My Armor Is Made of Fresh Air

Usually, I hide inside a story. Today, the story forces me into the open. My career, my children, my arrogance, my fears. Muay Thai, fantasy books, open windows. And carefully selected vulnerability.

The window is open. It always is. Even in winter, often enough. Even when the neighbors probably want to murder me. My music, the deep bass, a lot of noise. I need to feel the outside. Open. Not caged in.

Inside. My room. Rainbow vomit everywhere. The PC I built, glowing like a jellyfish swarm on meth. The walls, half of them painted by myself, a huge Death Stranding mural that looks like a lonely apocalypse, no hope left, the other half gaming posters, DragonBall comics and black hexagons. Just because I think hexagons are cool. My grandpa’s pocket watch lies behind me on the shelf. A plant on my left. I got it from my parents when I moved out. Eighteen years ago. The original one. Now there are two new editions of it. I’ve cut branches off, made smaller versions. They’re still small. And growing. I keep watering them. Sometimes. Not always.

And music. Always music. Right now, screaming. Lorna Shore. Or movie scores. TV series. The Rains of Castamere. Or piano. Ludovico Einaudi. Depends. On my mood. The Spotify algorithm.

I’m sitting here. I’m typing, writing, or supposed to write my sixth article. It wouldn’t be the first I abandoned. Abandoned ones don’t count, right? I think. I’ve published five. Five pieces of me, my brain, thrown into the void. And here I am, again. Staring at a blank page. Not fully blank anymore. Wondering why I am actually doing this. Writing.

Here we go. An article about me writing an article. About me. And beyond. As always, some meta stuff hidden inside. Stupid ramblings. Completely over the top. Weird. Wrong. Welcome.

I’m not a writer. I’m a tech person. Extremely logical. Studied mechanical engineering. Didn’t like it much. Preferred the theory, the physics, the maths over the tangible. Spent my whole life in software then. Yes, that doesn’t really fit either. But it’s systems, things that work or don’t. And I figure systems out. Pretty fast.

My job titles kept changing rapidly. Test Manager. Functional Owner. Project Manager. Product Manager. Scrum Master. Team Lead. Corporate life and such. They have names for everyone and everything. A promotion needs a new title, right. Beneath the job descriptions, my work stayed the same: people, products, pressure, decisions, consequences.

There’s no poetry in failed product launches. There’s no deep fancy metaphor in a database migration.

And yet.

I read like a maniac. Fantasy, first and foremost. The classic high fantasy, originally. Lately, grimdark. The brutal version, where everyone is morally grey. Everyone dies, maybe, and nobody wins for real. In English. Since I was a teenager. Not my first language. Books are cheaper in English. So, money saved, efficient. It stuck. Now I can’t even read German fantasy anymore. It sounds so painfully wrong. Unbearable.

The next song. Finally, piano. Nuvole Bianche. The algorithm. One minute somebody is brutally shouting at the existential end of the world, the next there is a lonely violin. Then Woodkid. That voice. To the Wilder. Thank you Mr. Hideo Kojima. Anyhow, too many puns. Stop it.

I also read business books. Every now and then. Startups, leadership, scrum, management. You know, the stuff I earned my money with, professionally. And the other side of the coin, personality, improvement, learning, how to make the best out of your fucking life. The genre that’s a billion-dollar industry. All helping people. Or claiming to. Sometimes they do. Me, at least. Or rather, I helped myself because of them. Difficult to distinguish.

I worked at BMW. Flew business class around the world. Conducted workshops with people in ties and dress shirts while I walked in wearing band shirts. The metal ones. The screaming kind, my dad would say. Man, did I believe I was cool.

Then I went to a hearing aid company. My grandma was nearly blind. Her hearing aids were the thread still connecting her to conversations, to jokes, to voices, to us humans. My grandparents passed away a couple of years ago. My grandpa was my second dad. We live in their house now.

I just got lost there for a second, while typing. I was looking sideways. The plants. Growing on my left. Not moving is what I see. Wait, I was supposed to be introducing myself. I think it’s going fine so far.

I have a wife. The house. Two little kids. The full package. So normal. So beautiful. So completely insane. Everyone said I would never do that. Move back to my hometown. I did. Little lessons every day, taught by tiny people who can’t tie their own shoes but surprisingly often know exactly when I’m full of shit. “Put your phone away, Papa.” The house though and the stuff that comes with it, gardening, maintenance. Nope. Not me. Never will be. That’s what I’m telling myself. As if I had never changed before. My son asked me last week why he can’t eat grass. I told him animals do that, not us. He stared at me, thinking. I don’t think he bought it. I guess he tried it later. Or already had.

I recently quit my job. Management wanted me in. In their circle. Working with them, for them. Told me I’m good. Very. I’m needed. I wanted them gone. Very. They stayed. I left. Probably the worst career decision of my life. Everyone told me it would be. They said “Don’t”. And I did. Maybe only to spite them. There is a part of me that hears “stupid” as “do it just because.”

I travel. Backpacking when I was younger. World trips. Six months off. New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia. More. So many more before, after and in between. So many favorites. Thought kids would end that life. Nope. We just take them with us. Last trip was Oman. I met a man there who invited us into his hometown while I was lying on a hospital bed. He made tea. At 2 a.m. Tasted absolutely delicious after I had thrown up all the chicken in the world. His friend and his friend’s dad showed us their camel farm. Farm sounds wrong. They have camels. And tents. Delicious coffee. Dates. Insert-amazing-adjective dates. His dad didn’t speak English. It didn’t matter.

Sports. Football all my childhood. Skiing before climate change objected. Bouldering for years. Kickboxing and Muay Thai. Many, many years. Thailand. Trail running lately. Mountains needing a stopwatch sounds legit, right. Surfing on holidays. I live in central Germany. That sucks. I coach kickboxing as well. And handball. Kids between nine and twelve. It’s hard to explain why. People who know me still don’t believe. But it’s true nonetheless.

I keep finding ways to move. Standing still feels deeply suspicious. Time ticks.

I am a driven person. Unhealthily driven. Borderline. Ask my wife how much stuff I come up with or get into. She’ll just laugh. Whatever I do pick up, though, I do at a thousand percent. There is no good enough. I outperform. People, things, common sense. I am naturally very good at what I do. Competitiveness. Arrogance. Both. Definitely both.

I am a winner.

And you realize what I do here, right? I name the arrogance myself. Before you can. Before it can even materialize in your brain. Makes me look self-aware. Vulnerable, even. I can open up, emotionally. Right?

That’s convenient. Conveniently architectured.

Maybe this entire article is controlled too. Maybe I decide what weakness you get to see. I might even consciously make it sound good. I am trying, true.

I know my armor. What it’s protecting though, that’s harder. So much harder.

The problem with winning is that it never answers what you were trying to prove. I have spent my life answering who I am with activities. It has worked. For a time, every now and then. Not always. Definitely not. Less, the older I get.

The plant is still here on my left. After eighteen years. The pocket watch is still there. Way older, decades old. Handed down through generations. The window is still open.

So. No job. What do I do now?

That stuff above. And the writing. This writing, now.

I hate those articles, the “10 Lessons I Learned” ones, the “5 Things You Must Do” ones. I’m no preacher. I don’t have all your solutions bookmarked. Or the truth, as if that even exists. So I tell stories. Things that happened. To me. Because of me. Things I notice. Oftentimes too late. Maybe people find something in them. Maybe they don’t. Not “they”, not “people”. It’s you, actually. Do you?

People try to divide private and business life. Screw that. You’re the same person. One set of eyes, two ears, one brain. One set of scars. Hard word that, scars. Implies pain. And memories. The latter I write about. Mostly work-related. Experiences. With or without pain. For now. Not because that could be more easily monetized later. You have to find your niche, right. It’s 2026. All these preachers keep saying. No, I want the work part out of my head.

There’s one thing I have learned so far though. Surprisingly. While writing.

The internet can still be human.

Let that stand there for a second.

Well, back into my brain. The messy, chaotic, beautiful craziness. Pouring out cadences of non-conforming sentences. Parts of sentences. It’s exhausting. Reading. My brain. No? I know, I live inside.

So, the dark side of writing: promoting it. People claim you should never be scared to do that. Still, there’s always reluctance. To stand up naked in a conference room full of people in ties. I may be exaggerating. I mean, look at this article. But I did it anyway. Or will do it. When I convince myself to push this article live. But then again I keep remembering these people, those complete strangers, who wrote comments on my articles so positive they looked completely suspicious. Networking. Sub-farming even. It crossed my mind. Why have I become so paranoid? Thank you, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. I finally got rid of all of you last December. Anyhow, I read those heartwarming comments five times. I’m lying. Ten, some of them. Still feels hard to believe someone wrote this. A stranger. Let me read again.

I’m back. I keep refreshing my notifications. All day. I am not very proud of how much I do. Waking up in the morning, positively stressed. Maybe, just maybe, there is another one of those genuinely warm messages.

There is something about putting words into the world and waiting. The void, Substack people call it nowadays. You cannot force the result. You cannot outperform the silence. You publish and you sit here, me in my rainbow room, and you wait. Eventually you leave the room. But there’s still that smartphone with you. Beeping, notifying. A strange world we live in. A random person says something kind and you read it. Ten times. And you crave more.

I did not know how badly I wanted strangers to care. But wait, stop there. Do I really want that? Is this the real me? Or do I deliberately paint a picture of a vulnerable guy opening up to create sympathy and boost my ego in return. Which is still the same thing, I guess. Deflection. Another lofty layer of armor. Convenient, again.

So, who am I?

All of that. None of it. Depends, as always. Not on the algorithm. Not yet.

I called this newsletter Tracing Scars because I keep returning to the moments people dismiss as insignificant. The ones where something shifts, a small innocent thing, even after everyone has simply moved on. The tiny moments. The quiet moments. The invisible ones. I trace them. With unsteady fingers.

Oh, I also forgot the gaming part in my bio above. It’s thousands of hours lost. Or lived. Death Stranding is the best game ever made. The mural, you remember. This is not up for discussion. The Last of Us is close. I’ll admit that much.

The window is still open. As it is, most of the time. The summer air moves across the room, flows around me. I feel safe inside.

The room is quieter now. Finally. Spotify sometimes ends. The PC still glows. The HyperX rainbow microphone on my desk, still switched on, unused. My wife doesn’t hate my speakers. Definitely doesn’t love them either. She just shakes her head when the whole house shakes with my new subwoofer.

The plant, the clock, the rainbows. Me in the middle. Years, decades. Moving on, tick tock. My kids are growing up. Changing. In front of it all.

I don’t necessarily know where this goes. I no longer control what you make of it. Call me out on my bullshit. Help me put some dents in my armor.

I’m closing the window now. The page is full enough. Time to go outside.

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Season One · Leaders · Story 6/12