Dear [Redacted],
Sometimes I feel like I might come across as ridiculous, but the frustration is real in a way that goes beyond words. There are days I want to cry because I miss being surrounded by nature, or because I miss the moments where I’ve met the truest version of myself. Those encounters mean everything to me in a way no one else could ever fully recognize. Even I can’t completely capture what I feel when I enter that state where I am more than myself, where my mind and body are fully alive.
It is a rare internal activation. Something lights up in the deepest regions of my consciousness and fires through me in a way nothing else does. Nothing else gives me that fullness unless I am completely immersed in living as someone who accepts who they are and moves from that understanding. To live fully, I must first look within. That is not a philosophy I adopted. It is something I discovered by feel.
The closest comparison I can reach for is the professional athlete. Not the competition itself, but what sustains it. The inner architecture. The rituals, the mental states, the private disciplines that no one else sees but that make everything else possible. Basketball gives me that. Not as sport but as a practice of becoming. And soccer does something similar when I watch it, because I can feel exactly what I would do inside those systems. I can read the internal pressure of the players. I see myself in them. That recognition alone does something to me.
It is maybe a testament to an internal reward system I only get access to when I feel genuinely confident in my ability to compete and to fight. And that almost hurts, because I have not allowed myself to access those conditions nearly enough. For reasons I understand and reasons I don’t. What I know is that something real lives in those environments that does not live anywhere else for me. Not validation exactly. Camaraderie. The experience of truly applying myself alongside and against other people who are also fully applying themselves. Being seen by people who actually matter to me within those conditions genuinely heals something. It brings me closer to God. I feel so different about myself there than I do anywhere else.
Without those conditions, something degrades. I become idle with the very gifts that only reveal themselves when evoked physically and competitively. I cannot sustain long term reward systems the way other people seem to. What I can do is find immediate consequence, immediate satisfaction, immediate presence. Those competitive environments are maybe the only place I achieve actual presence in the current moment. And when I live too long without them, I start to lose the thread back to myself.
I’ve watched myself fade in and out of my own head over the years. I wake up and nothing I’m holding feels like it actually matters. I find myself pretending to feel how I used to, trying to trick myself back into that channel just to locate a source of real meaning. A borrowed contentment has replaced something that used to be genuine. And somewhere along the way of becoming who I am, I misplaced a part of myself. Every time I find the shell of that person, I no longer fit the mold. And I’m starting to not even care about that anymore, which frightens me more than the loss itself.
I get little pleasure from much of anything sometimes. And what concerns me isn’t just the absence of joy. It’s the disparity. Between what I know I am and what I am currently living. Between the fullness I have touched and the flatness I am moving through. That gap is real, Seth. It is not dramatic. It is not self-pity. It is a precise and accurate perception of distance from myself, and it costs me more than I usually let on.
I don’t know what happens if I just stop. But the curiosity that comes with that question makes me feel more alive than the lie of pretending the current conditions are enough. I’m not trying to be dark. I’m trying to be honest about what it takes to hold myself together when so much of what I am is hyper-fleeting, constantly becoming more disparate from the nature of my own lived experience.
It is a real frustration. It is not always enough on its own.
I’m well aware of how odd I am. I’m aware of how people read me through frameworks I don’t recognize in myself. That’s fine. What I want, what I have always wanted, is to feel like what I experience matters enough to be worth holding onto. Worth shaping into something. Worth sending.
That’s why I’m sending you this.
CAMIGULA
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