Cracking the Shell: Silence, Stability & Noise

Cracking the shell took me decades—a narcissist’s voice projecting his own shortcomings onto me, looping them back until I almost believed they were mine. It became the wallpaper of my mind, not a flaw of my own, but a parasite I had to outgrow.

The fog I lived in wasn’t marijuana smoke, though outsiders loved that joke. It was doubt, stoning me daily with whispers of not being enough.

And when I finally looked around, I realized the pressure didn’t only come from one voice.

At home, my father only ever wanted one thing: stability. Not because he was against entrepreneurship — in fact, with his own entrepreneurial background, he might have been secretly proud if I’d chosen that path. But what he couldn’t accept was joblessness. Breaks for medical recovery, moments of burnout, even pauses that weren’t cleanly explained — those were the triggers for his worry. His concern was stability, not my inner noise. That part, he never wanted to hear or act on.

My mother’s refrain was different. Provide, provide, provide — always for her. Love translated into expectation, into obligation.

And my sister? She was the one who nudged, who said, start something of your own. She was the counter-current to all that fear.

But outside of family came the heavier layer: the industry itself. Strategy. Consulting. Rooms swollen with jargon, hierarchies, and people who mistook exhaustion for brilliance. The weight wasn’t just in the workload — it was in the culture. The performance of knowing, the constant performance of stability. I carried not only one man’s echo, but the heaviness of a whole industry pressing down.

And then there were the supposed friends — the ones who mistook performance for truth, who only ever reflected the surface of my life. They never understood what really happened behind the curtains. My true allies? No more than two.

The noise of all this — family, industry, false friendships — still freezes me sometimes. Anxiety hits sharp, fear kicks in, and I stall. But rebellion doesn’t always start as fire. Sometimes it’s as small as pressing publish on a messy sentence.

The silence persists.
So do I.