Related:

The urgency to change is a strange thing.

For years, I sabotaged myself — not out of malice, but confusion. Lack of understanding. The wrong environment. Too much noise from the outside, too little clarity on the inside. And then life, as it does, delivered a blow sharp enough to jolt me awake — the kind of moment that feels like taking an ice-cold shower with no warning. No towel. No comfort. Just clarity, painful and honest.

That’s when I saw it.

No structure.

No routine.

No rhythm.

No system.

No sleep schedule.

No meal consistency.

No clean water intake.

No silence.

No self-respect.

No sense of direction.

Just chaos — a thousand tangled threads and no hand to pull them apart. How do you rebuild a life when the whole thing is fractured? When even the idea of starting feels like trying to build a tower in a hurricane?

Years of impulsivity, unfiltered emotion, addiction, dopamine chasing — they rewired me. There’s no clean slate. No blank canvas. Only one that’s already been scribbled on, torn at the edges, stained with habits I didn’t even realize I was forming.

But here’s what I’ve learned:

My brain works differently. And the more I try to understand it, the more questions I uncover. It doesn’t move in straight lines. It doesn’t respond to force. But it does respond to rhythm. To meaning. To patterns that feel like something real.

So maybe that’s where I begin.

Not with the big questions. Not with the existential rebuild. But with the daily things. The foundations. The bricks I step on every single day, even if I’m not aware of them.

Because right now? Everything I do — every pattern I follow — is a quiet form of self-destruction. It’s a structure, yes, but it’s one built from the exact things I no longer want to be. That’s the real starting point. Not a goal. Not a dream. Just the decision to break the rhythm that’s been killing me.

This is the first quest.

Break the loop.

First:

I need a clear mind.

No more substances. No more crutches. No more half-functioning simulations of stability.

No medication.

No addiction.

No false supports to trick me into thinking I’m okay when I’m not.

I need to start over. From scratch.

That means letting my mind run in its raw state — stripped from influence, filters, and fog. I need to observe it like a foreign animal I’ve been living with for years but never really understood. See how it thinks. How it reacts. How it feels without interference. Only then can I begin to understand what I’m actually working with. Only then can I build something real.

And that terrifies me.

Because I don’t remember who I was before all this. I don’t know what I’ll find under the surface — what parts are mine and what parts were just coping mechanisms stacked on top of each other, year after year.

But I can’t afford to be afraid of myself anymore. I already lost too much time to that.

Second:

I need to reactivate my systems.

This body — this life — runs on systems whether I like it or not.

Movement.

Sleep.

Nutrition.

Water.

Sunlight.

Discipline.

Right now, they’re either offline or completely corrupted. So step by step, I have to dig into each of them.

Identify what’s broken.

Find what works better.

Replace, repair, optimize.

This is the plan.

This is Phase One

But before I even move forward — before any plan, any thought, any system — I need to admit something I’ve been avoiding:

That I deserve change.

That I deserve peace.

I don’t fully believe that yet.

Not all the time.

But somewhere, beneath the weight of everything, I know I could become the kind of person who does. And that’s enough for now.