**Date**: Jan 09, 2026 > [!important] You were born to write. Stop caring what people think about you. Embarrass yourself, fail and fail and fail again until you succeed. > - You won the English and Art award in primary, middle, and even high school (all awarded to one male and one female student out of the entire school that’s consisted of the most students out of any other district on Long Island) - You won a scholarship for $49,000 / year from the president of Boston College for your essay that you submitted personally, when you found out they didn’t offer you enough money at first for you to get out of your father’s puppeteer grip that suffocated you through up to high school. He read it on the spot, and afterwards, the news came weeks later, during which time you had felt stupid for trying—not because you did, but because you were told this by the same people who congratulated you when they heard the news. - “You should be a writer”, is something you’ve heard the most in your life, and it’s something dormant that’s been instilled within you, and it’s about time you fucking let it out. - You scored 800/800 on the SAT Writing section. - You scored 5/5 on the Advanced Placement Literature Examination (1% achieve 5/5) - You were asked to speak at the White Coat Ceremony by the President of Student Government (Ellen) - which you couldn't because you were in the states preparing for board exams. - You wrote a letter to the editor in 1 day as a favor assignment to a former supervisor and current one, and was accepted to a Q1 journal. No edits, revisions, just one hour of typing on your Apple Notes app laying down on your bed. “You don’t owe anyone your silence, suppression, or apology. You, of all people, have a right to be yourself in the privacy of your own company.” ⁃ Message from myself to myself So rant, spend an hour journaling your thoughts, starting a business, failing or succeeding, losing and winning, but never ever again let yourself do or say anything because you care about what others may think. You need to talk to yourself because the people who speak to you, don’t see you as you are, and tell you things that are only meant to keep you here—in pain and alone—and this makes them happy—far more happy than your presence, your love, or efforts to make them happy could ever bring. That’s why you are alone today, with nothing and no one, but with everything and everyone at the same time in a different sense. What they call a waste of time is not your waste of time. The only waste of time has been when you followed the advice of others that never even asked what makes you happy or to understand you; a waste of time is whenever it wasn’t based on your own intuition or direction. This is a reminder to my future self—you, Danny, whatever date or year you find this note—that as of today is the day that you will remember as your rock bottom, but more importantly—as the last rock bottom. You come from nothing, and you’ve had to scratch and claw to get everything that you had, lost, and rebuilt—in an endless cycle that would make even Sisyphus go: “Damn, that motherfucker will not quit.” I am writing this to you, again, future self—who I assume had yet again found himself back to the top of the hill and watched the boulder roll back down—with a smile on his face, knowing this is what life has been always, is, and always will be—for those who desired to be remembered in this world after they are gone, don’t care about what they have while they are in this life. This is a reminder you that today, on January 9th, 2026, you woke up with a pain in your chest so heavy, a sensation of water up to your neck like you were drowning, because you put all of your faith, love, and effort into the happiness of others, and felt the pain of realizing that it’s these same people who wanted you to feel the opposite. Your writing matters. It is your voice (author’s voice) in your writing (style) that moves people—whether by eliciting positive or negative emotions, recognize that art by definition is to express a polarity of strong emotions in those who interpret or experience it’s existent of creation (read). In conclusion, you have nothing and no one, and the emptiness you feel today, the reminder that all the pain from all those years ago when you were a child, that surfaces up today when you are a man, to say “You really deserved all of that” is utterly and completely bullshit. You must have something in you that you didn’t even know. This is the day that you decided that the way forward is to be misunderstood, embarrassing and humiliated and fail time and time again, because it is in those moments you find what you need to know to make the most progress.