Thirty years with the handbrake on
There’s a specific feeling I want to describe, because I lived inside it for about thirty years and never once heard anyone name it.
It’s the feeling of driving with the handbrake on. The engine works. The wheels turn. From the outside, the car is moving. But inside, you can feel it — a drag on everything, a resistance that never lets up, a sense that you’re working twice as hard as everyone else to get half as far.
I was a capable person. That was never in question — school said so, work said so, results said so. I taught myself things nobody asked me to learn. I built a business from nothing. On paper, I was moving. And underneath all of it, always, that drag. Watching other people get through their days as if it cost them nothing, while the same days cost me double.
I looked everywhere for the fault. I blamed my discipline — though I worked constantly. My motivation — though I wanted things desperately. My diet, my sleep, my habits, my character. Later the search turned medical: years of tests, and every test said fine. Nobody could tell me why. When every test says fine and you still can’t move freely, you start to believe something must simply be wrong with you. I believed that for a long time.
Here’s what I understand now, and what I wish someone had told me at twenty.
A handbrake isn’t a fault in the engine. It’s a brake. Its job is stopping the car. And it doesn’t apply itself. Something applies it.
Somewhere very early, a part of me learned that moving freely wasn’t safe. Being seen too clearly, wanting things too openly, taking up room in the world — those once carried a danger it never forgot. So it did the protective thing: it braked. Quietly. Constantly. Without asking me. For thirty years I sat in the driver’s seat wondering why the car felt so heavy, never knowing there was a hand on the lever.
That reframe changed everything, because it changed what kind of problem I had. You cannot fix a handbrake by pressing the accelerator harder. I’d spent decades doing exactly that — more effort, more discipline, more force — and all it produced was exhaustion. No extra speed, just burnout. A brake doesn’t respond to force. It responds to safety. It releases when the part of you holding it becomes convinced — slowly, through experience, not argument — that it’s safe to let the car move.
That’s what the last few years of my life have been. Not pushing harder. Learning safety, from the inside, a little at a time. And the release, when it comes, isn’t dramatic. The drag is simply not there one day. You do an ordinary thing and notice it cost you what it costs everyone else.
If you know this feeling — if you’ve been capable and stuck at the same time for years — I want you to hear the two things I most needed to hear.
There is nothing wrong with your engine. There never was.
And you can’t be blamed for a brake you never knew was on. You weren’t lazy. You weren’t weak. You were being protected — clumsily, by something that meant well, for far too long. Teaching it that the danger has passed: that’s the work. It’s slower than forcing. It’s also the only thing that ever moved my car.
The road is still there. It’s been waiting.
— Adam