The old craftsman ran his palm along the long axe handle.

“Acacia,” he said. “An interesting choice. It’s a tree with character.”

Dmytro, who had only recently returned home after being discharged from military service, silently nodded. More than once he had wanted to throw the stubborn piece of wood into the fire. It resisted both knife and sandpaper with remarkable determination. Yet every time he kept carving, remembering the respect his father had always had for acacia. It had become a matter of honor. A debt that needed to be paid. A story that had to be finished by restoring his father’s old axe.

At last, after hours of sanding, the handle was smooth. He brought it to his neighbor, an old carpenter, to have it properly fitted and wedged into the axe head.

Old Mykhailo seemed to be looking at him more than at the axe.

“Do you know what makes acacia so unique?”

Dmytro shook his head.

“It’s stronger than most woods. It grows quickly, yet it withstands impact better than oak, which takes decades to mature. It doesn’t rot in the ground for decades. It can sit in water as if it knows nothing can harm it. People made fence posts, foundation piles, and tool handles from it. It was born to carry heavy loads without giving in.”

The carpenter turned the handle over and pointed to a thin crack, barely visible along one end.

“But it has one peculiar trait. If you simply leave acacia to dry after cutting it down, it often cracks. Not because it’s weak. Quite the opposite. To endure everything life throws at it, it builds up enormous internal stress. One day, that tension becomes greater than the wood itself can bear, and it tears itself apart.”

They stood in silence.

Outside, summer rustled through the trees.

“That’s why people who truly understand wood never rush acacia,” the old man continued. “They let it dry slowly. They keep it away from harsh sunlight. They give it time. Sometimes they make small relief cuts to release the internal stress—not to weaken the wood, but to keep it whole. And if a tiny crack has already appeared, they stop it while it’s still small, using a wooden dowel or a butterfly key so it can go no farther.”

“So... even the strongest wood needs care?”

“The strongest needs it the most,” Mykhailo smiled. “Weak wood breaks the moment it’s put under pressure. Strong wood can carry pain inside for years. Until one day it suddenly splits apart, and no one understands why. By then, it’s often too late to repair.”

The sunburned veteran silently clenched the hands that still remembered the weight of a rifle. Something stirred inside him—something he had carried for a long time without ever allowing it to surface.

“How do people release that kind of tension?”

The old man didn’t answer immediately.

“In different ways. Talking to a brother-in-arms. Working with your hands. Working the land. Fishing. Sports…”

He paused for a moment, choosing his words carefully.

“Tears, if they come. The embrace of your children. Prayer. A therapist. A song. Silence.”

Dmytro gave a crooked smile when he heard about tears and therapists. Empty offices, personality tests, and strangers who had never seen what he had seen had always filled him with quiet irritation. But the old carpenter looked at him without judgment, without trying to teach him anything. Dmytro swallowed his first reaction and simply lowered his eyes back to the workbench.

“It doesn’t matter how,” the old man said softly. “What matters is not keeping all that tension locked inside.”

He rested his hand on the pale acacia handle.

“If even acacia isn’t ashamed of what builds up inside it... why should a human being be ashamed of their own?”

Dmytro picked up the handle from the workbench, still covered in golden curls of fresh shavings. Warm. Solid. Honest. Somehow, it reminded him of his own life.

The crack at the end was still very small.

There was still time to stop it.

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At some point, I noticed something strange. The same thoughts could spin in my head for weeks without stopping. I would replay conversations, scenarios of the future, possible mistakes, and catastrophes. The more I tried to find a solution, the more I became tangled in my own thoughts.

And then, I would pick up a pen and a notebook. And something would change. The problems didn’t disappear. The answers didn’t appear by magic. But the anxiety seemed to lose some of its power.

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For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was no longer inside the chaos, but standing right next to it. Back then, I didn’t know that various techniques of writing therapy, narrative approaches, and other psychological methods existed. I was just intuitively looking for a way to cope with what was happening inside. That is how a journey began that later led me to books, stories, articles, my own methodologies, and a deeper understanding of myself. But at that moment, everything was much simpler. I just needed to survive another difficult evening.

When writing becomes a lifebuoy

Sometimes I didn’t write because I wanted to make sense of something. I wrote because I didn’t know what else to do.

There were periods when anxious thoughts overwhelmed me so intensely that I no longer tried to analyze them.

Dozens of scenarios, fears, and unresolved questions were spinning in my head simultaneously. I felt that the system was overloaded.

I would sit at the table, open a notebook, and start writing down everything. No structure. No beautiful phrasing. No attempt to create a coherent text. I was just dumping everything pulsing inside onto the paper.

Sometimes, after a few pages, I felt such relief that I would close the notebook and fall asleep. Today, this seems obvious, but back then, I didn’t understand why it worked. I just noticed the result.

While I was writing, I was grounding myself. Writing didn’t solve my problems. It brought me back to a place where I could actually solve them.

Over the years, several large A4 notebooks were filled this way. They were true chronicles of my struggle with anxiety, attempts to understand myself, and the search for grounding. I used one of those notebooks as an illustration for this text.

If someone had told me then that these chaotic notes would one day lead me to writing my own methodologies, stories, and texts as large as novels, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. At that moment, I was just trying to survive the day.

Why it works. When a person is in a state of anxiety, the brain switches to a “high alert” mode. All attention focuses on finding threats and trying to control the future. The problem is that thoughts start going in circles. Writing helps break this cycle in several ways:

• Slowing down: For me, pen and paper proved to be especially effective. When we write by hand, the speed of thought inevitably decreases. We can no longer jump between dozens of thoughts per second. Each word must literally be passed through the hand. This creates space between the thought and our reaction to it.

• Externalization: As long as anxiety stays inside your head, it feels like it is reality. But the moment you put that thought on paper, a distance appears between you and the anxiety. You are no longer the anxiety. You are the person observing the anxiety. This is a very important shift in perspective.

• Releasing resources: Our brain does not handle the endless holding of the same thoughts very well. When a thought is written down, the need to constantly keep it in the “operating memory” disappears. Chaos gets a container, and the head gets a chance to rest a little.

But over time, something unexpected happened. Writing began to perform a different function for me. If initially I used it as a tool for release, later it became a tool for research. I started asking myself questions. Looking for patterns. Analyzing my own reactions. Writing notes, reflections, articles, and essays.

At some point, I noticed that I use different tools for different tasks. When anxiety was too strong, pen and paper helped me. They slowed me down and helped dump the internal noise. But when I transitioned from simply writing out thoughts to researching my experiences, to writing articles and essays, I opened my laptop more often.

It was then that I realized that writing is capable of more than just reducing anxiety. It is capable of turning chaos into structure. And structure into meaning.

Three practices that still help me, and might help you

1. Free writing: When anxiety becomes too strong, don’t try to write beautifully. Just write down everything that bothers you. The main task is to get the contents of your head out. Try to divide your notes into categories: “I can influence this” and “I cannot influence this.”

2. The writer’s perspective: Describe your day in the third person: “He woke up with anxiety and couldn’t bring himself to start work for a long time...” An outside view often helps see your situation more clearly and with more compassion for yourself.

3. The metaphorical diary: Imagine your anxiety as a stormy ocean, an abandoned house, or a winter forest. Metaphors allow you to express what is difficult to formulate directly.

Maybe you won’t find the answers today. Maybe the anxiety won’t disappear after the first page. But something important will happen. Instead of carrying this entire load inside you, you will place it in front of you on paper. And that is a completely different position. That is exactly where my journey once began.

How do you deal with mental chaos when it starts to overwhelm you? Have you ever tried writing your thoughts down on paper? Or do you have your own way of regaining your footing in difficult moments?

A week ago, I hit the “Publish” button on Amazon Kindle. My first book is now available to the world. By all the laws of the genre, I should now be frantically refreshing stats, running targeted ads, or posting enthusiastic announcements on social media. But I am not doing that. I wrote an article on Substack, where I have few subscribers, wrote a couple of tweets on an empty X, and posted one message on Reddit in a book section. And, of course, I know that this event, so significant to me, will most likely go unnoticed by everyone else.

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This is logical. I have no audience. English is not my native language, and I am fully aware that a translation, no matter how high its quality, inevitably loses some of the “nerve” that was present in the original text. And yet, I did it.

I published it for one reason only: it was on the to-do list of things that would be “good to accomplish someday.” It was my way of closing another gestalt. In this book, “City on Tiptoes”, if you read it (it is available for free download on Amazon until June 13), there are many strange locations: the alley of too-small victories, the square of useless decisions, the post office of unsaid words. And this article is a sort of continuation of that journey.

Because after a book goes “out into the light,” it does not head to the bestseller shelves, but to my personal “landfill of unwanted things.” A beautiful name, isn’t it? And, perhaps, the only honest one for the current moment.

If anyone were to look into this landfill, they might be horrified by the volume - not of trash, but of meanings that never found their addressee.

There lie articles and guides on panic attacks. This is not dry theory: I lived with neurosis for 25 years and dragged myself out of it on my own. These texts have already helped many of my acquaintances, but to the global algorithm, they are currently invisible. There also lies a therapeutic fairy tale about a wanderer passing through the 8 circles of anxiety hell. Almost an autobiography. And the autobiography itself lies there too - I don’t know why I even wrote it.

There is “City on Tiptoes” - a psychotherapeutic tale in an absurd style. There is a CBT technique I created, very simple and effective for those who drown in anxiety daily. There is the book “60 Days of Escaping Neurosis” - a practical guide with exercises that give a person the resource to work with psychologists and psychotherapists, with whom they can later figure out how they got into that neurosis in the first place and why.

There is the mystical novel “The Seattle Code” about the manifestation of desires, and another one about relationships with money, which answers the protagonist in his dreams if he writes a question on a napkin before going to sleep. If you gather all the clues scattered across these books, you get a ready-made instruction manual for life.

There is my anti-hustle system, which I have been working on for the past few months. It explains how to avoid burnout, how to act according to the phases of life rather than against them. I have never encountered this non-linear system anywhere before - it should have felt like a cool compress on people exhausted by hustle culture.

I finished all of this in just over a year. And I took all of it to the landfill.

Many will ask: why? Why didn’t I just promote it?

I look at the modern content industry without resentment or snobbery. On the contrary, I look at successful info-gurus the way a technologist looks at someone else’s perfectly engineered factory. They built a damn effective conveyor belt, they are doing great, and their blueprints are completely clear to me. The process looks linear and logical: you take the simplest thought, expand it into tweets, short threads, or notes, assemble an essay out of them, and then - a book. The sale of value happens at every single stage. And by the time the finished system is released, the audience is already warmed up, and sales are happening through subscriptions, consultations, and products. It works, it brings in money, and it is foolish to deny it.

I, however, do the exact opposite. But not out of a spirit of contradiction, but because of the specific nature of my internal assembly. I conceptualize an idea and work on it until a finished, monolithic piece of work appears. I physically cannot - my brain and my gut rebel against this - break a holistic experience into “useful bite-sized pieces” for the algorithms. I work until the thing is complete. And... that is it.

No selling of value at the creation stage. No preliminary audience. And then you step out into the world, completely unknown, and say: “Look at this cool thing I made.” And in response - silence. Absolutely logical silence. The value of this thing is incomprehensible to people because it is not wrapped in the usual marketing packaging. They weren’t led to it gradually. The rare passersby who happen to glance at my counter just shrug and walk past, even though what you wrote could save them years of life or a ton of money.

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I don’t know how to play this game, even though I know its rules. Trying to launch the same conveyor belt inside myself, I feel how my internal wiring literally melts, smells of burnt insulation, and blows the fuses. When I finish a piece of work, it is as if my brain turns off the light in that room. Everything has already been said, the monolith is assembled. Trying to go back now to disassemble it into individual tweets, posts, or promotional notes is not just boring, it is mentally impossible. The entire interest, the whole drive was in reaching the end and completing it. And once that is done - the completed stage loses its importance for me, so to speak. And this is not about the fear of hate - I calmly post my texts in the public domain. This is precisely some kind of systemic code incompatibility. The work is done, the gestalt is closed, the spark that ignited me has burned out. Let it lie. And my ADHD brain is already looking for a new challenge.

Why am I writing all this? I am well aware that my way of operating is extremely inefficient for the current market. There is nothing and no one to be offended by here. This is self-reflection to understand another one of my internal limitations.

Why, knowing what to do and how to do it, am I unable to do it?

I don’t think I am the only one going through this path. Which means we can try to find a way out together.

There is one thing that is important to articulate. It would be hypocritical to say that I am above recognition. That I create “for the drawer” out of some higher virtue and don’t need the world to notice my efforts at all. That is not true. Deep down, like any human being, I want proof that what I created is not just an echo in an empty room.

In our culture, the main generally accepted way to get this proof is through sales. But here, a currently insurmountable barrier arises for me. I don’t despise sales as a process, but for me, attempting to act according to ready-made templates turns into severe violence against myself. To sell effectively the way it is done today, you have to put on a “salesperson” mask, turn yourself into a content creator who chops their experience into “success cases” and “audience pain points.” But that is not me.

When I tried to do it - and I tried repeatedly - the result looked ugly and fake to myself. When I think about “warming up” an audience, chasing reach, turning my books into marketing funnels - I feel the value of the work itself begin to evaporate for me. It stops being an answer to my internal request and turns into a commodity. And a commodity is something that can be replaced, sold, and forgotten.

And therein lies my personal small tragedy: I am stuck in a dead-end between the impossibility of not creating and the physical impossibility of promoting what is created the way the era demands. The world is structured in such a way that it needs the marketing “packaging” that the modern viewer is used to. But finding a version of this packaging that does not cause acute internal rejection and does not contradict my structure is something I haven’t managed yet. This, by the way, might be one of the most difficult tasks of my life. Because I managed to get out even of a prolonged neurosis with a bunch of accompanying problems, but here, it is a dead-end for now.

An open ending: what to do with this landfill? And so I stand before this “landfill,” where dozens of completed lives, therapeutic tales, and practical instructions capable of changing someone’s everyday reality - I know this for sure - are collected. And I ask myself a question to which I still have no answer.

What to do with this next?

To leave them lying in silence means admitting defeat before my own inability to bring my works to people. To try to turn into a “salesperson,” with whom I have absolutely nothing in common, means betraying the very therapy for the sake of which I wrote it all. Doing this against my internal structure, I will be faking it. Even if others don’t notice, I will know the truth.

I am not looking for a “magic pill” here from marketing experts who will tell me how to properly set up targeting or plant hooks for the audience. I am looking for another effective way of promotion - one that my internal “Self” can accept without a feeling of violation. A way to transmit value as a monolith, without turning myself into a content factory and my work into noise.

Is it even possible to bring such a product to the person who vitally needs it if you are not ready to play by the standard rules?

I don’t know the answer. I am looking for it. Getting angry at myself. Reflecting. Sorting through options, but they don’t fit the keyhole I am trying to open yet. For now, I just keep writing. I create a new thing, complete it, feel it become a part of me, and then... then I take it to that very landfill again.

And yet, a main question sits inside me: is it even possible to find or create a method of promotion that fits me specifically? Since for some reason I physically cannot copy what works beautifully and effectively for others. Does this other path exist in nature, where I don’t have to break myself over my knee?

My brain refuses to believe that the problem has no solution. And while I am looking for it, this landfill keeps growing.

I would be interested to hear if you have experienced this and how you resolved this question for yourself.

I wrote this book last autumn. It had no pre-planned plot or outline, just a pure stream of consciousness. Perhaps that is why “The City on Tiptoes” turned out to be so unusual. So unusual, in fact, that I tucked it away in a drawer for a long time.

It might have gathered digital dust forever if a reader of my novel “Seattle Code” hadn’t asked me: “Do you have anything else to read? Not articles or essays, but something for the soul.” I remembered this manuscript, quickly glanced through it to see if it was worth sharing, and suddenly found myself immersed in the world I had described. What once seemed like absurd fiction now felt like a therapeutic tale, a story where everyone can find a part of themselves.

This is a true therapeutic quest. As we move along the route, we encounter characters and situations that embody our familiar mental traps: “The Chewer of Past Regrets,” “The Bridge Afraid of Heights,” “The Square of Useless Decisions,” and “The Post Office of Unspoken Words.” We visit the “Alley of Tiny Wins,” where we learn to notice the small things that actually make up our lives. In the “Square of Final Choice,” we decide what to let go of and what to carry forward. And at the “Station of Unmet Encounters,” we finally face those we were once too afraid to talk to.

These locations are not just scenery. No, each one holds actions that help us break out of the anxiety loop. This is exactly where the therapeutic power of “The City on Tiptoes” lies, and why it became the first book I decided to publish on Amazon.

In one of the chapters, there is this dialogue: “At the very end of this suspended path, I couldn’t help but ask the closing controller: ‘What if my decision turns out to be wrong in the end?’” “It doesn’t matter at all here,” he shrugged simply. “The most important thing is to stop hanging helplessly between eternal ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ You can always correct a decision along the way... But you cannot hang in the void forever.”

And in another, a character says: “Now you know for sure,” said the Hamster with Memory, “that being close to someone is sometimes much scarier than remaining alone... But it is certainly not as painful as regretting for the rest of your life that you didn’t even try.”

I decided to act in accordance with my own words. To try. To become closer to you, my readers, instead of remaining alone. So that I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t even try.

From June 9th to June 13th, the book is available for free download on Amazon here: [Link >>]

I am asking you to download it. I write a lot about self-therapy, neuroses, and anxiety, trying to help others navigate life with fewer struggles. I know for a fact that this text will at least make you reflect on the things we live through daily, and perhaps, it will offer solutions for your current life circumstances.

If you download it, it will mean to me that the world is responding. And if you find the time to leave a review after reading, it will help the book reach those who need it most right now.

Thank you for walking this path with me.

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The Mirror with a “Publish” Button

Many people begin writing publicly with a clear goal in mind: to build a personal brand, gather an audience, and sell a digital illusion of their success. I started writing because I needed a new tool for self-exploration.

It has always been agonizingly difficult for me to answer that banal question: “So, what do you do for a living? Who are you?” Whenever I tried to explain, I would spiral into endless justifications or simply wave it off: “Oh, a bit of everything.” The world demands a short, tidy label. I didn’t have one.

For years, I tried to squeeze my fluid, multiple nature into dry, rigid boxes. I felt as though something was fundamentally wrong with me. I thought that if I just tried harder, put on the correct professional mask, and tailored my suit to fit the industry standards, I would finally “fit in.”

This text is the story of a fish that realized just in time: the only way to survive the net is not to look for a comfortable corner inside it, but to tear it apart.

What you are about to read is not the result of months of psychotherapy. It is the outcome of a single, intense day of absolute honesty with myself. A day when years of trying to be “understandable to everyone” shattered against a mundane interface requirement, and instead of the paralyzing internal code “I am Nobody,” my system finally rewrote itself to say: “I am a Metamorph.”

In reality, this means the ability to flow from form to form, from one activity to another, without losing productivity and without clinging to dead social roles. Perhaps this firmware will suit you too, if you find yourself suffocating in a world of templates.

The Mirror with a “Publish” Button

Attempting to write publicly turned into something rarely achieved in theory: the texts created a real, ruthless mirror. The platform became a practice of self-exposure for me, where every routine question of “what can I give to people?” was instantly ripped out by its roots and turned inward: “And who am I to say this in the first place?”

This is the chronicle of a transformation that occurred in literally twenty-four hours. In the morning, I was paralyzed by a simple prompt: “Choose your niche. Define yourself.” By evening, I realized that the question itself was fundamentally wrong.

Chronicle of a Single Day: How It Happened

Morning. 09:00. Dead End The laptop screen glowed steadily. Substack politely but persistently demanded that I fill out my profile description—a short line meant to explain to the world who I am. I had been trying to write it for weeks. Every attempt felt artificial; every draft ended up in the trash. But today, I decided to fill out this damn profile. No matter what.

And that is when hell broke loose. A counter of my past lives switched on in my head:

An economist? A bank employee? A crisis manager? A business trainer? A plastic repair specialist? A salesman? An e-commerce store creator? An importer? A writer? A trader? A fund manager? An investor? An entrepreneur? An out-of-body experience researcher? A metaphysician? A diving flashlight developer? A metaphysician?..

And dozens of other professions and activities that I had entered, deeply immersed myself in, mastered, and... left behind throughout my life. Because I wanted to move on. I wanted to explore. Every single one of these definitions is the absolute truth. But choosing just one meant voluntarily consenting to the live amputation of all other parts of myself, just so blank algorithms could categorize me more easily.

An internal system crash threw the familiar, killing error: “If you are everything at once, it means you are no one in particular.” Total mental paralysis set in.

Afternoon. 14:00. Trying to Conform I am honestly trying to play by the rules. I take a notebook, list my qualifications, and try to cross a snake with a hedgehog to birth a pathetic “unique selling proposition.” The result is a cardboard, dead text. It reeks of cheap marketing courses and falsehood from a mile away. A text with no living human being behind it—only the role expected of me.

At this moment, years of pressure reach their peak. The net I am tangled in begins to cut into my skin. A silent scream echoes inside: if I put on this suit now for the sake of subscriber counts, I will have to wear it every single day. And I am physically incapable of doing that.

Evening. 19:00. A Flash of Honesty I close all the tabs filled with marketing advice and articles on growth by local gurus. If publicity is a mirror, let it be clean, not warped. I sit down and begin to write not what I “should,” but what is tearing me apart right now. I write about this very paralysis. About how terrifying it is not to have a clear label in a world where everyone has a barcode pasted on their forehead.

And at that exact moment, a sharp click happens. What had been accumulating for years finally takes shape. The “I am nobody” error vanishes. In its place comes a massive, liberating realization: I do not have to choose one cramped room in this house. I am the entire house.

My true nature is not a static point; it is constant change, adaptation, and synthesis. I am what can be called a metamorph. And my total inability to fit into boundaries is not a defect, a malfunction, or a lack of discipline. It is my genuine superpower.

Night. 23:00. Firmware Updated Instead of a standard profile description, I hit the “Publish” button under this manifesto. The text went live. The fear vanished, replaced by pure, childlike curiosity.

This day, of course, did not solve all my life problems, but it changed the most important thing: I am the one who sets the rules of the game in this territory now. Writing permanently ceased to be a dreary obligation to generate content. It became a scalpel for self-vivisection—a tool for exploring my own depths, and the first confident steps into the darkness where social masks are no longer required.

P.S. I recently wiped my Substack completely clean. However, after some thought, I decided to re-upload this story of self-discovery. A few parts showing exactly how it happened. It serves as a map and a guide for those who are currently suffocating in a world of rigid self-definitions, just as I used to.

The Metamorph Chronicle // Part 2.

23 Days on Dark Souls Difficulty

When I first started my experiment on Substack, I set a very simple, dry goal for myself: to write every day simply to overcome my fear of public exposure.

The math of the challenge was elementary: 23 days = 23 posts. Why exactly 23? That’s just what I decided.

I naively assumed it would be a regular training exercise. Discipline, regularity, habit formation—the dull foundation of standard productivity manuals. Instead, it turned into harsh shock therapy through total exposure, a head-on collision with my sub-personalities, and reassembling myself from scratch right in front of passersby.

A Mini-Report as a Warped Mirror

At the end of the experiment, I sat down to write a standard summary of the results. The display case metrics looked tangible enough: xxx subscribers, xxx views, a few comments. But I no longer cared much about this facade. Something far more interesting had occurred behind it.

Hidden beneath were dozens of different voices and roles. Each new post became a stage where I had to change costumes and deliver a new, sometimes polarized truth. When I re-read my own texts, a jolt of electricity literally ran through me: every single post was written by an entirely different person.

In one text, I played the profound philosopher; in another, I snapped with the sarcasm of a sci-fi satirist; in a third, I choked on real, physical pain; and in a fourth, I laid down rigid methodology for cognitive therapy. I altered my voice, intonations, and style as if an entire theater troupe lived inside me simultaneously. It’s just that before I started writing daily, I had managed not to notice it.

For platform algorithms, this kind of chaotic jumping is labeled as “scattered,” a lack of focus—the cardinal sin of a content creator. For me, it is the only authentic truth.

23 Days vs. 5 Years of Psychotherapy

And then I realized: these three weeks gave me exponentially more than years of traditional psychotherapy. In the cozy office of an analyst, you can safely theorize about yourself for years, building beautiful hypotheses and dissecting mental concepts.

In the public space, everything becomes far too real. Text strips you bare. You cannot lie to a text; it does not hide your scars. You simultaneously see yourself through the eyes of a living reader and a soulless algorithm, and there is no escaping this cross-examination.

Paradoxically, it was the algorithm with its rigid boundaries (”Who are you? What is your niche?”) that became my primary catalyst. It methodically struck my most vulnerable spot. I tried to adapt, trying on various roles, but they instantly melted, mutated, and flowed into one another.

It was like the final scene in Terminator 2, where the liquid metal robot falls into a vat of molten steel. Do you remember how it frantically, at top speed, tries to take on different forms from its memory—one face, then another, then someone else’s texture? It desperately searches for a mask that will allow it to hold on, to solidify in that aggressive environment, but the scorching metal consumes everything. The shells disintegrate before they can set.

That was exactly how I was thrashing around in this digital net, cycling through my past social roles. And it was precisely through this high-speed cycling, as all the artificial suits fell away like dust, that what I truly am finally broke free.

Around that same time, I stumbled upon the term “multipotentiality.” Something clicked inside, I began to dig deeper, and the mosaic finally came together. It turned out that my internal chaos was not a psychological disorder, a prolonged identity crisis, or a simulation. It was simply a specific way of thinking. A deviation from the gray social norm, but not a pathology.

“Multipotentialite”—that’s what Barbara Sher called it. But I had already chosen a different definition for myself earlier: a metamorph. For the first time in long years, I received a legal right to just BE. Not a mask, not a convenient label for someone else’s perception, but myself—in all my multiplicity and fluidity.

Life on Maximum Difficulty

If my life were a video game, a neon notification would have flashed across the screen by now: “New Class Unlocked: Metamorph.” But even that was not the end of the game. It turned out to be merely a transition to the next, far more dangerous map.

Because my starter pack didn’t go anywhere. The game continues at maximum settings, in Dark Souls mode:

• Body: Fibromyalgia (chronic pain), thyroid issues, diabetes, restless leg syndrome, chronic insomnia, body spasms, chronic headaches.

• Psyche: Background organic anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, anxiety-depressive disorder, ADHD.

This entire medical combo won’t vanish just because I found a beautiful definition for my identity. This is the battlefield upon which I have to deploy my metamorphoses every single day.

The Bottom Line: About Money

And here, the metamorph faces the most grounded and cynical question of all: how, exactly, do you make a living? How do you survive in the material world when you don’t have one clear profession and a single straight path in life?

Usually, multipotentialites manage this in a few ways:

1. Portfolio Income: Deliberately creating several unrelated financial streams.

2. Project Cycles: Working in surges and waves—entering, building, exiting, switching.

3. The “Core + Chaos” Formula: Having a monolithic baseline of stability, surrounded by a churning ocean of controlled experiments.

4. Monetizing Synthesis: Selling a unique product to the market born at the intersection of polarized competencies.

In my personal financial architecture, my “core” is trading. It is what has given me independence for a very long time. Meanwhile, the space for chaos and experimentation belongs to Substack, books, philosophy, and irony. My real interest now is to try and turn this boiling chaos not into unsystematic digital noise, but into a finished, living product that is, in fact, me.

Five Rules of the New Map

Substack became my personal testing ground. Every post is not just letters for the sake of traffic; it is a local micro-battle, a record of a victory or another failure. A transformation laboratory broadcasting live, not a podium for mimicking expertise. From this lab, I walked away with 5 ironclad rules for my new path:

1. Forget about finding a niche. My only niche is the dynamic process of metamorphosis itself.

2. Accept chaos as the climate. Physical pain, anxiety, mental scatteredness—these are not annoying system errors; they are the fundamental rules of the game on this map.

3. Vulnerability is fuel. The more honestly and ruthlessly I expose my vulnerable zones, the more powerful the therapeutic effect is for me, and theoretically, the stronger the trigger for the reader.

4. Finance is a portfolio. I will never have a single door, but I must try to design and build a house with multiple autonomous entrances.

5. Continue the chronicle. You must write and reflect right in the middle of the mutation process, without waiting for the “final assembly.”

I still haven’t found a final, rock-solid answer to the question “Who am I?” But I have finally found a language in which I can speak to myself without revulsion. I haven’t found a way out of my labyrinth, but I have fully accepted the fact that this labyrinth is my only home. My path is not a straight line; it is a fractal. I was uplifted, I was inspired. Finally, I found a way to define myself. My soul sang.

If you also regularly catch a paralyzing sensation of “I am a fraud,” if you are torn between polarized roles, and if a mosaic chaos churns inside instead of a monolithic personality—know this:

You are not broken. And you are not alone.

This is not a diagnosis; it is simply the life of a mosaic person. Yes, it is Dark Souls level of difficulty, but that is exactly why this quest is so damn real.

The morning after publishing this manifesto, I woke up with a cold realization: even crutches like the terms “metamorph” and “multipotentialite” are just more temporary labels. The labyrinth hasn’t ended. And to avoid settling for other people’s ready-made answers, I began creating my own navigation system for people like me.

How this internal compass works and how a metamorph can stay sane between trading, philosophy, and fibromyalgia will be covered in the next chapter.

The Metamorph Chronicle // Part 3.

The Multipotentialite’s Rock Bottom and the Birth of the Roleless Type

For a long time, I lived with the sensation that something was deeply wrong with me. On one hand—kilowatts of energy, new ideas, projects, deep immersions into polarized spheres. On the other—none of it sticks to me permanently. Social roles dissolve, long-term plans collapse, and all that remains as a net result inside once the dust settles is a hollow, pure: “I am.” And nothing more.

When I stumbled upon the term “multipotentiality” during my 23-day writing marathon, I fell asleep happy for the first time in years. I remember that relief: “Thank God, I’m not broken. I’m not the only one. I’m just multifaceted.” I wrote in detail about this relief and finding the self-definition of “metamorph” in the previous chapters.

But the euphoria did not last long.

Soon I realized: in my case, multipotentiality is more like the floor beneath my feet, but by no means the foundation. It is the upper, glossy layer.

Beneath it, at a much greater depth, lives an entirely different type of person—one that modern psychologists and coaches do not talk about.

I called them the Roleless Types.

The Curse of the “Wardrobe Room”

What is the key difference between a regular Multipotentialite and a Roleless Type?

A classic multipotentialite loves their roles. They are like a seasoned actor: today they put on the costume of a killer marketer and genuinely enjoy the process; tomorrow they swap it for the mask of an artist; the day after, a chef. Their “multiplicity” is a rich wardrobe room. They transition from role to role, yet they feel entirely comfortable and tangible within each one. They are playing.

For the Roleless Type, it is entirely different. The moment I put on any social label—be it “entrepreneur,” “expert economist,” “writer,” or even “professional trader”—an subconscious mechanism of rejection triggers almost immediately inside me.

A brief play at a role or a project sprint can bring genuine drive and utility. But as soon as the role drags on, turning into an obligation to conform to it day after day, it instantly becomes a cramped, suffocating solitary confinement cell. The suit begins to sit awkwardly, pinching at the shoulders and choking me.

Instead of enjoying the process, the Roleless Type begins to unconsciously (and sometimes quite consciously) sabotage it. We tear down our own successful projects, walk away from lucrative niches, and wipe out our results simply because the internal roleless metamorph physically cannot pretend to be just one thing for long.

Plans shatter, masks are tossed into the corner, and inside, all that remains once again is that single empty, ringing: “I am.” No credentials, no titles, no barcode on the forehead that makes sense to society.

The Chaos Phase as a Natural Environment

For an ordinary person, the collapse of plans and the loss of a social role is a life catastrophe, a reason for deep depression. For a Roleless Type, it’s just a Tuesday. Our baseline climate.

We are wired differently. Our psyche is non-linear. Our productivity does not obey standard chronological cycles of “set a goal -> take step-by-step action -> lock in success.” We function within a non-linear system where chaos, metamorphoses, and sharp switches are not a system glitch, but the only possible mode of existence.

Inside a Roleless Type, different internal modes constantly succeed one another:

• The Analyst: A cold, cynical mind dissecting charts and markets.

• The Executioner: A mode of total concentration, capable of monotonically assembling highly complex mechanisms for days on end.

• The Creator: A creative urge demanding that tons of text and philosophy be immediately poured out onto paper.

• The Reboot: A hard system reset, where you lie flat for days, unable to explain to loved ones where that hyper-sociable and energetic person you were just last Thursday went.

The biggest foolishness a Roleless Type can commit (and one that I committed for years) is to try to cure this chaos. To try to force oneself to live “like normal people.” This cannot be cured. Because it is not a disease.

The Authenticity Test: Pure Presence

When you strip off all social costumes, a terrifying and simultaneously beautiful event occurs. You are left naked.

Society is petrified of Roleless Types. Do you know why? We cannot be subjected to standard control and manipulation through status. We cannot be bought with cheap bait like a “prestigious position,” “stable standing,” or “respect in professional circles.” We don’t give a damn about these trinkets because we know their price—yet another suffocating cell.

To be a Roleless Type means having the courage to endure the emptiness. When people ask you, “Who are you?”, you smile genuinely inside, knowing that right now, you are nothing that they can name. You are pure potential. A living, moving presence.

We are not broken. We were simply engineered for different tasks. We are the ideal crisis-response elements, capable of navigating spaces where linear people experience cognitive meltdown from uncertainty. We are those “strange people” who maintain balance in a world falling to pieces from its own rigid templates.

We exist. And if you recognized yourself in this description—stop looking for “your final corner” in someone else’s net. Our home is the journey itself. Our strength lies in roleless freedom.

As this text settled on the screen, I realized that the masks were off for good. But one last step remained—to formalize this internal knowledge into a rigid, uncompromising document that would lock in the new rules of the game forever.

I needed my own system of coordinates... An internal code of rules for my multiplicity in the absence of roles. Not for others. For myself.

The Metamorph Chronicle // Part 4.

Rules for Navigating Chaos

The previous chapters of this chronicle were a record of a struggle. A struggle against platform interfaces, against categorization algorithms, and, above all, against my own internal code, which for years kept repeating: “Settle down. Choose one thing, otherwise you are nobody.”

But when the masks are discarded and the cramped walls of social roles are demolished, the Roleless Type finds themselves face-to-face with their primary, terrifying freedom—multiplicity.

Simply declaring “I am a Roleless Metamorph” or just “Roleless” is not enough. This new, wild territory demands its own rules of navigation. It requires a clear internal code that codifies the rejection of imposed templates and serves as a practical anchor. This is my personal survival manual in chaos, and simultaneously a marker for those who are ready to accept their changing nature.

Shattering the Myths: What They Tried to Do to Us

For years, the system tried to “fix” us, relying on three major myths about human productivity and success. It is time to call them out and destroy them.

Myth 1: A calling is a single point on the horizon. From childhood, we are told that everyone has a single “true” calling that they must find and hammer away at until retirement. For a Roleless Type, this is a death sentence. Our calling is the process of exploration itself. We are not a point; we are a vector. Our true realization lies at the intersection of polarized, seemingly incompatible fields.

Myth 2: Inconsistency is a discipline defect. You might abandon a successful business for a new profession simply because it became interesting. Or move from analytics into writing. At that moment, society twists a finger at its temple: “He has focus issues.” Nonsense. To me, this is not a focus issue; it is the natural completion of a Roleless Metamorph’s project cycle. We enter a niche, extract its essence, integrate that experience into ourselves, and move on. Keeping oneself trapped in a dead form for the sake of external approval is the true crime against one’s own effectiveness.

Myth 3: Stability breeds safety. People with linear firmware seek a stable role to hide from the chaos outside their window, and for their structure, this is a natural, functioning defense. But in an era of massive crises, it is precisely this rigidity that destroys them. When the old world collapses, “one-niche experts” get stuck in their roles like flies in amber. The Roleless Type, accustomed to constantly wiping their masks clean, adapts instantly. Our instability is simply a different system configuration. Our form of resilience.

The Exploration Method: Life from All Angles

Being a Roleless Metamorph does not mean being a superficial dilettante who skims the surface. It is a fundamentally different method of understanding the world. It is being a multifaceted crystal; at any given moment, people see only one facet. And the number of these facets is constantly changing.

We dive deep into processes, right down to the bone, but we do it in waves and cycles. We explore life from every available perspective—through numbers and charts, through the rigid logic of crisis management, through the gears of vintage clocks in our hobbies, and the absurdity of literary parables. And I show this world exactly as it is: without the gloss, through myths, working methods, and ruthless personal experience.

This does not make us better, smarter, or some kind of “higher caste.” We are normal. But our firmware is wired differently. Living with it is exponentially harder due to constant system resets, but for us, it is the only available norm. I no longer try to cross breed the unmixable for the sake of a pretty resume. Now, I am creating a portfolio of meanings where chaos and structure do not fight, but complement each other.

Choose Your Door

This text is not a call to anarchy. It is a call to total honesty with oneself.

If you feel that familiar social suits are tightening around your neck like a suffocating noose, if you feel cramped within the boundaries of a single barcode, stop breaking yourself for the sake of algorithms. You have the right to be multiple. You have the right to flow from form to form while remaining effective and free.

I am not offering ready-made recipes for success. I am simply opening the doors to a labyrinth where you set the rules of the game yourself.

Choose your door.

This is the point where I cannot help but ask a few questions:

• What facets of yourself have you been hiding for years just to appear “normal”?

• At what moment did your “strangeness” actually save you and become your main advantage?

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Recently, I had a rather interesting conversation about despondency (acedia). Someone told me that despondency is like... nothing serious. Just a person feeling a bit down, what’s the big deal?

But gradually, our conversation shifted to the topic of despondency as a biblical sin. “Nothing serious” would not be included in such a text, let alone listed among the deadly sins. Even back then, people understood the danger of this condition.

We talked for a long time, argued, and I promised to write a dedicated article sharing my view on the danger of this state, its relationship with depression, and the ways out of it. This was so I could share it later with the participants of that conversation. Moreover, it might prove useful to other people as well. After all, I am personally familiar with practically the entire spectrum of such states and disorders, and to get out, I was forced to study the matter deeply.

In today’s lexicon, the word “depression” has already become a mental parasite. We use it to describe a bad mood caused by rainy weather, fatigue after a hard work week, existential sadness, or a temporary loss of direction. However, a massive chasm lies between ordinary (even prolonged) despondency and clinical depression.

It is a mistake to mistake one for the other. In the first case, a person is in a deep psychological crisis but still possesses the resource for a volitional effort, shifting focus, and rethinking life. In the second, they are facing a severe systemic breakdown of biology, requiring serious medical and pharmacological assistance.

I will try to break down the key differences between these states, drawing on psychology, neurobiology, and philosophy, to understand where therapy ends and psychiatry begins.

1. Despondency as a Forerunner: The Entry Point into Illness

Despondency is not just a fleeting bout of “the blues.” It is a state of passive, viscous dissatisfaction with life, where one’s hands drop and familiar stimuli no longer bring joy. In itself, this emotion is initially adaptive: the psyche turns on a strict energy-saving mode after severe or prolonged stress. The brain is simply trying to protect itself from overload.

However, the danger of despondency is that it can take root. If this state drags on for months and years, it transforms from a protective mechanism into a destructive process, gradually undermining the body’s resources.

Scientific Confirmation: In evidence-based medicine and psychiatry, the counterpart to prolonged despondency is often subclinical (subthreshold) depression. A person in this state does not yet meet all the criteria for a clinical diagnosis but is already functionally limited. Major longitudinal studies published in authoritative journals such as The American Journal of Psychiatry confidently confirm that the presence of subthreshold depressive symptoms is the strongest predictor of developing severe Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). According to the findings of these studies, the risk of a clinical collapse increases several times over. Chronic despondency gradually depletes the brain’s ability to adapt to stress. The shadow of despondency, if not dispersed in time, gradually prepares the ground for a fall into the dark biological abyss of depression.

2. The Mechanism of Despondency: Helplessness, the Narrowing of the World, and Living Anger

When a person faces a prolonged crisis - whether it is the constant inability to escape poverty, an exhausting background existential threat like war, the collapse of life illusions, or a long-term illness - a natural reaction occurs: anger and protest. The psyche demands a change in external circumstances. But if changing them is objectively impossible, this anger finds no outward vent.

The world of the despondent person rapidly narrows. They lose interest in a wide circle of communication, information, and hobbies, fixating on the global injustice of what is happening - either toward the world as a whole or specifically toward their own “Self.” A phenomenon of getting stuck occurs. Unable to attack the external source of stress, the individual unconsciously turns this turbulent energy against themselves. Anger turns into autoaggression. The person begins to endlessly replay thoughts of their own helplessness in their head, blame themselves, devalue their past achievements, and sink deeper into apathy.

But here lies the key, fundamental difference between despondency and clinical depression: in despondency, anger is still alive.

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A despondent person can be angry at themselves (”I’m a coward/rag”), resent the injustice of fate, or internally protest. This anger, even if destructive and directed inward, is evidence that the subconscious will to fight has not yet been destroyed. The internal fire is still burning; it is simply blocked by false mindsets. At the same time, in classic severe depression, aggression (like all other emotions) burns out almost completely. Only barely smoldering embers remain. A depressed person has neither the strength nor the desire to manifest anger; emotional numbness sets in. If, in rare cases of severe MDD, aggression does manifest, it takes the form of a panic defense by a completely exhausted brain, rather than a hidden resource for fighting.

Psychological Mechanism: This phenomenon is described in detail in Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness.” When the brain, based on long-term negative experience, becomes convinced that its actions have no impact, it temporarily stops attempting to do anything to conserve resources. From the perspective of classical psychoanalysis (starting with Sigmund Freud’s famous work “Mourning and Melancholia”), despondency is an intermediate phase when the energy of protest is blocked and begins to slowly undermine the Ego from within, narrowing perception to the size of one’s pain, yet still preserving the inner core of the personality.

3. The Spiritual Aspect: The Historical Error of Separation

In the Christian theological tradition, despondency (acedia) is not without reason included among the cardinal sins. But it is important for modern people to properly understand the context of ancient texts. The word “sin” in its original biblical meaning (Greek hamartia) translates as “missing the mark,” “error,” or a spiritual illness that harms the person themselves, rather than legal guilt before a punishing court.

Theologians considered despondency extremely dangerous because it paralyzes the will. It is a loss of faith in one’s own strength, in the good nature of the world, and in the very possibility of healing. In Christian literature, despondency is called “the all-consuming death of the soul,” as it deprives a person of the ability to create, love, and hope. It is an absolute capitulation to difficulties.

However, a colossal historical tragedy lies here. At the time these texts were written, humanity knew nothing about neurobiology. Theologians physically could not separate psychological despondency from a severe illness - depression arising from internal biological causes within the body. Because of this conceptual conflation, millions of people today make a terrible mistake: when facing clinical depression, they look at it as the “sin of despondency” or laziness. Instead of going to a psychiatrist for medication assistance, they try to “pull themselves up by the collar,” punish themselves for weakness, pray through sheer force, and thereby completely destroy the remnants of the brain’s neurochemical resources.

The ancients’ call to “fight despondency with the will” is effective only when the biological foundation of the brain is still intact. Applying it to a person in clinical depression is criminal.

4. Depression: When Biology Breaks Down

If a person can be brought out of a state of despondency through psychotherapy, reframing, changing conditions, or behavioral practices, this will not work with clinical depression. At this stage, pure psychology gives way to biology. Prolonged despondency, constantly flooding the body with stress hormones, sooner or later flips the physiological switch.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is not a bad mood, but a severe systemic neuroendocrine disease. Robert Sapolsky, a professor at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading experts on stress, whom I highly respect, constantly speaks about this in his lectures and books. Sapolsky strictly insists: depression has just as real a biological and somatic nature as diabetes or cancer. It is not a “crisis of character”; it is a total biological collapse of the organism.

• Neurotransmitter Deficiency: In patients, the metabolism and reuptake of key neurotransmitters - serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine — are critically disrupted. The brain physically loses the ability to transmit signals of joy and satisfaction. Receptors are blocked or atrophied. This state is called anhedonia.

• Hormonal and Structural Collapse: In depression, the main “stress control panel” - the system linking the brain and the adrenal glands (HPA axis) - breaks down. Normally, it works like a simple automated switch: you face stress, the hormone cortisol is released, it helps you survive the problem, and then it turns off. In depression, this switch breaks. The body begins to endlessly produce cortisol (the stress hormone) in gigantic doses. Chronically high levels of cortisol act on the brain as an aggressor: it literally reduces the volume of cells in the hippocampus - the area responsible for memory, contextualizing fears, and regulating emotions.

• Neuroinflammation: Modern research shows that the brain of a depressed person functions in a state of chronic low-grade inflammation and oxygen deprivation (hypoxia).

A person in depression is not “sad” and is not “capitulating” - their nervous system is physically damaged. Demanding that they “just pull themselves together” or “find the positive” is exactly the same as demanding that a person with a broken and shattered leg stand up and run a marathon through the power of suggestion.

5. Exiting the Tailspin: Behavioral Activation vs. Medicine

The difference in the nature of these two states dictates diametrically opposed strategies for returning to a normal life.

One can and must exit despondency independently or with the help of a psychologist before it degenerates into an organic pathology. Since the ember of anger toward oneself or the world still remains in despondency, this anger must be used as fuel. It needs to be turned from the inside, where it burns the personality, outward — toward taking concrete actions.

In evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy, this method is called behavioral activation. To break learned helplessness according to Seligman, a person needs to regain the ironclad conviction that “my actions affect the outcome.”

• To achieve this, global goals that seem insurmountable are broken down into microscopic, guaranteed-to-be-executed tasks.

• Moderate physical activity (sports), returning to a basic routine, completing small tasks (washing dishes, tidying up the desk), and helping other people return the experience of successful action to the brain.

• Every small victory provides a microdose of dopamine, gradually expanding the narrowed world of the despondent person back to its normal proportions.

In clinical depression, the will is destroyed bodily. A person cannot take a small step not because they are lazy, but because they have no chemical capacity to transmit a nerve impulse. In this state, antidepressants do not “make a person foolishly happy.” They perform technical work: they reduce the level of neuroinflammation, protect against cortisol overload, and artificially restore the destroyed chemical foundation. Pharmacology is only needed so that the depressed person gains the basic physical strength to simply brush their teeth in the morning, reach a therapist, and regain the ability to perceive the words of a psychologist or therapist.

Despondency is a dangerous, prolonged psychological impasse in which aggression, locked inside due to the inability to control external circumstances, narrows a person’s world and begins to slowly grind down their personality.

If despondency is left unaddressed, if one encourages their own helplessness, succumbs to this numbness, and does not attempt to turn internal anger into constructive external action, an irreversible cascade of biological reactions is triggered. Over time, chronic stress degenerates into a hormonal and neurochemical collapse. Psychology definitively turns into hard somatics — clinical depression.

Understanding this boundary literally saves lives. It helps one strictly pull themselves up by the collar in moments of prolonged melancholy, using the remnants of anger for a behavioral leap, while simultaneously teaching deep compassion and gentleness when a loved one is genuinely and severely ill with depression. And to offer the help of a psychiatrist in time.

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There are people who live with a strange peculiarity. Not hallucinations. Not delusions of grandeur. Just a quiet background noise somewhere deep in consciousness: “You were capable of more. Where you come from, everything was different.” They can’t explain where it comes from. Just a shadow left by some elusive memory of something that feels very real. Less tangible than the haze of a dream dissolving before dawn. And yet it feels deafeningly true.

The Chicken

Picture a yard chicken scratching in the dust alongside other busy chickens. They are occupied with very important matters, productive from early morning until dark, searching for fallen seeds and worms. They have purpose and know how to pursue it. You scratch the earth to eat. You eat to lay eggs. Then repeat the cycle.

But one of them stops from time to time and looks at the sky, where falcons cut through the air swift and silent. In her eyes - a strange longing. As if somewhere deep in the body’s memory lives a knowledge: once, she could do that too. Her wings were not vestigial ornaments. They lifted her upward, toward the sun, where there were no limits of the dusty henhouse. And she is flooded with the sensation of a different perspective from above, of whistling wind, of a strong body capable of breathtaking maneuvers.

She shakes off these sensations like a spell. Lowers her head. Scratches the dust and debris again. Pecks at seeds. But she cannot shake the feeling that this - is not IT. Because the cells of her brain remember something entirely different. Whatever she does within her current circumstances always leaves the same feeling: not IT.

The Voice from Nowhere

People tell them: “You got an incredible result.” They shrug: “What’s so special about that? I’ve done better. This is just mediocrity. And it’s already boring.”

People tell them: “You pulled yourself out of a twenty-year neurosis and depression on your own, built a system for climbing out of hell, helped dozens of people.” They answer: “It wasn’t hard. I wanted out - I figured out how. Problem solved. Helped others, I guess that’s good.”

This is not false modesty. It’s a voice that has lived inside since some point in life. It doesn’t deny the effort. It says something else: “This is still just craft. Low-level. You’re painting plates, but your hands remember that this brush was once used for something else entirely.” The problem is, this person doesn’t remember being an artist - someone who sensed beauty in everything they saw and knew how to render it. They simply know: what is happening now is not IT.

The Shift. The Infinite Field

The best psychoanalyst in the country, who had trained dozens of psychiatrists, worked with this person for a year and a half. Found nothing. No trauma. No abuse. No explanation.

But when he asked them to describe themselves through an image - he received this:

“An enormous white field stretching into infinity. You can see how the surface curves slightly in the distance. Sometimes this surface is marked out like a chessboard. Every direction is equal. I take steps, but nothing changes. There are no landmarks to tell whether you’ve come any closer.”

In this field, he is always alone. This is not suffering. Not complaint. Not tragedy. It simply is. There is no one to share this solitude with. And no reason to. Because…

There, everything is possible. No obstacles. No direction worse than any other. Everything is perfect - simply by virtue of existing. What could be more perfect than a white infinite plain where there is nothing superfluous?

Coming back from there - any result falls short. Not because it’s bad. Because it is not white. Not infinite. Not perfect simply by the fact of its existence.

The paradox is that when he looks back at his earthly accomplishments, this person genuinely considers himself mediocre. Not diminishing himself. Comparing. Not to other people. Not even to an ideal. Comparing to that memory. To the way things were there. To the flight his wings remember.

Sometimes the chicken stops scratching in the dust. Closes her eyes. And finds herself there, on the white surface.

Amnesia

The most precise explanation arrived by accident.

A man has amnesia. He becomes a carpenter. He makes decent tables. People tell him: well done, one day you’ll make a wardrobe. But he somehow knows - this is low-level craft. Before the amnesia, he was a master wood carver. He could see beauty where others saw a gnarled branch. Until he carved away what was unnecessary. Then a masterpiece was born.

He cries when he writes this. Not from grief. From recognition.

“I somehow know I could fly. And now - a chicken.”

The Launch

These people are geniuses of beginnings and disasters of maintenance. Five times their money in a year on the market, then watching it slowly burn because it’s no longer interesting. Sixty essays in three months — then pressing delete with a blank face. Not stupidity. Not self-destruction. It’s the search for that specific sensation of launch — when you almost lift off the ground. After that, the result no longer holds value. The value was in the process. In the attempt to feel that lightness, that freedom of flow. When the goal is reached — the brain loses interest. Achievements exist, but the horizon has shifted again. The same white plain in every direction. Reset. Start over.

The world asks: “Where are you going?” And he walks because he walks. Toward nothing. Because he cannot stop walking. Cannot stop trying again and again to find what will resonate for real. What will confirm - these memories are not a glitch. Not invented.

How to Live with This

There is no answer. And perhaps none is needed.

Jung would call it the Self that is larger than the ego. The Gnostics - the spark. Plato - the memory of the world of ideas. For me, this is a glitch. A creature that by every measure is a chicken, but whose internal firmware is wired for flight.

We change professions every few years. We dismiss our achievements not because we’re cruel to ourselves - but because our bar is a horizon that always recedes. We cannot answer the question “what do you do?” without a half-hour pause. We run our accounts to the sky and let them drop to zero, because the value was in the running. We write a book in a month and then put the manuscript in a drawer. Because once again - not IT.

The world says: accept it. You’re a chicken. Lay your eggs.

We cannot accept it. And we’re not sure we should.

Because somewhere deep lives a quiet, unprovable certainty - once, I could fly.

And sometimes, in rare moments of honesty, we allow ourselves to remember this out loud.

And we cry - not from grief.

From recognizing ourselves.

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There’s a phrase I hear regularly. It always sounds like a compliment, but feels like a slap: “You look great. Stop playing the victim.”

I’ve learned to look good. It’s a separate skill, developed over years. Not out of vanity - out of necessity. Because the alternative is explaining.

Always. To everyone. In an endless loop. And never being fully heard.

I call us glitches.

In programming, a glitch isn’t a breakdown or a bug that needs fixing. It’s a moment when the system works - but not the way it was supposed to. Everything functions, just by its own rules, different from the standard ones. That’s why this word feels more precise to me than “special,” “neurodivergent,” or “person with disabilities.” A glitch doesn’t always mean a defect. Often it means a different operating mode - one the system didn’t account for, but which exists.

Glitches aren’t only those we call neurodivergent, though they’re part of it too. It’s also people whose body is their personal hell behind a completely presentable exterior.

Chronic pain that doesn’t show up on an MRI. Restless leg syndrome that keeps you awake at four in the morning while the rest of the world sleeps. Anxiety disorders that look like a raging fire on the inside and “just a pensive person” on the outside. The aftermath of a stroke that makes it impossible to hold a shovel - because the wrist doesn’t work properly and there’s no way to explain that to anyone staring at your athletic build. And much, much more.

We’re different in content, but alike in experience. The experience of constant explanation in a world that sees you as normal.

Society is built for the majority. Not out of malice, just math. Infrastructure, behavioral norms, workplace expectations, the pace of life - all calibrated for a person who only hurts when they’ve been hit, not by default. For someone who gets tired by evening, not someone who wakes up already exhausted. For someone whose mind works in a linear, predictable way.

For the rest of us, there are two paths.

Become a translator of yourself. Explain why you can’t do the thing you look like you can do. Why today you’re not who you were yesterday. Why “just pull yourself together” doesn’t work as an instruction. This is as draining as the glitch itself. Because every explanation is a small trial where you’re simultaneously the defendant, the lawyer, and the witness. And the jury still looks skeptical.

Pretend to be normal. Learn to look good. Choose the right clothes, the right expression, the right pace of speech and function until the resource runs out. Then go home, in the silence, and pay for it. With pain. With exhaustion. With days that fall out of your life, that no one knows about.

Most glitches I know choose the second path. Not because it’s better. But because the first one costs more.

There’s a particular cruelty in invisibility. It’s not that people are cruel. It’s that we have no language for this.

“Disabled” conjures a specific image. A wheelchair. A white cane. A prosthetic limb. Something visible, material, undeniable. For that image there are ramps, parking spaces, priority queues. But for a person who looks thirty-five and feels eighty - there’s no priority queue. No ramp. Just looks, when you sit down in the elderly seat on the subway because standing isn’t an option today.

“You look great” is not a compliment. It’s a verdict. You look normal, therefore you must be normal. Iron logic. Completely inhumane.

But there’s another end to this stick. In recent years it’s become fashionable to talk about your differences. That’s good - to the extent it removes stigma and lets people stop hiding. But every pendulum has a backswing.

A category of people has emerged for whom being a “glitch” isn’t a cross you carry, but a badge you flash. A diagnosis as a tool for getting privileges. ADHD as an explanation for any inconvenient obligation. An anxiety disorder as a reason not to do something you simply don’t want to do. Documentation obtained not because it’s necessary for life, but because it’s convenient.

I’m not a judge. And I don’t know where the line falls for each person between real suffering and its convenient interpretation. That line is often blurred even for the person themselves.

But here’s what I do know: real glitches, as a rule, do the opposite. They don’t broadcast it. They don’t ask for discounts. They spend enormous energy on not standing out, not creating inconvenience, not being a burden. That’s their way of existing in a world that wasn’t really built for them.

And that’s exactly why, when someone uses the language of vulnerability as a tool for privilege — it hurts everyone else. It makes explanations even more pointless. It adds another layer to the skeptical stare: “Sure, of course, everyone’s got something now.”

I named my blog The Glitch Preserve not to complain. And not to explain myself to people who won’t get it anyway. Just… maybe someone will recognize themselves. See that they’re not alone. That there are people who don’t need anything explained. Here, we know you’ve been through hell and I don’t need proof of your heroism or your suffering. I simply understand you.

Though the blog is called The Glitch Preserve, it’s not only about glitches. Honestly, there probably won’t be that much content specifically about this. But the content here is the creation of one such glitch - me. This is just one of the focuses of my brain, which works a little differently but looks at the world broadly. There will be everything that interests me and a lot of things interest me.

I created it because glitches exist. There are many of us. And most of us live in a mode of quiet compensation - invisible to those around us, very visible to ourselves. And sometimes it matters just to call it by its name.

Not “lazy.” Not “playing the victim.” Not “hypochondriac.”

A glitch. A person whose something works differently. Who learned to look normal - but that doesn’t mean they are.

This isn’t a tragedy. These are just different conditions for the problem. And we know how to work with them. We just sometimes wish someone wouldn’t demand proof.

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Spoiler: At the very least, because I had the courage to do it.

60+ posts. Each one was a reflection of me. Hundreds of notes. Did it hurt to lose them? Of course. It would be a lie to say it was painless.

But it would be an even bigger lie to ignore the alternative: I had become artificial. Upon joining Substack, I found myself bewildered by the “gurus” lurking in every corner, lecturing on how things “should” be done: how to format posts, how to spam notes, how to “squeeze” every bit of reach out of the platform. At some point, it felt like there were almost no living authors left-only algorithmic machines.

I tried to break myself, adjusting to these imposed rules. But these “rules” are merely profit-maximization tactics that bleed audiences dry by playing on the human desire for gain. I don’t blame them-it’s a free market. But I don’t like it. I wrote protest posts, I made public stands... but it still wasn’t right.

I had to admit it: I fell for these “fairy tales for the poor” and began losing myself. Creativity had turned into a cage.

So, I deleted everything. This isn’t an exit; it’s a detox and a reboot. I no longer want to be a hostage to the format. From now on, the rules have changed:

• No “Niches”: I write about what moves me now-from philosophy and technology to simple life observations.

• Two Languages, One Thought: I am returning to my native language to write with maximum depth. The English version will be an honest reflection of those thoughts on a secondary platform.

• Freedom over Reach: If the algorithms don’t like it—ok.

I am fully aware: the lack of a clear niche is a death sentence from the algorithms. The system loves clear labels, and what I intend to do doesn’t fit into them.

Here, chapters from my books and stories will sit alongside raw accounts of battling neurosis and chronic pain, reflections on procrastination, and my theory of non-linear life cycles. There will be practical advice and pure self-reflection. Everything and anything, all at once.

That is how an ADHD brain works. I used to think it was a bug that needed fixing. Now I know it’s a feature. My blog is turning into a “sanctuary for the strange.” For those who think differently, who are non-linear, and who seek meaning rather than just “content.”

Maybe this will become a useful resource. Maybe it will just be a place where I offload everything that resonates within me. No one knows what this will grow into. One thing is clear: I will do it my way.

Thank you for being with me in the “past life” of this blog. We start anew. No filters, and no more attempts to please the system.

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