How I Saved Myself From Ruin and Started Living an Incredible Life

Hard working on yourself is not just lifting weights

At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too — John Greene, Paper Towns

The strongest punch in the stomach I could ever receive. You know, the taste of blood in your mouth and the suffer.

My life has just begun again. 31st January 2019. After a month playing video-games all day, I found myself in despair. Why? I came back from Heaven, ready to make my life even better. But I didn’t have any power, any trust in myself.

Alone, stuck in my bedroom with a computer, some video-games and no one to talk to. I had no money and the idea of New Year’s Eve with my friends was far from being considered.

Rock f*cking bottom. How in this world I came from being the most loved one to the most ignored? It was a slow process, and I was keeping myself satisfied with the little instant gratification I could assure myself.

23.50. Now I must change my life and make a promise to myself.

2020 will be my year, I will do whatever it takes to recover and restart from scratch: I will write a book.

00.00. My life will be no longer a mess.

What Happened

The 1st January 2020, while the world was celebrating a new year, I was alone in front of a Macbook screen. And I was changing my life.

I started writing a little book about how you can change your life for free, and in four days I finished something that was just the beginning of my journey.

50 pages that saved my life from total despair.

I was still stuck in my “prison”, but I had a hope I would get outside of it soon. People around me didn’t understand what was going on with me, they were too busy living their life. That was the sign I had no-one to help me: what a blessing!

I was lazy, depressed, hopeless. I was lowering my standards, and I was ready to give away lot of my personal freedom just to find a job and keep myself occupied.

I was thinking money would have saved my life. And I was wrong. Money didn’t help me back in Tenerife, where I was living a dream. I could buy everything I needed, but I was so alone in my free days that I felt money as a curse rather than a blessing.

So how will money help me now that I’m both broke and alone?

It couldn’t get me out of this mess but I understood that my book anticipated the begin of a great journey. I had a hope now, something mine to share with the world, I wasn’t an empty guy anymore.

Slowly Regenerating

I stopped using social media: they were uselessly killing me. I was posting stories just to feel people where caring about my life, but I understood they were just looking around without any intention to know what’s going on in your life. And I felt bad.

I started working out again: cigarettes addiction has almost made impossible restart the trainings, but after a great deal of effort and reasoning I stopped smoking.

I started writing on Medium on a regular basis, and although I was alone in this journey I felt I needed to start making my life unique again.

The regeneration took 5 months of my life to be complete, and only now I feel the results of my persistent work and faith.

ILLUMINATION has permitted me to make a step from the “Nobody-Zone” to the “Community-Zone”: I wouldn’t be the writer I am now if it wasn’t for people like George J. Ziogas, Kathryn A. LeRoy, Ph.D., Dr Mehmet Yildiz and Kevin Buddaeus. They shared thoughts and ideas that made me keep writing and improve my ability.

Life is Strange

People are strange when you’re a stranger Faces look ugly when you’re alone — The Doors

I always listened to my senses, letting myself exploring the world and learning from it through experience. And there’s only one thing I will always be unsure and glad of: you never know what is going to happen.

You can build habits, attract the life you want, work hard, but most of the things that made me the person I am came from nowhere. That’s why you’re a stranger to yourself.

I though I would be the same person forever, and in a time frame of 2 years I was a bricklayer, a cabin-crew, a broke artist and a life coach. I am evolving as a person through a constant trial and error methodology. I achieve goals and along the way I decide I don’t need to go further with my accomplishments, how in the world we can determine our consistency?

Life is like a terrain: what you reap, is what you sow, they say.

But more than this, sometimes you just need to go somewhere, destroy yourself, and start again.

These are the moments where I see I have gone far. When everything ends, and we keep ourselves stuck in the past, I know there’s something beautiful that we need to build.

I was the most fortunate guy in my cabin-crew academy: I had the privilege to go Tenerife, to live there, to have great people to stay with. But I was dead inside, the external world wasn’t providing anything valuable for my inner world.

But I needed those moments of despair, listening to XXXTentacion in my car, weeping because I made my dreams come true, but I was terribly alone.

I’ve dug two graves for us, my dear Can’t pretend that I was perfect, leaving you in fear Oh man, what a world, the things I hear If I could act on my revenge, then, oh, would I?

Embrace the Pain

The only way I could be happy was partying, and I really loved it back in the days. But there, I struggled so much to enjoy my nights, mainly because it was always challenging to speak Spanish every time, and I was learning a lot every day.

The worst part was that people were fake people. Clubs are not the greatest place to make friends, but it was the only way I could enjoy some time speaking with people.

I was at the point where my flying days were awesome, but they were followed by days of loneliness and sadness. When I wasn’t working, I was running a lot and working out, but it didn’t help me to get rid of my pain.

It was a constant fight between my old me and the new me: I saw myself as this great boy having so much people around him, always talking and enjoying company, and now I was terribly alone, satisfying other people’s need just to keep them talking to me.

This is something I always tell myself: “I won’t do this…” and magically it happens. I’ve never been depressed or felt lonely before. And it taught me a invaluable lesson: let the pain consume you, you need a new skin.

I needed a new skin, a new way of dealing with the world. I passed from being dependent on mom’s money to dependent on my work abilities, but I was running myself through old patterns that were absolutely useless for the situation. And I understood it the hard way, but I needed that smack in the face: it saved my life.

Resurrection

During these months of trying to keep myself emotionally alive, I met a great number of people. Don’t get me wrong, I had very good times, but they were just because of the place, I could be in another place and still people would have enjoyed the night.

During these months, I started studying communication and psychology on a deeper level. I was extroverted, but still shy. I knew being abroad meant you needed to face challenges every day and being alone was the worst of it. I wanted to understand how I could approach strangers in a daily situation, where a lot of resistances operate in these kind of interactions.

I studied for months, read many books about it, and understood there was no shortcut: I had to go and make that step.

One day, while I moved in a city to buy some stuff, I noticed a girl on the other side of the road who made me feel curious. I had to know her.

It was my first approach ever, and I felt like a baby the first day of kindergarten. After some excuses, I decided to make my move and I ran to reach her.

When I opened the mouth to say “Hi”, I was overwhelmed by a kind of energy coming from my stomach, and instead of a normal “Hi”, I looked like I was about to throw up. But I was there, trying to connect, and it didn’t matter.

I was too nervous, and she felt it, so the conversation didn’t go somewhere interesting for both of us. But I was happy, I made my first step to connect instead of hide myself.

Thanks to it, I made more friends and met some Italian people who were living near me. Finally, I could relax a little bit.

Life is a strange creature, she always gives you want you need in the most extravagant way

What about Now?

I insulated myself before Covid-19 was an issue. And thanks to this I created habits that made me efficient while people where doubtful.

I recovered from my despair, I started blogging everyday and I run 4 days a week, conceding myself 3 days of pure relax.

I know there’s no concrete advice in my story, but I’m convinced you will find something insightful for your own experience.

I want to let you know that we are all mortals, and we must make mistake in order to let go of our old and messed up patterns. But most importantly, you need to recognize them, and work on them.

This is how I make my days wonderful, working on myself as much as I can, learning from the world now, acting in the world tomorrow.