PART TWO
Crushing the Goals He made resolutions.
Not casually. Seriously. Carefully. He wrote them down. Folded them neatly. Slid them into a drawer like evidence that he still believed effort would be rewarded and clarity was right around the corner.
Now it was 2026. Those promises felt absurd.
He opened the drawer without ceremony. Took the papers out one by one. Read them without nostalgia. Just recognition. They belonged to a different version of him. One who still believed life followed rules if you followed them hard enough.
He crushed them. Not angrily. Methodically. Ripping paper felt honest. Final. A physical act for an internal shift that had already happened.
Then he burned them. Watching those goals turn to ash didn’t feel like failure. It felt like relief. Like letting go of a language that no longer matched reality.
Because nothing felt real lately. The days blurred together. The future refused to load. He kept expecting to wake up somewhere else. In that other life. The one where things worked out the way they were supposed to.
In that version, he was driving down the coast. The phone would ring. What time will you be home? We’re waiting for you. But reality kept interrupting the fantasy. So he stopped believing in resolutions.
He chose intentions instead. And when even that felt like too much, he went smaller. One minute at a time. Not tomorrow. Not next month. Just this breath. This moment. This decision not to disappear into the noise.
He changed how he spoke to himself. Stopped claiming anxiety like it was part of his identity. Let it pass through instead of settle in. Some days it worked. Some days it didn’t.
But staying present mattered more than winning. The night before, he turned on payments for his Substack. Not because it was strategic. Because it was honest. By morning, there was proof that even small acts of truth can still create momentum.
That mattered. Because pretending everything is fine doesn’t make it true. Silence doesn’t equal strength. Most people aren’t okay. They’re just quiet about it.
This wasn’t about giving up.
It was about staying.
Staying awake. Staying human. Staying honest in a world that keeps asking you to numb out and move on.
He wasn’t out of the nightmare. But he wasn’t asleep anymore either.
And right now, that was enough.
My name is William Rochelle, but you can call me Bill.
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