do the talking, and I just greet them and observe.

…

I’m in school and I get an A in English…

Wow, you’re so smart Alex!

and I agree, I’m really good at English… I feel smart.

But then I go to my art class…

and see my grades…

I get a D.

My art teacher says:

Yeah Alex, you have potential but you just aren’t there yet.

Wait, I’m not so smart?

Or maybe… I’m smart but I need to be creative to do well in art…

maybe I’m not creative.

I’m sitting in front of my desk at home, I’m supposed to do my homework…

but it’s soo boring…

I can’t…

how long has it been?

10 minutes.

Ahh let me just take a short break and then I’ll get serious…

I lay in bed and start watching anime and YouTube shorts.

…

Oh no, I didn’t manage to do my homework tonight!

Why can’t I just be normal and study…

the smart kids study for hours at a time. Am I just unfocused? Lazy?

Or maybe… I’m just stupid.

…

My mother comes downstairs in the middle of the night…

I see her walking towards me with drowsy eyes…

Alex, you’ve been practicing on the piano for 7 hours?!

Oh wait, it has been a while… I just wanted to play a bit on the piano to get a better grade in music…

but I’ve almost learnt the entirety of the piece River Flows in You and so I barely noticed how much time went by.

Then my mother says:

Wow Alex, you’re so smart!

The same kid who couldn't focus for ten minutes could focus for seven hours. So “lazy” or “stupid” couldn't explain the whole person.

But one thing my friends always told me was how weird I was…

When I was growing up my mother described me as:

Extremely happy, always cheerful… helping people and talking to everyone.

But slowly over the years I start to take other people’s opinion of me very personally.

…

I’m 12 years old in school and I’m laughing and playing around with my friends… I have so much energy that I just have a lot to say and would usually wrestle with my friends all the time… even though I would always lose.

but then they tell me:

Alex, you’re so weird haha!

usually I would just let it go, I mean me being weird is me being myself.

but okay maybe I should just try to be normal for now… let me try it…

so the next break comes after class and…

I’m sitting with my friends and we’re just looking at our phones… barely anybody is saying anything and we’re just looking at memes and such.

I’m quiet and I try to match my friends energy almost perfectly.

…

But the very next day I’m wrestling around with my friends and just laughing it off, and then my friends would tell me that I’m weird.

Oh, yeah… I forgot I’m supposed to be normal.

…

As I got older, I started doing this more.

If something about me felt too weird, too loud, too different…

I tried turning it down.

and I just try to pretend to be like everyone else until school is finished… I don’t want to get bullied because I’m the smallest kid, so being normal is a very good thing.

So I got pretty good at trying to look normal.

But I found another word to describe myself with:

behind.

I’m 14 and I’m looking at other kids a bit older than me at school…

and I watch YouTube videos about young adults and they are rich… successful… and they seem to have everything going for them.

Meanwhile I look at my life…

My mother leaves work at 4 am in the morning when it’s dark… and comes home exhausted when it’s dark again…

and my focus on my homework and school has steadily declined…

I still manage to get good grades despite not studying… but I can’t be focused, I can’t work hard like the smart kids, I can’t be normal.

But if I become a computer engineer then people will respect me and I might earn a lot of money.

But I simply can’t, it will take too long. I will take a gap year from school and focus on making money as a gaming YouTuber. I will definitively not have a normal life. This is so fucked.

…

Years later… after dropping out of high school and finally helping to retire my mother…

Alex, I’m so proud of you… really, thank you!

And all of the sudden I don’t think about being behind.

All I care about is the smile my mother is showing me at this moment.

… I show a few people my YouTube channel:

Wow Alex, you’re so successful! And you’re only 18?!

You really are ahead and successful!

People were calling me successful now.

But there was one label I still completely believed:

I’m shy.

Then I went somewhere where nobody knew me.

I’m in South Africa with my father…

we are at this restaurant overlooking the sea and a lagoon…

There is this older couple who seems confused on what to order…

back at home I would’ve let them struggle and figure it out themselves, but let me just try talking to them.

Oh, wow thank you so much young man! What’s your name?

…

the sea and lagoon are completely overshadowed by darkness…

has it been this many hours?

I’ve been talking for so long my throat is starting to hurt.

Okay, I need to go in and pay, my dad is waiting for us to leave

…

Hello there! Haven’t seen you before!

Somebody at the cashier starts talking to me… I’m so happy I just tell them:

Oh yes, lovely country you have here! This is my first time in here!

Then all of the sudden I’m talking like a madman to them here…

I almost felt like the happy little kid when I was a young boy.

So where did the person who was shy go?

…

I see a lot of people who have the same skin complexion as me…

and I’m curious so I ask and they start saying:

Yeah, I think you are mostly colored or mixed…

Wait… I’m not black anymore?

Apparently here, people described me differently.

And suddenly I’m thinking about that kid at school again.

Black. Shy. Smart. Stupid. Weird. Successful.

Every word described something.

But none of them seemed able to describe all of me.

Years later, I’m more talkative, more expressive… and honestly, quite a bit weird again.

And I realized the labels weren’t necessarily wrong.

I was quiet sometimes.
I struggled to study.
I was weird.

The mistake was turning a description into a definition.

Quiet became shy.
Struggling became stupid.
Different became weird.

And once I believed those things about myself, I started behaving like they were true.

But the strangest part is…

I never felt like I was becoming someone else.

I thought I was discovering who I had always been.

I’m shy.
I’m lazy.
I’m weird.

And after enough years…

I barely remembered the kid who didn’t think about himself that way.

The kid who talked to everyone.

The kid who could spend seven hours at a piano.

The kid who could be weird without wondering what being weird said about him.

Those parts of me hadn’t necessarily disappeared.

I had just stopped using them as evidence of who I was.

And that makes me wonder how many parts of ourselves we forget…

not because they disappeared,

but because we found a word that seemed to explain us.

…

Because when I was 10, somebody told me I was black…

and I remember thinking:

Oh…

I never thought about myself that way.

I was just me.

Maybe growing up isn’t about finding the perfect word for who you are.

Maybe it’s realizing that no word was ever big enough.

I existed before I knew the word.

MOW

Alright, my dad plays golf a lot in our garden, have to move his golf stuff…

Hmm, okay his golf mat is there, it has a lot of needles on it so maybe I can just go and vacuum it up with the lawnmower…

Or, I could just pick it up and shake all the dirt off…

Ah, the mat is just like grass. I should go over it safely…

MOW SHREDS

OH MY GOD!

No no no… why did I do that…

I used the lawnmower to suck up all the dirt of the mat, instead the mat got sucked into the blades and got shredded…

There’s a whole strip down the middle that has been completely cut… god that was so stupid…

What do I tell my father? Do I either lie and hope he doesn’t notice or just tell the truth now and have him get angry at me?

But if I lie to my father… and he finds out later while playing golf… he will know I didn’t tell him.

AHH okay, let me continue mowing and decide later.

…

I’m done mowing the grass, but this is the worst time to stop… because now I have to pass my dad and tell him what I did…

Dad, I accidentally destroyed your golf mat.

I couldn’t look him in the eyes while confessing…

Ahh nooo, Alex why did you do that?

Oh well… I understand, shit happens… that’s life.

Wait what? He understands?

But years ago, I would’ve lied… probably told the truth but in a way that made it not seem like my fault…

And if I messed up, I would’ve told myself that I was a mistake, or that I was a stupid person…

This time… I didn’t let what I did make me think I’m a stupid person.
And that sounds obvious now. But for most of my life, I was terrible at letting a mistake stay a mistake.

I’m 14 years old doing a math test and I’m handing the paper in…

but I got one of the answers wrong…

even thought I did extremely well on the test, I still talk to my teacher immediately:

Teacher! I know I got this answer right! I know I should’ve but I just messed up!

My teacher looks at my test and we go through it together…

…

Yes Alex, you really did well. You understand it.

Yes I know right! Thank you for understanding!

I feel so good, now he knows I just made a mistake… and he knows how I fixed it and how smart I really am.

Okay, now I can move on from that mistake…

…

I’m in high school at 17 and I’m doing a test again… math…

I sit down and look at the whole paper, Pythagoras theorem…

What… I don’t understand a single thing on this paper…

Oh my god… my head hurts so much… is my brain really this dumb at calculating this?

Didn’t I study for this?'

I’m sitting halfway through the test, and I know everybody else has probably gone through most of the test…

while I’m still here barely on the first few questions…

but I’m tired, my head hurts… but I know if I fail this test I will probably get a bad grade.

I almost hold in my tears as I…

stand up… walk towards the teacher while looking at the floor… and hand it in early…

…

I’m on the bus going towards the train station…

God, why am I such a failure?

I used to be so smart when I was younger…

I'm getting the worst grades ever in my life…

have I become… dumber?

I wake up and am supposed to go the the gym.

ah, I really don’t want to go to the gym today…

but if I don’t go, I will probably lose the routine…

ahhh let me just skip it today…

…

I’m watching YouTube shorts while resting up…

but I’m thinking to myself:

God, why did I skip the gym?

I was too tired but now I’m literally wasting so much time…

I would’ve been way more productive if I went to the gym today…

I get out of bed and tell myself I will go the next time…

…

Ah, maybe I’m not so disciplined, I will just skip this week… I will start again next Monday…

I will just focus on work.

I’m recording videos and sitting on my bed and chair all day…

my back and legs start to get stiff…

I haven’t gone to the gym for a few days, it’s almost like my body really is telling me to go…

But damn… why can’t I just be more disciplined and consistent? But I also want to rest, I feel tired sometimes… but then I lose the entire routine and skip everything… AHHH

I should just gym all the time and never take a day off… then I’ll be consistent.

…

I’m laying in bed and I’m supposed to go to the gym…

alright… do I go to the gym today? Although I do feel quite tired and have a few others things I need to do.

Alright, let me skip today… and then let me start again next time.

I lie in bed almost all day and go to play my piano and read my books.

I live my life, and don’t think about the gym or how I skipped it.

…

I wake up 2 days later…

Okay, I’m ready to gym. I probably will be a bit stiff but I feel very much rested and ready to go…

I do my workouts and feel great afterwards. I don’t think about 2 days earlier when I skipped the gym and let it affect what I decide to do today.

…

I made a decision and whether it was the optimal one or not, I stopped attacking myself for it. Instead I focused on what I could do next.

The difference wasn’t that I stopped skipping days.
I stopped making the skipped day decide what I did next.

I rested. And when I was ready to train again, I trained.

I think that was one of the first times I understood what self-forgiveness was actually useful for.

I’m sitting at the dinner table with my family and the guests we have…

we are done so I take my plate to the kitchen.

Uh oh, I feel a fart coming… Should I fart silently? Probably more appropriate.

…

When I’m alone with my family and I fart, nobody really cares, so I should let it out… it’s a bit funny.

And maybe the people here will laugh at a sudden fart haha…

So instead of letting it out silently…

I MAKE IT LOUD.

Faaaart

My dad looks at me:

Alex, what are you doing!!!

My mother and the guests just look at me and laugh…

my mother tells my dad it’s not that serious…

Oh my I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.

…

Now I’m standing there completely embarrassed because I’ve done something so wrong, why did I do that?

But I blamed myself because of information that I could’ve only known after the event…

so in my mind, when I actually did it I really thought it wasn’t anything wrong or bad… I did it all the time with family.

…

Years later… I messed something up, I was supposed to send my father a document. But he wanted it in PDF instead of a picture.

So when I read the message that sting came in like damn, but then I immediately thought:

Okay, I didn’t know that. I will just send the correct document and immediately forgive myself by doing the right thing and not blaming myself.

I send a message to my father:

My fault. Is this the correct one? (PDF)

And then my father says:

No need to apologize, you couldn’t have known you were supposed to send a PDF instead of a photo. I could’ve been more specific.

I’m in town with my sister and we’re just going to get something quickly…

I park in my normal parking spot that I’ve always done…

I come back 20 minutes later and I see a ticket on my car…

As always, how many times am I going to forget to put that parking timer?

Wait… the parking timer is there.

What did I get a parking ticket for?

So I grab the piece of paper and read it…

$100 DOLLARS? What the hell did I do?

I look at the description… parked in a disabled spot without the proper papers…

I look up at where I’ve parked…

OH SHIT

I LITERALLY PARKED IN THE DISABLED PEOPLE’S SPOT.

…

Yeah, I parked in the disabled people’s spot…

My dad looks at me and is like: How did that happen?

But I just feel a bit embarrassed, but nothing happens…

I paid the ticket, told my parents the truth… they knew I made a mistake, I knew I made a mistake and I forgot about it a few hours later. Usually I would lie and then think of myself as an embarrassment, always messing up.

But…

The fine was already the consequence of my mistake. I didn't need to turn embarrassment into another one.

Looking back, I thought being consistent meant considerately doing the thing repeatedly for an extended period of time… without interruption.

But life, whether it forced me or not… made me take breaks every once in a while. And instead of simply taking the break and returning the next time to continue. I beat myself down and told myself I was inconsistent, undisciplined and lazy.

If my teacher saw that I understood the question, I could tell myself,

Okay, I just messed up.

But when nobody was there to reassure me, I was much more likely to turn the mistake into something about who I was.

Now I don’t think that consistency is only doing things uninterrupted without any feelings whatsoever to what happens…

I think it means: When the line breaks, how quickly do I return?

But no matter what, I still show up to work again… pick up from the day I took off… or continue from whatever mistake or bad things I made, without making it an identity or conclusion about myself or the future.

Missing one day wasn't what made me inconsistent.
The problem was what I did after missing it.

I used to think consistency meant getting it right again and again.

Now I think a lot of it is what happens when you don’t.

I still make mistakes.
I still feel stupid sometimes.
I still regret things.

I just try to take responsibility, learn what I can, and return.

I didn’t become consistent by learning how to never fail.

I became consistent when one failure stopped needing to become five.

Alex, what do you want to do when you grow up?

Uhh I don’t know… maybe a computer engineer?

Ah, you’re so smart! Good choice.

But, if I’m honest I don’t know either if that’s a good choice, or the right choice…

who am I actually trying to become?

this person who thinks I’ll become an “engineer” because I heard they make a lot of money… and because people will respect me if I have that job…

okay…

…

I’m at home and my dad is making something.

Oh, it smells good!

Sometimes…

I’m at home thinking about what I want to do but then I simply think to myself…

honestly, I just love eating food… I look forward to it.

I’m in school and while I’m sitting in class I’m thinking:

Oh yes, my dad is making spaghetti bologna!

…

And so I would run home and spend my days just living for dinner at one point.

and honestly, at this point I completely forgot that maybe there was something else that I could be living for…

A few years earlier…

My mother comes home from work, I can hear her opening the door downstairs…

Oh, mom is home!

I throw my headphones on the keyboard, I’m still playing with my friends but I’ll be back soon.

I see my mom exhausted…

It’s dark outside… she left home at 04:30 am when it was dark and she’s back home now late in the evening…

I help her take off her jacket…

as her knees are swollen…

and her back hurts.

And I tell her:

Mammi! When I’m 18 I promise you will never have to work again!

I don’t know how I’ll do it but…

I need to help my mother!

…

I take a year of before starting high school…

I try to build up a YouTube gaming channel…

After struggling for a little over a year…

I start making money…

at 17, I made my first $10,000

at 19, $25,000

And eventually I had made almost $600,000.

…

My mother comes home…

Mammi, you don’t have to work…

Alex, are you serious! I’m so proud of you.

And the way she said it. And the way I felt. Her smile.

Was the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced

She hugs me.

And now, I can truly play games and just help my family…

…

So I’ve done it…

I retired my mother…

bought the house that we live in…

and can travel wherever and I can work from whenever as well.

And for many years…

it feels good.

One day I’m working again, making the same version of a video…

hundreds of videos have been posted…

slowly starting to run out of ideas…

So I have to start almost doing the same things over and over…

the channel has gone down to $10,000.

But a few months earlier, it was at $6,000 so I panicked and worked way harder.

…

How much more money should I make?

Should I try to go for $30,000?

I will need to work 8-12 hour days though…

playing the same game over and over.

I really do enjoy it, I do.

But something feels off.

I work twice as hard to earn half the amount of money that YouTube paid a few years ago.

How long can I sustain this and continue helping my mother and family?

Shouldn’t I start up another business?

…

I’m working for a couple hours… the deadline for the video is yet again done…

so I go back to bed and scroll YouTube shorts. Just waiting and procrastinating until I have to work on the next video.

I start feeling lost.

But nothing is wrong?

I have so much and I have my dream job.

My goal didn’t fail, it worked out. And that was the entire problem. I got everything that I wanted, and because of that I decided to myself that there was no other goal for me to really work on. The more money I make the longer I can keep my mother retired…

But I was only working towards a means of keeping the life I had, and I just did the bare minimum to make sure I had enough money…

I wasn’t really growing or learning anything.

I thought I was continuing to work towards the goal of keeping my mother retired.

But the goal of retiring my mother had already finished…

I’m not lost because my goal failed.

I’m lost because it worked.

After going for the one thing I never had, a relationship…

I focus everything to my girlfriend. Now, I believe I have everything I have in life.

I honestly don’t care that my channel is doing worse, I get to spend time with her!

…

we eventually break up and then I finally realize…

I have gotten absolutely everything in my life… a fit muscular body, I had a girlfriend and got to experience everything with that. I have all the money necessary, my mother will be fine.

Okay, let me actually start up something on the side, I like to teach and help people.

I will start to play the piano again after years of putting it off…

I will actually read for once, that book Think and Grow Rich my mother gave me when I was like 12…

And I will be more consistent with going to the gym…

And also… If I earn a lot more money I will get more girls… I should go to the library and read a lot more, that’s where the smart girls are.

…

I’m in the library reading Atomic Habits…

I hear footsteps…

I look up

Oh my god, could that be my next girlfriend?

Oh no, oh no.

Wait, where was I in this book?

I’m sitting as close as possible to the entrance of the library, because there all kinds of women will be able to see me reading…

I hear light, calm footsteps. Another potential soulmate?

I look up…

It’s a full grown dude.

Ah shit, let me just read…

Wait where was I again?

but after doing this for a few months…

something changed…

…

I’m sitting in the library reading again, and somebody walks by.

But oh my god, I’m learning so much about business…

psychology…

the way people work…

meaning…

I read Man’s Search for Meaning.

All the ways of purpose, how looking forward to something in the future makes us endure the present.

And I ask myself:

What am I really supposed to do with my life now?

I’m constantly thinking about the question…

like one day I will get an epiphany…

oh my god! I found the meaning of life!

And that now that I know, I will forever have the meaning of my life…

…

That never really happened…

I still don’t know what the meaning of life is.

But while I’m sitting there thinking really hard about the question.

I do realize that maybe just taking the question seriously was enough for me to start changing…

I finish work on my gaming channel yet another day… I could just go and watch YouTube shorts and movies and procrastinate until the next video…

but instead. I want to play the piano. So I sit down and decide to practice for only 45 minutes a day…

No pressure to complete anything, just having fun.

and everyday I see myself slowly progressing, learning better pieces. Understanding patterns and becoming proud of myself whenever I learn an “impossible” piece. Know I can conquer harder and harder pieces.

Then afterwards I sit down, listen to relaxing music and read for 30 minutes a day…

Oh my god! This bit of human psychology is so insane! I will write this down and synthesize so other people can understand themselves better

Then I go to the gym…

I start talking to people there… learning all about them, and training to actually enjoy the process of the gym rather than just training to “have it over with”

And I met a guy like me… dedicated, focused and we talk about the meaning of life together and how to live a good life.

…

All of the sudden I’m doing more things than…

Yet I’m not forcing myself to do any of these things, I just did them for the fun of it.

A few years ago I would play video games for 12 hours a day and not think of anything else, let alone my real life.

Now I’m playing games while working and I’m thinking:

Okay, I want to do something else…

I can barely work for 4 hours while playing games…

I want to read, play the piano and go to the gym…

go for my short walks…

talk to my mother for 15 minutes spontaneously…

I don’t do everything with a deep purpose…

Sometimes I eat dinner and think:

Damn, this dinner is soo good, my mother’s a master chef.

And I start wondering why every part of my life needs the enormous question…

Why does the piano matter to me?

Why should I read?

I used to think everything that didn’t progress my goals was useless…

If I can work… why would I take meaning in doing as useless as playing the piano? I could make more money.

Why would I need friends? I hate going for stuff, I just want to go home and work on business.

My whole meaning in life, especially as a gaming YouTuber came from how much money I could earn…

how much I could provide…

but eventually there were some things that gave me more meaning than anything I could’ve thought…

Almost a year ago, while I was still struggling to figure out what to do…

I get an email from someone who watches my gaming videos…

They tell me something along the lines of:

“Hello, I’m from Brazil… you know, I’ve been feeling really down lately and just watching your videos has helped me so much. You don’t know how much you’ve helped me go to sleep and forget life. So thank you for everything!”

Immediately I start to cry…

I never knew… that my silly little gaming videos could help someone bring so much value and peace…

I’ve gotten millions of views…

earned more money than I could ever think off…

gotten enough subscribers for YouTube to reward me with a plaque.

Yet somehow, none of that compared as much as one single person telling me:

You’ve helped me.

I realized just how separated I was from my audience…

how much I love talking to people…

want to teach and understand myself and other…

…

Now I’m making these stories…

I look back at small and seemingly ordinary things in life that should have absolute zero meaning….

why did I hide from guests so much?

Why did I care so much about what other people thought about me?

Why did I think and become the way I am in life?

Or, why did I wipe my ass with a cardboard roll because I was too embarrassed to ask for more?

And the more I try to understand myself… the more I can help others understand themselves better.

And now, I read comments like:

Wow, I did this too.

I never thought about it that way.

Thank you so much for this message.

And I think I’ve found a business that now aligns well with who I am as a person…

not just telling stories within video games…

but helping people understand themselves through stories too…

and that may or may not give me meaning for a long time.

But this gives me something to look forward to.

Everything I notice in my life becomes meaning for others.

Everything I read in my books becomes a way to help others.

Every time I think of another idea that I realize will make others understand themselves better…

So this is part of meaning in my life right now…

but I know that even this life won’t give me purpose forever.

In a few years from now, I may or may not feel like:

Okay, I feel done with the piano… instead of giving it up, let me try the violin.

I don’t like training at the gym anymore, instead of quitting let me try running.

I don’t like making videos anymore… but I still like helping people understand themselves… let me make a movie, write books or do podcasts.

Maybe there is some completely different way of helping people that I can only learn once I’ve lived long enough…

and knowing that maybe I don’t know…

doesn’t scare me anymore.

Because I already had my greatest purpose in life end… and once it was finished…

life kept on going.

So if I one day any of the things in my life start feeling meaningless or boring…

I will probably find something else.

Because the things that bring meaning to my life, will change as I keep on living…

and as long as I’m alive.

I’m going to keep on changing..

keep learning new things…

meet new people I could never imagine…

and probably enjoy things in the future I would never do today.

Because it would be strange if the answer I had to the purpose of life, at 21. Explained the purpose of my life for the rest of my life.

This is the biggest things that confused me…

I thought the meaning of life…

was one huge thing.

The reason that I’m alive. The thing I’m supposed to spend every waking hour of my life focused on.

But I think meaning is smaller than that…

some meaning like helping my mother can give me purpose for years…

something as simple as wanting to live for the the dinner can give me purpose for the next few hours…

And nothing about these things last forever…

but they make me want to really live the life I have… Now.

I still don’t know what the meaning of life is…

If somebody were to ask me:

Why are you here?

I don’t have a real answer, only something abstract…

I don’t know.

I thought meaning was something that was found.

A permanent solution to all my problems, if I could think hard enough to find it… I could finally stop worrying about that question for the rest of my life.

But life never worked that way…

I care about something and start moving towards it…

sometimes I can reach it…

and sometimes I stop moving towards it.

And then… something else pops up in life that I can start caring towards.

I haven’t found the meaning of my life.

I’ve just built a life that keeps giving me meaningful reasons to live it.

And so I look at the reserves of toilet paper…
Oh no…

Now usually I would just ask for more, but I’m to embarrassed because I would be admitting to my family that I’m sitting here taking a shit.

So instead I look at the naked cardboard roll…

And somehow decide:

This will work…

So I wipe my ass with the empty cardboard roll and flush it down the toilet.

I don’t think much about it and go about my day.

…

I walk in on my mother, she is looking down the toilet…

What is she doing?

Oh my god, she’s pulling out something out of the toilet…

oh no! I was the one who did it!

But instead of admitting it I just watch and go back, maybe she thinks someone else did it…

From that point onward, I just opened the door lightly and always asked for more toilet paper, even if it smelled like complete shit.

And this wasn’t even the weirdest relationship I had with shitting…

I'm at my friends house and I feel a sudden urge to take a shit…

but I don’t want to poop here… I want to go home and do it. Because at home it’s way more comfortable and I know how clean the toilet is.

Okay, let me hold it in… I’m sleeping over but I can hold it until I go home tomorrow.

…

I wake up and all of the sudden now I really need to poop, but I know I’ll be home in a few hours…

I say goodbye to my friend, get home and immediately unload on the toilet…

And I do this everywhere…

if I’m at school, I almost never poop there…

at a friend’s house? Little bit better but I still wait…

…

I’m at a football trip with my team and we have to stay there for 4 days.

Now obviously I will have to shit in that time, but for now I ignore it…

the days pass by and I’m playing in the heat of summer…

I have no problem going to pee, but…

now I feel like taking a shit.

…

I’m on my way home from the football trip, my dad has picked me up!

Only problem is that we’re 2 hours away from home…

and I haven’t taken a shit for 4 days straight…

why… why can’t I just be comfortable pooping normally?

Is there something wrong with me?

…

I get home and I absolutely demolish the toilet…

didn’t stand a chance…

the turds are so big that the splash from the toilet water reaches my ass cheeks…

it was disgusting to feel the cold water on my ass, But I’ve never felt more relieved.

…

It’s strange because I could pee basically anywhere.

Apparently taking a shit anywhere except home felt way too personal.

I’m taking a shit and just sitting longer than I should on my phone…

and I’m about to wipe…

but all of the sudden…

Door opens

It’s my dad!

He looks at his phone too, but then he looks at me…

I stare back at home from my phone…

and then he closes the door…

…

What the fuck was that!

How didn’t he see I was in here!

Oh wait… he was on his phone…

and I forgot to lock the damn door…

…

I need to pee badly so I walk to the bathroom with my phone in hand…

I open the bathroom door, it’s unlocked…

I look up…

dad

sitting there on the toilet is my dad on his phone.

I don’t say anything, he looks at me… I look at him, and I close the door.

And I just laugh.

What the hell!

Haha that was so funny…

But why was my dad taking a shit funny…
but me taking a shit felt like classified information?

I’m taking a shit again and I’m on my phone…

just watching YouTube shorts… I want to wipe but wiping will take a minute. Let me just finish watching a few shorts.

10 minutes later

Oh my legs are sooo stiff…

oh my god, my blood from there is gone…

okay let me quickly start to wipe.

…

Instead of just taking a shit for 2 minutes, I stay on my phone just because I can’t be bored for that period of time.

And then I realized, I was willing to let my legs go stiff and disgustingly hated wiping my ass after waiting for so long…

because now it would be cold when I’m wiping my ass…

instead of the warm asshole if I had just done it in 2 minutes.

…

Eventually I got comfortable enough pooping that I developed the opposite problem.

Now I was TOO comfortable.

maybe I’m getting too comfortable writing this too…

I’m in bed thinking about video ideas…

I don’t know what video to make next…

what if I don’t make a good video and I waste time?

What if I start losing money, my family depends on me…

Oh no.

I’m starting to overthink to much, ah shit…

now my stomach is starting to really hurt…

I need to stop worrying about the next video. Let me get rid of this stomach pain.

Sharp pain.

PLEASE can you stop hurting stomach, go away… go away!

But it doesn’t work. Alright let me just go to the toilet to be safe…

I immediately get diarrhea…

I throw my shirt off while taking this shit. It’s starting to hurt so much and I’m getting really warm.

With the shirt off I get reduced heat generation.

…

A few hours later I’m sitting in bed and my stomach is fine…

but now my ass starts to really hurt.

Oh my god, it’s swollen isn’t it?

It just gets worse and worse…

the next day I wake up with the sharpest pain I’ve ever felt.

I can’t move… my whole asshole is completely swollen.

I’ve gotten hemorrhoids.

And how the hell will I do my work now? Oh no I can’t make the next video…

I’m sitting in bed with my legs stretched like a starfish…

because if I close my legs I squeeze my ass, and that was excruciating.

…

2 days later it’s so bad I can’t be asked to be in bed like this…

I would sit with my family at dinner with a face that was completely straight…

but underneath I was sitting on my ass, so I had the worst pain imaginable.

And I would walk like I had held in a shit for a thousands years…

So now, I really worry about myself and my work. I have to get medicine.

…

Mother, I’ve been in so much pain. I think I have hemorrhoids.

Oh my god Alex! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?

Yeah, I guess I was too embarrassed…

She gets me the medicine and eventually I start to get better…

I was anxious.
My stomach was a mess.
I kept going to the bathroom.
A few days later I had some of the worst hemorrhoid pain of my life.

I had always thought emotions happened in my head.

Apparently my ass had other opinions.

When I was a kid, I would rather wipe my ass with cardboard than tell my mom I was taking a shit.

Years later, I’m lying in bed like a starfish telling her my ass is swollen because I need medicine.

Embarrassment had gone from making me wipe with cardboard…
to making me wait two days to ask for help.

I don’t think poop made me wiser.

But somewhere between those two moments…

I stopped treating being human like something I had to hide.

At school and around strangers I was really quiet…

my parents would tell everyone I was shy.

And I thought I was shy too.

But then I would go home…

close my bedroom door…

put my headphones on…

and somehow become completely different.

I would scream at games…

swear at random people online…

talk to people for the entire day…

and some of the friends I made there honestly felt closer to me than the friends I saw in real life.

So for a long time I basically thought:

Yeah… this is probably the real me.

I’m just too scared to act like this in real life.

I’m sitting with guests for dinner…

answering their questions and pretending to be talkative and all.

my parents would usually tell people I’m shy and quiet.

Okay, I thank my parents for the dinner and say goodbye to the guests, I run upstairs…

and after closing my door, I immediately hop on my games…

…

I’m just playing games with my friends, and sometimes I get genuinely scared…

WOAAHH

And I don’t think much about it…

I can barely scream at school or anywhere else so I’m just letting out all my energy.

But then, out of nowhere…

Light knock

My mother opens the door:

Alex, could you please tone it down? I’m trying to sleep.

Oh my god, yes. Sorry mother.

And I’m thinking to myself:
Damn, I’m just having fun. But of course I need to be quiet… as always…
But my mother really needs to sleep.

I start whispering to my friends instead and as they’re screaming and having fun.

I just want to scream again.

…

Another time I’m in my apartment and forget to be quiet, and I’m screaming my lungs out and rolling on my chair whilst playing games…

and all of the sudden I hear from underneath me:

BANG, BANG, BANG

OH SHIT. What was that?!

Oh my god, it’s my downstairs neighbor…

I’ve been screaming so much that I forgot somebody underneath me is literally trying to sleep.

And it’s midnight.

I really need to be quiet, holy shit…

It’s winter break, and I’m on an online platform called Discord.

And I’m just talking to people on there, and playing games…

Whenever I’m playing a game and someone tells me I’m bad:

Shut the fuck up. Nobody likes you!

You’re a loser.

Haha what an idiot he is.

…

And whenever I used to lose really badly

You’re a fucking idiot.

You got so lucky!

I would talk to my friends for hours, I spent 14 hours some days just playing this game called Rust.

And when my friends and I met people on there…

I would insult people and just copy what my friends were doing.

Nobody knew how I looked like, nobody knew me in real life.

…

I’m talking to people online and they say something I don’t like…

Now in real life, if I don’t like somebody, I talk back to them with a smile, slowly distancing myself but saying everything they want to hear. Until I’m eventually out of their sight.

But online, I just tell them they’re a completely idiot…

and I block them.

My blocked list was so long I had to scroll down for a minute to get to the end.

…

The day after I’ve berated people and screamed my lungs out, I’m in school with my real friend group. And I’m just on my phone….

my friends are laughing and chatting, but I’m just sitting with them being the quietest kid in the friend group.

I’m the smallest kid as well, so I don’t want to say anything wrong to absolutely anyone. Because I know if I curse at someone like I do online, I won’t be safe…

I meet a guy in a game I play…

and we instantly connect. We talk about real life, scream together in the games and insult people together…

it’s almost like it’s me and him against the rest of the world.

Because with him, I can show him the part of me that isn’t quiet…

So I’m talking to him constantly…

and we don’t even know each other’s appearances. So I know that he isn’t just talking to me for external reasons. He wanted to talk to me.

He doesn’t know I’m the smallest kid…

the quietest kid…

or the kid who pretends to be someone else in real life.

We spend 14 hour days on the weekends just playing together. And after a few months of playing together, he becomes one of my closest friends…

yet, he lives further away from me than any of my real life friends.

…

Me and my friends are sitting in school together on some couches. They mostly talk to each other and I join in every now and then…

But I’m not really interested in what most of my friends are saying…

I’m talking to my friends online, just chatting with them. Telling them the insane stuff were going to do tonight after school…

Can’t wait to go home and swear…

scream my lungs out…

and talk about life…

I just want to go home and play games.

And when I think about all of this now…

I don’t really know if saying the online version was the “real me” makes sense anymore.

Because yeah…

online I definitely showed parts of myself that I was too scared to show in real life.

I screamed.

I talked constantly.

I told people about my life.

I made friends with people I had never even seen before.

And I think that part really was me.

But then I also think about all the people I insulted…

all the people I blocked because I didn’t like one thing they said…

and all the things I would say online that I would never say if that person was actually standing in front of me.

Was that also the real me?

…

Maybe.

It was still me doing it.

But I don’t know if being able to do whatever I wanted automatically made me more myself.

In real life I was scared of what people thought about me…

so I hid a lot.

Online I didn’t have to care as much because if someone hated me…

I could literally just block them.

And disappear.

…

So maybe I wasn’t taking off my mask when I went online.

Maybe I just had a different one there.

I think both versions were me.

The quiet kid at school was me.

The kid screaming at his computer was me.

The person talking about life with someone he had never met was me.

And unfortunately…

the kid calling random people fucking idiots was me too.

…

I used to think being myself meant removing everything that was holding me back.

But now I’m not really sure.

Because sometimes what was holding me back was fear.

And sometimes…

it was just remembering that there was another person on the other side.

Around my parents friends, I was quiet and polite.

Around my friends, I was loud, weird, and wrestling with them.

Around my girlfriend, I even lied about myself just so we could seem more similar.

For years, I never really questioned it.

Until eventually I started wondering:

Which version of me was actually real?

My parents tell me:

Alex, we have some friends coming over for dinner.

and immediately I say okay… but then just go to my room and lock myself in.

Damn, now I have to eat dinner when they’re gone. I don’t want to go down and meet new people.

So I start playing games… and a while later I hear the front door open…

I continue playing my video games, hopefully I can survive until I can eat alone.

…

It’s been many hours and my stomach…

RUMBLE

Damn… I want to eat…

But if I go downstairs, I will have to greet them all… and my parents probably told them to that I was a little bit shy…

I don’t like talking to people, I know when I go down there I will have to talk.

…

I hear laughter and loud talking as I descend the stairs, I already know what will be said…

Ah there he is! Finally came out of his room! Welcome.

Yeah… finally came out of my room.

I try to be polite and just smile and say hello to everyone…

I just want to eat. But now I know they will probably ask a million questions about my life…

but I really don’t want to talk, I barely know all the answers to my life myself…

Yeah Alex, so what do you want to become?

Uhh yeah I think I want to do computer engineering…

Then she tells my mother:

Wow, you have such a smart kid!

Good, now they think I’m smart and I’m talking a lot too…

…

The conversations with all the guests were always fine…

Yet, the next time we had guests over…

I would hide in my room and do the same thing over and over…

…

The weird thing was…

I was completely okay telling myself:

I’m shy.

That was just who I was.

But I hated other people actually seeing me that way.

So I would spend hours hiding upstairs…

then finally come downstairs and try to prove I wasn’t the shy kid I had just spent the entire evening being.

I’m with my friends in school… we have a break between classes…

I start to grab my friends and wrestle with them, as always.

I say weird stuff and scream, but we’re all laughing…

but then they say:

Alex, you’re so weird haha.

…

Most of the time I just took it as a joke. But somehow today, I just wanted to be normal. I was always the weirdest kid so why don’t I do it.

The next break comes…

I’m with my friends and we’re just staring at our phones…

No wrestling…

No funny jokes…

No banter…

…

And the next day, I completely forget to be normal…

I’m back to just wrestling and being an expressive kid…

and my friends would call me weird every once in a while. And the cycle would repeat itself.

But which version of myself was really me?

With my friends, I could only keep the “normal” version of myself alive for a few hours.

With my girlfriend…

I took it much further.

My girlfriend sees a YouTube short…

it’s a couple riding together on a motorbike…

Wow, you see this Alex! Couple goals.

…

Normally I would just laugh it off with her… but maybe, maybe I can tell her that we can do that…

that I once rode on a motorbike with my father…

Yeah, we should do that too! I rode with my father, we should ride together one day!

and immediately I regret the words coming out of my mouth.

I don’t want to ride a motorbike, I never even rode with my father.

Wait, you really want to Alex! Wow I’m so excited!

…

Oh okay, wow she actually is so excited now!

Okay, maybe I should just try to become interested in bikes, I mean I could become someone to ride motorbikes…

…

A few weeks later me and her are looking at motorbike equipment…

I try on helmets, and gloves and all the kinds…

Hmm yeah, this fits me I guess…

I look over to my girlfriend…

Oh my god Alex! this helmet is so cute!

Look at these gloves!

Wow I know exactly what this is!

I’ve never seen her as excited as when she’s dreaming about these things…

I really have to become someone to ride with her…

…

My girlfriend asks me:

Alex, did you really ride with your father?

And I say:

Yes yes I did as a child yeah…

But when I asked my father…

No, we’ve never ridden before on the motorbike

Why did I ask my father? I knew it was a lie.

So I told my girlfriend…

Ah, maybe it was with someone else. I’ve never ridden with my father…

Wait, so you lied?

Oh no no, I think I forgot, but yeah I’ve ridden on a motorbike before…

…

And even when she caught me…

my brain found a technicality.

I had ridden a motorbike once when I was maybe ten.

So now I could tell myself:

See? I didn’t really lie.

…

I did.

I told her I rode with my father because I wanted us to have something in common.

And instead of admitting that, I kept changing the story so I could still feel like I was being honest.

…

My girlfriend of course gets annoyed…

and then I eventually say…

Yeah I don’t know… I will try to ride a motorbike but if I don’t like it then sorry but I can’t ride with you as a couple.

And she says:

I understand, we don’t need to have the same interests and all. You do whatever you feel like.

Wait…

She was completely fine with the version of me I was trying so hard to hide.

Okay…

I land in South Africa with my father and for the first time…

I’m really in a place on the opposite side of the world, nobody knows me…

nobody cares who I am. I will just enjoy this vacation…

So I meet a few people working at an ice cream stand…

They look happy and open. Let me try to say something outside of my ice cream order…

Hello, such a lovely country you have here!

I just wanted to say something nice…

…

but eventually I was just enjoying talking so much to the ladies there…

that I forgot completely that I was supposed to swim at the lagoon.

I tell them:

Oh it was so nice talking!

And eventually go down to swim…

…

The rest of the trip I went from keeping my head down most of the time to making eye contact first, like the people here…

and just talking about life…

…

My father calls my mother:

Yeah, Alex is just so talkative! He is really enjoying it here!

I agree with him, I really do like talking to everyone.

People were starting to smile the moment I came up to them.

I’ve never had that before…

and by the end I had talked more in a few weeks of my vacation…

than a few years back at home.

…

I’m walking to the gym…

I walk past people, and I look them in the eye and smile.

For the first time, I notice some of them looking back and saying

Hello!

Wow, I used to only keep my head down and never even bothered to look up and see if anyone here wanted to talk…

The world hadn’t suddenly become friendlier.

I had finally started giving it something to respond to.

Looking back…

I spent years trying to figure out which version of me was the real one.

The quiet kid around my parents friends.

The weird kid wrestling with his friends.

The boyfriend trying to become interested in something because his girlfriend loved it.

The guy in South Africa talking to strangers for hours.

And I think I was asking the wrong question.

They were all me.

Of course different people bring out different parts of us.

The problem wasn’t that I had different versions of myself.

The problem was how often fear decided which version was allowed to come out.

I was afraid of being seen as shy.

Afraid of being too weird.

Afraid that being different would make people feel less connected to me.

And the more I tried to control how people saw me…

the harder it became for them to actually see me.

South Africa was different.

Nobody there knew who I was supposed to be.

So for once, I wasn’t constantly deciding who I should become before I spoke.

I just talked.

I still act differently around different people.

I think everyone does.

But now I try to notice when I’m changing naturally…

and when I’m changing because I’m afraid of what someone will think.

Because maybe being yourself doesn’t mean acting exactly the same around everyone.

Maybe it means not being afraid of which parts of yourself they get to see.

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Usually I would do the same but I get bored and just pull out a piece of paper.

And I start to write a few numbers…

1… 2… 3…

100… 101… 102…

300… 301… 302…

507… 508… 509…

Woah, I have no more space left on the page… guess I’ll stop.

Then my teacher comes up to me…

Alex! What have you done!

I look at her, and I start to cry.

Why is she yelling at me?

My mother, who also works there comes up to the teacher and asks her what happened…

Oh I’m sorry, it’s just that in my 21 years of teaching…

I’ve never seen anyone do something like what your son has done!

My mother laughs it off and I still don’t understand…

what was so impressive about what I’d done…

But from that moment on, my mother would keep telling me I’m special and smart.

…

For most of my childhood, I thought school was slowly revealing who I was.

A good grade meant I was smart.

Struggling to study meant I was lazy.

Sitting alone meant I was shy.

Hating an essay meant I hated writing.

I never really questioned those conclusions.

They just became things I knew about myself.

But as I got older, life started giving me completely different evidence.

I could barely study for ten minutes…
but I could practice piano for seven hours.

I thought I hated writing…
until writing became one of the most important skills in my business.

I thought I was naturally quiet…
until I traveled somewhere nobody knew me and couldn’t stop talking to people.

And eventually I started wondering:

How much of who I thought I was came from me…

and how much came from what happened to me at school?

I’m sitting in school as a teenager, I can barely study for 10 minutes at home and at school I almost fall asleep trying to listen to the teachers…

Why can’t I pay attention?

All the other students seem so focused…

And I hear they study for hours at home…

…

I’m in a test and it’s about halfway done…

I hear a chair being pulled back… the scratch against the stone floor…

and I look up, of course it’s the smart kid…

How are they so quick! I’ve barely gone through this…

Damn, why can’t I be quick and smart like them…

…

Maybe I just can’t be great at anything, I’m simply too lazy and stupid.

…

But school never sat me down and told me who I was.

It gave me grades, assignments, classmates, deadlines and expectations.

I was the one who kept turning all of them into evidence about myself.

My teacher is talking about something in front of class…

but I have no idea what the teacher is talking about…

I’m fully listening but I couldn’t tell you what he talked about 10 seconds ago…

…

Any questions, anyone?

Should I raise my hand?

I look around… nobody else is raising theirs…

Damn, am I the only one who doesn’t get it?

Am I just the stupid one?

But I really want to improve my grades and become better at school…

But if I raise my hands then everyone else will think I’m the only stupid one…

So I don’t raise them…

…

Another student raises their hand…

I look over at him, and then I hear the words leaving his mouth…

Oh thank god, that’s exactly what I wanted to understand too!

The teacher explains it, I understand it now…

but the strange thing is I don’t think the student who raised their hand is stupid…

the strange part is that the smartest kids were the ones who would raise their hands most often.

Maybe I didn’t think I was stupid because I didn’t raise my hand.

I wasn’t scared that asking the question would make me stupid.

I was scared it would show everyone else that I was stupid.

So I stayed quiet.

And staying quiet kept me ignorant longer.

I thought asking questions would expose my ignorance. But staying quiet was what kept me ignorant longer.

COVID has arrived and we are told to stay at home…

from now on most of our school days will be performed from home…

But then when it comes time for physical education, instead of me thinking I was saved, our teacher still had assignments for us. Most of the times it was simple research about human health and muscle functions.

But this time our teacher wanted us to go for a walk, and send him a screenshot of the steps we took.

Alright, it’s nice weather outside, sunny and not too cold… the winter is over so perhaps I should enjoy the spring and summer and actually work out.

I walk to the hallway…

Ah, wait…

If I only have to send a screenshot of my steps… then that means I could just alter the number on the screen…

…

I’ve been playing games for the past hour.

Oh shit, I have to Photoshop my steps so I can send it in to my teacher…

I use an app where there aren’t many analytics to debunk my fake evidence…

and there we go.

Nice, now I can spend physical education just playing video games.

I mean, I technically completed the assignment?

…

A few days later, the teacher accepts it…

Good job, Alex. You’re a good kid and student!

oh my god, I actually got away with it!

I’m sitting in a history test…

but god dammit, I forgot to study for this test. So instead I quickly got the cheat sheet…

and I place it right under my ass, all I have to do is look down and act as if I’m thinking or writing and I can read it.

Perfect!

…

Okay, I’m more than halfway done with this test, I got this…

Classroom dead silent

I try to look down at the answers…

but damn my ass is so big I’m covering some parts of the text…

okay let me just adjust myself a little bit…

CRINKLE

Everybody looks my way…

Oh my fucking god, you have to be kidding me…

WHY DID THE PAPER MAKE SUCH A LOUD SOUND…

I keep a straight face…

the teacher walks over to me,

Alex, what do you have under there?

I feel the urge to lie… but honestly I’m too lazy to make an excuse, this was my fault completely.

I hand in the paper… and all my classmates laugh at me.

…

The test is done, everybody is leaving. And as I’m almost rushing out with my steps…

Alex, I need you to stay behind.

Classmates giggle

…

It’s dead silent between me and my teacher…

Alex, I know you cheated on the test and I will fail you… but I’m giving you a chance to redo it. Okay?

Yes Maria, thank you so much and I’m so sorry.

But my father works as a teacher in the same school as her, my life is over if she tells him that his son had cheated on a test…

But in the end… she never told him…

I completed the test a few weeks later…

and this time I didn’t even think to cheat…

I actually studied for a long time… and did well.

…

Grades instead of learning.

Steps instead of health.

Completing instead of understanding.

I got very good at figuring out how to win the scoreboard.

I just didn’t always notice when I had stopped playing the game.

I’m supposed to write a long essay for my English assignment…

I have a deadline of a few weeks, but oh my god how boring it is.

Oh well, wait…

if I only have to write a certain amount of pages, that means I can just stretch ideas out.

Okay, let me get started…

Furthermore, I think that I this topic is obviously extraordinary. Because the premise of it is

I write as many advanced words as possible to extend the character length, and try to drag out the sentences so the page fills quicker…

then I can play video games after…

I don’t want to do school assignments at home when I can play all day.

…

I get a B on the assignment and get an A in English…

I barely tried, and I still did well…

Thank god, because English is a lot of writing…

and writing is so incredibly boring, I hate it.

…

Years later, I’m building my gaming channel to retire my mother who was working endlessly at her 9-5 job.

And as I’m studying thumbnails and video ideas…

I read about a lot of related subjects…

I have a whole notepad filled with ideas, I can’t stop writing…

If I don’t catch up with my competitors, they’re going to outperform me.

So I write as much as possible…

Titles are writing.

Hooks are writing.

Copy writing is writing.

Ideation is partly writing.

Then when I publish a video, I get data about how the video did and the idea…

Ah the video did quite well, okay this idea is working quite well. Let me write down why it worked and try to really understand it.

I have to write clearer titles, ideate and write a good thumbnail template, so that my viewers also understand everything way better.

…

Wow, I’m enjoying this, writing and reading about different subjects for this goal.

…

School taught me to write until I reached the required length. Business taught me to write until someone understood.

School didn’t only give me academic scoreboards.

It gave me social ones too.

Who had friends.
Who sat alone.
Who talked.
Who was quiet.
Who belonged.

…

I’m about to enter the school cafeteria…

Oh god, I have to find a table to sit at…

I grab my food and immediately look around…

Ah there, an empty table

…

I sit there not looking up, eating alone.

Other kids are probably looking at me like I’m a loser, sitting all alone here.

But…

I used to have my best friend group that I used to sit with and eat. It was so easy to eat at the school cafeteria…

Why am I so alone?

I lost almost all my friends here…

I feel lonely.

…

Eventually, after sitting alone during recces and school lunches so many times…

I decide to just talk to a bunch of boys in my class…

they seemed genuinely good, but I just didn’t want to feel alone.

So now, I’m eating together with them always.

Except now I’m always with my friends during free time.

It was normal to hang with friends during the break…

But I never wanted to feel or be alone, or to even be seen alone at school.

…

I solved the visible problem.

I wasn’t eating alone anymore.

But I was still the quietest person in the group.

So instead of questioning why I felt uncomfortable around people, I gave myself an explanation:

I’m just shy.

And once I had the label, I stopped needing to investigate it.

My mother hears a faint tune coming from downstairs…

she comes down with her bathrobe and I see her with tired eyes walking up to me…

Alex, wow. You’re still practicing on the piano! But it’s midnight, you should rest…

I glance over at the clock, it really is midnight.

You’re so smart Alex! I always knew you were special…

…

I had studied on the piano ever since coming home from school. Because I decided to get a better grade in music, just for fun.

So after almost learning a whole piece and studying for 7 hours…

I ended up playing it for my teacher…

Wow Alex, you’re so talented and smart!

…

I go to the mailbox to get my report card for the term…

I open it quickly and read through the grades…

Oh, art… D. I hate art.

…

Music: A

Wait, I got an A in music!

I really loved to study that piece…

Wait, how come I can’t study for 10 minutes. But I just studied for 7 hours and genuinely enjoyed it…

nobody had to tell me to study for that long, I just did it myself.

…

At first, the lesson I took from this was simple:

Maybe I actually am smart.

But years later, I think even that was incomplete.

I was still trying to answer the same question.

What am I?

Smart or stupid.
Disciplined or lazy.
Shy or social.

Life kept showing me that I was more conditional than any of those labels allowed.

Wait.

I can’t study for ten minutes…

but I just practiced piano for seven hours?

Maybe the question wasn’t simply whether I was disciplined.

Maybe it mattered what I was trying to become disciplined for.

And once I started looking, the same contradiction was everywhere.

I thought I hated writing.
Then writing became one of the most important parts of my business.

I thought I hated reading.
Then I found questions I desperately wanted answered and started reading voluntarily.

I thought I was simply shy.
Then I went to South Africa, talked to strangers constantly, and loved it.

Life kept giving me evidence that school never had the opportunity to give me.

Looking back, I don’t blame school.

School had to measure something.

Tests measured my answers.
Essays measured my assignments.
Grades measured my performance.
Attendance measured whether I showed up.

Those measurements weren’t necessarily wrong.

I was asking them questions they were never designed to answer.

A bad grade became:
“Am I smart?”

Struggling to study became:
“Am I disciplined?”

Sitting alone became:
“Am I someone people want around?”

Hating an essay became:
“Do I hate writing?”

Eventually those answers stopped sounding like things that happened to me…

and started sounding like me.

Then life kept contradicting them.

And I began to realize that maybe growing up wasn’t about finally discovering the perfect description of myself.

Maybe it was learning to question all the descriptions I had mistaken for permanent.

School didn’t decide who I was.

I let what happened at school decide what I thought I was.

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Video games were basically my entire life growing up.

And somehow, I turned that into my job.

Now I literally make money playing games…

but after a few hours, I usually want to stop.

For a while, I thought I was losing my passion for them.

But I think something else happened.

My life got bigger than my bedroom.

School ends yet again, I can finally go home and play video games.

I run home and immediately throw my school bag on the floor as I hop on my computer…

I say hello to my friends and we start to play all day…

…

It’s dark outside, but I really don’t want to stop playing, I know I won’t get much sleep but I need to do this…

I’m spending 12 hours some weekends just playing, even though I should be studying.

One day though I’m in bed after a day of school…

Father, I’m sick. I can’t go to football practice…

Honestly don’t want to play sports today, I just want to rest and play video games…

…

Door opens…

Father!

He just looks at me with an angry expression and closes the door…

He saw me only with underwear sitting on my computer playing games…

Damn, I wish my parents would understand that I really just love being at home and playing games…

Maybe I should quit football so I have more time for games…

…

Summer vacation starts… this is the best time of my life!

I’m hopping on my computer. Instead of going outside and enjoying the warm weather after a long hard winter… the only thing I cared about was the amount of time that I could just stay up all night and play.

It’s 6 AM. I’ve been playing all night with my friends, and I can see the sun through the blinds…

this is the worst… Now I have to hear the birds chirping and I can barely sleep.

…

I wake up at 5 PM. My father looks at me walk out my bedroom and just said…

Had a good night?

I respond positively… I guess my dad doesn’t care as long as I get good grades at school. But during the summer break I can do whatever the hell I want…

After eating “breakfast” at nearly 6 PM…

I decide to get a bit of tape from my dads closet and close my curtains…

Tape the edges of it to the wall…

And now, it’s almost completely dark in my room.

Now, I can play games all night and just relax…

I think I’m just a Night Owl. I prefer the darkness and I’m just introverted, so I don’t need to go outside and meet people.

Just my type of lifestyle…

I’m playing games for a living now…

I decided to become a gaming YouTuber to help my mother, who was constantly exhausted from working.

So now… I’m playing games and making videos out of them for 12 hours a day…

This is just perfect, so so perfect.

I again, close the curtains. Tape them shut and just work…

And it works. I earn so much money I can barely believe it. I really must be dreaming.

So now, I never have to leave my house…

I can play with my friends and do whatever…

And I can help my mother.

I come up from my room at 3 PM. My dad starts to talk about it…

Alex, I know you like being awake at night. But please fix your sleep schedule…

I don’t really care about that. I love working at night…

Alex! We should travel to South Africa, you deserve a break!

Hmm, yeah I have been working for a few years now just playing games…

Let me travel to this new place…

I tell him I’ll go. And I don’t think much about it.

…

Oh my god! Look at this place! Full of crime and guns and violence!

My dad tells me…

Alex, you haven’t been there have you? You haven’t seen the whole story, you first need to experience it.

I know my dad has been there seventeen times. But I’m not blind.

Am I going to die down there in South Africa?

…

We’re driving to this massive lagoon with a village next to it. This is something so beautiful…

I ended up talking to some people selling ice cream there…

And they were so nice and happy, so open.

…

Then at the village next to this lagoon…

I sit down and this older couple comes in.

I ask them if they needed help with the menu.

Thank you! What’s your name?

We ended up speaking… until I glance over at the sky…

I arrived here when the sun was still high…

and now, it is completely dark.

…

I’m walking into the restaurant to pay and there are even more people there.

Asking me for my name, how Europe is and whatnot…

My god, I love Europe but I just love being here and talking to you!

My voice was hurting when me and my father were driving home, because I had talked to much…

Wait.

If I’m naturally someone who wants to stay inside and avoid people…

why am I enjoying this so much?

See son! I knew you would like it here. Not like what you saw online hah!

Hmm I guess he’s right… so far.

…

In the end, I had talked more in 2 weeks than years back at home…

And I’m thinking…

Why do I have to go home? I just wanna stay here…

For the first time in probably a decade…

I thought to myself…

I’ve barely thought about my computer or games this trip.

I thought I knew how the vacation would go based on the bad news I saw from my bedroom…

But I never thought that the things I would experience was something I simply couldn’t read or think about from my bedroom.

I’m sitting down in my bedroom and touch my keyboard and mouse for the first time in weeks…

Damn… I have to get back to playing games and have to make a new video.

But… I just wanna go back and talk to people…

I want to enjoy the lovely sun…

and experience the nature.

…

Eventually I start to do things that I can control, outside of vacations…

I’m going to the gym…

I pick up books and read…

I start to play the piano that I had abandoned for years…

Go out for walks…

to enjoy the nature that had been outside my window for years.

Talk to random people and give out compliments everywhere. Just like in South Africa.

My family…

they tell me that I’ve never been more happier or talkative and that I spend more time with them.

Eventually, I build this business where I help people reinterpret their lives through stories…

And all of the sudden, my whole life involves tiny experiences that literally mean me having to go outside, and travel.

Video games didn’t become less fun. Other parts of life became more meaningful.

I’m playing games with my friends…

I’ve decided that I only play on Saturdays…

I love it, I never stopped loving video games.

But I tell them…

If I spend all week playing video games… It will prevent me from living the life I currently want to build.

I could become so addicted and play all week, but I simply can’t.

And they respect it…

now we all look forward to the one day that we play.

…

I’m sitting at my computer, ready to record my gaming videos for four hours…

As I get into it, I start thinking about my books…

I’m thinking about the piano piece I’m learning….

Oh my god, the places I want to travel to…

I’m literally daydreaming and escaping my video games. When I used to escape my life to just focus on the games.

Now, while I’m playing… I look at the sun shining on the trees.

I can’t believe I used to tape my curtains shut so I wouldn’t have to see the wonderful world outside.

Looking back, I thought I was growing out of video games.

But I don’t think I was.

I still love games.

I still love being alone sometimes.

And I still spend a ridiculous amount of time in this room.

But this room used to contain almost everything I wanted from life.

Now it doesn’t.

I didn’t stop loving what was inside my bedroom.

I just discovered how much life existed outside of it.

The richer my life became, the less I needed one thing to fill it.

Years later, I thought I was stupid.

And somehow, I spent even more years wondering whether I was special enough to ever do something great.

Looking back, I think I was asking the wrong question.

Because every time I tried to figure out who I was, the answer changed depending on what had just happened to me.

I’m 5 years old sitting in kinder garden…

all my classmates are playing in class…

I’m getting a little bit bored. Hmm…

I’ll get a piece of paper and just start writing something.

So I draw the number 1…

Then… 2,3,4…

100, 101, 105…

300, 301, 302…

507, 508, 509…

Oh… the whole page has been covered in numbers… I can’t draw anymore.

…

My teacher comes up and starts yelling…

Alexander! What have you done?!

I did something wrong, I can’t hold back my tears…

I start to cry audibly…

Then my mother whose also a teacher comes up to my teacher…

Sorry I didn’t mean to upset him, but in my 21 years as a teacher I’ve never seen anything like it!

My mother starts to laugh…

I’m studying for a test in school, but it’s so incredibly boring…

I wish I could do something fun. Oh well let me just study and get this over with…

…

I can’t do this anymore, I’ll just do the test. How much time has passed?

10 minutes…

Why can’t I study for longer? But I don’t want too, let me go to bed and just watch YouTube shorts and movies.

…

I’m doing the test… and the smart kids are quickly finishing it.

I see one by one how they finish the test early…

Every time I hear another chair be pushed back against the floor…

I look up and think…

How are they so quick? It takes me twice as long to thoroughly go through this…

I’m just not smart like them…

I heard one of them has almost perfect grades across the school, probably will become a doctor…

Yet, I don’t even know what I want to do with my life.

Maybe I’m just too stupid. I can’t even focus or study.

Because, my classmates can study for hours without a break…

I stopped thinking:

I started thinking:

And that mattered because I thought smart people were the people who did great things.

So if I wasn’t smart...

why would I ever try to do great things?

My mother hears a lovely tune of music downstairs…

She thinks she’s dreaming, she puts on her robe and heads down…

It’s a piano playing?

She sees me practicing on the piano…

Oh my god Alexander. You’re still practicing?!

I look up at her with a smile and tell her I’m almost done…

I’m learning this piece by Yiruma, River Flows in You.

And I just want to get a better grade in music so decided to learn it just by myself…

…

But I look at the clock while my mother is here…

It’s midnight. My mother came home 7 hours ago and saw me practicing…

You’re so smart, Alex!

For once, I believed the words smart about me…

How could I not study for 10 minutes at my desk.

Yet spend 7 hours learning music when nobody really told me too?

…

Looking back, nothing magical happened to my brain that day.

The evidence changed.

…

My teacher looks at the video…

Oh my good Alex, that’s great!

…

I look at my report card at the end of semester.

Music: A

I’m trying to do a class presentation…

I have a really great paper, but…

I’m too shy to really talk this out.

I completely mess up my words. I look down at my paper and not enough at my classmates…

I mess up again, I look up at them…

they’re just staring…

they must think I can’t talk.

…

My parents tell their friends that I’m just a shy and introverted kid and always have been.

They call me shy. And after enough awkward interactions, I start calling myself shy too.

I’m just a shy person. There’s nothing I can do about it…

I think I want a job or life where I don’t have to speak to people.

…

I become a gaming YouTuber and sit inside all day, not talking to anybody. Just to myself into my microphone…

What a lovely job. Now I don’t have to talk to people…

Knock

Son, we should travel to South Africa. You deserve a break!

…Hmm, actually I have been working for a few years now. Let me take a few weeks off.

I’m in a restaurant in this lovely little town, almost no people so should be peaceful…

This older couple comes up, older… but wow, especially the lady just looks so young and happy.

They start looking at the menu, a little bit confused. So I just start talking to them…

Need help with that?

Oh yes thank you, wow what’s your name sir?

…

The sun has set, it’s completely dark outside…

And I’m laughing with the people inside the restaurant and outside.

I go into the bar and people are asking me for my name and where I’m from.

I tell them about Europe and how I enjoy talking to the people here…

Yet, just a few hours before… I thought I would have a good time because there were almost no people I had to talk too…

If I’m naturally someone who doesn’t need people...

why am I enjoying all of this?

I thought identities described me. I didn’t realize they were giving me instructions.
Stupid meant: don’t attempt something intellectual.
Shy meant: avoid people.
Ordinary meant: don’t expect to do anything extraordinary.

Shy became a part of me that told me to live life without interacting with people.

And because of that I never thought I was special… even though my mother repeatedly told me I was, I couldn’t believe her…

so I never attempted anything extraordinary.

How was I ever supposed to know whether I was special?

I look at people younger than me…

People making millions who have lived shorter…

Kids going into the best schools…

A kid younger than me playing the piano better than me…

Someone going to the gym everyday and having a disciplined morning routine.

So many special people…

…

Am I special?

Is there anything in my life I’ve done that’s great?

Let me think…

Maybe the story I wrote the numbers 1-509… but I was just a kid.

School… no.

Physique… no.

Talent… no.

Personality… no.

But I did get an A in music… could maybe become a pianist.

My mother comes home everyday from work with an expression…

her back hurts…

her knees are swollen…

and her doctor tells her she needs to stop working or her condition will get worse…

But we need the money…

Mom. When I’m 18, I promise you never have to work again!

…

What do you want to do in school, Alexander?

I don’t know.. maybe become a computer engineer?

Let me just go for a normal path… I luckily do have good enough grades for it.

But… then I remember… The promise I made to my mother…

Let me focus on that, I’ll just take a year off school. Let me try to earn money like my favorite gaming youtuber. He’s a millionaire playing games. Then I can solve the biggest problem in my life.

…

Instead of doing a think where I think…

What does this say about me?

I start asking…

What does this problem require from me?

YouTube.

Learning.

Trying things.

Failing.

Improving.

Making money.

Continuing.

…

Oh my god you’re a YouTuber! teach me how!

You’re so special… you make that much money?!

Wow, you’re so successful for your age…

At five years old, one experience made someone think I was unusually smart.

Years later, another set of experiences made me think I was stupid.

I was the same person.

The evidence changed...

so the identity changed with it.

And I did the same thing with being shy.

Talented.

Confident.

Successful.

Special.

I spent years collecting evidence to figure out what kind of person I was.

But I never realized that the labels I chose were changing what evidence I would ever get to collect next.

Maybe you’ve been waiting too.

Waiting to know you’re smart enough.

Talented enough.

confident enough.

special enough...

before attempting the thing that could give you completely different evidence about yourself.

Maybe I was special.
Maybe I wasn’t.

I think I wasted years asking the wrong question.

Because I thought I needed to know what I was capable of before I tried to do something great.

But maybe you only find out what you’re capable of by giving yourself something meaningful to do.

I didn’t need proof that I was special.
I needed the chance to find out who I could become.

My mother leaves the house yet again at 04:30 am. I’m of course asleep but it’s pitch black outside…

I go to school with my father and sister, so I live most of my days without my mother…

But then as it’s dark again, I hear the opening of the door.

Somehow, through my headphones…

even while I’m playing games. I shove my headphones and run downstairs…

She greets me and I take off her jacket

Mom, when I’m 18 you will never have to work again!

I’m only 12 but I know I can do it!

…

I’m about to end primary school and I wonder what I’m going to do with my life…

Maybe I’ll become a computer engineer, maybe a doctor…

But then I remember,

My mother is struggling so much, and going through school would take too long to retire her.

How can I make a lot of money while doing something I enjoy?

Okay, I love watching PewDiePie. He’s a millionaire playing games. And I love games.

Instead of looking for a job, maybe I should solve the biggest problem in my life…

With a job that I would really enjoy…

…

I’m taking one year off before high school to seriously start YouTube…

I just published my first video on my new gaming channel…

Starts to grow slowly.

Okay, let me learn everything I can about YouTube.

I will spend 8-14 hour days just working…

Months have gone by, still only 277 subscribers…

…

I’ve been doing this for a few months now, and I’ve still barely gotten any growth…

Growth is actually declining…

Why isn’t this working!

I’ve been working so hard…

am I just wasting one year off my life…

…

My mother comes home from her job,

Her knees are swollen…

and she needs a foot bath because they’re too swollen…

And her back hurts so she comes home to sleep…

Welcome home mother…

But I can barely look her in her eyes…

her son, who took one year off school, is not going anywhere.

Why would she respect me?

Alexander! Hope you’re doing so well!

My mother is always so positive, how does she do it…

Oh my god!

My channel is exploding!

A video is going viral and everything is working out…

I even got monetized!

This is it…

All the hard work after months finally paid off…

Now I can start earning money and finally start to help my mother.

I tell her the news, she’s so happy for me!

I still have months until school begins. At this rate I won’t have to go to school!

…

It’s January 2022, It’s been 6 months since taking the gap year and the channel…

Is doing worse than ever…

Or it’s not actually doing so bad but I’m trying everything.

But it barely earns over 200-300 dollars a month.

I have over 1000 subscribers…

Yet it feels like none of them came back to watch most of my videos now.

…

Why did I even get excited…

Even when I make it, everything just fails again…

I never should’ve started this YouTube channel.

At least I would have been 6 months into my high school.

And now 6 months behind, well actually 12 because I’m wasting the next 6 months now.

My father tells me to help him with something…

Yes father!

As I’m doing my thing though. I’m too much in my thoughts, just thinking about if things don’t work out…

I end up messing up the tasking and forgetting things.

Alex, you forgot this thing. Pay more attention!

Usually, I let this go. I don’t even take it personally…

But I listen to him. And close off…

I hide my face and I’m trying my best not to break down in silence…

As I’m doing the work…

I’m wondering…

Why do I always fail…

why does everything I do just never work out…

and even when it does, god crushes my hope…

why do I even live, if I also can’t keep my promise to my mother.

…

I finish helping him and go back to my room.

I scream into my pillow…

I cry…

And for the first time in my life, I genuinely think about ending it.

I don’t actually want to die.

I just don’t want to keep feeling like a failure.

Because somehow…

had become

I’m in high school, the channel is actually doing pretty well for once…

I’m making $1000 a month. But now is time to actually focus on school. And not waste any more time. At least this path will be safe and secure…

as long as I get good grades…

do my homework…

and listen to the teachers…

…

I’m taking this test, and as I get the paper I look down…

Oh my god…

I don’t know anything about this…

Wait, didn’t I study for this?…

no, I was trying to grow my YouTube channel.

…

The test is halfway done and I almost start to break down…

Why am I such a failure?

I won’t even be able to pass high school at this rate…

I used to get such good grades in primary school.

Now school is failing, and my YouTube channel will fail too.

My mother cannot be saved…

…

I pick up the paper, try not to break down as I hand the teacher my test.

And I leave.

I used to walk up early with confidence in primary school because I knew I basically aced the test.

Now I’m walking out because I’ve become so much worse then I used to be…

…

I’m taking the train home, and I sit by the window seat…

I cry my heart out, but in a way where the sobbing is really quiet.

What do I do?

How can I ever achieve anything?

And now my mother is picking me up, oh great. Fucking great…

Now she will know how much I failed this test too…

And I know she will smile and tell me I’m so smart and everything, I know she means it.

But I just can’t do anything…

Because, I will watch her go to work tomorrow.

…

I enter the car and immediately start to cry more than I ever have in my life…

Alexander! What’s wrong. Did someone hurt you?!

Are you being bullied?!

I say to her…

I can’t do this mom… I can’t do it anymore…

I was also so stressed by school and by YouTube.

I’m working at school, and then spending 8-14 hour days during the weekends and breaks to work on YouTube.

I tell her I need to drop one of the businesses…

…

I’m at home and I feel good somehow, my mother understood…

she talked to my father and tells him she’s never seen me this upset ever.

At least now, I feel heard. And that I can decide what to do next.

…

I’m sick for a few weeks, turns out I had COVID.

I had taken one terrible test and used it as proof that I had become stupid.

I didn’t even know I had COVID.

A big update for my game comes, but I’m sick.

Doesn’t matter. I’m going make all the videos that I can about it. I have a lot of time now from school because I took a little break.

I’m streaming, and my viewers ask me if I’m okay…

I’m coughing and laughing as my viewers are worried.

But after a few days, something extraordinary happens…

I get more views than I ever had before.

…

$500 dollars in a single day!

I don’t care if I’m sick, I’m going to pump out videos!

I’m going to film all day, then spend the night editing the videos.

Then I earn $600 dollars with the next video.

And then, all of the sudden when November 2022 ends…

I had made $6000 dollars.

In a month.

…

I tell my mother the news, and for the first time…

Alex, you’re so smart and successful!

I actually believe her…

Maybe all those failures hadn’t been telling me who I was.

Maybe I needed to live long enough for new evidence to appear…

I’m so happy I’m alive.

I drop out of high school after a few months of doing it.

And I focus all in on YouTube…

I can go back to high school before I’m 20. So now that I’m 17, I have all the time to earn money and help my mother.

Then, a few months after dropping out.

$10,000…

$20,000…

It doesn’t feel like reality…

I was playing silly games for a living, and I could make so much money off it.

…

Yes, Alex he’s so successful! He’s playing games and makes more than doctors!

My mother when she talks about me…

But she always said that, she always said positive things about me.

Yet this time, I can smile and agree…

…

When I went to a tax consultant, he looks at me and my father and asks for my income…

Yes, he made $20,000 last month…

He looks absolutely shocked…

Even though I agree, I don’t think about the money at that point…

Because when I came home one day, I would buy the only thing that I needed money for…

My mother comes home one day from work and me and my father decide…

That she doesn’t have to work…

…

We tell her the news and she immediately jumps for joy….

Thank you, Alex! I’m so proud of you.

I’ve never seen her more happier in my life.

And I even though I have a faint smile because I act nonchalant…

I really never felt more fulfilled.

And I finally thought, that for once.

I could reach a goal.

…

Looking back, I thought all those failures were showing me who I was.

They weren’t.

They were showing me what I still didn’t know how to do.

I wasn’t useless.

I was inexperienced.

I was scared.

I was trying things I didn’t know how to do yet.

But because I couldn’t see the person I might become…

I treated the evidence I had that day like it was all the evidence I would ever have.

Maybe the most dangerous thing about failure isn’t failing.

It’s deciding too early what the failure means about you.

Because sometimes the evidence that changes your mind…

hasn’t happened yet.

I thought I knew how my story ended.

I was just reading it too early.

But looking back...

the life I wanted required me to make them.

The only way I could have stopped making mistakes...

was to stop doing anything that could change me.

Early on in school I’m naturally getting A’s and B’s. School made mistakes feel very simple. There was a right answer, a wrong answer, and enough wrong answers lowered your grade.

And so I never wanted to make mistakes. I remember once finishing a math test when I was 14…

I did quite good on the test, but I made a mistake on one of the questions.

I couldn’t get my mind off of it. How did it happen? It shouldn’t have been a mistake.

I sit down with my math teacher and we spend a long time on it.

Teacher, I know the right answer now!

I never should’ve made that mistake.

My teacher says,

It’s okay Alex, you still did well.

But I didn’t want him to think I did badly.

So now that I showed him I could figure out the right answer, now he thinks I’m smart…

Alex, you’ve figured it out, you will do better next test.

Now, I’m not as much of a failure.

…

So somewhere along the way, I stopped seeing mistakes as information. I started seeing them as evidence of how well I was doing.

It’s a lovely summer day and my dad asks me for help…

Alex, come and help me grill this meat!

Yes dad!

I’m sitting and watching the grill.

But occasionally I’m looking away at the nature or something, I’m easily distracted.

All of the sudden, a bit of the fat on the meat dripped down into the flames…

a cloud of fire burst from the food…

okay, I know what I’m supposed to do…

turn off the gas…

get the fire blanket…

and close the grill.

…

But I freeze…

my dad rushes over, and he quickly handles everything himself.

but I realized that…

Some mistakes actually can have consequences.

so now, I start noticing mistakes everywhere…

Tiny details I could’ve done differently.

Things I constantly forgot.

And decisions I could’ve made differently.

Eventually, that way of thinking follows me into bigger decisions.

Should I stay in school?

Should I drop out?

Should I keep doing YouTube?

What if I choose wrong?

Now a mistake doesn’t just mean losing points on a test.

It feels like I could ruin my future.

…

I’m in high school and trying to build up my YouTube gaming channel.

And I’m doing a test that I thought would be easy…

But now, I can barely think of any answers…

Wait, I knew this as a kid…

I’ve never felt this lost in school ever…

Why am I so dumb?

I make so many mistakes and I end up walking up and handing the paper early…

Because I feel like a complete failure compared to who I was in primary school…

….

Then, as I decide to focus all in on my business I decide to drop out…

And dropping out of school becomes terrifying because there is no answer sheet anymore.

Nobody can tell me whether it’s the right decision.

…

My sister calls me and is crying. She tells me to come up.

I’ve heard her cry a lot but something about her tone this time was very serious…

I hear intense footsteps upstairs…

I rush to my family…

I see that my father has cut himself and that there’s blood everywhere.

I assertively ask my family if anybody has called emergencies in a calm and clear tone of voice…

my sister can barely talk, I understand.

I take her phone and I call them.

I’ve never talked more clearly in my life…

But when they asked all the questions I accidentally missed one…

Sorry what did you say?

After correcting myself, I help clean up the floor and we drive to the hospital

…

Everything ended up working out…

But I never thought I would ever act like I’m in full control of my body, in an emergency like this.

For years, freezing at that grill became evidence that I couldn’t trust myself when something went wrong.

I still made a mistake. I misheard one of the questions. But this time, I didn’t treat the mistake like proof that I couldn’t handle the situation. I corrected it and kept going.

I notice the same thing when I play piano in public.

I used to make one mistake...
and immediately think about the mistake.

Sometimes that made me mess up the next few notes too.

Now I can hit the wrong key...
hear it...
and keep playing.

The mistake still happened.

I just stopped turning one wrong note into the rest of the song.

…

One wrong note doesn’t ruin a song unless I stop playing because of it.

Maybe life works the same way.

…

Then I look at the decisions that changed my life most.

Starting YouTube.
Leaving school.
Relationships.
Businesses.

None of them came with an answer sheet.

I made bad calls.
Changed direction.
Failed.
Corrected.

And somehow, I kept moving.

And slowly I realize:

the choices that created the most growth in my life...

were also the choices where mistakes were unavoidable.

I had spent years trying to build a life where I made fewer mistakes.

But to eliminate mistakes completely...

I would have had to eliminate experimentation.

Risk.

Learning.

Change.

I would have had to stop moving.

That doesn’t mean mistakes don’t matter.

Some mistakes hurt people.

Some cost money.

Some have real consequences.

So now, when I make one, I try to do something different.

Take responsibility.

Fix what I can.

Understand why it happened.

Learn from it.

But I try not to turn:

I made a mistake

into:

I am a mistake.

I used to think a good life was one where I made fewer mistakes.

Now I think it’s one where I make them...

take responsibility...

learn what they can teach me...

and keep moving.

Because the only way I could have stopped making mistakes...

was to stop doing anything that could change me.

But the same feeling can mean completely different things.

I’ve just found out I need braces. But before I can get them, I have to get four teeth pulled out.

So, now I have to get the first one pulled…

Why did I agree to this…

I’m going to experience the worst pain ever…

I have to get them pulled out in a few weeks…

…

Everyday I’m thinking about how the dentist will cut me open.

And I start to get stomach cramps.

I can’t think straight while working.

And I talk while I work, how the hell will I work with teeth operations and braces?

…

I’m shaking as I’m waiting for my name to be called…

My stomach starts to rumble and it starts to hurt…

Am I going to bleed out?

What if he accidentally cuts parts of my mouth?

…

Alexander!

I enter the room and he tells me to sit down…

After injecting the anesthetic, I immediately close my eyes and just focus on staying calm.

I can feel something being cut…

But then all of the sudden, I feel the tooth going out.

…

There we go Alexander, it’s done.

Wait already? That was quick.

And now, my stomach pain is gone…

My mind is calm…

And I’m glad that I’m making progress towards braces…

…

Doctor, am I going to lose too much blood?

No, Alexander. It will bleed but the bleeding will stop soon.

I had spent weeks reacting to something that hadn’t even happened yet.

…

I’m at the airport. I’m about to fly home with my sister alone from vacation.

Even though I thought I was confident...

I was incredibly nervous.

My mind was racing.

As we were lining up for passport control...

I go and stand there, but then this woman comes up to me.

I’m thinking,

Ah she must be saying something nice.

I honestly don’t even remember what she said.

…

Then another guy comes up and said clearly.

What do you think you’re doing, you’re cutting in line!

What is wrong with you?!

And then I immediately apologized.

I’m so sorry.

It’s my fault

He looks at me up and down with discontent and walks in front.

I take my sister to the back of the line.

I realize that I had mixed up the queue.

It was completely my fault.

I was so inside my own head.

that I stood in the wrong line.

Now everyone is thinking about me.

Great.

Now everyone thinks I’m an idiot.

I’ll remember this forever.

…

A few minutes later, the people who complained to me.

They are talking with their travel mates.

Looking down on their phones.

Laughing with their mates.

…

They’re not even looking at me, I’m right behind them.

Why aren’t they thinking about me?

Aren’t they concerned with me?

I just made a big mistake.

What I did has been done, and I’m just going to make sure me and my sister get home safely.

Instead, I forgive myself and I stop thinking about it for a minute.

The moment had ended for them. I was the one keeping it alive.

I’m in South Africa, just arrived to enjoy this lovely vacation…

I’m walking the lovely beaches…

Enjoying the good food…

And the sun everyday…

But me and my girlfriend get into an argument online. And it was a big one.

…

We decide to breakup and go our own paths…

I’m absolutely devastated, I thought I would marry her.

Even when the sun is shining, I close the curtains and just cry all day the next day.

I can’t exit my room to tell my parents.

I don’t know what I’ll do without her…

I feel so alone again…

I thought she was my soulmate…

…

I need another girlfriend, maybe if I become a millionaire it will be easier.

When I’m back home, I will go to the library and read, that’s where the smart girls will be.

And I’ll go to the gym more…

I’m reading at the library, and every 10 minutes I look up…

Is that my future girlfriend?

I keep on reading, but damn, I want a girlfriend.

…

After a few weeks I’m reading again…

But this time, I don’t look up.

I still notice girls walking by. But now I don’t even want to lose my place on the page.

I’m reading all about becoming successful, understanding myself and other non-fiction topics.

I go to the gym several times every single week…

And I even start to play the piano every single day.

…

After a few months, I have become a version of myself I thought was in my dreams.

And yet, I thought the time after my breakup would look like a nightmare.

The pain was real. But what I thought the pain meant wasn’t necessarily true.

I thought the pain meant I had lost the life I wanted. Looking back, it pushed me into a life I hadn’t even imagined yet.

When I feel something strongly now, I don’t immediately ask:

How do I get rid of this?

I try to ask:

What am I feeling and what am I assuming this feeling means?

Because fear can feel like danger.

Pain can feel like a ruined future.

Embarrassment can feel like everyone is judging you.

The feeling can be completely real without your interpretation of it being true.

I thought feeling bad meant my life was going wrong.

Looking back...

I thought my feelings were telling me what was true.

Sometimes, they were only telling me what I believed was true.

Feelings are real. But they are not always reality.

But somehow, a few days somewhere unfamiliar could change how I saw myself for years.

And the strange thing is, it usually wasn’t the extraordinary part of the trip that changed me.

I went to Paris and saw the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.

But some of the experiences I remember most were just talking to French people and random tourists.

Looking back, the experiences that changed me most often seemed completely ordinary while they were happening.

I’m gaming almost everyday, I play with my friends and we’re having a good time together…

I never want this moment to end, I also talk about how school sucks and how I just want to stay inside and enjoy my life…

I start racking up thousands of hours as a teenager on many games, I’m so happy when I'm just at home doing my own things…

…

When I graduated primary school, I’m working as a gaming YouTuber and live the same life, playing games as a living is the life.

I can work online so I never have to leave the house…

I’m making videos, then consuming content about the world.

Wow, my country really is going to hell…

That country I will never visit…

The news is covering all this crime, thank god I can stay inside forever…

…

I go outside to pick up some stuff and buy food in my home town…

Oh my god that guy can barely drive…

Okay, somebody is yelling at someone there…

Did that person look me up and down?

Yeah, let me just stay at home…

The world is clearly chaotic.

…

The less I experienced the world, the more certain I became that I understood it.

My father tells me that we should visit South Africa…

He’s been there so many times, he talks about the food, the people and the weather…

I tell him,

Okay, I’ve worked for a few years. I can take a couple weeks off.

And so I don’t think much of it, it’s a few months from now.

…

I’m consuming all the news about South Africa…

The crime…

The barbed wires around houses…

The guns…

I’m thinking to myself,

Oh no, I shouldn’t go. I’m going to get robbed and die.

I’m shaking as I watch more of the content and their politics…

Oh my god is that what the politicians think of certain people?

Isn’t that country the most racist?

Okay, it has the most wealth inequality…

I’m landing at the airport in Cape Town…

As we get our luggage, I see security guards with assault rifles…

My god, this may be my last trip ever. Especially to this country.

There are people with guns… at the airport.

…

We pick up our car and drive to the hotel,

Look at the table mountain!

My father says,

And I think to myself,

Wow… yeah look at the tabletop mountain!

The clouds are flowing over the mountain!

Yeah, that’s the table cloth, they call it.

…

As we arrive at our place, we go out and I see a homeless guy, half naked walking around…

Do you see him?

Yes Alex, there’s homeless people everywhere.

I’m a bit bothered but okay…

As we drive around South Africa I see the most beautiful nature I have ever experienced in my life…

A rainbow bending over the desert, while thunderstorms rage to the left of it…

I think I’m in heaven,

I’m talking to people and smiling my heart out, here they seem so genuine…

They are constantly smiling and asking about me and my father…

I remember talking more in a few days there than months at home.

…

But as we continue to drive…

I also see places called townships, where people are poorer and live very dense to each other.

When we’re pulling up to traffic lights, people are selling goods.

They show them to all the cars until the green light turns on…

One time we paid for some fruits and as we drive off, he grabs our car and scream

Please give me money, more money!

As he falls down…

And we were in a town where even children were asking for money…

I still saw inequality.

Some of what I’d seen online was real.

But so was everything I hadn’t seen.

The internet hadn't necessarily lied to me. It had given me information without the experience required to put that information into context.

…

But despite that as the vacation was coming to an end I didn’t want to leave South Africa…

When I left, I wish I had stayed…

I’m celebrating my sister’s 18th birthday party by spending it in Paris…

She is so happy, and we’re going to the Louvre and to see the Eiffel tower…

But it was freezing as hell, I’m going up the tower and trying to cover myself up because the wind is blasting me…

But it was still nice I guess…

Eiffel Tower.
Louvre.
Famous city.

Yet what stayed with me?

The people, I remember talking to people from Spain…

I practiced Spanish as good as possible with them, and they enjoyed it.

We met up to tour the Eiffel tower together… But yet, I liked talking to them just as much as being up at the Eiffel tower.

At home, I start talking to people more… giving compliments…

I thought people here in Sweden didn’t talk a lot… But when I genuinely talked to them like I did in South Africa, something changed.

They opened up more, they smiled…

This guy at my pizzeria always smiles and I ask him about his life every time I go there…

…

I always went to the gym, even when I was always playing games and stuff.

But this time, I talk more to the people there…

I apparently start becoming known at the gym…

A business owner somehow knew about my business as started asking me for help.

And I am the one to smile first to people, which sometimes leads to conversations.

…

I thought Sweden was quiet and lonely.

But when I came home and started behaving differently, people started responding differently.

The place hadn’t changed. I had changed how I entered it.

…

Every time I gave myself more experiences, I gave myself more opportunities to discover that something I believed wasn't completely true.

I think I hate people.

So I avoid people.

Because I avoid people, I don’t have experiences that contradict the belief.

So I continue believing I hate people.

And I started wondering how many other things in my life worked the same way.

If I thought I was shy, I avoided talking.

If I avoided talking, I never got better at it.

Every awkward conversation became more evidence that I was shy.

My experiences shaped my beliefs. But my beliefs were also choosing my experiences.

I had spent so much time interpreting life that I’d stopped giving life a chance to contradict my interpretations.

Maybe that’s why some weeks of my life changed me more than entire years.

It wasn’t because those weeks were longer.

There was simply more life inside them.

…

But I don’t think the answer is to book a flight to South Africa.

I don’t think you need to chase extraordinary experiences at all.

The times when I traveled to experience the biggest things in my life…

The things that impacted me the most were often the ordinary small incidents…

I used to think changing my life would require something extraordinary.

But when I look back at the periods where I changed the most, I mostly find ordinary things.

Conversations.

Mistakes.

People I barely knew.

Places I went.

Things that didn’t seem important enough to remember.

And maybe that’s why I couldn’t understand what they were doing to me at the time.

Maybe the experiences changing who you are don’t feel important yet because you haven’t lived long enough to understand what they changed.

For years, I thought I needed to sit alone and think harder until I understood myself.

But sometimes I didn’t need to think more about my life.

I needed more life to think about.

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So I thought the hard part was over.

Then I failed my driving test four times.

I’m shaking as I’m waiting for the driving instructor. I’m about to get my driver’s license if I pass this driving test.

As we enter the car, my hands are starting to slip because of the sweat…

I tell myself,

It’s okay, I’ll just focus on the road.

As we’re driving out, the instructor is dead quiet. She just tells me where to go…

As she’s writing down or filling in the check marks…

I think I made a tiny mistake…

Oh no, let me glance over and see what she’s doing…

But because of that now I’m so focused on not failing that I’m not driving properly.

…

The test was going well still, but now I had to reverse into a road.

This seems pretty easy, no cars here…

As I turn, somehow I almost turn off the road…

Do it again…

Now, I have to do it correctly, or she will think that I don’t deserve to pass.

…

Again, I can’t reverse properly. What am I doing wrong?

…

Now, the drive back to the driving school was awful…

I’m still hopeful, maybe there’s a chance?

Yeah, unfortunately Alex. You’ve failed the test.

…

I tell her I understand…

Then as I leave the place I cry…

I try to dry my tears with my shirt…

45 minutes pass before I even get the courage to tell my father.

…

I passed the theory test on my first try.

I genuinely thought I would pass this too.

Now I have to call my father...

and tell him I failed.

Okay, I’m driving quite well this time, the instructor doesn’t seem so cold and serious…

I’m smiling a little bit as I’m driving…

I signal correctly…

Maintain the correct speed…

And check my mirrors constantly…

…

I accidentally make a mistake. But it’s small…

I think to myself…

No, I’m not going to look at the instructor. Stay focused on the road, I got this.

…

The last part of the test comes up, he looks satisfied. So now all I have to do is park the car.

He tells me, out of any of these spots just park the car in…

I want to prove to him I could park next to a car, I will prove myself to him…

…

I’m literally parking one centimeter next to this other car, the car instructor yells…

Stop, stop… STOP!

I quickly stop… And he tells me to look…

I did it again, I messed up. If I were to have continued I would’ve scratched the car.

…

Alex, why didn’t you just pick one of the open spots?
Yeah, I don’t know. I messed up. I completely understand why I failed.

The first test, I could blame my nerves.

But this time?

I had chosen the harder parking spot myself.

There were empty spots everywhere.

Why would I do that?

For the first time, I wasn’t just disappointed that I’d failed.

I was disappointed in myself.

…

I don’t even want to cry… I’m just disappointing in myself, I call my father to pick me up…

And as I’m telling him why I failed, he tells me it’s all good.

But telling him why I failed this time, was the hardest thing ever.

I thought because I was so close to passing my second driving test I would get it the third time.

But I somehow kept failing and failing,

My third driving test, I drive too slowly in a roundabout. And the instructor looks annoyed.

…

Maybe, I’m just bad at driving,

Why don’t I just take the bus or train…

I never should’ve ever taken this driving license.

I hate this, I hate this…

…

I take my fourth driving test, and this time I’m not even feeling anything, I just focus on the road…

I messed up seriously again…

Having to tell my father that I failed again…

I feel so numb as I have to tell him again, that I failed.

The first time I failed, I cried because I couldn’t believe I’d failed.

By the fourth time, I barely reacted because I could believe it.

Failure had become what I expected from myself.

All these driving tests I took at a big city that was unfamiliar, now I got a test in the city where I learnt…

As I’m heading for the test, I drink a red bull…

I got this, I’m going to fucking pass this no matter what…

…

As I’m driving, I’m literally smiling…

The instructor is doing his thing…

On my first test, every time the instructor wrote something down, I wanted to know what it meant.

Did I mess up? Does she think I’m bad? Am I failing?

Four failures later, something was different.

He could write whatever he wanted.

I didn’t look over to see his reaction…

My job wasn’t to convince him I was a good driver.

My job was to drive.

…

As I pull into the driving school, he looks at me.

Oh no, I probably failed again,

…

Is he giving me that look?

…

Alexander, you drove really well.

You passed.

…

Really! oh my god thank you sir!

Yes, you drove really well. You made a few mistakes but I would say you’re very competent.

I smile so much I end up giving him a handshake.

…

Then I call my father, and my parents are extremely happy and proud of me.

Passing the theory test once didn’t make me a genius.

Failing the driving test four times didn’t make me a failure.

Passing the fifth didn’t suddenly make me a winner.

They were results. I was the one turning them into identities.

Somewhere along the way, I had stopped saying:

I failed.

And started thinking:

I’m a failure.

Those sound almost identical.

But one describes something that happened.

The other describes who I am.

And if I could turn four failed driving tests into an identity...

I started wondering what else in my life I’d done the same thing with.

Maybe failing doesn’t tell you who you are.

Maybe it only tells you what happened this time.

As the classroom is dead silent, all of the sudden I adjust my body a little.

SCRAMBLE!

All my classmates are looking at me now…

The teacher walks up to me, asks what I have under my body…

I look up to her as my whole body gets warm and sweaty…

I hand her the paper with all the answers…

And everyone bursts out laughing.

…

As the test is over, the teacher tells me to stay. Again my classmates look back at me and giggle.

Oh no, this is it… my father is also a teacher at this school so she will tell him.

I immediately start thinking of excuses.

…

Alex, I know you cheated, but I won’t tell your father.
Just redo the test again.

I’m completely shocked, I was ready to defend myself, say I didn’t have time to study. And that if only I hadn’t moved I never would’ve been caught.

But instead, she gives me a chance to redo it? And she won’t tell my father?

…

Looking back, this was obviously my fault.

I literally had the answers under my butt.

But whenever something went wrong, my first instinct wasn’t to ask what I’d done wrong.

It was to find a reason why it wasn’t really my fault.

My father would give me something to do.

I’d completely forget.

Alex, what happened?

Ah... I couldn’t find it. I tried, but it didn’t work.

I hadn’t tried.

I forgot.

But now my father thought I’d tried.

And somehow that made me feel better.

I cared more about looking responsible than actually being responsible.

I stole my dads credit card to buy virtual currencies in a game…

I just took a little bit of money, I didn’t think it was that much…

And then I bought some gems in Clash of Clans.

But in the moment, my stomach drops.

Something feels wrong, but then for a second…

I get to become better at this video game.

I tell myself that I deserve this.

…

My father finds out.

Alex, what did you do with my card?!

And somehow...

I still deny it.

I run to my mother.

I tell her I didn’t do anything.

She believes me.

So now she’s defending me from my father...

while I’m standing there knowing he’s right.

And suddenly they’re arguing with each other...

over something I know I did.

…

I thought denying my mistakes protected me.

But responsibility doesn’t disappear because you refuse to take it.

Someone else usually ends up carrying it.

I’m halfway across the world when I realize I’ve made a serious mistake.

I’m buying a house from my father...

and I forgot to sign one of the documents.

The loan needs to be paid out urgently.

And because of my mistake, my father could lose thousands of dollars.

So I have to tell him.

…

Two days pass before I finally call him.

Father... I messed up.

He gets upset.

And immediately, my brain starts doing what it had done since I was a kid.

The bank wasn’t clear.

I’m halfway across the world.

How was I supposed to know?

I was buying my own house...

but for a moment I was the same kid sitting in that classroom trying to explain away the cheat sheet under his butt.

…

But then he tells me…

Alex, it’s all good. I’m not angry at you.
Life happens, let’s just solve this problem.

…

And suddenly there was nothing left to defend.

I had made the mistake.

He knew I’d made the mistake.

I knew I’d made the mistake.

So we could finally stop figuring out who to blame and start figuring out what to do.

I’m trying to water the flowers in my garden, but all of the sudden the water hose breaks…

I try to reinstall it but I can’t fix it…

I just lay it down on the ground and hope my parents fixes it…

…

My father calls me up…

Alex, why is the water hose here?

I tell him that it’s broken and that it can’t get in.

Then he tells me

Alex, if you don’t know the answer. Call me, or ask ChatGPT. Whatever, just don’t leave a task uncompleted.

For a split second I try to think about something to say to defend myself…

To tell him that it wasn’t my fault.

But, I tell him…

I was wrong, and you’re absolutely right…
I messed up, and will 100% call you or help myself out. I won’t half ass it.

That was it.

No argument.

No excuse.

Nothing to protect.

…

My dad smiles…

Claps my back…

And heads on off…

When my teacher caught me cheating, I thought admitting I was wrong meant losing.

For years, I protected myself that way.

If I could find a reason something wasn’t my fault, I didn’t have to feel as bad about it.

And sometimes...

things genuinely weren’t my fault.

But eventually I realized I was asking the wrong question.

Because proving something wasn’t my fault never told me what to do next.

So now I try to ask:

What part of this is mine?

Sometimes the answer is everything.

Sometimes it’s almost nothing.

But I can always decide what I do next.

I used to protect my ego by denying my mistakes.

Now I protect my relationships by admitting them.

Taking responsibility doesn’t mean believing everything is your fault.

Not everything that happens to me is my fault.

But what I do with it is my responsibility.