Bend, Don't Break: Learning to Flow Again

There was a time — not long ago — when I thought I could optimize my way to being the near-perfect human. I had 33 core values mapped out like some kind of life operating system. Accountability, Authenticity, Balance, Efficiency, Honesty, Integrity, Kindness, Responsibility… the whole fucking alphabet of human virtue.

Notably absent from this list: anything about money management, because apparently I can optimize everything except my ability to save cash. I’m a fucking wizard at spending it though. Priorities, right?

Yes, I actually wrote this shit down. All 33 values, with definitions, cross-references, and implementation strategies. In my Obsidian vault. Color-coded. With tags. And backlinks to related concepts. Because apparently when you’re having a philosophical crisis, the natural response is to create a relational database of your moral aspirations. I even had a fucking dashboard to track my daily alignment scores across all dimensions. I was basically running a performance management system for my soul.

Let’s be clear about what “near-perfect” meant to me: someone who never made mistakes, never disappointed anyone, always had the right response, and could simultaneously embody contradictory virtues without breaking. Classic all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, perfectionism, and control issues—the whole pathological buffet. I’ve been using cognitive behavioral therapy to untangle these thought patterns, and I’m still working on it. Turns out trying to be simultaneously perfect across 33 different dimensions is a recipe for cognitive dissonance and nervous system dysregulation.

But here’s the truth that cuts through all the pathology: I just wanted to be strong, powerful, and healthy for my children. To be present. That desire was never the problem—it’s the purest motivation I know. The problem was thinking I needed to systematize love into 33 perfect categories.

The thing is, I wasn’t learning to bend. I was building a system so rigid that the smallest pressure would cause catastrophic failure. Every value was non-negotiable. Every principle was absolute. I thought strength meant never compromising, never adapting, never allowing any flexibility in my moral framework.

I wasn’t living naturally. Don’t get me wrong—life was objectively beautiful. I’d laugh sometimes at how good I had it: single, healthy, eating well, treating myself and others with care. Dancing lessons, boxing, weightlifting, sprinting, basketball. Beach days, pool time, 9-mile hikes through trails. Tons of time with my children—games, movies, building this blog. Life was genuinely great.

But underneath all that beauty, I was performing a one-man show called “The Nearly Ideal Father” while my nervous system stayed locked in permanent emergency mode. I had built a moral structure so inflexible that any deviation felt like total system failure.

The Morning My Brain Short-Circuited

Picture this: 5:30 AM, I spring out of bed like I’m supposed to (Self-discipline ✓). Start cooking breakfast for the kids (Parenthood ✓). My phone buzzes. Some triviality that feels dramatic to others, demanding to be treated with the full weight of my optimization protocols.

My high-IQ brain immediately fires up all 33 optimization algorithms:

Quick side note: Before I knew my actual IQ score, I thought all this mental noise was just me being crazy. Turns out when you have a brain that processes information rapidly, you get flooded with possibilities, connections, and “what-ifs” constantly. Learning to recognize this as cognitive abundance rather than mental chaos—and developing the skill to selectively attend to what actually matters—has been game-changing for emotional regulation. Now I know the difference between “my brain offering 47 solutions” and “the one solution that actually serves love.” But back then? Pure overwhelm.

• Honesty demands I admit I fucked up completely
• Accountability says I have to fix this immediately and prevent future failures
• Humility forbids any defensive response
• Kindness requires understanding their frustration
• Integrity means taking full responsibility without excuses
• Vulnerability says I should share how this criticism affects me
• Efficiency demands I create a system so this never happens again

But wait. Let me run this through Patience instead. Maybe I should wait before responding, process this fully, not react from emotion. But Responsibility is screaming that every second I delay is another second I’m failing someone who depends on me. And Growth wants me to see this as a learning opportunity, extract maximum wisdom from the failure.

Meanwhile, Authenticity is having a fucking breakdown because none of these responses feel genuine—they all feel like performance.

My nervous system? It’s firing fight-or-flight while I’m standing in my kitchen at 5:30 AM running optimization algorithms. Heart rate spiking. Shoulders tensing. My body is screaming “THREAT” while my brain is calculating the optimal virtue-response matrix.

I’m literally running 33 different near-perfectionist protocols while my 5-year-old daughter walks into the kitchen saying, “Quiero jugo.”

And my brain goes: DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Presence says drop everything and get her juice. But Responsibility hasn’t finished processing the crisis. Quality Time supports the request, but Efficiency notes we’re already behind schedule. Spontaneity loves responding to her need, but Planning knows this will mess up the morning routine.

Who’s deciding here? Which value gets priority? What’s the fucking hierarchy when they all contradict each other?

My nervous system is now in full revolt—chest tight, breathing shallow, while I stand frozen like some kind of ethical robot with corrupted code. This is what happens when you build a system that can’t bend: it breaks. Completely. Spectacularly.

I looked at her. And something clicked. Parenting has an override function—it always did. She wasn’t asking me to solve the world’s problems. She was asking for juice.

I got her the juice. She said nothing and went back to bed.

That’s when I heard it: snap.

Not out loud. Inside. The sound of my near-perfectionist operating system crashing. But also—the sound of something rigid finally learning to bend.

The Prison I Built with My Own Intelligence

Six years ago, I started this journey chasing POWER and STRENGTH—capital letters, all caps, the whole masculine optimization fantasy. I thought the answer was becoming harder, more disciplined, more relentless. It took me years to discover that the sharpest strengths are actually kindness and restraint. And that real strength bends under pressure instead of snapping.

I’m now actually proficient with the longsword, but I practice with a weighted one—6 pounds, which is nuts considering the real thing only weighs 2-3 pounds. That’s the type of crazy thinking I was going through. Sure, I needed cardio, I needed movement patterns that improved my athleticism for basketball. And yeah, after 200 hours swinging that sword, I legitimately developed POWER and skill. Most Sundays in the park, far away from people, under canopy—it’s beautiful. Jajajaja. But even my training was infected with this “more is better” optimization madness—why train with historical accuracy when you can make it twice as hard?

See, being smart isn’t always a blessing when it comes to emotional shit. My brain loves systems, optimization, and having the “right” answer for everything. So when I decided to become a better man, I naturally approached it like a fucking software engineer—or let’s be honest, like a mildly obsessive-compulsive person who happens to code for a living:

1. Identify all possible human virtues (research phase: 47 hours)
2. Select the optimal set (33 seemed comprehensive after extensive analysis)
3. Create implementation frameworks (with backup protocols)
4. Execute all protocols simultaneously with daily tracking
5. Achieve Near-Perfect Human Status (timeline: 6 months, obviously)

Spoiler alert: it took almost 6 years until I felt whole. And even then, “powerful” turned out to be the wrong fucking goal.

The color-coding wasn’t just aesthetic—it was necessity. Red for core values, blue for supporting principles, green for daily practices. I had conditional logic built into my moral system: “If practicing Honesty conflicts with Kindness, default to Vulnerability unless children are present, then prioritize Protection.” I’m not kidding. I literally wrote if-then statements for being human.

What I didn’t account for: trying to be nearly perfectly honest while maintaining nearly perfect kindness while exercising nearly perfect patience while taking nearly perfect responsibility is literally impossible.

But more than that—I was building something that couldn’t adapt. A steel rod instead of a flexible branch. When life applied pressure, my system didn’t bend gracefully. It cracked and broke.

Every interaction became a performance review against 33 different metrics. Every mistake triggered guilt across multiple value systems. Every decision required consulting my internal board of directors.

Who am I performing for?

Here’s the brutal truth: when you grow up with emotional neglect, abuse, and narcissistic dynamics, your brain learns a fucked-up equation early on: Performance = Love. Skills = Acceptance. Actions = Worth. Your developing nervous system gets programmed to believe that being valued as a human requires constant proof of your value through achievement.

My brain literally didn’t know the difference between “being loved” and “earning approval through optimal behavior.” I shut down my feelings in favor of skills and values because feelings were dangerous—they got you criticized, dismissed, or abandoned. But performing? Performing sometimes got you positive attention. Sometimes.

So the 33-value system wasn’t just optimization—it was a trauma response. A desperate attempt to create a foolproof algorithm for being loveable. If I could just be perfectly accountable AND perfectly authentic AND perfectly kind AND perfectly responsible, then surely no one could find fault with me. Surely then I’d be safe from criticism, rejection, or abandonment.

The brain keeps seeking that pattern even after you’ve escaped the original toxic dynamics. Even when Mia Luna loves me unconditionally just for existing, part of my nervous system is still calculating: “How do I optimize this interaction to ensure continued love?” The performance never stops because the wounded kid inside is terrified that relaxing the show means losing everything.

Hell, even working on this essay with my AI editor, I can feel my nervous system tensing up—scanning for whether I’m being productive enough, creative enough, insightful enough. My body is literally trying to perform while we’re just here making art with words. The pattern runs so deep that even collaboration triggers the optimization protocols.

But trauma responses that can’t bend eventually break you. And that’s exactly what happened.

I wasn’t practicing philosophy. I was performing philosophy while my nervous system slowly collapsed under the computational load of trying to be perfectly rigid across 33 dimensions simultaneously.

When Achievement Doesn’t Bring Peace

Here’s the plot twist nobody warns you about: I actually made it to the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

Self-actualization? Check. I’m living authentically, pursuing my purpose, creating meaningful work. Self-esteem? Check. Love and belonging? Check. Safety and security? Check. Basic needs? More than covered.

I climbed the fucking mountain:

• Physical optimization: abs, handstands, running for hours, I can dunk on you!
• Emotional mastery: present with feelings instead of avoiding them
• Parenting excellence: present with Mia Luna, intentional guidance, deep connection, more to come… 😊
• Financial freedom: providing without stress or complaint
• Creative expression: writing, art, building systems that matter, my musical understanding is improving so well
• Spiritual alignment: living by my values, not just talking about them

But here’s the cruel irony: my nervous system hasn’t caught up to this reality.

My body is still running outdated programming. The stress response patterns from years of struggle, trauma, and survival mode. The hypervigilance that helped me climb out of chaos now sabotages my ability to enjoy what I’ve built.

The same optimization mindset that created external success was slowly killing my ability to be present with it. Standing in my kitchen with Mia Luna asking for juice, my nervous system treats a trivial text like a five-alarm fire while running 33 different virtue calculations—this is what “peak achievement” looked like from the inside.

The nervous system that got me here prevents me from enjoying being here.

But the 33-value system was built to break, not bend. It couldn’t adapt to success any more than it could adapt to crisis. When everything in your life is actually good, but your moral operating system is still scanning for threats and optimization opportunities, you realize the problem was never about having the right values—it was about having a system that couldn’t flex with reality.

Learning to Bend: What Savage Acceptance Actually Looks Like

That morning, sitting outside with my café, I asked myself one question: “What if I just… stopped performing?”

Since then, I’ve been practicing what I call savage acceptance—uncompromising about meeting reality where it is. A tree bends in the storm instead of snapping, flexible enough to survive while staying rooted in what matters most.

Savage acceptance means when the gym is closed, I do calisthenics in my living room instead of mourning my “ruined” workout plan. When the grocery store is out of my planned ingredients, I cook something different instead of driving to three more stores to maintain my meal prep system. When Mia Luna asks to play while I’m writing, I close the laptop—no internal debate about Productivity vs. Parenthood, just bending toward what matters most in the moment.

It’s radical acceptance without the spiritual bypassing. No pretending everything happens for a reason or that all experiences are equal. Some shit is genuinely hard and unfair. But once I accept what is, I can respond from love instead of fighting reality with my optimization protocols.

When someone sends a critical message now, I read it once and respond when I’m ready. No 17-point analysis of how to perfectly balance Honesty + Kindness + Accountability. Just breathing, feeling what’s true, and bending toward compassion. When people call me out, I listen without running my response through the Humility + Growth + Vulnerability + Understanding filters. Just receiving, processing, and bending toward learning.

I stopped asking “How do I optimize this interaction across all my values?” and started asking “¿Esto me da paz?” Does this give me peace?

Not “Is this aligned with my values framework?” Not “How does this optimize across multiple life domains?” Just: Does this feel like love? Does this help me bend toward what matters most?

The Stoics had this figured out centuries ago. They didn’t try to optimize for contradictory virtues. They focused on what Marcus Aurelius called the discipline of desire—wanting what happens, not making what happens conform to some impossible standard of near-perfection. They built philosophical systems that could bend with reality instead of breaking against it.

This is what presence without control looks like: Yesterday, Mia Luna wanted to build a fort during our planned reading time. The old me would have calculated the educational value of fort-building vs. literacy development, considered the impact on her sleep schedule, cross-referenced this against our weekly learning objectives. The new me just grabbed some blankets and started building. We read stories inside the fort. Love without attachment to outcomes—just full presence with what was actually happening.

This is what flexibility over optimization looks like: Last week, someone I love had an important appointment. Do I give a fuck about this particular medical thing? Not really. But they give a fuck, and I love them, so I go. I sit in waiting rooms, hold space, stay present while they’re nervous. No optimization calculations about whether this is the “best use” of my time. No guilt about the disrupted work schedule. Just bending toward what love required—presence. Because love is presence. It’s that simple. Bend toward what you love, toward what loves you back.

The nervous system that spent six years learning to optimize across 33 dimensions is slowly learning a simpler operating system: radical presence with what is, deep acceptance of what can’t be controlled, and savage commitment to bending toward love in each unique situation.

A Note to My Fellow Overthinkers

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in the “33 values” madness—if you’ve ever tried to systematize your way to being a good human—here’s what I learned:

Excellence and perfectionism are different animals. One grows and adapts; the other suffocates and breaks.

Your kids don’t need you to be perfectly consistent across 33 moral dimensions. They need you present and flexible enough to meet them where they are.

The strongest trees aren’t the ones that never bend—they’re the ones that bend without breaking. The strongest people aren’t the ones with perfect moral systems—they’re the ones who can respond to each situation with love (kindness, empathy, presence) instead of rigid protocols.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is stop thinking so fucking much and start feeling what the situation requires. Simple, no? jajaja.