1. You can’t outrun your insecurities
A few days after my first marathon, I was writing a letter. I stumbled upon an opportunity – significant, or so I told myself: giving a presentation about university life at the school where I had graduated. It seemed grand and meaningful, the perfect opportunity to improve several realms all at once. I pictured myself standing and speaking, with everyone impressed. And yet, as soon as the thought took root, it grew into something else entirely. I began to wait anxiously for a response. And in that waiting, I hardly slept. Not for any good reason, mind you—I knew my nervousness was irrational. Still, my heart kept hammering in my chest. My offer was accepted, and yet, instead of relief, I began to feel worse. My pulse grew louder; every beat echoed in my head; for days, I heard and felt every single one. That was when I decided I must redefine what it means to be Kiryl P. This wasn’t an overreaction, I told myself. No, it was a revelation—a spark to light a fire that might burn away whatever was broken inside me. And what is broken inside me? Where do I begin?
My problem is that I feel threatened all the time.
At university, I am surrounded by people—smarter, faster people. They see connections I didn’t even know were possible. Concepts come to them as naturally as breathing, and when I finally sit down to study, I am still left clueless. It’s almost funny—when I complain, no one believes me – they see me as their intellectual superior. Some of them, I know, barely try. They sleep through their lessons, they drink themselves into oblivion, they attend lectures only on a whim, and yet they grasp concepts I can’t fathom even after hours of work. And still, their carelessness seems to mock me as much as their brilliance does.
And then, there is, of course, my body. I fear someone—anyone—pointing at me, laughing perhaps, and asking why I am so skinny. I’ve trained for two years, and yet I’ve gained little. I even lost what I was proud of—my six-pack—when I trained for that damned marathon. I imagine myself defending this loss in some fictional confrontation, and the very thought makes me feel weak. In my mind, I see their sneers, hear their accusations, and I can already feel the sting of being found wanting.
And my social skills? I’ve discussed it before. In the past few years, I have gone through a monumental development. When I was little, I was the quiet kid who got bullied. Then, in a cruel twist of fate, I became a bully. I, the outcast, turned aggressor, and for what? To find myself hated even more, misunderstood, and bitter... A few years later, I began to change. In a mere year, I went from being entirely isolated to being able to talk to hot blondes. Through sheer determination, I’ve dragged myself up from the abyss of isolation, seeing improvements at a speed hard to replicate. But unfortunately, that development did not continue. Over the summer before university, I hardly interacted with people and thus declined socially. After university began, things did not get better. Now, in the city, I barely remember how to smile at strangers. I have lost that which I worked towards. Do you understand how small that makes me feel? To see others glide through life with ease, with charm, with laughter that I can’t even pretend to replicate?
Life is war. I’m surrounded on all sides by adversaries. At university, in the city, everywhere—each face a rival, each laugh an insult. I see them all trying to take what I don’t even want, and yet, somehow, I still feel the sting of it – they all want the pretty girls. This is how you find yourself running a marathon with two weeks’ training: not out of passion, but out of a desperate, futile need to push – a scream to escape the omnipresent negativity. To push hard enough to make it stop. To push so hard that maybe, just maybe, I could finally feel like I’m enough. But you can never push hard enough to outrun your inadequacy. Excellence is the bare minimum; anything less is failure. And excellence? Even that only buys you a moment of relief. The mountain keeps growing, and you keep climbing, only to realize there is no peak. What a cruel joke it is to want so much and to know, deep down, you’ll never have it.
As such, that negativity, that fear, that perception of feeling threatened has now been piling up for two months. I planted negativity, and now my inner garden started to yield fruits of devilish seeds, leaving me nothing but negativity. If I continue that way, I will die young and live a miserable life while doing so. There have been times when I couldn’t sleep because I wasn’t successful enough – and for what?
2. Who am I fooling, really?
I was lying to God. Yes, lying outright, brazenly, and with such meticulous devotion that I almost convinced myself otherwise. For quite some time now, I have prayed—morning, evening, and sometimes even in the middle of the day when life seemed unbearable or I needed some luck. I prayed fervently, clutching at discipline, love, health, intelligence, and forgiveness for my sins - like a beggar at the edge of some celestial charity line. Each word of my prayer, carefully curated, an offering of my best self—oh, how pious I must have sounded to Him. “Thy will be done,” I would say at the end, solemn and pure, my voice dripping with false humility. Yet, all the while, I was lying.
Yes, lying. I prayed as if God Himself could not see through my hypocrisy. “Teach me to love and teach me to forgive,” I’d say—what noble words! Yet my true thoughts were vile, unspeakable things. Indeed, ‘teach me to love and teach me to forgive’ sounds good-hearted, and ‘I envy that charming alcoholic for his effortless grasp on what I must wrestle for hours’ is not remotely divine. That envy burned me alive, and I would say, “Forgive me, Lord,” not because I sought redemption but because it seemed like the proper thing to do. I was no angel, and my prayers were no offering of light. They were transactions, desperate bargains disguised as reverence. And the worst part? I knew it all along.
I suppose you wouldn’t understand—why anyone would persist in prayer if they knew it’s a lie. But I do. Of course, I do. It wasn’t about deceiving God; how could I deceive the omniscient? No, the lies weren’t for Him—they were for me. They were the salve I needed to cover up the cracks of my own inadequacy. But those cracks widened, the lies piled up like rubble, and I found myself crushed beneath them. And when I could take it no longer, when the weight of it all threatened to tear me apart, I did the only thing left to do.
I stopped. I dropped the act, the charade, the angelic airs. I whispered the truth, ugly and unpolished: “This is who I am.” And it was only then, at that moment, that I found relief—not in answers, not in divine intervention, but in the simple act of ceasing to lie. I stopped playing games and started to be sincere in my prayer. I took off the mask of the personality I wished to have, the very personality I had almost convinced myself I had: “This is who I am. Amen.”
3. Accepting yourself means telling the truth
‘I don’t want to.’ There is no poetry in that phrase, no gilded edge, no pretense. It is raw and unpleasant, like biting down on steel. But it is the truth, and to speak it is a victory.
A week ago, as I stood on the platform reading, waiting for the train to arrive, a woman approached me. She asked if I had ever studied the Bible. I told her I had. She seemed pleased, eager even, and as the train rumbled closer, she hurriedly scribbled her email on a scrap of paper, hoping to stay in touch. And yet, at that moment, I told her something most wouldn’t: ‘No. I don’t want to; I don’t feel like it.’
I said it simply, plainly, as though it were nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. To say ‘no’ in that moment, rather than feigning interest or manufacturing an excuse, was monumental. There is power in that refusal—the power to declare, without apology, where your boundaries lie. To say ‘no’ is to understand that life is finite and that time and energy are not infinite wells from which to draw endlessly. And more than that, it is to recognize that every ‘no’ is a bigger ‘yes’ in disguise. Every honest refusal is an affirmation of something deeper, of a purpose you refuse to compromise.
There is a masculine elegance in the ability to reject—to say ‘no’ when the world whispers ‘Why not?’ This refusal is not a gesture of cruelty but of clarity. To accept yourself truly, you must first accept the limits of your time, your will, and your soul. There is only so much you can do in your time... A man’s ability to resist the temptations and distractions of life is directly proportional to the depth of his consciousness. In other words: The ability to say ‘no’ is directly proportional to your level as a man. Saying ‘no’ is not weakness; it is a bold and unmistakable demonstration of power. ‘No’ is a complete sentence. If it is not, then neither is your character. To explain or justify every refusal is to dilute your purpose, to chip away at the foundations of who you are. But a genuine ‘no’—unadorned, unashamed—is a yes to your truest self, a confirmation of the life you are determined to lead. To tell the truth, even in something as small as this, is to honor the man you aspire to be.
4. On focusing on strengths
A few months ago, I worked as a photographer to apprentice myself in the art of business. It was my first day, and exhausted, I decided—perhaps unwisely—to visit one last restaurant, an Italian place. The owner accepted my pitch, and I felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of photographing there. My camera battery, however, had other plans. Undeterred, I promised to return in the evening to complete the job. That’s precisely what I did. I worked hard and poured myself into the task, and the result was better than I could have imagined. The owner was impressed, even tipping me €20—my first self-earned money. He went a step further, offering to hire me as an event photographer for parties at the restaurant. A triumph, right? Well, it should have been. But then I checked the clock. It was eleven at night. Eleven! And in that moment, I woke up—not from sleep, but from whatever haze had clouded my judgment. How had I let so many hours slip through my fingers? How did I end up working so hard for someone who disrespected me—cracking jokes at my expense, while being glued to his phone?
This experience was a symptom of a broader problem: my brain shuts down when I’m surrounded by people. In group settings, I either vanish into passivity or take on the entire burden myself. Politics, negotiation, diplomacy—these are not arenas where I thrive. And maybe they never will be. Mastery of social intelligence would take years, perhaps decades, of relentless effort, and even then, it might remain a weak spot. Is it worth it to pour myself into changing what feels so fundamentally out of sync with who I am? Or would it be wiser—saner—to simply accept it?
That’s the essence of self-acceptance: doubling down on your strengths rather than fighting to change everything all at once. If social maneuvers drain me, why not let someone else take on those tasks? There are people who live for what I find exhausting! Why struggle to transform myself into something I’m not when I could instead excel at what I already am? By closing doors, I see what to commit to. Self-acceptance and focus differ in their manifestations, but at their core, they are the same.
5. On finding your unique and eternal way
A while ago, someone asked me if writing was a wise use of time. The answer came to me at once: verily, it is! If you were to list every great person, the vast majority would be capable communicators, able to wield words as a weapon. Words are a leverage, infinite in their reach. To tame your thoughts, to distill them into language, is to master the very fabric of existence.
Yet, there lingers a nagging question: should I not instead utilize the spoken word? Why not record videos or audio? It seems reasonable—obvious, even. But life is not a simple equation.
The first tenet of life is to use what you have. And what do I have? I have a quill: I enjoy writing, yet I am a painfully mediocre speaker at best. It would be madness to dilute my strength by chasing what I lack. Victory is never guaranteed, yet to spread oneself thin is to guarantee failure. I’ve poured hundreds of hours into speaking, and I’m tired of swimming against the current – after over a hundred videos, I had enough.
When people ask me why I don’t record videos anymore, I see their eyes glaze over with the illusion of the grass always being greener. “Surely,” they imply, “the audience for videos is larger! Surely, it’s better suited to the times!” But I’ve stopped caring for such fleeting considerations. Life is a test, and I have chosen my answer.
“Try social media! Try podcasts! Try anything else!” But these people are blind. They see only the surface, the momentary glint of what sparkles now. They do not understand. I write not for today, not for trends or attention. Those things are feminine in their essence—eternally shifting, eternally restless like the wind bending this way and that. They hold no substance and offer no permanence. I write to leave a legacy. My words are not for the moment; they are for the ages. Trends will fade. Attention will wither. And when all has passed, what remains is stillness.
Stillness is power. While others rush about, climbing their ladders of fame and fleeting success, I sit. I write. I am unshaken. Let the world move if it must—I will not – unless it is my path.