I grew up Italian, in a house where food was love. If someone cared about you, they fed you. And I was a heavy kid from early on.

My mom had a phrase for it. You’re not fat — you’re big boned. She said it with love. She said it to protect me. It was the kindest possible explanation for why my body looked the way it did, and I believed it completely, because your mother tells you who you are, and you take it as fact.

For years, that was simply true. Not an opinion. A fact about my skeleton. This is just how I’m built.

Then, the summer between eighth and ninth grade, I lost a hundred pounds.

I’d stumbled onto something almost insultingly simple: calories in, calories out. I ran the formula. And the weight came off — a hundred pounds of it.

And here’s what I actually learned that summer, and it was worth more than the weight: it had nothing to do with my bones. The thing I had believed was a permanent, structural fact about me — the thing I’d have sworn was just reality — turned out to be a story. A kind, well-meant story handed to me by someone who loved me and couldn’t see past it either. And the moment I tested it against reality, it fell apart.

I want you to sit with that, because it’s the whole point of this chapter. You are living inside beliefs about yourself that you have never once checked against the truth. And some of them are running your entire life.

Here’s how deep this goes for me, because the “big boned” thing was just the training wheels.

My parents moved us to the wealthy towns in Michigan, because that’s where the best public schools were. Good intention. But it meant I grew up as the poorest kid in the rich town. And a kid notices that. I noticed it every day.

So, I built an identity around it without realizing I was doing so. I became the one who had to prove himself. The class clown — because if you’re going to be different, at least make them laugh. And underneath the jokes, a low steady hum: I’m less than. There’s something wrong with me. School didn’t come easily to me, so I blew it off — which, of course, made me do worse, which fed the exact story I was trying to escape. That’s the first thing you need to know about these beliefs: they don’t just sit there. They arrange your life to prove themselves right. Your ego will fight to be right and doesn’t discriminate.

Basketball was the one place where the story went quiet. I put everything into it, and it gave back — I earned Division I scholarship offers. For a while, being good at that one thing held the whole fragile identity together. Now, people looked up to me.

And then my senior year, I had a falling out at school, and the basketball path fell apart.

And when it did, the story didn’t just get louder. It changed. It went from I have to prove myself to something final and total: I am a loser.

That belief is different from the others, because it doesn’t ask you to try harder. It tells you the verdict is already in. The ego wants to be right. Without getting involved in “good vs bad” or moral scenarios, the ego goes looking for ways to make itself right.

I was confused about who I was. I was fearful, I wouldn’t find the level of success I had found in basketball. The way to quiet the voice in my head became drugs. Then, heavier drug…..

Then, years of reaching outside myself for something — anything — to fix what I felt inside. I wasn’t chasing a high. I was trying to escape a sentence I’d handed myself.

And every hard year that followed, some part of me nodded along: see, I told you. Loser. The prophecy fed itself. I would make momentary runs at travel, business & relationships. Looking back most of them ended loud and messy….the way things would end for a loser.

That’s what a belief does when you don’t know it’s a belief. You don’t experience it as a thought. You experience it as reality — and then you unconsciously build a life that confirms it.

Here is where it broke.

Years later — clean, sober, and finally still enough to look — I started studying the teachers who would become the voices I trusted most. And they were all, in their own languages, saying the same impossible-sounding thing.

There is no finish line.

There is nothing to achieve to finally become okay.

You are not separate from everything, out here alone, having to earn your way in.

And — this was the one that took the ground out from under me — there is nothing wrong with you. There never was.

To go one level deeper, those mistakes you made are made up of hot air. Let me explain. The word “mistake” is a human construct. In order for it to have any meaning, someone had an idea for the word and its meaning. They shared the word and meaning to another by hot air through their mouth. There are many options on what makes a word stick from this point. As the word is used and endures, people create stories around it. Parents introduce them to their children. Words like “mistake” carry emotional responses from parents. In a society that cares about what others think, mistakes can’t be made. When we start being scared to be human, every path is a loser.

I’d spent my whole life running the formula backwards. I thought I had to fix the outside — the body, the money, the status, the achievement — so that I could finally feel okay on the inside. And these teachers were telling me the direction was wrong. That the okayness I was chasing wasn’t at the end of the striving. It was underneath it, the whole time, waiting for me to stop long enough to notice.

There’s a line I’ve quoted before and I’ll quote again, because it’s the sentence that finally landed all of this in my body:

The place you are looking for is the place you are looking from.

When that landed, I felt a relief I still don’t have adequate words for. My nervous system, which had been braced my entire life, finally set down some of the weight. Because if there’s nothing to achieve and nothing wrong with me, then the “loser” was never a fact about who I am. It was a lie I got handed by a hard moment at seventeen — and then spent decades proving true, because I never once thought to question it.

It was never truer than “big boned.” It was just words made out of hot air. When you take the time to really think about this, it can be eye opening to say the least.

So here is what I want to ask you to consider, gently, because it might be the most important question in this whole book:

What have you decided is just true about you — that you have never actually tested?

I’m not enough. I’m too much. I’m the one who has to hold it all. I always fail at this. Nothing will ever change. I’m not the kind of person who gets to be happy.

You say these to yourself as if you’re reporting the weather. As if they’re facts about your skeleton. And I’m telling you, from the other side of a few of them: they are not facts. They are stories — many of them handed to you long ago, often by people who loved you and couldn’t see past them either. And the reason they feel so true is that you’ve spent years unconsciously arranging your life to confirm them.

The good news is the same good news I found that summer with the scale. The moment you’re willing to hold a belief up and actually look at it — is this true? do I know this is true? — you’ll find that the walls of the prison were never made of stone.

They were only ever made of sentences.

I’ll see you next week.

If this landed, follow along — I write every Monday, for the parent carrying more than anyone sees.