"This shit has to end with me"
I sit in my living room, working through knots in my mid back and neck that have been there so long they feel structural.. like they were built into me rather than accumulated. With every release comes a wave: anger, frustration, then sorrow (sometimes all three at once), moving through me like weather I didn't forecast and can't stop.
This is myofascial release. The body keeps what the mind couldn't process, and for every place you braced against something you couldn't control, and every time you swallowed something that should have been said out loud. Every moment of verbal impact that landed hard enough to feel physical, it goes somewhere. It doesn't disappear, it waits, and when you finally give it permission to leave, it reminds you of everything it's been holding on your behalf.
I was taught to follow directions and keep quiet. That's what made a good child, apparently. Obedience without question. Compliance without curiosity. Don't ask why. Don't push back. Don't be difficult. I was naturally skeptical and questioned everything, not to be defiant, but because I genuinely wanted to understand how things worked, why things were the way they were. Whether the rules actually made sense or just existed because someone needed them to. That made me difficult. "Too smart for your own good." What they meant was: "you see too clearly and it makes us uncomfortable." So I learned to carry it quietly. The questions I wasn't supposed to ask. The things I noticed that I wasn't supposed to notice. The knowing that lived in my body before my mind could articulate it, that something about the life being handed to me didn't fit. That knowing has a cost.
It burns, daily. My nervous system still carries the burnout of years spent in environments that demanded I be smaller than I was. I refuse to build a life that replicates that. I refuse to have relationships that demand obedience over understanding, compliance over truth. Some chains look like protection until you realize they were never meant to come off.
I was 14 the first time I understood what fulfillment actually felt like. First season of supermoto racing. Novice class. I had never done anything like it before not at that level, not with that structure, not with other riders around me who wanted the same thing I wanted. I took to it like I had always known how. By the end of the season, I had a trophy in my hands. 4th overall. Novice class. First season. My last race before the final standings, I had a wrist injury. Raced anyway. Placed poorly. Watched the points slip. And still ended the season in the top five. But it wasn't the placement that stayed with me. It was what the trophy meant. Individual recognition of skill. Not a participation award. Not a team result where my contribution disappeared into the group. Something with my name attached to a performance that I produced hurt, inexperienced, still figuring it out, and it was enough. For a kid who had spent his whole life being told he was behind, broken, too much, not enough, someone handed him a trophy and confirmed what he already knew. "You did this, you specifically, and it counted." I wanted to chase that feeling for the rest of my life.... and then it was gone.
Not because I failed or chose to walk away, Because the decision was made for me. The proof didn't matter. The trophy didn't matter. What mattered was the blueprint the inherited one, the one that said fulfillment looks like stability, security, compliance, a life lived inside the lines someone else drew for you. I tried to live inside those lines for years. It almost killed me.....
Here is what action sports taught me that nothing else could: Fulfillment is not found in security. It is found in commitment. In the moment when the body and the mind and the will collapse into a single point of now when you drop in, when you hit the corner, when you commit to the line with no margin to turn back. That moment doesn't lie. It doesn't negotiate. It doesn't ask you to be smaller than you are. It asks everything. And in asking everything, it gives you back yourself. I spent years trying to find that feeling in safe places. In routines. In the kind of stability I was told I needed. And every time, the same hollow echo came back. This ain't it. The mold that was handed to me the one that said a fulfilled life looks like security and obedience and shrinking yourself to fit, was always broken. I just had to be willing to stop pretending it wasn't.
I am still on the floor. Still releasing. Still feeling the waves move through me the anger, the grief, the frustration of a body that held on longer than it should have had to. But something else is moving through too. Something that feels like room. Like the knots aren't just tension leaving they're space arriving. Space for something that was always supposed to be there but couldn't fit alongside everything else being carried.
The Chainbreaker doesn't break chains in a single dramatic moment. It breaks them the way myofascial release works slowly, deliberately, one layer at a time. With the understanding that what was stored in the body took years to accumulate and will take patience to release. But it releases. It always releases.
I was 14. That kid never left. He's just been waiting for enough space to move again.
-MR. BONEZ