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Stories about the things men carry but never say out loud. Written by one man figuring it out in real time. Start wherever it stings.
The Algorithm Knows My Rising Sign
I have a confession that will surprise no one who has ever had a bad week.
Last winter, on a grey Tuesday, walking my dog through a neighbourhood that looked exactly as I felt — damp, directionless, slightly behind schedule — I opened YouTube and searched for a tarot reading. The most optimistic one I could find. Something about breakthroughs. Energies aligning.
Fine, Thanks
I was happiest alone as a boy. I had a bicycle and fields and small forest roads, and I could ride for hours without seeing anyone and feel completely full.
But I also loved being near people. Just not in them.
My mother's kitchen, when relatives came to visit. The adults around the table, the coffee, that particular hum of people being easy with each other. I sat in the other room and listened. Not to the words. To the warmth of it.
What Money Was For
When I was a child, we had a system.
If you needed to use the outhouse — really use it, the kind that takes time — you turned on the electric heater five minutes before you went. Ten if you had the patience. The outhouse was cold, especially in winter, and the electricity cost money, so you didn't just leave the heater running all day. You planned. You waited for someone else to finish, then went immediately after, while the air was still warm.
Looking in the Wrong Direction
Everyone I know has asked it at some point.
What do I want to do with my life? Or some version of it — what am I meant for, what is my purpose, what is the work that will finally feel like mine. We ask it at eighteen and at thirty and at forty-five.
The Parent You Never Had
I don't remember how old I was. Three, maybe four.
I remember the room. The door between me and everyone else. The knowledge — not thought, knowledge, the kind that lives in the body before the mind has words for it — that I had done something wrong. Eaten incorrectly. Moved wrong. Said something that didn't fit. Nobody explained what.
Men's inner life — without the mask
I climbed for over twenty years before I thought to look down.
Not a mountain. The usual ladder — the one they set up for you before you know what's at the top. School. Job. Better job. Title. Salary. Apartment. Car. The kind of life that looks right from the outside and feels thin from the inside.
The Handbook Nobody Gave Us
I was five, maybe six years old.
It was late evening at my aunt's place in the countryside. The children had been sent to bed at nine, as they always were. But I couldn't sleep — too wired from the day, from playing, from whatever keeps a small boy's mind running long after his body should have surrendered. I wanted to be in the living room. Not because I particularly wanted to be with the adults. I just wanted to feel a little older than I was.
The Room
There is a room I have been trying to earn my way into for most of my life.
It changes address. Sometimes it's a house in the suburbs where my uncle's wife walked in and thickened the air without saying a word. Sometimes it's a startup office with a CEO who recruited me personally and then, eight months later, told me to prove myself more.
Knowing Isn't Freedom
On the gap between knowing your wounds and actually being free of them.
I have done the work.
I know why I get angry. I know what's underneath it. I've traced the root back to a boy who didn't have enough power and is now walking around in a man's body, occasionally honking at strangers like it means something.
Furious Stupidity
Stupidity makes me furious. And fury makes me stupid. That’s the loop.
I’m not a saint. I’m a man with childhood wounds. And if we’re honest, childhood wounds don’t come alone — they bring their friends: shame, fear, and the kind of old nervous-system panic that can hijack a grown man in a perfectly normal situation.
Proof of Work
Part I
Books have been my most patient teachers. Everything I understand about money, work, and career comes either from my own experiences or from reading about someone else’s. Work entered my life early. Not just as income. As identity.
For a long time, work was the reason to wake up. The structure. The adult costume. When you don’t yet know who you are, a job feels like a definition.
Hunger Wounds
Part I
On food, shame, sexual insecurity, and the body that remembers.
I don’t have the healthiest relationship with food. Intellectually, I understand that food is medicine. It fuels the body. It sustains energy. It determines longevity.
But understanding something and living it are different negotiations. Food has often been a comfort.
Second Time
I became a father the first time when I was still trying to become a man. I was in my early twenties. Married young. Carrying more responsibility than clarity.
I thought adulthood would arrive automatically. That marriage would make me stable. That fatherhood would make me wise. That if I stepped into the “adult world,” answers would meet me there. They didn’t.
Old Reflexes
There are moments when I don’t become the man I believe I am. They arrive unexpectedly. A tone. A look. A sentence delivered just slightly above me. And before I can think, something tightens inside.
I stop being measured. I stop being calm. I stop being the man who writes reflective essays. I become reactive. I’ve started to notice a pattern.
The End of Pleasing
There is a man trying to emerge in me. Not a protesting man. Not a wounded man. Not a man still arguing with his past. But a man who understands it.
A man who has finally realized that proving himself is an exhausting hobby. He no longer tries to be impressive. And even less to be liked. He just wants to be himself. Honest. Calm. Unarmed.
After the Climb
I didn’t start writing this to teach you how to be successful.
And certainly not to tell you how to live your life.
Honestly, success is a strange game. Most of us think we know the rules — money, titles, square meters, horsepower, the occasional airport lounge photo. I believed that too. For years.