Prologue: Hi, I’m Michael
Dear reader,
I don’t know who I am.
Isn’t that the best beginning for an adventure? There’s not only a whole universe to explore, but also a whole self. It’s equally exciting and terrifying. The greater the potential adventure, the scarier it is to set out on it. For the first time in my life I’m at the edge of something I know nothing about, and can’t pretend to know anything about.
I was born in Poland in 1977, at a time when it was both Catholic and communist. I was the first child of the total four my mom would have, but my brother wouldn’t be born for another three years, and my sisters were nine and ten years away. I was born with an emergency c-section, since the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. If you ask me right now, I would say that I was born at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place under just the right circumstances. However, this only tells me where and when I was, not who I am.
I know this much: I’m gay. I’m a man. I’m an introvert. I’m an explorer. I’m a storyteller. I know that I love the people I love, and that this journey of exploring who I am also means re-discovering everything in the universe, including me and the relationships I have.
But other than that, I haven’t got the faintest idea of who I am.
I wonder what you think when you read that sentence. I imagine myself twenty years ago; someone saying “I don’t know who I am” would make me do a mental eye-roll, because it sounds so deep and pretentious. Three months ago, I would have been certain that I know what you mean, and that I don’t either. Then I would have proceeded to tell you who you are — because at that point I still knew who I was, and therefore could tell you who you were.
It’s like knowing who you are turns you into a carnival mirror for others to reflect themselves in. Sometimes we offer that mirror-image when someone asks us for it, other times we force that mirror-image on people unasked. The distortions in these mirrors will be different, depending on who that person is and how they, in turn, have been reflected by all the people in their lives. Sometimes, the distortions will be painful, like when something we want to be looks distorted and twisted in the reflection from another human. Other times, they will be a source of happiness and surprise, when something we thought was really small in us, is distorted to look big in another person’s reflection. The strength of the reflection, and by extension the strength of the distortion, is directly correlated to how important the person reflecting us is.
There’s a catch 22 here. It’s really hard to how who you are until you’ve seen enough of yourself reflected in other humans, but no other human can offer you an undistorted reflection. Over time, the same distortions of ourselves will have repeated enough times for us to accept them as truths. If people tell you enough times that you are a responsible person, and that is what you want to be, then that distortion becomes part of you that you like. On the other hand, if enough people tell you you are a worthless piece of shit, then that distortion might eventually become a part of yourself that you hate — but hey, you’re a worthless piece of shit, and I guess that hating yourself for being worthless is just what a worthless piece of shit would do, right?
I have been both: the worthless piece of shit, a feeling I shared with many fellow gay kids of my generation. The responsible person, a trait shared by many oldest siblings. The distortion of being a worthless piece of shit was in a way the easiest to cast off; it gave little at a very high cost, and it also assaulted a part of me I can be sure of: I am gay. I was fortunate enough to live in a time and at a place where enough people held up a mirror with a counter-distortion, if you will: the Pride movement. In a way, the Pride movement is a measurement of how accepting society is. If nobody gets reflected with a distortion for being gay, there’s no need for counter-distortions.
It’s self-evident why worthless piece of shit is a destructive distortion, but even the seemingly positive distortions come with a price. If you are a responsible person, there are things you do not do: you don’t take great risks. You are not fun, because fun easily turns into irresponsible. It doesn’t have to, but the risk of having fun turning into being irresponsible makes it safer to never be fun. It did for me.
And so, I thought I knew who I was. I was the responsible big brother, the person who knew so much stuff that his friends called him Mickipedia (from Micke, the Swedish nickname for Michael, and Wikipedia), the caretaker who had answers to most people’s problems. I was in the middle of a successful career. After a life of trying things out — programmer, writer, gamer, project manager, skydiver, personal trainer, dance instructor, lecturer, writer, teacher, to name a few — I had seen enough reflections of myself to know that this was what I’m capable of. Life was at a peak higher than all previous peaks. I had a close circle of friends, and a partner of six years that I love more today than ever (something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and will explore in this book), a nice apartment and a flashy title: Head of Innovation at a communications agency. I liked the role. I was challenged enough to be stimulated, and while there were things that chafed, the good things outnumbered the bad. Society told me I was successful too, if you see the salary for the job you have as a collective measure of success. I earned almost twice the median salary in Sweden, and so I had a comfortable life.
Then, something happened. Some call it realizing who you are. Others call it an awakening, or a re-birth. I think some would even call this hell, because not knowing who you are when you’re 40 is terrifying.
Misunderstand me correctly: I’m still the same old person I was. I still strive to be kind, just like I believe most people do. I still have the same amazing group of people around me, with my partner, my friends and my family being closest, and the whole group is so much larger than that. If you have bought this book, in a way you belong to that group too even though I do not know you. The action of buying this book affected my life in a positive way, and I hope that my book pays you back a thousandfold.
So what’s the difference? I think that the best way to describe it is this:
Imagine that living life is like exploring a giant castle with endless space: each experience is a new room. We can never be sure if the next room will hold treasure, a trapdoor or a monster, if it will lead to the dungeon or the throne room, but still we explore it. It never seems to end, although we know it isn’t true; everything has an end.
I was at a point where I had explored so much of this castle that I thought I had most of it figured out. There were still countless rooms to explore but I had grasped the mechanism and the rules of the layout. I had the means to explore it. I knew which rooms were more likely to hold treasures. I knew how to deal with the monsters. I knew how immense this castle was, and that I never would be able to explore all of it, but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. My castle had windows, but they were always dark. There was nothing outside of life, and so there was nothing outside my castle. Looking through these windows showed nothing but a dark, endless void. It was like looking at death, and since I was afraid of it, I avoided even looking at the windows. And it wasn’t hard to ignore them, all castles offer a multitude of experiences and distractions at any given moment.
Have you ever heard, read or seen something that for a moment really blows your mind? Something that shifts your perspective for a little bit, or makes you realize that the world is larger than you thought? To me, that feeling is like a lightning flash outside my castle, for a short while illuminating the darkness outside the widows, hinting that there may not be a void outside. The stronger the feeling, the brighter the flash. Those moments were frequent when I was a kid, but as I grew older, they became increasingly rare. One of these moments I remember is when were talking about the Big Bang. Up until that talk I had looked at Big Bang as that singular moment when the universe in an instant was filled with heat and hydrogen atoms. Someone said that you could look at Big Bang as an event that still keeps happening, 13.8 billion years later, and will keep happening until runs out of energy (the heat death of the universe). So if Big Bang is still happening, that means that we are the Big Bang happening. This particular lightning bolt was intense, and just like the bolts before this, it faded.
This event is like the sun rose outside my castle, revealing that there indeed is a whole world and a whole universe outside the castle, and it’s beautiful. Beautiful like that moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when David says “Oh my god, it’s full of stars”.
The sun lights up all the rooms too. Sometimes the window through which the sun shines is tiny. Sometimes it’s a panorama window with the grandest view you can imagine. Whatever I’m experiencing at those times becomes amplified in that way a scenic view improves an amazing dinner. Sometimes, the sun disappears behind a rain storm that makes everything drab, wet and gray. But I know the sun is there, and that I will see it eventually.
“To see things in a new light” is an apt saying here, as the sunlight also changed how I see many of the rooms I’ve been through. How the people I’ve had in my life, and those I now have, look. But most of all it changed me. It’s easier for me to be kind and forgiving, towards myself and towards others, in that way it’s easier to be kind on a lazy, sunny summer day compared to a stressful commute on a particularly shitty day.
I’ve been on this journey my whole life: trying to figure out who I am. It’s a funny joke, that when I was so sure I was there, because everything felt so right and good, I realized that the answer is I don’t know. Every single moment in my life makes sense at this exact point, as if each single experience and interaction has a gravity, pulling me towards this exact moment. Some experiences have almost non-existing gravity, like small asteroids. Sometimes they have the gravity of planets, and maybe even suns. If you’re lucky (or maybe really unfortunate), you encounter a black hole. It’s an object with such gravity that you cannot be sure it won’t destroy you — but it can also slingshot you, hurling you further and faster into wherever you’re heading.
This is what happened to me. The particular string of events that turned into my black hole began on June 17th 2017, and ended yesterday, October 22. This period was one filled with contentment, peace, a new-found sense of childish wonder and also a little manic. I had a feeling of something great waiting around the corner. It did, and it didn’t. The speed and force I gained shattered my reality, just to reveal that the new reality the same, but in full Imax rather than on a smartphone screen.
Imagination is an amazing thing. Leave the slightest crack open and it will find a way to get in, and wherever it exists, hopes and dreams are born. Become really good at knowing things, and you’ll have a powerful tool to fight off imagination. There’s nothing like a dose of adult knowledge, delivered in a matter-of-fact tone, to mercilessly destroy whatever labor of imagination it’s aimed at. This, I know, since this is what I did. I’m glad it kept coming back, because now I need it more than ever. Without it, I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with all this newly discovered space. I would have retreated back into the smaller me, knowing that there’s something larger, unexplored. I think I would have found the strength to leave at a later point, but it would have been very painful, knowing that whatever world you’ve explored is just a fraction of your potential.
My “black hole” was a strange period. The feeling of exultation was so strong, so powerful that I questioned my sanity more than once. Not in that half-joking sense, when your certainty of being sane is so high that the joke isn’t threatening, and you laugh. I choked on the laugh.
I’ve had this idea for a while now, a book entitled “Letters from the person I needed when I was younger”. I loved reading as a kid, and my creative streak found an outlet in writing. Writing is one of those things that puts me in a state of flow where time and space blur and disappear. When I was a kid, Stephen King, Arthur C Clarke, Astrid Lindgren and many more heroes of mine created worlds for me to escape into. Books are a way to talk inside the head of living people even after I’m dead, and a way to help people create new worlds in their head. Even though I’ve had quite a few paid gigs as a writer, I’ve rarely dared to dream about becoming an author. This was one of those dreams that I had locked away so tight and so deep, that imagination could not get in. There was not even the faintest hope. The only time I dared to ease the pressure was on the rare occasion I bought a lottery ticket. What I paid for was not the actual lottery ticket. I paid for the ability to dream in that time between the purchase and the actual lottery. I was Schrödinger’s millionaire until I checked the numbers. On a a couple of those occassions I allowed myself to say “maybe I would write”. As soon as I said it, logic and reason started assaulting the dream, and until now they only had to say one thing to make it so weak it faded away: “Well then, mister big-time author, what are you going to write about? A book is so much more complex than a blog post or a short story.”
Knowing they were right, I let hope go. What I had was great, and it was good enough, right? But it came back in force just when I needed it the most: in that moment of enjoying existence tinged with the exhilaration of being slingshot around a black hole towards somerthing new. It came back, and I started writing this book.
If you are an explorer, you have to take risks. I think that’s partly why I’ve taken many a risk for experiences, but few risks for financial gain. That explorer part of me has been kept in strict check by other parts of me that at the time were more important: the big brother, the responsible, the smart person who knows so many things (like the only way to write a book).
I let go of so much unnecessary control that night of June 17th. I think that’s what allowed me to get close enough to the black hole for it to either devour me, or slingshot me into unknown territory. I didn’t know which one it would be until yesterday. When you use gravity assist to accelerate a spacecraft, your calculations must be very exact. You want to get as close as possible, for maximum speed, but not too close because that will make you crash). During this time, I did many things on gut feeling instead of grounded in reasoning and logic. You see, reasoning and logic were my best tools for control, and I was a master with them. For once I tried not to use them. I think it allowed the other parts of me — those that discovered this book, and that I’m discovering in this book — to navigate in a way I never consciously could.
Gut feeling allowed the explorer part of me to do things his way. Instead of waiting until the whole book was ready and in my head, he started writing. And since the explorer no longer had logic and reason restraining him, he said no to the traditional path with publishers and editors and decided to self-publish. I decided to keep the process open, inviting the readers to help edit it.
I’ve never been good at failing when someone’s watching; it made me feel overwhelmed with humility, worthlessness and anxiety, what if this failure is the thing that will define me to others? When someone is watching me doing something where the risk of failure is high, my whole experience is coated with the anticipation of failure. What’s worse, to me, not getting things right the first time used to equal failure. Fear is an excellent motivator in many cases, but not in relationships and creative processes. Indeed, these two would turn out to be the things I had to work the hardest for. In order to succeed, I had to overcome those fears, cliché as it may sound. My fear of failure resulted in perfectionism, because everything can be improved and changed. There’s always a better metaphor to use. A slightly better way to phrase things. If I didn’t set a deadline, I would vanish into a mental masturbation of always improving something that never will become perfect anway. In hindsight, I can see that I was subconsciously helping my current-self three weeks ago. That’s when I posted those first chapters I’ve written on Reddit. It’s the meanest and kindest, worst and best place that I know on the Internet. Especially the big gay subreddits /r/gaybros and /r/askgaybros. If I could survive the possible onslaught of “who do you think you are?” and “your writing sucks” and the myriad of other things I feared, if the book meant so much to me that I wanted to do despite any vitriol, I was ready.
With the help of Reddit, I realized that I was.
Next, I decided to put up a deadline. I had recently set up a Patreon page so people could support me while I was writing, but what I needed was not money as much as a commitment and a deadline. Two days after I realized that my dream did not depend on the approval of anyone else, I shut down my Patreon page and set up a pre-order page on my website, with a delivery of the books in December. Perhaps this deadline is way too short. I didn’t think much when I set it. It felt right, and that is what matters. I’m learning to navigate through my gut feeling.
At that point, I had written four chapters of the book, and had edited them based on feedback from readers. I had started taking pre-orders. I had a plan, and it felt right in every aspect except one. My original intent was to help you as a reader — to tell you something important about how to get here — and at the same time re-visit my twenty-year-old self. That intent was designed by that former me, Mickipedia who knew things, who wanted to help others, an interesting, entertaining, insightful and sometimes even funny. But just like my past-self has the potential to be so much more, so does this book.
As you can understand, I had to begin anew. The process is still the same, writing the book in the open, with the help from any readers. I will still be using the entries from the online diary I started writing twenty years ago, and wrote from 1997 to 1999. Today, I would call those things blog posts rather than diary entries, but since my twenty-year-old self called it a diary, ‘diary entries’ is what I will call them in this book. It’s will be a series of letters to that twenty-year-old, written in an attempt to make an honest inventory of my experiences and memories.
So this is not a self-help book. At least it’s not in that “Follow these 7 habits of happy and successful people to get the perfect life” way. I cannot tell you anything you don’t already know. In this conversation with my twenty-year-old-self I’m about to have, I express my personal truths and insights. I make no claims of knowing the recipe for a happy and meaningful life, I only know I have found my recipe for a meaningful, happy life. If anything I write or say feels true — or resonates in you (writing this, I realize that it’s only recently that I’ve begun to understand the true meaning of that phrase), it’s only because you see something you already knew packaged in a way you haven’t encountered before. I don’t have any advice to give you or much to tell you, except for a good story that I’m writing to help myself. And maybe, if we’re both lucky, you’ll find something in reading this story that helps you tell kinder stories about yourself.
As for me, I hope that writing this book will help me figure out which parts of my old self to keep, and which to discard until next time they’re needed. I realize that it will be a raw and naked process that sometimes will be scary and hopefully oftentimes amazing. I’ll be even harder as English isn’t my native language, but I have my own reasons for that. At the end of writing this book, I will hopefully know more about who I am. And just like whoever I am at the end of writing this will contain many parts of who I was, this book will contain parts of what was already written in that exulted and slightly manic state the months before yesterday, when the black hole hurled me out into this unknown space where all I know is that I’m a man. I’m gay. I’m an introvert. I’m an explorer and I’m a storyteller. The dream I’m free to explore now is one of becoming an author for real, because now I have a great story to tell: how I came to this launching point of the greatest journey of my life. I know I will enjoy writing it as much as I hope you enjoy reading it.
This is a semi-finished chapter of a book I’m writing called “Letters From The Person I Needed When I was Younger”. Once it’s finished — the planned release is in 2018 — it will be available as paperback, e-book and audiobook on Amazon. All chapters will be available for free here on Medium, and if you want to support my writing it (and support keeping it available for free) you can help me in any of these ways:
- Pre-order my book: https://kazarnowi.cz/preorder-my-book/
- Share this book with others. Here’s the link for the index of the book here on Medium.
- Help me edit this book. If you see mistakes, or something that doesn’t make sense, send me a note. You can highlight any part of the text and leave a comment on that part.
