finding yourself means going beyond thinking in parallel and antithesis

the beautiful nuances of who you are must be found through bottom up exploration

I used to believe I was an original thinker, and to a certain extent, I definitely was. Not in the way of being radically original, as you are supposed to be when people suggest you are, as if your thinking was so completely new and so completely different from others’ thinking that surely no one else came up with the same thing already.

I was an original thinker in the way my ideas and values were alloys of thoughts materially sourced from places and people afar. I welded my neurons in new required wet lines, fired up the circuits, and injected the shapes with those thoughts, now fully mine. People around started thinking I was crazy ambitious, that I was different from others, and that one day I’d become someone, whatever that meant for them. For me specifically, it surely meant becoming the next Steve.

Steve Jobs, of course.

I think this often happens to high intensity people who grow in secondary cities, or whatever falls below that according to the inherent social scale we all locally carry with us. My hometown is considered a secondary city for some reasons I consider quite unfair: it should not be higher than a tertiary city!
This is not meant to be a Disapproval Statement of the place I grew up in, but I wanted to let my mind wander and I let whatever came out be glued on the paper. And what came out is that part of me, hiding in plain sight, that still indulges in antithesis thinking, that thinking where how you define yourself is not a bottom up discovery and creation of who you are, but rather a rejection of what you dislike and, why not, underneath it all, look at with superior contempt.

As I was saying, I think this often happens to high intensity people who grow up in secondary cities. In lack of real people in your proximity you can temporarily idolise, not only do you turn away to borrow some resources from, but you position yourself against what you happen to have around.

It’s your first pedestal, a beautifully imperfect yet loveful attempt to stand on your own. A Declaration of Not Being, masqueraded as a Declaration of Being.

Thinking in antithesis is kinda necessary, helpful at least. It’s easy, it’s instantaneous, it’s reactive. It’s also very clear, almost undeniable. Being averse to something else gives you a strong message that, well, you don’t wanna be like that, you don’t wanna think like them. And it works, it works when you gotta start somewhere to, consciously or unconsciously, discover who you are.

But then, it breaks. It happens in the same way the apartment you just moved in is a mess and you want it to be beautifully decorated. You start removing things, but at a certain point, there is not much else to remove. You’re left with naked walls and a naked pavement. That’s you, left undressed, naked, wanting to dress up again asap, because being naked feels cold, even when it’s summer. It could be forty-five degrees celsius hot but nobody ain’t removing that blanket off of me. A friend tells me that’s likely an evolutionary response that mimics the sensation of human touch. That makes sense, especially when my girlfriend doesn’t want to be hugged at night and I am left hugging my pillow instead.

When you’re naked and you want to dress again, you have many choices. The one that makes the most sense is to actually think about how you would like your outfit to be, hypothesize what you like, get the items, and try if it all fits. But nobody does that.

Well, I haven’t.

What I did instead was to challenge all the stripping I had done up until that point. Like, yes, I wanted to get away from everything I felt so strongly averse to and hated and disliked but now that I don’t know what to put on and I am also naked well what if maybe I have been too harsh? What if I was wrong? What if I have misread the situation? What if I instead liked it?

All of a sudden I am a magic ball, bouncing back and forth on the billiard table court, until I stop in the middle, unable to move.

When you realise it doesn’t work, you’re not moving, you want to cling on to something. You wanna cling to something and hold on to it as strongly as you can. You begin thinking in parallel. You look for how others dress, for others’ new concepts, for others’ new styles. And you’re excited, cause in that endeavour, you see things you didn’t imagine existed. You see things that somehow resemble what you confusedly saw already, but were too afraid of cleaning your lenses and looking further within.
And in the curious and hopeful act, you create new stories. You tell yourself that you too are gonna wear baggy jeans and extra wide shirts, and if you live in Berlin, you definitely tell yourself that you too need a pair of new balance.

But those are all stories, because in the end, you don’t know.

You are too different from others for what others do to be a perfect match with what you want to do. The tongue twister was not intended, I am sorry if you need to re-read it twice. Anyway, and even if you look identical on the outside, there are so many inner nuances that’ll break the outfit you wanna adopt. The only way to reveal those nuances is to create your own style and have the courage to own it. And that’s very hard because when you no longer think in antithesis and when you no longer think in parallel, you think from the bottom up, which is aiming at uncharted territories while barely being able to see the horizon, while the mind is painting detailed catastrophes of how you will fall on the other side.

You’re no longer delegating the courage to choose to others, you’re choosing this time.

We recognise it’s a bit ridiculous when we talk in terms of furniture or outfits. Imagine someone crying because they have bought a new lamp but they are not sure if it’s gonna fit next to the bed. Or even worse, if they’re gonna like it two years down the line. Or even worse than worse, if it’s the right lamp because they haven’t seen anybody else successful with that lamp. What lamp does Dua Lipa have at home?

Thinking in parallel reduces the perceived uncertainty but postpones the real bottom-up thinking and the real bottom-up discovery. I know because it is what I have done all my life. It was Pink Floyd and my story was that I’d write songs about society. It was Slash and I’d become a guitar player. It was Stephen Hawking and I’d become an astrophysicist. It was Steve Jobs and I’d change the world. It was my manager and I’d be as great as him to lead while still living a wonderful lifestyle. It was Tyler Dank and I’d build a great company fully remote. It was Cristina Cacioppo and I’d learn to code and then launch my startup as a technical CEO. It was Tomas Pueyo and I’d become a great geography writer while working in tech. It was Ayushi Thakkar and I’d become a great writer by just writing about emotions and feelings.

The story I told myself seemed my story, but it was not. It was an attempt to create a working Frankenstein by putting pieces of others I liked.

All of this has been useful and refreshing. Crazy how many people have so many ways of finding greatness. But I can’t keep on running behind others’ way of greatness. Their ideas of greatness are an idea, a potential scenario in my head, unmatched by reality. This is the reason why so often I stopped doing things or I just kept on planning things, because I got attached to the story, and when the story didn’t work, instead of adjusting, I fiercely remained attached to it, and instead of accepting that maybe what I like is not to write about geography, but to write about what I naturally write about when nobody watches, I longed for another story which was reasonable to be attached to.

The ways this works multiply at so many levels. It spreads across how you live your Friday night, how you like to travel, how you like to train, how you like to work, when you wake up, and when you go to sleep.

I’ve come to believe that most of personal greatness is not planned, it emerges. One of my favorite examples of this is Joe Rogan. If you go to his first hundred episodes, you will find him interviewing comedians, business people, and fighters. Pretty much, what he still does today. But today, he is Joe Rogan, he is the person who interviews comedians, business people, and fighters! And magically, it makes sense! But if you put yourself in his shoes to start with, you would have surely thought, how does this make sense at all? It needs to be only about fighters, it needs to be only about the challenges in their careers, it needs to be that, it needs to be this.

They are all stories, only actions unfold the truth. You don’t need permission to do something you like, you don’t need to do something for five years, you don’t need to start something only if you gonna spend the rest of your time doing it, you don’t need others’ stories to attach yourself to, you don’t need a track to follow. You can just do things, maybe you like them, maybe not, maybe you do them one hour per week, maybe it’s gonna take you two months to complete something others take one or fifty weeks to complete.

Yesterday I recorded my first podcast, and half of what I wanted to talk about was thrown off once I followed the flow of the conversation. All the ideas I had for this blog were also thrown out once I paid attention to what I like to write. And it’s not pieces about coffee and maps, it’s pieces like this one, where I keep on using the dress analogy when it actually started as a furniture analogy, but it was too late to change.