It took 10 years to make this

The story I hid from the world. And what it took to reveal it.

Ten years is over 20 Marvel movie releases and 10 iPhone updates.

It’s one worldwide pandemic. Two and a half presidential terms. And at least three existential crises. It’s your favorite jeans wearing out, coming back in style, and then back out.

Ten years is enough time to change your life; or to put something off for so long it starts to feel like it could never exist beyond an idea in your head.

This long-form video essay I published — even what you’re reading now — is both the thing that changed my life, and the thing I thought I’d never finish.

On the surface, my video titled “What a 10-year fitness transformation couldn’t fix” is a 44-minute meditation on my fitness journey and the truth about what a goal can take from you (and what it might leave behind when you’re finally ready to listen). For anyone who’s ever found themselves trapped between a goal and their own mind, I think you’ll get it.

But there’s more to it.

Ten years ago, I started a YouTube channel to document that very fitness journey. Oh, how fun it was to flex a creative muscle beyond doing what I had always done — writing words on a screen. I did it for a while until one day I just …disappeared.

And it wasn’t just me that disappeared. So did all of my public creative work. Just silence for all that time.

So to put this video out now is a new beginning.

Because finally, it exists.

You see, this video isn’t just about fitness. It represents something much bigger and more personal: It’s the product of a decade of effort and avoidance, of changing goals and changing selves, and eventually finding the nerve to return to something I thought I had left behind.

It’s about finally creating again after so many years of thinking about it, circling around it, and never quite doing it.

And while a part of me wants to regret all the time I didn’t spend making things… I also know I couldn’t have made this any sooner.

People say the hardest part is just starting. But what I’ve found even harder than starting is starting again.

Fitness transformations and creative reinventions have the same enemy: inertia. It’s easy to keep going when what you’re doing is nothing. Harder to stop, reset, and try again, especially when no one else is expecting you to.

But now, I’ve broken the loop with this.

At last.

And it feels so good to be back at the beginning again.