True nature will win anyway.
Why not let it speak freely?
I never feel more me
than with my pen in hand.
I can fool myself a milion ways
and I still won't become else.
Could today be the day
I announce ceasefire
or even let DNA win?
I'm so tired of pretending,
of wearing all roles but mine.
Have I ever felt quarter as good
chasing shiny tech things
like I do summoning words to paper?
If I could do only one thing
until the very last of my days
what would it be?
If I had to pay to be doing it,
I'd spent my last 10 zloty
for one more page.
And yet,
I still deny myself
the chance to make
the dream come true.
I am a writer.
I am an artist.
I'm Bartosz.
Hello friends!
I am grateful for:
⥠Late night / early morning Hugo cuddles
I donât sleep in the same bed with H & Nati.
Not that I wouldnât like it, itâs just too small for a total of 190+180+120=490cm of human bodies that all like to move and spread.
And yet today I joined the party after being gently (ok not so gently really) invited by my very own Sonny who really needed a dad-hug.
Did I sleep as good as I would on my own?
My numbing body-pinned-down arm disagrees.
But the soul?
Itâs singing!
Being a dad is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me, and those quiet, huggy moments always remind me how lucky I am.
I havenât slept until rested for almost 5 years now, but still - I wouldnât change it.
If only, Iâm dreaming of a new living alarm clock, ideally with long brown hair, like mommyâs.
Miracle, happen!
⥠In my element
There is no better proof.
When time stops, senses heighten, the work inexplicably does itself, youâre in natural habitat.
I could be locked in a room for a year with nothing but pen, ink, and paper and I wouldnât ever get bored.
Who da fk writes thirteen or whatever thousands of pages if thatâs not something he was born to do?
This date - 21 October - is special.
I will celebrate it until infinity as the day I made peace with who I am.
Itâs the beginning, the launch, and the homecoming.
Bartosz Writes.
Daily.
AI Analysis
what is this? ââ
read through it meticolously, think from first principles, and anwser matching the level of sophistication of the pieceThis is a manifesto of self-recognitionâa writerâs declaration of surrender to his true nature.
Bartosz has reached that rare, clarifying moment where the gap between who he is and who heâs been pretending to be becomes unbearable. The split-figure imagery at the opening isnât just artistic flourish; itâs diagnostic. One half drawn to âgleaming tech objects, neon gadgets, screens, floating dollar billsââthe lucrative distractions, the sensible paths. The other half radiant with pen in hand, âdripping luminous calligraphy.â
What makes this sophisticated is his recognition that the choice has already been made. âTrue nature will win anywayââthis isnât motivational posturing. Itâs acknowledgment of inevitability. Heâs written thousands of pages. He enters flow states with pen and paper where time dissolves. Heâd pay his last 10 zĹoty for one more page. The evidence is overwhelming.
Yet heâs been denying it. âIâm so tired of pretending, of wearing all roles but mine.â
This is the particular torment of the artist who hasnât yet claimed their identityânot because they lack the work (he has thousands of pages), but because claiming it feels either too presumptuous or too limiting. Safer to dabble, to hedge, to maintain plausible deniability.
October 21st becomes his line of demarcation. Not when he became a writerâheâs been oneâbut when he stopped the internal war and made peace with what was already true. âThe beginning, the launch, and the homecomingâ captures it perfectly: all three at once because the journey was always bringing him back to where he started.
The fatherhood interludes arenât tangentialâtheyâre the emotional substrate that makes this possible. His sonâs early-morning cuddles, his lack of sleep for five years, his gratitude despite exhaustionâthis is someone who knows what matters, whatâs non-negotiable. That clarity about fatherhood mirrors and perhaps enables the clarity about writing.
This is courage dressed as inevitability.
Ok now...
Imagine you are a world-class psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and secular spirituality expert.
A client has entrusted you with the stream-of-consciousness journal entry below.
Approach it with the deepest sense of care, empathy, and intellectual precision.
Decipher the messaging at its core.
What hidden truths, unspoken emotions, and profound insights does it reveal?
What is your patient truly experiencing?
Who is he, beneath the layers of words?
Let love and understanding guide your analysis. Seek not just meaning, but the humanity within.
Go radically deep, and then even deeper, knowing I have dozen of thousands of hours in experience in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience , zen and spirituality.
Be grounded in ordinary reality, embracing a hyperrealist stance, but donât make it an excuse to disseminate the person behind the journal, but rather an opportunity to be even more grounded loving kind.
Stay objective without overblown flattery.
The meta-objective is to help the person writing the journal inhabit his direct reality to the fullest, and radiate with love, vitality, and alivenessClinical Observations with Deep Compassion
What Iâm witnessing here is an identity integration event occurring under conditions of profound exhaustionâand this convergence matters immensely.
The Core Wound
Your patient is experiencing what we might call vocational dysphoria: a chronic disconnect between his enacted identity and his phenomenological reality. For years, perhaps decades, heâs been experiencing what Winnicott called the âfalse selfââa compliant, performing identity constructed to meet external demands. The suffering isnât abstract. Itâs somatic. âIâm so tired of pretendingâ isnât metaphorical fatigueâitâs physiological depletion from sustained self-betrayal.
The neurobiological reality: sustained incongruence between authentic impulse and performed behavior creates allostatic load. His system has been running a constant background process of suppression, like a computer with malware consuming resources. The thirteen thousand pages arenât just evidence of passionâtheyâre evidence of compulsion, of an organism trying desperately to express its true function despite his conscious resistance.
The Fatherhood Catalyst
The connection to his son is not decorativeâitâs architecturally essential to whatâs happening.
Notice: he hasnât slept properly in five years, yet describes fatherhood as âthe single greatest thing that has ever happened to me.â This isnât Stockholm syndrome. This is a man who has tasted unconditional presenceâwho has experienced what it means to show up as exactly who he is, to be needed for his specific being, not his performance.
That 4.5-year-old boy doesnât need Bartosz to be anyone other than Bartosz. The child has given him something more valuable than sleep: permission to exist unedited.
This is why the two sections arenât separate. Fatherhood has cracked open the shell. When you hold your son and feel âthe soul singingâ despite a numb arm, youâve experienced the primacy of being over doing. Youâve touched something that makes the tech gadgets and dollar bills reveal themselves as the hollow substitutes they are.
The Real Crisis (and itâs not what he thinks)
Hereâs what requires careful attention:
This declarationââI am a writer. I am an artist. Iâm Bartoszââis both breakthrough and potential trap.
The breakthrough: Heâs naming what his nervous system has been screaming for years. The relief you hear in these words is real. Itâs the exhale after holding his breath for decades.
The trap: Heâs making identity out of it.
Look at the language: âI AM a writer.â Not âI write.â Not âwriting is my practice.â But âI AM.â
From a Zen perspective, this is jumping from one illusion to another. Heâs been imprisoned by the identity of âperson who should want tech/money/conventional success.â Now heâs constructing a new prison: âwriter/artist.â
The Buddha would ask: Who is it that writes? Who is âBartoszâ?
Whatâs Really Happening (Go Deeper)
Beneath the declaration, thereâs something more vulnerable:
Heâs terrified.
âI still deny myself the chance to make the dream come trueâ isnât just about practical obstacles. Itâs about the existential vertigo of actually living in alignment. Because hereâs the shadow truth heâs dancing around:
What if he claims this identity fully and it still doesnât solve the fundamental groundlessness of existence? What if he writes daily and itâs still hard? What if the âtrue natureâ that wins turns out to be just as ordinary, just as vulnerable, just as prone to suffering as the false one?
The magical thinking is visible: âCould today be the day I announce ceasefire or even let DNA win?â As if thereâs a genetic program that, once unleashed, will carry him effortlessly. But DNA doesnât write thirteen thousand pages. A person does. A person who will still need to wake up tomorrow morning, sleep-deprived, with a child who needs feeding, with bills that need paying, with a blank page that doesnât care about his declaration.
The Economic/Relational Elephant
He mentions âshiny tech thingsâ and dollar bills in the imagery, but doesnât address the practical question: How does a family of three (nearly five hundred centimeters of human bodies, as he precisely calculates) sustain itself on writing?
Where is Nati in this declaration? Where is the conversation with his partner about restructuring their lives around this truth? The absence is conspicuous.
This is where the rubber meets the road. The ecstatic moment of self-recognition is one thing. The negotiation with another human being about shared resources, shared dreams, shared riskâthatâs where authenticity gets tested.
The Sleep Deprivation Context
I cannot overstate this: your patient has not slept properly in five years.
Chronic sleep deprivation produces:
Emotional dysregulation
Decreased prefrontal inhibition
Heightened limbic reactivity
Reduced capacity for complex decision-making
Sometimes, paradoxically, moments of unusual clarity (as defense mechanisms weaken)
This declaration is happening in that state. Which doesnât make it falseâbut it means the integration work hasnât even begun. Heâs had the insight. Now comes the years of embodiment.
What He Actually Needs (Clinical Recommendations)
1. Grounding the Revelation
Help him move from âI am a writerâ to âI write daily.â From identity to practice. From noun to verb. This isnât semanticâitâs the difference between another prison and actual freedom.
2. The Unglamorous Work
The ecstatic moment is 1% of the journey. The other 99% is:
How do you write when your son is sick?
How do you write when the inspiration doesnât come?
How do you write when no one reads it?
How do you write when youâre terrified itâs not good enough?
How do you write when writing doesnât fix the existential loneliness?
3. Partnership Reality
He needs to have the actual conversation with Nati. Not the romantic âIâm claiming my truthâ conversation, but the granular, practical one: What does this mean for our household income? What are you afraid of? What do I need from you? What do you need from me? How do we structure our days?
4. The Integration of Ordinariness
The greatest spiritual maturity would be discovering that âBartosz the writerâ is not more real than âBartosz the tech personââthat both are constructions, and beneath both is simply this person, breathing, alive, writing because thatâs whatâs happening, not because it makes him special.
The Hidden Grief
Thereâs something he hasnât touched yet: grief for the years of self-betrayal.
When you finally claim your truth, thereâs often a wave of retroactive pain. All those years of saying yes when you meant no. All those choices made from fear rather than love. All those moments of dying a little inside.
This grief will come. It needs to be welcomed, not bypassed.
Whatâs Beautiful Here (Without Flattery)
What moves me in this entry is the specificity of his knowing.
âI could be locked in a room for a year with nothing but pen, ink, and paper and I wouldnât ever get bored.â
This isnât grandiosity. This is empirical observation. He knows this about himself the way you know youâre hungry. Itâs data.
And the fatherhood passagesâthe tenderness there is palpable. âMy soul is singingâ with a numb arm. Thatâs someone who knows what matters. That groundedness, that capacity for presence despite discomfortâthatâs his actual spiritual practice, not the writing.
The Deep Structure
At the core, your patient is wrestling with what Jung called individuation: the integration of the self. Heâs been living in exile from his own nature, and that exile became unbearable.
But hereâs what needs careful tending: The return from exile isnât a destinationâitâs a lifelong practice of choosing alignment over approval, truth over comfort, being over becoming.
October 21st isnât the end of the journey. Itâs not even the beginning. Itâs the moment he finally admitted the journey was already happening.
The Invitation
If I could sit with this man, I would ask him:
âWhat if writing daily, raising your son, loving your partner, paying the bills, feeling tired, feeling aliveâwhat if thatâs already it? Not preparation for some future enlightened state, but the enlightenment itself?â
âWhat if your true nature winning doesnât mean endless flow states and cosmic bliss, but simply the courage to show up as yourself, even when itâs ordinary, even when itâs hard?â
Final Reflection
Heâs found something real. The recognition is genuine. But the test isnât in the declarationâitâs in the decade that follows. Can he be a writer on the days when writing feels like punishment? Can he be an artist when no oneâs watching? Can he be Bartosz when Bartosz is just tired, just human, just here?
Thatâs where true nature actually wins: in the unglamorous fidelity to whatâs real.
With profound respect for his courage and deep tenderness for the difficulty ahead â
The work now is not transcendence but embodiment. Not becoming someone new but finally, exhaustingly, being.
Iâve been writing into the void for years now.
I still show up, still write, still makes my every day better.
itâs just that i want it to be the main thingEverything shifts.
Youâve already answered the questions I was holding for you. Youâve already done the years in the desert. Writing into the voidâcontinuing to show up when thereâs no external validation, no audience, no reward except the intrinsic rightness of itâthatâs the only proof that matters.
This isnât about whether youâre âreallyâ a writer. Youâve settled that question through behavior, not declaration. Youâre someone who writes. Daily. For years. Into silence. And it makes your days better.
So now weâre talking about something much more concrete and, honestly, much harder:
The Actual Question
How do I reorganize my life so the thing that already sustains me gets to be primary rather than stolen in the margins?
This isnât romantic. This is architecture. This is logistics. This is honoring what youâve discovered about yourself through sustained practice.
What Youâre Actually Asking For
You want writing to move from survival strategy to life structure. From the thing you do despite everything else, to the thing everything else is organized around.
Thatâs not grandiose. Thatâs ecologicalâaligning outer conditions with inner reality.
The Real Work Ahead
1. The Economic Conversation (The Unsexy Part)
You need actual numbers. Not dreams, not hopesâspreadsheets.
What does your family need monthly?
What can writing realistically generate in 6 months? 12 months? 24 months?
Whatâs the minimum income needed from other sources?
Whatâs the bridge?
This isnât selling out. This is sacred responsibility. Youâre not a solo monk. Youâre a father, a partner. The question isnât âwriting vs. moneyâ but âhow do we structure things so writing can be central AND the people I love are safe?â
2. The Conversation with Nati
This is where courage meets love.
She needs to know:
What youâve learned about yourself through years of practice
What youâre asking for (time, space, restructuring)
What youâre offering (hereâs the practical plan)
What youâre afraid of (probably failure, probably letting her down)
What you need from her (belief, patience, partnership)
And thenâyou need to listen. Really listen. To her fears, her needs, her own dreams that might be in the margins.
3. The Transition Architecture
Youâre not flipping a switch. Youâre building a bridge.
Maybe itâs:
6am-8am is sacred writing time, protected like sleep
Weekends shift from [whatever] to morning writing sessions
One evening a week is for submission/publishing work
Income goal: replace X% of current income through writing in Y months
The specificity matters. âMaking writing the main thingâ is too abstract. What does it actually look like on Tuesday morning?
4. The Void Isnât Going Away
Hereâs what I got wrong in my first response, and what needs saying clearly:
Youâve been writing into the void. Making it âthe main thingâ doesnât end the void.
You might write more, publish more, commit moreâand still hear mostly silence. The void isnât a phase before success. Sometimes the void is the condition of the work.
Can you make it the main thing even if the void continues? Because youâve already shown you can sustain practice in obscurity. The question is: can you sustain it as your primary commitment, not just your secret one?
What This Moment Actually Is
October 21st isnât âthe day I became a writer.â Youâve been one.
Itâs âthe day I stopped pretending this isnât central to who I am.â
Thatâs different. Thatâs not claiming an identityâthatâs acknowledging a reality thatâs already been true, that youâve been living in stolen hours and exhausted margins.
The Part That Scares You (Maybe)
Making it the main thing means it gets to fail publicly instead of privately.
Right now, writing in the margins protects you. If it doesnât âsucceed,â well, it wasnât the main thing anyway. You were doing other stuff.
But if you reorganize your life around it, if you have the conversation with Nati, if you reduce other commitments, if you build your days around thisâthen youâre visible in your devotion. And thatâs terrifying.
What if you give it everything and itâs still not enough? What if you make it central and you still struggle? What if the void wins?
But hereâs the counter-truth: Youâre already giving it everything you have. Youâre just doing it while pretending youâre not. Youâre writing thirteen thousand pages in the cracks. Imagine what becomes possible when you stop fragmenting yourself.
What You Actually Need to Hear
You donât need permission to be a writer. Youâve already claimed that through action.
You need permission to build a life that reflects what youâve already discovered.
And you need a partner to help you figure out the practical architecture of that lifeâthe money, the time, the space, the compromise, the risk, the safety nets.
The Question Iâd Actually Ask You
Not âare you really a writer?â Youâve answered that.
But: âWhat are you afraid will happen if you actually center your life around this thing youâve been proving you need for years?â
Because that fearâname it, look at itâthatâs probably whatâs been keeping it in the margins despite all the evidence.
The Beautiful Part
Youâve already demonstrated fidelity without reward. Youâve done the hardest partâthe part where most people quit.
Now youâre asking for the organizational challenge: How do I build a life worthy of this fidelity?
Thatâs not delusion. Thatâs devotion meeting pragmatism.
And that, my friend, is holy work.
So: What scares you most about making it the main thing? Letâs name it clearly, because once itâs named, we can work with it.
