Sometimes the past controls you through avoidance
I almost gave up on something I want because a guy I've never met needs my life to stay exactly the way it is.
He used my story in a Twitter thread last week to convince his followers to drop out of college. Filipino kid, nine siblings, dropped out at 19, built a company, sold it, now makes money from a laptop on the beach. He got my age wrong, my revenue wrong, and the part about what it actually cost me, he left that out entirely.
I found out because three people sent me the screenshot. All of them said some version of "dude, you're famous." I wasn't famous. I was a prop.
This happens more than I'd like to admit. Someone hears the highlight reel and grabs it like a sign at a protest. See? The system is optional. You don't need the degree. You don't need the job. You just need to bet on yourself.
They leave out the part where I spent my late twenties so stressed I ground my teeth down to nubs. They leave out the part where I delivered burritos at 35. They leave out the part where selling the company felt like nothing because I'd already burned through every relationship that would've made the moment mean something.
But that version doesn't fit the thread.
Here's the trap. Once your story becomes useful to other people, it stops belonging to you. You become someone else's evidence. And evidence can't change its mind.
I've been thinking about trying something new. Not walking away from what I have. The products work. The revenue's fine. But there's something else pulling at me. Something that would probably fail publicly for a while. Something that doesn't fit the narrative at all.
And every time I start to move toward it, I feel this pull. Not from inside me. From outside. From the version of me that other people are using to justify their own decisions.
Because if I pivot, if I go back to school, or take a job, or try something that doesn't look like freedom, what happens to the guy who quit his path because of my story? What happens to the woman who left her job because she saw someone like her do it and survive?
I'm not that important. I know that. But the weight of it is real anyway.
You've felt some version of this. Maybe you told everyone you were going all in on your business and now it's not working but you can't say that because your cousin quit her job after watching you do it. Maybe you gave advice once and someone followed it and it worked and now they come to you for more and you have no idea what to say because you got lucky and can't admit it. Maybe you posted about your routine or your results or your freedom and now you're performing a life you're not sure you want anymore because people saved the damn post.
You become a fixed point. A reference. And reference points aren't allowed to move.
I watched my dad do this for thirty years. He was the guy in our family everyone pointed to. Came to America with nothing. Raised nine kids. Never complained. The story was so clean and so useful that he could never say he was tired. He could never say he wanted something different. Because everyone else's courage was leaning on his.
He's 71 now. I've never once heard him say he'd do anything over. I don't believe him. But I understand why he can't say it.
I almost did the same thing. Almost stayed exactly where I am because the story was working. For me, for the people watching, for the whole tidy version of my life that strangers screenshot and send to their friends.
But I've been in this spot before. Staying somewhere because leaving would mess up someone else's picture. I did it for ten years with my company. Stayed because my employees needed me there. Stayed because my family held me up as the one who made it. The story of the guy who built something from nothing doesn't have a chapter where he walks away to try something weird and small and probably stupid.
I'm trying the thing. I'm not going to say what it is yet because I don't want to turn it into content before it's real. I want it to be mine for a while. Unpolished. Unposted. Allowed to fail without anyone making meaning out of it.
The version of me that people use as proof, he's real. But he's a photograph. One frame from one angle on one day. And a photograph can't grow. It just sits there looking like whatever you need it to look like.
I'd rather be blurry and moving than sharp and stuck.
— Best, Jose
