The life you wanted will eventually be one you can't describe at a dinner table without flinching.
I had my best month ever last September, and I didn't tell a single person in my family.
Not my mom. Not my brothers. Not the group chat with my closest friends from high school. Nobody.
I sat in a rented apartment in Lisbon, looked at the number on the dashboard, closed the laptop, and went for a walk like nothing had happened.
The trap is this. You build the thing you wanted. And then you realize the wins don't translate into any language the people you love still speak.
My dad worked at the same job for thirty-one years. Came home smelling like the warehouse. Ate dinner. Watched the news. Slept. Did it again. Nine kids on that paycheck, and he never once complained about a Monday.
What am I supposed to say to that man? Hey Dad, I made more last month sitting in a cafe than you made in a year of double shifts.
I'm not gonna say that. Nobody's gonna say that.
So you stop saying anything.
You stop posting the photos because the photos look like bragging. You stop mentioning where you are because Lisbon sounds like a flex and Bali sounds worse. You stop telling your brother about the new thing you launched because the last time you did, there was a pause on the phone that lasted about two seconds too long, and you've been editing your sentences around that pause ever since.
You learn to talk small. You learn to ask about their kids, their jobs, and their fantasy football team. You learn to say "yeah, work's good, can't complain" when work is, in fact, the easiest it's ever been, and you have nothing to complain about, and that itself feels like a thing you can't say.
You become a person with a whole second life that nobody you came from gets to see.
And here's the part that messed me up. I thought the loneliness would go away once I figured out how to talk about it better. Like, there was a script I just hadn't found yet. Some humble phrasing that would let me share the good stuff without it landing weird.
There isn't one.
The gap is real. Your life doesn't look like theirs anymore. And the more honest you are about it, the more it costs. So most days you just shut up about it, and that shutting up becomes its own little weight you carry around.
I called my oldest brother on a Tuesday a few months back. He'd had a bad week at work. Boss being a dick, the usual. He vented for like forty minutes, and I just listened. And when he was done, he said, "Anyway, sorry man, what's new with you?" and I said, "Nothing really, same stuff."
I had just signed the biggest deal of my year that morning. Same stuff.
I hung up and sat on the floor of my apartment for a while.
Nothing changed dramatically after that. I didn't have a breakthrough. I just stopped pretending the silence was strategic. It wasn't protecting anyone. It was just silence.
What I do now is smaller than it sounds. When something good happens, I tell my mom the human part. Not the number. The part she can actually hold. I went surfing this morning. I made something I'm proud of. I'm okay. She doesn't need the dashboard. She needs to know her son is okay. That she can give me.
The numbers I keep for the two or three people who live in the same weird country I live in. The ones who get it because they're in it too. That's a small group, and it took me years to find them, and I don't take it for granted.
The rest of it, I just sit with.
Surfers know this thing where, after a really good wave, you don't paddle back out yelling. You just sit on your board for a minute. You let it be what it was. You don't need anyone to have seen it.
Some wins are like that. You catch them clean. You ride them all the way in. And then you sit on the water alone for a minute, and that has to be enough.
Most days it is.
Some days it isn't, and you call your mom and tell her you went surfing.
— Best, Jose
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