In 2025, my friends found out. They called me the next day. I didn’t answer. They didn’t stop there, they found another way to reach me, and we talked about it directly, plainly, the way you talk about something too serious to dress up. I’m not going to describe what happened before that call in detail here, only that it was the darkest point I have ever been, and that I am genuinely grateful I did not stay there.
It took me a while to get to that point. It started in 2021, when I had separated from the people who actually knew me, and somewhere in that gap, feeling like the person I actually was wasn’t good enough, I met new people while I was at my most vulnerable. Instead of staying myself around them, I started performing someone else. Someone easier to like, I thought. Someone who wouldn’t get left again.
That circle had a particular shape to it. They loved gossip. They built their closeness out of tearing other people’s reputations down, dressed up as insight, amateur psychologists diagnosing everyone’s flaws except their own, laughing at other people’s misfortune like it was intimacy. And because I was already performing, already unsure my real self was acceptable, I let it consume me. Slowly enough that for a long time I didn’t notice I was disappearing.
By 2023, I finally cut it off. I stopped talking to them. I thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. They spent the next two years harassing me instead, calling it something else, casting themselves as the ones who’d been wronged, as if walking away from them was the crime. By 2025, that had done more damage to me than the friendship itself ever had.
Somewhere close to that point, I heard a song called “It’s Called: Freefall”, by Rainbow Kitten Surprise. I won’t walk you through the lyrics line by line here, you can go listen to it yourself, but the shape of it is this: the narrator calls out to the Devil, half-joking, looking for an escape. And the Devil that shows up isn’t a tempter. He’s tired. He’s honest. He’s the voice that finally says the thing you’ve been avoiding saying to yourself, that you’ve spent yourself keeping everyone else afloat, that you’ve been mistaken for a lifeline so many times you forgot you’re allowed to need one too. And letting go, in that song, isn’t falling into ruin. It’s the relief of finally setting something down.
There’s an image in it I keep coming back to, even now. Something you offer as a gift can be received as a noose by people who only ever wanted somewhere to hang their own weight, never actually wanted to be helped down. That was the shape of it exactly, with the circle I’m describing. I thought I was being generous. I was being used as a fixture.
That reframing did something to me I can’t fully explain, except to say it worked. I had always thought letting go of that whole performance would be a kind of failure, an admission that I couldn’t hold it together. The song made me see it the other way. Holding it together was the failure. Freefall was the fix.
There’s something else in it worth naming directly. Nearly everything the song describes before the fall is effort, hustling, keeping score, holding a position. The fall itself is the one part that isn’t work. It’s the only thing in the whole song that’s actually free. I’d spent years treating letting go as one more task to be brave enough to complete. It isn’t a task at all. It’s the absence of one.
Viktor Frankl wrote about what he called the last of the human freedoms, the one thing that can’t be taken from you even when everything else has, the freedom to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances. I had to choose, plainly, whether to become as vicious and destructive as that circle had been, in defending myself, or to just stop. I chose to stop. Not to fight back in kind. Just to stop.
That phone call the next day wasn’t the end of it. It was the beginning of the part I actually want to tell you about, because I didn’t get through any of this by myself, and I don’t want to pretend I did, or that it happened all at once.
One person had already been there the whole time. I’ve known Fabian since 2021, before any of this started, which means he was there for the collapse too, not just what came after. He is, without exaggeration, the most morally serious person I have ever known, kind almost to a fault, disinterested in the truest sense of that word, caring about his friends’ good and his family’s good and very little else. He’s a devout Christian. I am not. It never once became a wall between us, he respected the difference completely, and he never stopped backing me, troubles and all. If it ever came to it, I would give up a great deal to protect him.
The rest came later, slowly, one real friendship at a time, even while the harassment was still going on in the background. Gabriela was one of the first, in 2024. She has a presence you feel the moment she’s in a room, strong, direct, nothing soft about how she carries herself, and underneath all of that, she cares more plainly than almost anyone I know. She listened. She gave real advice, not comfortable advice. She never once put me aside, not for a moment, and I have come to think of her as the sister I would have chosen if I’d gotten to choose.
Angel came that same year. He became something my own older brother never quite became, not through any fault of his, just a different kind of bond. Since we met, he has never stopped trying to point me somewhere better. I share my wins with him on purpose, because he was the reason for a lot of them, he’s the one who helped me set down my own irresponsibility and actually become more myself, who kept pushing me to try things other people looked at and saw nothing worth trying. Whatever I am now that people might call an engineer, in the fullest sense of someone who builds things and keeps building, Gabriela and Angel are the two who poured the foundation.
Jaimar came at the start of 2025. We talk every single day, long conversations that go past whatever the actual problem is. She never just gives guidance from a safe distance. She put her own name on the line for me once, believed in me publicly when that cost her something, when it would have been easier not to. I think of her as a little sister now, one I will always look out for, because she reflects back at me the part of myself I most want to keep, the part that cares about people for no reason except that they’re people.
Bryan arrived around the same time. Younger than me, somehow already the kind of man I am still trying to become. Not just good, though he is that, genuinely, in a way that deserves saying out loud. He listened when I had nothing put together to say, taught me things without making it feel like a lesson, pushed me to improve, and never once let me drift off to the side. He gave me a line I still repeat to myself: “leave problems aside, focus on your work and your personal life.” Simple, almost too simple to write down, and exactly what I needed someone to say to me plainly at the time. If I am someone who is building several things at once these days instead of one thing badly, a real part of that traces back to him.
Ricardo came around the same time, another one who just started being a big brother without ever announcing it or asking for the title, the way Angel did. We talk often enough now that it has become a real habit rather than an occasion. Like Fabian, he’s always pushing me back toward staying rational when I’m not. The difference is where his advice comes from. Fabian reasons his way there. Ricardo speaks from experience, his own, lived and paid for, not a principle he arrived at from the outside. I’ve come to value that distinction more than I can easily explain. The wisdom of someone who actually lived through the thing they’re telling you about is a kind of tenderness the rest of us rarely get offered, and even more rarely recognize while we’re being handed it. I have felt real, unforced care from very few people in my life. He is one of the clearest ones.
Jaimar, Bryan, and Ricardo arrived right as things were reaching their worst, not after. I don’t think that was a coincidence.
I keep thinking about Atlas for this. In the myth he holds up the sky forever, a punishment that starts looking like an identity, weight he never agreed to and can never set down. For a while I was doing something close to that, except the weight wasn’t punishment from a god, it was a performance I had built for people who were never going to give me anything real back in exchange for carrying it.
So here is what I actually want to say to you, plainly, the way I’d say it across a table.
You get to decide what you actually want, and you owe yourself an honest answer for why you want it, not the answer that sounds good, the real one underneath it. If the honest answer is that you want people to stop leaving, or you want to feel needed, or you want somewhere to belong badly enough that you’ll take any circle willing to have you, say that to yourself first. You can’t fix a want you won’t name.
Once you know what you actually want, protect it. Don’t invest yourself in people who are bad for you, or in people who plainly don’t care whether you’re doing well. Don’t invest yourself in whatever it is that’s quietly consuming you either, a circle, a habit, a feed you keep refreshing at two in the morning. That includes places like this one. I write a blog and I mean every word I put in it, but even this, even the internet itself, is something you’re allowed to close. Shut it down sometimes. Go be somewhere real. Nothing on a screen needs you awake for it.
I told you earlier what Frankl called the one freedom nobody can take from you, your attitude toward what happens to you. Here’s the other half of that same freedom, the one I had to learn later: you also get to choose where you put your care, and it was never required to go toward people who wouldn’t put any of theirs toward you.
So don’t suffer over what was never yours to control. Whether someone likes you was never that. There are eight billion people on this planet. Some of them will never like you no matter what you do, and that was always going to be true, and it says nothing real about you. Plenty of others will love you exactly as you actually are, no performance required, the way Fabian, Gabriela, Angel, Jaimar, Bryan, and Ricardo did. Go find them instead. Stop paying rent to the ones who won’t.
If the people around you aren’t giving you anything real back, emotional support, an actual moral compass, room to grow, and all they’re offering is somewhere to perform, ask yourself honestly whether you’re building a friendship or building someone else’s version of Atlas’s punishment. You are allowed to freefall.
Atlas never got to set the sky down. I did, because six people made sure I had somewhere real to land. I would take freefall over forever holding up something that was never mine, every single time.
I want to name this properly: that chapter is over. Not just survived. Won. I came out the other side more myself than I have ever been, and I intend to give that the respect it deserves instead of shrugging it off the way I used to shrug off good things about myself. What’s left standing on the other side of all of it is someone who loves frogs, unapologetically, who gets genuinely excited about nerdy work most people wouldn’t look at twice, and who finally, actually represents the person writing this, instead of a performance of one. I am happy with how this turned out. I am not going to complain about the road here anymore, only that I need to keep smiling more. This is my victory, and I am claiming it as exactly that, the thing that keeps turning me into someone confident, someone with real charm because it is earned now instead of performed, someone genuinely good, a little more of him every single day.
To the six of you, Fabian, Gabriela, Angel, Jaimar, Bryan, Ricardo, I know you’ll actually read this, so let me say the rest straight to you instead of past you. You were never just pillars to me, structural, useful, holding something up and nothing more. You taught me the most important thing underneath all of it, that letting people genuinely care about you, and letting yourself believe it when they do, isn’t a weakness to manage or a debt to keep track of. It’s the standard. Genuine care isn’t one nice thing among other nice things that make a life good. It’s the whole motto. It’s all.
Before I close this, I want to say something to the people I know will actually read it. There are more of you in this than the six names above, and I don’t want that to go unsaid. Miguel, I’ll give you your own proper space another time, but I appreciate you right now too. Michael, the same. The whole group of us who found each other and kept finding each other, online and off, you know who you are. Simon, and everyone else I haven’t named here yet, I mention you because I got lucky enough to end up with something like a second, giant family. I love you all, plainly, the same way I’d say it about blood. You were my family too, when I needed one most.
