The hardest part of the writing process often comes with the start of a new text. What would the topic be? What kind of text? Is is reflective or descriptive?

I often find myself unable to write for I can’t answer these questions unless my impulse to tell a story breaks through the writer’s block that often plagues me.

My excuse, today, is my Golden Birthday, as I turn 27 on a 27. It means very little aside of the numerical coincidence, but in the grand narrative of my life (or at least in the way I’ve decided to frame it to escape the boredom of mediocrity), this date means a turning point, maybe a restart or reboot after a year that may have been one of the most intense and significant in my life.

For that goal, I might invoke the ghost of Ernest Hemingway, for only a life like his could map out in a life like mine, at least when it comes to the variety of places and events that I’ve lived in those last 12 or 13 months.

Maybe I should start reminiscing about the short lived digital journalist stint I had from February to July of last year, covering and analysing news from the world, focusing on Latin America and profiling leaders and figures while fumbling the ocassional article about elections I was assigned to write.

I remember these first months of my last year fondly, for the people I worked with represent some of the finest minds in Europe, and their editorial advice really got into my head, even if we couldn’t manage to keep the project ongoing for reasons external to us.

During that time, when I met a now dear friend of mine, I also traveled extensively, in an odyssey I often call, to myself, “From Malta to Galicia”, since those were the first and last destinations of my trips from March to August, and which coincidentally, were the geographical settings of two of the four weddings I attended as a guest during the year.

I also went back to the United States and to France in what was more of a recovery of my lost steps than a new discovery, first to receive in ceremony attended by my noble protector my first academic honor, and then to return to the château that had already see me shine as a singular voice amongst the Atlanticist elite.

Likewise, I stayed for an extended period in Spain before that Galician wedding, and over all those journeys, I found myself thinking about my solitude, and my friendships, in an internal dialogue that accused me of my own shortcomings and yet comforted me in my proximity to some of the best people I’ve met.

This last year I’ve lived, in many ways, taught me what friendship, real friendship, is, as those who belong in my heart have proved it repeatedly, and those who do not have shown their truth soon enough for me to chase them away.

Naturally, a tangential nobility was found over my work and my travels, as my stays in Malta, and then Washington DC, Normandy, Madrid and Galicia reminded me of the often forgotten aristocratic virtues of hospitality and honor, very much the same I tried to extend, even in a bit of a personal hardship, to my friends visiting me from Sweden, and that I’ve shown by inviting and offering my place to any of those friends wishing to come to my city.

And yet, if the first half of my year was an odyssey of success and geography, the second was a descent into a psychological trench, that could have ended with my defeat if I had not taken it as the fuel to actualize my own potential.

It began at a wedding, an ironic setting for the introduction of a woman who would later be revealed as a “skinwalking succubus.”

I re-met her under the shadow of gossip, for the friends I thought I knew were already busy poisoning the earth, speaking of issues we ignored like we were characters in a Victorian melodrama.

And so, we found a perverse bond in our shared status as outcasts, two only children against a world of blenders and betrayals, an alliance of those who would see a forever in each other as I deluded myself in her love-bombing.

But the fever dream-like nature of this love began to tarnish with the first cold realization: there is a specific kind of humiliation in being a secret. After she crashed her car on a gray road outside Kraków, an afternoon trip meant for clearing our heads after a heavy week, I was made to vanish like a ghost so her parents wouldn’t know I existed.

I was the one she called a “good man,” the one who gifted her wax-sealed books of his own soul, and yet in the light of her reality, I was a pleasure hidden in shame, a convenience to be tucked away when the night fell.

The architecture of this “humiliationship” was built on breadcrumbs and shadows, and I realized, maybe soon enough, or maybe too late, that I was dating a mosaic, a creature constructed from the stolen shards of others.

She had cast me as Stanisław Wokulski from Bolesław Prus’ classic Polish novel, Lalka, a titan of industry but also tragic, noble striver, while she played a part that wasn’t hers to play, maybe showing me her actual nature as a hollow doll.

And all in all, the final shot at my delusion came through a man I thought was her spiritual doppelgänger in the truest literary sense, as he mirrored her life so closely it felt like a glitch in the narrative: the same school, likings and even stories.

To find out that her “spark” was merely a fire stolen from him, for she had replaced him with me on a single Tuesday, was the revelation that broke the spell.

He started stalking me in my regular coffee shop like a traumatized soldier looking for a gun, trying to bond with a fellow survivor of the same disastrous campaign, only to realize we were still holding grenades with the pins pulled.

But my dignity stood stronger, and instead of an explosion, I chose to walk away from the honors he offered, because a title held by a man with no honor is just a heavy piece of tin.

Unlike him, still leashed to the skinwalking succubus we had both loved, I decided to expose myself to expose her, and published my poetry, enduring its leak among their classmates, even at the cost of mockery.

I realized then that the fact that the object of one’s love was a fraud doesn’t make one’s capacity to love a fraud.

In the heavy game of identity and heart, there are those like tapestry, woven of continuous, if bloodied, threads, and those like mosaics, mere pieces broken glass reflecting whatever light happens to be nearby.

I may have lost a number of fake friends and a supposed additional prestige I didn’t need, but I found the exit to a dark labyrinth I wish to never step foot on ever again.

And while I was exorcising the ghosts of my personal life, a new conflict was brewing in the sterile, digital workspace of a a job I took to survive in hopes of better opportunity.

The man in charge was a academic composed entirely of spreadsheets and arrogance, who viewed the world through the narrow aperture of minute-by-minute idle time, convinced that a doctorate was the only sign one could perform meaningful labor in his paper fief.

In his eyes, my skills and different provenance, from the legal real instead of that of the hard sciences, were lower tools to be managed and monitored as mere clerical accessories.

And so, very quickly, I found myself trapped in a what this small man thought was my first adult job, that felt like a digital panopticon.

I was a lawyer being told to turn a twelve-page policy report into a spreadsheet because for those who analyze facts like data points, prose was apparently an inefficient luxury.

I watched him unilaterally edit my time-tracking to reflect his petty theft of minutes that mirrored the theft of my identity in the months prior.

Naturally, a collision was inevitable, and it came in the form of of a clumsy attempt to force through document signing a task-based professional into the mold of an hourly factory worker.

He wanted me to sign away my contractual rights for the sake of his internal symmetry, but he forgot that he had hired a lawyer, and so when I flagged the legal risks, the systemic mismatch between labor law and his minute-level obsession, the gaslighting began.

He couldn’t see a whistleblower protecting the firm from an audit more than he saw a subordinate questioning the master, and his retaliation was swift and clinical.

One day after I formally invoked my protected status as a whistleblower, the termination letter was signed, with him trying to pivot the narrative to unsatisfactory work, a classic move in the mediocre man’s playbook.

He pretended everything was normal while stripping my files access, blaming synchronization issues for what was clearly a digital exclusion of an uncomfortable truth.

But he had miscalculated, as he didn’t know I had for evidence the receipts of his edits, his removals, and his arrogance.

As a now well-known stress manifested in the physical agony of my back pain, I realized I was stepping back into the labyrinth, and whether it is a woman trying to steal my spark or a CEO trying to steal my time, my survival mechanism had perfected through repeated exposure: Documentation and Dignity.

I secured counsel, refused to talk to him, and told him to speak to my lawyer, chosing the silence of the thickening tapestry of my soul over the noise of his broken machine.

If my year had slowly derided my respect for a academia, and for titles as vanity markers for those unable to make more of their lives except pander in echo chambers for validation, then my experience with one of its worse exponents would bury my respect for it at last.

One could think my story would end here, and it would be a bitter conclusion to a year that started bright only to end horribly.

But if my experience surviving a succubus taught me anything, it is to never approach anything good from a state of hopelessness, for demons feed on our voids.

I was barely walking away from the wreckage of a toxic relationship, still unaware of how my feelings had been leaked to the world and blind to the schemes of the man that skinwalker had mimicked the traits I had fallen far, and entering into another wreckage, one built on legal non-compliance and 19th century time control.

But somehow, early on, my senses made me look fast for an exit. There was something that didn’t quite suited me then, and in hindsight, I was right to trust them, for my 26th year would have ended with me as a victim and not as a prospect for higher things if I had just accepted my misfortune.

As such, the man writing this is the one who identified an ocean in the middle of a legal desert, that took the trauma he had endured to weaponize it into a product people older, sharper and more powerful than him would pay for.

In my pain, I turned my scars into a proprietary legal product, and instead of applying for a job, I staged a resurrection, half siege, half heist, all in all, a move few if none could have pulled from the dreadful comfort of their couches.

I reached out to who’d become my next employer, pitching myself as a solution to problems they weren’t too keen to show in the open, and instead of a resume, I sent a manifesto that invoked their successful business models, leveraging all my unique complexities as skills they could deploy by engaging me in.

In just a couple weeks, my setting shifted from the claustrophobic digital panopticon of my apartment to the sky high views of Warsaw towers, bonding with peers and partners over being outsiders in a rather closed industry and of turning out breakup pain into art.

My presence, just shortly before demeaned as a social liability, as time to be squeezed, or as leverage for the sick games of toxic people, was being valued, quite literally, by those who wanted me in but wouldn’t know in which box to put me to make sense in their structures.

Our months-long conversation moved past standard tracks into realms only experienced practitioners would know, vetting my market as an unique asset they could exploit in a demonstration of the aristocratic loyalty I had shown to my friends months prior.

While the waiting was unbearable, an old reminder to the pain of my tainted love, the masterpiece materialized when I took my own professional dispute and transformed it into an exclusive product I could sell them.

It was the antifragility I had once tried by turning my heartbreak into art, weaponized into turning my own conflicts into knowledge I could deploy in service of better allies. I wasn’t a survivor anymore, I was something else entirely.

By the day before my new year in this world, victory was already taking shape, as promises to create something together were openly spoken.

And thus, the 27th of February, my Golden Birthday, was no longer just a numerical coincidence, but just like Edmond Dantès, it was the date I escaped from a prison in which I was demeaned and discarded, to rise up and become what I’ve always been, free from the fear of a failure I have already endured and survived.

I was born on the same date as Constantine the Great, who codified an empire, and Sir Roger Scruton, who understood that beauty and tradition are the only shields against the desecration of the modern world.

I share this day with Justice Hugo Black, a man of the law who knew that the text is the only thing that stands between a citizen and the mob, and with William F. Buckley, who made a career of standing athwart history, yelling “Stop,” when no one else would.

My history is one of foundational shifts and hard-won sovereignty: it is the day the Edict of Thessalonica turned a faith into a state, the day Manuel Belgrano first raised the blue and white flag of a new Republic that would become Argentina, and the day when Spanish Haiti became independent as the Dominican Republic.

It is a day of violent clarification, from the Battle of Tarqui between Gran Colombia and Peru, to the Polish Uprising of 1863, where the “siege” of the soul was met with the steel of the insurgent.

I am marked by the Discovery of the Neutron in 1932, finding the heavy, neutral core of my own being, and haunted by the Reichstag Fire of 1933, a grim reminder of how the mediocre man uses “emergency” as a legal ladder to tyranny.

From such a wide variety of events, lives beginning and ending, and history making itself, my birthday landed at a crossroads of revolution, philosophy, and the birth of new orders.

I don’t know what my 27th year on earth will bring me, but as the Count of Montecristo, I can only “wait and hope” for the best, for all human wisdom is captured in those three words.