Bizygomatic
𝔊𝔯𝔢𝔢𝔡
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- Dec 4, 2025
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We all were kids once.
No stress. No hierarchy. Nobody's opinion mattered but ours and we were completely fine with that. Would you have cared as a child if someone said your favourite superhero was bad? No. You would've argued, or ignored them entirely and moved on within seconds. Would you have cared about a pimple? Not even slightly. Would you have hesitated to walk up to someone because your hair wasn't right? Never. That thought wouldn't have even occurred to you.
This is not nostalgia. This is a fact about who you were.
Or is it?
Before I build anything on this foundation I should acknowledge the crack in it: memory is reconstructive. Rosy retrospection is real and well documented. We systematically misremember our past selves as more carefree than they were. Some of us were anxious children. Some of us were already building avoidance patterns at seven. The "confident child" may be partly myth. A composite of the best moments, smoothed over.
But even granting that, the directional claim still holds. Whatever baseline you had, something moved it. That movement is what's worth understanding.
II. The Erosion
It was gradual. That's the part nobody warns you about. Not one event, not one person, not one moment you can point to. It was accumulation.
You speak out of turn in class and the teacher shuts you down in front of everyone. That gets filed away. Your parents snap at something you said on a bad evening. To a child, that registers as your primary attachment figure rejecting something about you, and so you quietly retire that part of yourself. Small things. Repeated. Over years. On a nervous system that was still being built.
The mechanism here isn't mysterious. It's operant conditioning, except the punished behaviour was self-expression. And unlike training a dog, you weren't even aware it was happening. You just stopped doing the thing. You called it maturity. You called it reading the room. You called it growing up.
What you actually did was learn, at a cellular level, that visibility was dangerous.
Seligman's learned helplessness experiments are worth knowing. Dogs subjected to inescapable shocks stopped trying to escape even when escape became possible. They'd been trained by the environment that effort was pointless. They didn't decide this. They absorbed it through repetition and then it became their operating assumption.
You are not a dog. But the architecture is the same.
The honest counterargument: some people go through identical conditions and come out the other side intact. Siblings raised in the same house diverge. This means environment isn't deterministic, which means neither genetics nor circumstance fully explains what happened to you. Which means there is some third variable. And the uncomfortable implication of that is that the variable might be partially you. Not blame. Observation. If it's partially you, it's partially accessible to you.
III. What Needs To Happen
You need to destroy the opinion you currently hold of yourself.
Not improve it. Destroy it. Burn the entire structure down because it was never yours to begin with. It was assembled by other people's reactions, other people's moods, other people's bad days taken out on you.
I believe this. I also want to be honest about how little this belief has moved me.
There's a gap between knowing something and it changing your behaviour, and that gap is where most self improvement discourse quietly dies. Insight without mechanism is just storytelling. So what's the actual mechanism?
Identity based habit formation. James Clear popularised this but the underlying research is solid: behaviour change that targets outcome ("I want to lose weight") is far more fragile than behaviour change that targets identity ("I am someone who moves his body daily"). The outcome based version gives you nothing when the scale doesn't move. The identity based version gives you the behaviour as evidence of who you are, independent of results.
The problem is you first have to believe the identity. Which requires evidence. Which requires behaviour. Which requires believing the identity.
The loop is real. It doesn't resolve neatly. You enter it anyway, by force, on a day you have chosen arbitrarily.
IV. A Note On What I'm Actually Doing Here
I should name something uncomfortable before I continue.
Writing this publicly on a forum, after two years of withdrawal from social contact, is itself a social act. And I notice I feel better having written it than I did before. Which raises the question: am I actually starting something, or am I performing the start of something?
There's a version of this post that functions as a substitute for action. The dopamine of articulating intention. The social validation of strangers reading a redemption arc. The false sense of completion that comes from having planned something in detail.
I've done this before. I've written lists. I've journaled protocols. I've constructed frameworks for exactly how I was going to change, and then the construction became the thing itself. The map replaced the territory.
So I'm holding this post loosely. It is a marker, not an achievement. The achievement comes later or not at all.
V. Starting Again
If you're under 18, there is absolutely no reason you cannot start right now. Talk to people again. Approach girls again. Make attempts. Fail. Fail publicly. Fail repeatedly. This is not defeat. This is the process.
Do you remember your first day at school? New place, new faces, no familiarity whatsoever. You were terrified. And then you adapted. You talked to someone. Then someone else. A week later you had friends. You didn't overthink it. You just moved.
That capacity is still in you. It didn't leave. It got suppressed, which is different from lost.
The survivorship bias caveat: "a winner is a loser who tried one more time" is technically true but it also describes every person who kept trying and still lost. Trying is necessary, not sufficient. I include this not to be defeatist but because I'm tired of motivational framing that glosses over the variance. Some people do everything right and the outcome is still bad. That's real. It should be acknowledged.
What it doesn't change: the expected value of trying is still higher than the expected value of not trying. Even accounting for the variance. The math still points the same direction.
VI. Where I Am. Honestly.
Two years of near total withdrawal. I stopped going to the gym. I became reluctant to be seen. I retreated. I watched time move while I stayed still.
I gained 25 kilograms in 2025. Lost 20. Still behind where I was two years ago.
Now here's the cope I want to examine directly: the peptides, the nootropics, the research, the biohacking framework. There is a real risk that I've been medicalising a behavioural problem. That the focus on optimising my biology is sophisticated sounding avoidance of the simpler, harder thing, which is just leaving the house and doing uncomfortable things until they become less uncomfortable.
The biology matters. Sleep, training, hormonal baseline, these are real levers. But no peptide addresses learned helplessness. No nootropic rewires the association between social visibility and threat. Those require exposure. Repetition. Discomfort that doesn't kill you, accumulated over time until the nervous system updates its threat model.
I can't think my way out of a hole I behaved my way into. I've been trying to do exactly that for two years. It has not worked.
VII. The Protocol
The discomfort of starting again, the awkwardness, the early failures, the first weeks at the gym where you feel like you're performing improvement rather than actually improving, that discomfort is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It is the adaptation response working exactly as designed.
There is no neutral. There is no coasting. Stasis is not a stable state. It's slow decline with good optics.
From today:
Gym.Clean eating.No porn. No fap.Fixed sleep.Peptides and nootropics, as support, not as the strategy.This journal. Even if no one reads it. Especially then.
Gym.Clean eating.No porn. No fap.Fixed sleep.Peptides and nootropics, as support, not as the strategy.This journal. Even if no one reads it. Especially then.
If you're reading this and you recognise yourself in any of it, I won't tell you you're not as far gone as you think. I don't know how far gone you are. Neither do you, probably. We're poor at assessing our own states from inside them.
What I'll say instead is that the version of you capable of reading this critically, noticing the copes, questioning the framing, that version of you is not passive. That version is still running.
Buried things can be excavated. Or they can't. You find out by digging.
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