The car
Maybe it's a machine you love. Or maybe it has quietly become evidence that you're successful, powerful or desirable.
WHY I CREATED THIS
I spent most of my life trying to become someone.
My story isn't really about success. It's about what happens when you keep building identities to solve something underneath.
Every time one version of me stopped working, I built another.
The tough kid
Growing up, being tough, cheeky and anti-authority became part of who I thought I was. Then I developed a painful knee condition and stopped exercising. I kept eating like the active kid I had been and gained a lot of weight. One comment about my body suddenly made appearance mean something it hadn't meant before.
I became hyper-focused on my weight, stopped eating and eventually developed anorexia and body dysmorphia. By thirteen I had gone from roughly fourteen stone to six and a half stone. I was physically weak, but I still had the old identity to maintain.
The first ego death
When a younger boy at school mocked me, the identity said I had to fight him. Reality said I was underweight, exhausted and terrified. I chose the identity anyway. I lost badly.
The identity collapsed. I didn't yet understand that the identity wasn't me.
I became shy, anxious and deeply self-conscious. For years I carried a story that people were laughing at me.
The confident version
At eighteen I moved to Magaluf partly because nobody there knew the shy version of me. I took work that forced me to speak to people. Then drugs gave me a shortcut to the person I desperately wanted to be: confident, social, fearless and alive.
I became attached not only to drugs, but to the version of me that appeared when I took them. Work hard in the week, party hard at the weekend became the next character.
The successful version
When I eventually quit drugs, the deeper philosophy hadn't changed. I simply moved the search somewhere more socially acceptable: sales, property, money, cars, business, physique, women and self-development.
I worked relentlessly because I believed the answer was somewhere ahead of me. If I could just become successful enough, attractive enough, wealthy enough or confident enough, I would finally be okay.
The empty peak
Eventually I had many of the things I'd thought would solve it. A fast car. A good physique. Money coming in. Women. Business success. From the outside, it looked like the strategy was working.
But I was more miserable than ever.
That left me with a question I couldn't outrun: what do you do when you have done everything you thought would be the answer — and it isn't?
The other way
I stopped asking what else I needed to add and started questioning the philosophy itself. I stripped away the things I had been using to maintain the character and rebuilt from somewhere deeper.
I learned to see the stories, meanings, identities and conditions I had placed between myself and the love and peace I kept trying to obtain from outside.
Today I can still play with business, cars, fitness, ambition, relationships and different versions of myself. The difference is that none of them have to tell me who I am.
That is the freedom I want this work to offer: not a better identity, but freedom from needing one.
