Who you are right now won't fucking cut it. (The only real way to change)
It starts with a confession.
I have a confession.
At this stage of my life, it’s no longer difficult to say.
This is only because it’s a confession I’ve made before—a confession that, if you also confront it, might make you physically squirm.
You’ll wonder why I’m telling you this, at first, and probably want to bite my head off for suggesting it. You might shake your first and scream at the device from which you’re reading these words.
Because, who am I to tell you what to do?
It’s difficult to admit, isn’t it? How most humans today are such sellouts? How we’re encouraged to tell other people how to live, when we’re barely students ourselves. How we’re encompassing our belief systems in frameworks, models, ideologies, philosophies, and religions, to function only as evidence to somehow prove we know whatever the fuck we’re talking about.
We’re all fools. Unfortunately, most of us are blind fools, instead of curious fools. If I’m going to choose any lifelong foolishness, I’m going to choose the fools’ path of endless exploration, questioning, curiosity, and daring to share the imperfect parts.
This is my strange way to show why I—someone who is not a psychologist, a therapist, or cognitive scientist in any way—am so determined to discover the answers to this one fundamental question.
What that question is can change depending on who you ask, but at least I’m confident not all of us are trying to “preach,” but to learn collectively.
Before I tell you this confession, I acknowledge this is a difficult thing for people who think in endless, destructive, beautifully complicated loops.
People who struggle daily with their wayward minds—whether you’re neurodivergent, are knee-deep in the abyss of mental health complications, or suffering in another abstract yet psychologically verified way—understand that it’s difficult to recognize this truth, rip it out of their chest, and present it like a bed or fresh organs on a butcher’s table.
(And yes, I am one of those people, though I don’t think that’s a mystery)
So again, at thirty years of age, I confess:
I’ve died many times.
Even that, is a lie.
I’ve destroyed myself many times.
Killed. Punished. Eviscerated.
That, Dear Thinker, is the truth.
In fact—and maybe this will disgust you—but I’ve lost count into how many times I’ve committed this act.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve reached into the cavity of my mind, my consciousness, my soul, my chest—because God, if you’re serious about this, it hurts like hellfire—stared my Old Self in the face, raised the knife, and cut myself into pieces.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve taken on the role of the Murderer and the Mortician, diving into ligaments that are invisible, that lurk deeper than the muscle, sinew, veins, blood, and bone that formulate the flesh-laden human body.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve looked upon my Old Self’s corpse, spat on it, set it aflame, and watched, watched, watched, as my Becoming Self—the Self that fought for release, to demand this destruction—looked upon the smoke and roiling flames, before slowly curling into a position of submission, as something entirely new and frightening through the ashes.
Maybe you’ve done this, too.
If you have, you understand.
If you haven’t, I’m hoping this letter brings some sort of clarity. Or, curiosity. Or, another idea in a sea of unhelpful explorations.
Because many people and legitimate experts talk about how things work, but not a lot of them are writing about those experiences from the perspective of someone who’s still wrestling with the potential answers.
If you’re wondering, to put this observation in an almost insultingly simple way, I have destroyed myself many times because there is simply no other way to pursue what matters most to me.
If you have a specific vision of yourself in mind that you don’t feel “ready” for, the only way to get there is to kill the parts of you preventing those outcomes from shaping into reality. Radical action needs to take place for deep thinkers, deep dreamers, and deep artists to burn themselves to ashes.
I’m confident sharing this confession with you not to ruminate in self-pity, but to acknowledge that I’m still learning.
I’m writing to actively create a path for myself—and hopefully inspire you to do the same for yourself—that paves a favorable direction for this new Resurrection.
Today, to be frank with you, I want to talk about a lot of things related to this.
Things that, separated, don’t make much sense, but together, they should serve as synchronous cables designed to serve one another down to the barest bone.
We’re going to explore many avenues today:
I — The Self: Questioning and unraveling the concept of the Self, and what that truly means for the individual.
II — The Mirror: Radical self-examination through contemplation, physical and mental habits, and systems designed for your Future Self.
III — The Ghost: Who you want to become through intentional action, imagination, creativity, and responsibility. Not who you were, or who you are today. This is where we break down who you're building on this Resurrection Quest through suffering, learning, creation, and consequence.
While I wasn’t planning on organizing my personal newsletters to you this way, Dear Thinker, I think it’ll be much more valuable to read in this format.
My goal today isn’t to change your mind.
That’s never my goal.
But, like you, I’m sharing what makes me curious.
I’m on a quest of my own design, motivated to destroy the Old Self to get closer to the vision I’ve canvassed across my mind.
And, I don’t have all the answers to these questions. I only have a personal journey to reference, to build into the diagram set before me, to follow and learn from and fail and perhaps allow it to kill yet another Self in the future that simply won’t allow my ambitions to take hold.
This is an exploration.
Welcome to it.
I — The Self.
"The interpreter module creates the illusion that we are in control of our actions, and it does so by constructing theories about our behavior based on our past experiences." — Michael Gazzaniga, neuroscientist and professor
What is the Self?
It depends on where you look. If I were sitting across from you at a table, drinking from a fresh coffee, pondering on this subject while you wait for my response, I would probably tell you something so simple, and so muddled, you wouldn’t know what to do with it.
A neuroscientist might touch only on the mechanical makings of what the “Self” could be—which is valuable—but often leaving out the other machinations that make this topic so puzzling for humans.
Sometimes, we see the Self as purely reactive.
The Self doesn’t know which behavior to adopt or imitate unless it has an example to follow. This could be ingrained in a conscious or unconscious level. I’ve read some arguments that this gives an illusion of control, where we convince ourselves we know what the “Self” is, but we actually don’t know, because we’re not aware of what’s influencing the Self to become what it is.
This includes past experiences, knowledge you’ve collected, people who’ve inspired you, art that struck a chord with you, etc.
Then, you have people like David Hume, who coined the Bundle Theory.
If you’re not familiar—and I wasn’t, until I did research for this essay—the Bundle Theory argues that objects and the Self aren’t unified, or “one thing.” They’re just collections—or, literally, “bundles”—of properties and personal perceptions. There’s not one element to them that indicates it has its own “I,” or identity placement.
So, for example, a grape isn’t a grape because it’s a grape. It’s not just “sweet,” or a “fruit,” or red, purple, or green. It’s just a bundle of qualities.
The only thing this theory compares to, in my mind, is how our human bodies process nutrients from how we eat and process food.
For example, when you eat a cheeseburger, you’re not consuming a “cheeseburger.” Your body doesn’t recognize beef as “beef,” or cheese as “cheese.” It’s not reading those things as what they are on a social scale.
You’re, instead, recognizing and consuming the specific nutrients—fats, calories, protein, etc.—which are, in fact, bundled qualities of those elements. Once they enter your body, their original names and labels don’t matter. What does matter is how your body responds to it, and if what you consume carries the necessary attributes that leads to a strong internal, mental, and outward physique.
Hume seems to challenge the idea that there is no “soul” at all. Instead, he seems to propose that our identities and souls are just what we perceive them to be.
In other words, an illusion.
I don’t personally believe in this in every stage (at least, I feel like I haven’t been convinced yet) but I do understand some of the logic.
Reason why is actually because of the example I just gave you: the body, the food we consume, and how those nutrients are understood and dispersed.
When I think of the Self, I think of the Soul.
While we don’t have any concrete scientific evidence that a soul could exist, I find it really interesting that so many cultures, historical figures, and distinguished empires seemed to champion the concept of the soul, and what that could mean for humanity’s long-term purpose.
To be honest with you, this is a discussion worthy of its own exploration. The soul and its many convoluted, fascinating origins. Philosophers, scientists, and historians have debated about the existence and probability of the human soul for centuries, and I do believe this is something we will not be able to prove with any future technologies. (At least, within my lifetime)
You could source from many different minds on what the Soul could be.
Aristotle would describe it as “the first actuality of the natural body that has natural life.” He opposed Plato’s ideologies of the Soul as an immortal essence that was separate from the human body, meant to survive death and even become part of a reincarnation cycle.
Epicurus would identify the Soul as an entity composed of atoms that “disperse” upon death, rejecting the idea that the Soul has any corporeal identity after the human host meets their end. Existence dies alongside the flesh.
Stoics have an interesting perspective. Admittedly, I haven’t read as much as I would like beyond Marcus Aurelius’s direct teachings—this is something I’m excited to change in this coming year with my reading goals—but it seems that Aurelius, in particular, viewed the Soul as an embodiment of virtue, rather than anything metaphysical, or evidence of immortality.
So, what does this have to do with the Self?
When you confront yourself with the idea of the Soul, you have to rationalize what that relationship with the Self could mean.
If a Christian believes their Self and Soul are intertwined with God, God’s books and teachings, and the belief system tied into it, they’ll search for any possible reflection within themselves to reach paradise after death.
While a nihilist might be more pragmatic, they’re usually opinionated on what existence and the Self could mean.
The nihilists I’ve spoken to don’t believe there is such thing as a Soul, so they don’t have any desire to explore their “reason” for living.
I’m personally hoping that life exists after death, simply because I don’t want my existence to come to an end. I want there to be a Soul, to give further reason to my purpose being here on this planet. I’m not religious, or tied to any strict belief system. I simply believe there must be a reason humans—and potentially millions of other species on planets far beyond our understanding and current cosmic reach—exist, whether that’s as an accident, a form of intelligent design, or a mix of both.
You might be asking yourself these questions if you’ve ever tried making sense of your Self, the Soul, and the complicated threads woven throughout:
“How can I get in touch with my true Self, if I don’t know if a Soul exists?”
“I don’t care at all about the Soul, or whether it exists or not. I only care about achieving my personal goals, and right now I’m not getting there. Why?”
“If my Self and my Soul are intertwined, how come nothing makes sense? I try everything, and nothing seems aligned. No matter how my mistakes I make or how many projects I start, it’s all a jumbled mess.”
You could add a dozen variations to these, depending on where you are in life, Dear Thinker, but these are the questions I imagine most people in this dilemma would find themselves—if they care about this at all, of course.
Some would call this overthinking.
I call it trying to solve a significant problem all humans can relate to—whether they realize it or not—while navigating life with as much evidential support, creative energy, and listening to intuition and logic as tightly and loyally as I can.
Perhaps you feel the same.
With that said, here is where I suggest you reframe what the Soul and Self might mean in the grand scheme of self-creation:
Whether you’re religious, atheistic, deistic, or simply just trying to follow what drives you towards what makes the most sense… you are a creature of interconnected creation, actions, thoughts, emotions, and explorations.
Your ideal Self—the person, the body, the mind you’ve always dreamed of buildilng—can only be defined through the movements you make, not just the thoughts you paint across the mural of your conscious.
Your Soul, if it exists, actually is not relevant at all when it comes to the decisions you make with this one lifetime.
It’s, ironically, quite pointless to be nihilistic when the existence of the Soul does not matter when it comes to your individual path to creating, making, and establishing a footprint in the universe as we know it.
You must—with all the newfound awareness you possess—reject the idea that your possible Soul has any direct hold over your potential Self.
This was a very hard thing for most people to accept. They want religion, ethics, and other outside forces to define who they should be. They want idealisms and ways of living to be spoon-fed to them. They want to feel like their Selves can grow, change, break apart, and rebuild on their own.
This is the fault of most belief systems.
There is no shortcut to creating a Self. There is no “one answer” to identifying what makes you worth living. There is no end-all, be-all category that defines any attachment between you, and the Self you want to embody. There is no one “expert,” or mentor, or guide who can promise you a way to get there.
That responsibility is yours, and yours alone.
II — The Mirror.
“I am wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of, but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance." — Plato, Apology
You might be wondering, Dear Thinker, what we could possibly talk about now that we’ve confronted the ugly, beautiful reality of the Self.
You’ve now explored an idea that you are responsible for who you become. Action matters more than thought. Your Self is determined solely by those actions. Your Soul may or may not exist—that’s not for me to figure out, and frankly impossible to prove in this current timeline.
(Although I hope we get actual evidence of such a thing before I die)
There’s a chance you’ve never actually stepped outside of yourself before.
There’s an even higher chance you’ve tried to step outside of yourself in order to create a satisfactory answer to a question you may have about the internal workings of your mind, your actions, and so forth.
Most people might interpret what I’m saying as learning to be empathetic. Empathy is very important, yes. However, this is less about practicing empathy and emotional intelligence, and more about learning to separate.
No, this is about detachment.
Detachment is not apathy—it’s building resilience to low-level thinking, habits, and actions that used to waste your energy, and now can no longer touch you.
As a sensitive and highly aware person, I understand why the topic of detachment is very uncomfortable for others who feel the same.
But, it’s very important to recognize that purposeful detachment is not the same as apathy. It’s not about not caring. It’s about creating a barrier between your emotions, thoughts, and—yes, the Self—against ideas, people, concepts, and dysregulation that hinders you from painting a clear mental picture.
When I was a young teenager, I hated it when people didn’t like what I liked. I felt the need to constantly defend the books I loved, the movies I loved, and other pieces of art that gave me a sense of meaning and were criticized by others.
In my early twenties, I very quickly learned that this was an extremely low-level way of thinking. I was not practicing an intelligent way to behave. I was so attached to the mediums I was consuming—as well as my personal writing, since fiction is my first and most ever-lasting love—that I would get red in the face and laughably bothered by the opinions of others.
This was a deep-seated insecurity. It’s obvious, looking back. I haven’t felt that way in well over a decade, and I remember what it felt like to finally break free of those self-inflicted chains, and recognize the value of detachment.
This is a hard skill to develop, but it’s absolutely necessary if you want to become a remarkably intelligent human. You have to get comfortable with competition. You have to get comfortable with the idea of achieving something someone else doesn’t have.
If you want to be incredible at anything, you have to be so secure within your interests, creative exploits, and ideas, that people disagreeing with you, mocking you, or inflicting any intention of harming you, cannot hurt you.
The people who don’t know how to do this are not aware of how attached they are to their insecurities. They care so much about what others think of them, that they have no idea how to grow individually. This puts them in a constant state of paralysis, indecision, and directionless projects.
Now, consider this for your own life, Dear Thinker.
Have you found yourself caring too much about what others think? Your peers? Your family? Your significant other?
Have you found yourself trapped in a cycle of addictive self-abuse, where you’re the only one truly inflicting damage and pain onto your mind?
Have you wasted hours of your time scrolling on social media, projecting your insecurities onto them? Wishing them harm, misfortune, or even parasocially toxic death, simply because they have what you don’t?
Have you spent your limited time on this planet so concerned about how you measure up to the billions of other strangers on this floating rock in the universe, that you’ve never been able to dissect what creates potential within you?
These are extremely damaging loops within your consciousness that prevent you—and millions of others who think like you—within a cycle of self-victimization.
Dear Thinker, let me be very clear about this, and if you only take one handwritten note from reading today’s letter, I advise it’s this:
To victimize yourself is the path to eternal destruction.
Everyone suffers.
If you view yourself as “special” or “different” to most humans, it’s crucial to recognize this is not objectively true. If you consider your struggles as too special or different to your neighbor’s, you will find every excuse possible to avoid responsibility.
To intentionally detach—to learn how to step outside of your Current Self and observe your actions, personality, failures, and wins, in order to achieve remarkable goals that you currently can’t reach—you must let go.
You will, as a result, remain in the same place you started. Forever.
To fight against this—for it is a systemic problem—every single individual must build their own Mirror.
Including you.
This Mirror acts as an objective guide. It reveals your deepest faults. It explores your most powerful attributes. It allows you to examine the previously unexamined.
With a carefully focused perception, you must peel back your previous actions, questions, and inactions to understand how your mind has played a role against itself.
Make no mistake—it’s very difficult for humans to make meaning out of negative experiences. (At first)
When most people try to pick apart what happened to them, they end up failing.
It’s not because they’re not “good” at objectively learning from their faults. It’s that they haven’t learned what it’s like to ruminate on their past actions, mistakes, and experiences without feeling worse.
To destroy your Old Self, you have to make meaning. Meaning-making requires deep reflection and examination. It’s pointless to look back at your life and only try to make sense of it without learning how to apply those learnings into future systems and thought processes.
Most people stop the self-examination process once they learn—whether on a surface level or a mid-level—how to understand their feelings.
This is only the first step, however. It’s not enough to learn what’s causing your emotional reaction. It’s important, of course—and a field of skill-building I’m still trying to adapt as a neurodivergent individual—but it’s not the finished outcome you should be searching for.
I’ve come a long way as a person who often gets trapped in her own thought loops, self-sabotage, and mental spirals. I’ve faced moments of mania and psychosis with rippling consequences. I’ve endured the deep pits of depression, anxiety, and poisonous self-victimization before I knew how to name them.
The only way I was able to identify how to recognize these patterns in their infancy—at least, to the best of my ability, as I have not conquered this quite yet—was learning how to reframe my Mirror.
The daily practices I commit to that help build this Mirror, are:
Daily walks and resistance training. Everyone is telling you to walk more, and you should listen. Walking is extremely important for your physical, mental, and creative longevity. It clears the mind, improves cardiovascular endurance, and burns calories. Resistance training builds muscle, which assists your bone health, long-term movement as a human, and positively adds self-competition to your goal arsenal.
Write, write, and write. Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, start writing. Capture daily thoughts. Dash your mental trappings onto sticky notes, or in your note-taking app. Use the internet or a physical destination as a place to store your questions, ideas, and fleeting streams of consciousness. Writing is thinking—and it benefits everyone.
Eat enough (good) food. I’m not a nutritionist, nor a dietitian. You must consult those professionals for proper guidance. My personal experience comes from overcoming an eating disorder, using apps to make sure I’m eating enough calories for my physical and mental needs, and recognizing that the human body is complex, yet needs nutrients to survive. I’m not telling you what to eat—just, please prioritize awareness around the food you consume. It affects your progress more than you realize.
Read, read, and read. Similar to writing, you must read every single day. Most people suggest audiobooks, but I suggest eyeballing actual words on a page to teach yourself how sentences flow, how dialogue is structured, how ideas are communicated, and how literal mechanical operations of syllables, ideas, and writing techniques build upon one another. (Audiobooks are still great, in their own way, but I do challenge you to try both).
Consume 10% less and create 10% more, every day. With the exception of reading, it’s valuable to protect your creation time. Once you build a reliable habit that cuts down your mindless consumption habits, you’ll start to see mental and physical changes. Your emotions will feel more present. Your thoughts will start to make more sense. Use this extra weight to create more, whether that’s through writing, an art form of your choice, mapping out an entrepreneurial idea, or something else. Humans are meant to make, so make.
These practices, while small, compound dramatically with daily attribution.
These types of actions are also ridiculously powerful when it comes to self-examination. It’s impossible to ignore individual progress when you’re obeying the inherent needs of the human mind and physical body.
Build your Mind.
Build your Body.
Build your Mirror.
Your exact path will look very different to mine, but you can start to learn what’s causing those mental blockages that prevent you from achieving the Self you want to build.
Without awareness—without the Mirror—you become trapped in the endless psychic loop of eternal destruction.
If you don’t follow small daily practices, you won’t recognize what your Future Self is asking for. You won’t have the mental availability to create the projects your Future Self envisioned. You won’t have the space within your physical or corporeal form to allow the Future Self to take their roots.
The choice is yours… but it’s critical you think long and hard about your decision, whether or not you build the Mirror.
That responsibility is yours, and yours alone.
III — The Ghost.
“"What does your conscience say? — 'You should become the person you are!’” — Friedrich Nietzsche
Dear Thinker, if I’m being honest with you, I originally had this essay split into four parts. But then, it would be too long, and I would end up straying from the points that matter the most.
At this point in the letter, what matters isn’t trying to persuade you to embark on a quest of killing your Old Self—not literally, mind you; please take this metaphorically and don’t do anything crazy—but to remind you that it’s necessary.
You have to take drastic, insane, radical action in order to change your life.
I’ll be writing another personal essay on this soon, but stop and think about this for a second. Take out a piece of paper, open a document, or any platform that allows you to think openly and write without abandon. Write one sentence—just one, for now—and channel one question:
“What does my Future Self deserve that my Current Self can’t offer?”
Answer it. Do not erase it. Do not cross anything out. Answer that one question in whatever document you’ve opened, and use that as the core reminder of why you’re doing what you’re doing.
This is, as you can assume, is much easier said than done.
Anyone can let their vocal chords tear across their throats and bellow from the tallest mountains about how they’re finally going to transform their body, mind, and Self.
Then, you’ll find they have collapsed months later, wallowing in the digital doom of the internet’s deep abyss, waiting for another excuse, another escape.
(You know who these people are, subconsciously; everyone does)
While I am going to write about this in-depth in a separate letter soon—with frameworks, systems, and learnings from the most brilliant minds who’ve ever graced fields of human study—I find myself wondering how to tell you what you need to do in order to take that first step.
For most, the first step is the hardest.
For me, the first step is the easiest.
I recognize you might be facing a different stage of Resurrection right now.
You might be in a period of deep suffering.
Your flashlight is gone. Your mind is wandering, desperate, and hungry. But, you’re lost. You’re so trapped within the cyclone of pain, sadness, longing, and solemnity that it would be impossible to show you your Future Self even if you had all the potential in the world. This illness is the Dream Killer.
You might be creating with feverish desperation.
You love what you build, but you’re not seeing any tangible outcomes. You create, and share, and create, and share, and end up curling into yourself because no one seems to care. No one cares, and so you stop believing in that initial rush of fulfillment. This slow, dreadful feeling washes like poison in your veins, until you abandon yet another project, and jump on the next.
You might be facing consequences from trying something like this before.
You’re a veteran in killing your Old Self. You might be more like me, where you know no fear when it comes to self-reinvention, but you’re not sure where to direct yourself going forward. You’re so enraptured with the vision you’ve set before you that you struggle to make sense of time as it passes you by. A week feels like a month. A month feels like a century. Soon, you get impatient, lose sight of your progress, and abandon your ship for another.
I won’t apologize if these remind you of something entropic you might be experiencing right now.
If it will push you to become hideously aware about your current state of mind, physicality, and mental strength, then it needs to be written. It must be voiced.
If you deserve one thing, it’s the opportunity to view yourself as the human being you are not, not just who you are.
If you’re disgusted with who you are, you must do something to change it.
No amount of wishing will change anything. No amount of prayer will change anything. No amount of journaling will change anything. No amount of “manifestation” will change anything. No amount of staring your Old Self in the face, sneering, and kicking them while they’re down, will change anything.
You must decide, then act.
(You can thank Epictetus for that philosophy)
No, this is not about brutalizing your Old Self.
It’s about laying your Old Self to rest.
With savagery and grace intact.
You must treat your current habits—the losing habits of the Current Self and the Old Self—as intentional saboteurs that deserve to be eradicated completely.
Anything less will leave the temptation of the Old Self waiting to snap you up in their greedy jaws, eyes and gums bleeding with lust and decay.
In order to destroy the Old Self with intention, rationality, and emotional intelligence, you must think about it holistically, because every decision we make as humans is interwoven within each other, even if they don’t appear that way.
For example, writing is thinking.
People who write more, think with clarity. They’re usually more articulate, more well-read, and are going to support their arguments with more research and stability than someone who doesn’t. By practicing writing as a vocation, they learn how to think better than most.
Most people probably wouldn’t consider writing and thinking to be directly connected, but they are. Many actions we commit to daily are interconnected with many other factors.
The same is true for the food you eat, your mental health, physical activity, and your gut microbiome.
(There is, after all, a reason experts call the gut the second brain—and we can talk about the gut-brain axis and how nutrition matters in another personal letter).
Dear Thinker, this whole vision might be daunting.
You might even wonder if this is worthy of your attention.
This journey is not meant for the weak, I won’t lie to you.
It’s a mission that’s designed for the people who are embodied with tumors of the oppressed; weaknesses ingrained into their bone, their blood, and their psyche from years, if not decades, of repeated abuse from the Old Self.
It starts with taking radical action. With your mind.
A promise you must make for your Future Self. A silent vow that you will do whatever it takes to break the chains of the Old Self in order to latch onto the rewards of your Future Self.
This applies to literally any goal you can think of. If you want money, but you find yourself locked in a tailspin of feeling sorry for the fact you don’t have it, you must take radical action. If you want to be healthy, but you find yourself binging on hyper-palatable temptations like chips, cookies, and snacks well into midnight every day, you must take radical action. If you want to build muscle, but you find you can’t commit to the schedule you’ve created, you must take radical action. If you’re lonely, but you find yourself wondering why no one will talk to you when you haven’t left your apartment in sixty days, you must take radical action.
My hope for you, Dear Thinker, is this:
That you look at yourself with deep, unpolished honesty, and you put who you are now in a position of reckless, radical, and unapologetic self-correction.
You don’t deserve the ideal outcome of the Future Self.
No one is truly born into the Self they want to become. They yearn for it, they dream for it, and they work for it. You, as well, must earn it.
Kill your Old Self with intelligence, awareness, patience, and clarity.
Then, you’ll start to find the pieces of the Self you’ve always wanted to become.