I was born in 2000, and every step of the way has been hard for me. I was a gifted kid, but also extremely sensitive, often anxious, overwhelmed by social situations, and constantly feeling like I’m not good enough.

At 7, my parents took me to a fish farm where I seemed to be the only one who could feel the pain of the fish being killed there right then. The world started feeling awfully crooked from then on, and I awfully alone. I was a vegetarian for 5 years since then, but quit as I felt like I wasn’t making a difference, and I couldn’t take the isolation anymore. Guess I did it before it was cool.

School was hell for me. The social environment scared and overwhelmed me. The feeling of never being good enough was mainly the reason for that, and it also led to me hating my classes. I always had the feeling that I was wasting my time, that I needed to do something bigger than this. If I actually tried, my classes were too easy to be fun, so usually I didn’t.

The feeling of needing to do something bigger had a reason, of course. After everything started feeling crooked when I was young, I withdrew a lot, mostly into video games. Wanting, no, needing to do something bigger was in part because I felt like the world was filled with an immense amount of suffering, and since I was the only one who could see it, it was up to me to change it, all on my lonesome. Hundreds of video games where I save the world as the powerful hero didn’t exactly help with this belief. And it felt unbelievably heavy having the world on my shoulders while the only concern of everyone around me was the next math test.

For most of my childhood, I withdrew into video games. It was the only place where the world felt in order. Of course, it led to me feeling more and more anxious and incapable of handling real life.

At 14, I discovered lucid dreaming by accident and found a kind of salvation in it. It carried the same magical world as all those video games, but it wasn’t just an escape. Lucid dreaming feels like meditating, like being perfectly present in your mind, your dream body. Being free to do anything I want in a world that feels so real, without any fears, it was and still is cathartic.

But no matter how good the dreams were, I still had to wake up every day, and there were a lot of things the dreams didn’t help with. Perhaps, because I only had one side of the coin, they might have even made things worse. After finding unlimited freedom and creation through my dreams, school didn’t exactly feel less like a waste of time. Then there’s the loneliness aspect. A great athlete gets cheered on. A great student gets praised. I got scolded by my mother for being up and about at 3 am because then my dreams would be more vivid when going back to sleep. Every night, I did things that other people couldn’t even dream of… sorry, couldn’t resist. And no one could ever see it.

My daily life felt like a prison to me, and I was going to break out, no matter what. As crazy as that sounds, deep depression led me to put all my time and effort into something I saw as a 1% chance it was even possible: To find god through lucid dreaming, defeat him, and become god myself. Obviously, I became a god easily and just chose not to use my great powers as a mercy to all you little humans. Obviously.

My ambition was the only thing that kept me going, and after having made no progress for a year of trying every single night, I broke down. Since then, depression has been a constant friend to me, whether I like it or not. He comes and goes in waves, depending on the times, but he’s there. I even lost my lucid dreams for many years after that. It’s pretty hard to feel present and conscious when you wanna feel nothing at all.

After about a year of full-on depression, I found a small community in the shape of a video game blogging app. I connected with others, and before long, I was writing my own articles about my favorite games or characters. Frequently, my posts were featured on the front page of the app, which was exactly the feeling of being seen that I needed at the time. I wrote occasionally before this, but here, my love for writing really was sparked when I saw how it can make people see me for who I really am, when usually people just look through me. It also made me realize the importance of community.

I quit school a year early. In retrospect, something I wish I hadn’t done, but at the time, I couldn’t have kept going. I moved out at 17. With the financial support of my parents, I studied video game design and art in another city. For the first time in my life, I felt passion for my classes. However, I still found the social environment of it hard to manage and felt very alone as usual.

At the start of my last semester, covid hit, and it led to so many disappointments. I couldn’t go to school anymore, and became isolated in my 20qm apartment. I didn’t manage to finish all my exams or to build a strong portfolio. I really tried, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t get a job afterwards, and was unemployed a lot, then worked in some related companies where I did IT or Web Design. Nothing lasted long.

I had to move another 5 times since moving out. Makes it hard to feel safe or at home anywhere. Stability really just becomes an empty word at that point. During all this time, I tried tremendously hard to build a life for myself, to work hard… to be good enough. But I never was.

During my studies, I changed my diet again. For many years, I’ve struggled tremendously with brain fog, fatigue, mood swings, and many more issues, so when I came across a random YouTube video that advertised all of this going away when you follow a ketogenic diet, I had to try it. It took a while for it to really become stable; adaptation was quite hard for me, but now it’s made my life better for many years already. My brain fog, which made it so hard to focus on classes, has gone away completely since then. No afternoon dip in energy. Mood is much more stable. This was what sparked my love for biohacking and optimizing life through habit changes.

Another chapter I can’t forget to mention is when I was 21, with all the escapism and isolation in my life, I had never had a girlfriend. During covid, when I especially noticed how little social life I have, I decided to make a change. After trying for a while to be more social in everyday life, to go out, to talk to girls, to fail horribly at dating apps, nothing was really moving. What followed was a period of many years of excessive partying, going to clubs at least once a week, continuously trying to meet girls and to, well, sleep with them, I suppose. Ironically, I was probably the least interested in hookups out of all the people there. My logic was attraction -> sex -> attachment -> relationship. My logic tended to fail at the attachment part, and when it didn’t, then I got to be in a relationship with someone just because we felt attracted, which didn’t exactly go well either. It led me down into more and more open communities that advertise as offering so much connection, something I felt starved of, when really it only led to more moments of intensity, followed by loss. Having all those short-lived connections as someone who’s been alone for most of his life has been equally healing as it’s been traumatizing.

Following the influence of those circles, and my ever-growing frustration with trying to function in jobs I’m not meant for, I decided to become a life coach. At this point, with my constant feeling of not being good enough, I had already spent so many years optimizing and experimenting with my own life. I guess I was quite obsessed with figuring out how to build a good life since I was always so far from it. I drifted into a desire for that perfect life to show off with. I quit video games, quit everything nerdy, really locked in, bought a gold watch, and always put the room in awe with the most confident introduction.

I still feel like everything I ever did was with the thought of if only I became better, more successful, more impressive, and confident, then someone would stay. Perhaps you already guessed it at this point, but that’s a scar that originated from my parents.

During all this time, I still felt lost. Then something changed when I was 25. I was dating a girl who insists on being polyamorous, and another woman who really just wants to fuck, at the same time. Meanwhile, all I wanted was an exclusive girlfriend. My whole nervous system was a mess. Then something happened that scared me straight. After some months of horrible on-off dynamics, I broke down in winter. I ended these situationships and went through a long period of self-isolation and recovery. Since then, things have been slowly changing for the better. I learned to be alone because I really understood that there are worse things than being alone, even when you feel lonely. What first felt like a failure ended up being extremely healing for me. When withdrawing from the world, I found more safety in my inner world again, first through video games, then dreams, then writing. Failing at being this confident, hyper-social persona led me to find back to what I’m really like. I started writing and changed the focus of my work from one-sided life coaching to something that combines dreams with life, just as it’s always been connected for me.