Late Self-Help: On Repetition

First essay for the already dead

A friend who insists I have a particular way of seeing things has been telling me for ages that I should help others. I don't know if he says this because he thinks the hearing loss diagnosed late in my life marked me and makes me different, or because he confuses some of my inconsistencies with interesting ideas. He even suggested I become an ontological coach. I told him that if I can barely help myself, how am I going to help others?

Since he repeated it so many times, something about it stuck with me. I began to think that others' perspectives can sometimes capture an angle of ourselves that we overlook. A photograph someone else takes of you is always better than a selfie. The other person has the perspective we lack.

So, although I never linger in the self-help sections of bookstores, I started wondering what else I could contribute to the world beyond my novels, poems, and stories that experiment with forms of psychological terror, science fiction, romantic drama, and even dark humor, with the intention of discovering who we are and where we stand.

I'm one of those who gets moved by a story like John Cheever's "The Swimmer" and would recommend it to everyone without being able to define its genre. That's why I don't like to pigeonhole myself or define myself too much as a writer. I think it's others—like my friend—who end up saying who you are and what you write.

So I thought about contributing something to my readers. And while exercising at the gym today, to compensate for the hours I spend sitting and writing, I remembered the idea I'd like to write about: how we learn. Or more precisely, how we learn through repetition.

THE WRONG GRAVE

Making mistakes takes time.

Is it worth it to fail fast? That would be ideal, but we have our internal rhythms. Almost no one can make mistakes at will. For example, if you arrive late to a cemetery and get lost, you'll never find the grave you were looking for that same day. The little stone angels will turn their heads to follow us with their gaze and pass along the word: "This person is lost; when night falls, they're going to despair."

And that's exactly what happens. Only when the sun goes down do we realize that the grave we were looking for was in the other direction. And the caretaker is already coming to kick us out because he has to close the heavy iron gate. That's what making mistakes is like: it consumes all the time you had for that attempt. There are no shortcuts. Only the frustration of knowing the day is over. Even though the next day you go earlier and find the grave, or more precisely because of that success, you don't realize you have a tendency to be absent-minded and need to take precautions.

COINCIDENCES DON'T LAST LONG

Life is treacherous. What we most need to repeat never comes back. That girl who smiled at you on the train won't be in the same car tomorrow; that moment of connection when you could have said something is already gone. That book you found with a margin note that seemed written for you won't be there tomorrow. Someone else will buy it, or it will simply get lost among a thousand others.

The tragedy is that what we most want to repeat slips away forever.

But what does repeat—and this is what really matters—are the errors we commit with relish, the obsessions that pursue us, the themes that truly matter to us. We have a small margin of time to learn. We just need to pay attention to learn from this recurrence.

ONLY THROUGH REPETITION

I told myself I would never use TikTok. It seemed horrible to me. And one day I recorded myself talking about literature, just to try it, and it didn't seem so horrible. So, although very few people saw it, I felt I was doing something useful.

Then, only through repetition, I learned that microfiction works better for me than any call to action or promotion of my novels. It's the simplest thing in the world. Write a microfiction in a beige notebook, add music to it. Post it. Soon you discover there are people who save it. You can't believe it. You wrote several novels and it nearly killed you to get them read, but with microfiction you reach Generation Z.

Before, asking people to read me made me feel like I was in a nightmare where I buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad and read it in a day, or where I discover that, after a night of sleepwalking, I unknowingly recommended The Power of Now with a video that went viral on social media. The atomic habits we copy from others to promote ourselves and reach a goal through months of mechanical repetition usually bathe us in nuclear radioactivity that makes our potential readers put us in quarantine.

EVERYTHING I DIDN'T KNOW

It's one thing to know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It's another thing to really think about it and apply it if you're going to rent an apartment. Maybe once we're already in the apartment we'll discover, in the shadow of a midday, that we chose poorly by not thinking carefully about that. And only then do we learn it.

We beautify ourselves in front of the mirror every day, adjusting every detail to look perfect. But it took me years to realize something obvious. No one ever sees me the way I see myself in the mirror.

In the mirror I see myself as I am, but when someone looks at me face to face, they see me reversed. My right side they see on their left, my left side on their right. I'm combing my hair for a perspective that only I have: my own reflected one. After the doubt assaulted me several times, I was able to realize this.

It takes time to understand that when we mistakenly say in the movies that Tom Cruise has a mole on the right side of his face, it's actually on his left cheek. The movie screen follows the same logic as being face to face with someone, but my brain resisted processing it. Some ideas need to appear again and again until they finally settle.

THE NEW GHOST

A novice ghost wouldn't know how to scare from day one. At first, it would make mistakes. It wouldn't know how to turn the lights on and off at just the right moment, which corner of the room to stand in so the child of the house discovers it backlit, how to whisper in its victim's ear, or make it clear that it's them and not some other entity wandering around the house. Only after repeatedly encountering the same situation would it learn the exact timing, the perfect location, the precise whisper. And perhaps by that moment... it would be alone in the house with no one left to scare.

The ghost discovers the cruelest law of repetition. Sometimes you master a craft just when the world it served has already vanished.

That's how we learn. Not to triumph, but to understand what works for us. And in case a new family inhabits the house, to be prepared, to adapt with what we already know, because it's very likely that what scared the previous child won't scare the new one. And repetition prepares us for variation.

Now the ghost, more confident, might not try to scare so suddenly. Who knows, maybe it no longer needs to scare anyone.

I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL

Turns out I'm not the only one who thinks about these things.

Just think of Kierkegaard, who even wrote a book called Repetition, signed under the not-so-subtle pseudonym Constantin Constantius. For him, repeating isn't doing the same thing over and over, but giving experience another chance, with the possibility of new meaning.

And he hits the nail on the head with an uncomfortable truth. What we really long for isn't to get back the former beloved, who will never return (and if she did return, she would be a different person). What we truly miss is the person we were when we were with her. That more confident, happier self, full of hope. I don't know anything truer.

Repetition, in its deepest sense, isn't going out to seek someone else's ghost, but the effort to rescue that version of ourselves we thought was lost. That can come back. And sometimes it returns in completely different contexts, when you least expect it.

But please, let not everything come back. Nietzsche with his terrifying idea of "eternal return" makes us think: what would happen if you were condemned to live this same life, exactly the same, over and over for all eternity?

I have a friend who is delighted with our high school years. He would live all of that again, exactly as it was, without changing absolutely anything. For him, Nietzsche's idea would be a dream. For me, on the other hand, it sounds like a nightmare.

I don't want to go back to being that somewhat lost teenager in the schoolyard, smiling out of compromise in conversations I couldn't hear well, feeling weird without being able to understand why.

Nietzsche's litmus test isn't the desire to repeat a perfect life, but the desire to repeat yours exactly as it was: the good and the unbearable, without being able to change anything. My friend passes the test. I definitely don't.

And the thing is, deep down, Nietzsche forces us into a total reckoning, a radical yes or no. But real life, real learning, is rarely so absolute. It's not about accepting an entire eternity, but about paying attention to what insists, to what repeats until we finally see it.

Even science has proposed that our most repeated nightmares serve a similar function. They would be a "threat simulator" designed by evolution, forcing us to rehearse the same dangers in a safe environment. As if our brain knew that learning takes time and didn't want to let us wake up until we had rehearsed enough.

And so, between errors, failed attempts, and fears that repeat, we discover what really matters in daily life. Neither Kierkegaard's infinite hope nor Nietzsche's eternal condemnation. The repetition that counts is the one that seeps into the everyday. Like water boring through stone.

REALIZING

I realized I had hearing loss by accumulating uncomfortable situations. When the shame and pain of being different reach you with all their force, you look for the reason.

After being diagnosed (only at age 32), I tried to explain the consequences of growing up with hearing loss to some people, and they never understood. Until recently I told myself: how are they going to understand you if you didn't even understand yourself?

To reach that question, years of hitting the wall.

And from there I learned that it's no longer worth trying to be right. I don't argue with some people because I know it's pointless—they'll never change. It's better to avoid it, turn a deaf ear (my field of specialization, though I didn't choose it), and not respond.

My heart is grateful that its beats remain constant. But acquiring that discernment can take so long that when you achieve it, you might no longer have any heart left.

DON'T COMPARE YOURSELF

Not being able to summarize some novel plots like other people used to upset me. For example, no matter how many times I've read it, I'll never be able to summarize Wuthering Heights. All that family lineage is too much for me.

So to avoid tormenting myself for not being able to tell that plot, now I think that what doesn't stick in my head, I don't need, that the image of Heathcliff destroyed by how he lived is enough for me. That conveys all the novel's power.

I tell myself that what remains in the mind is what I needed to incorporate. It's what I like and what keeps me going. Besides, if I remembered all the plot details, maybe I'd never write my own stories.

THE WAR YOU WIN BY LOSING

Learning emerges when we're not looking for it. It's a war won by losing. You lose time, you lose the illusion of the direct path, but you gain knowledge that you no longer need to write down to remember. It becomes part of you, like a scar.

We repeatedly encounter the same obstacle, rehearse the same failed response. But it's right there, in that familiar failure, where suddenly (and without warning) something gives way. The lesson arrives disguised as defeat.

And once you accept that repetition has its own rhythm, you become more patient with yourself. Even though it hurts to discover that 7,000 days for twenty years is so few days.

There's nothing left but to keep approaching something you might never fully understand, because along the way you're going to stumble upon something else that was waiting for you.

Something that insists. That stays with you. That distinguishes you. That was yours.

Only through repetition. Only through sedimentation.

Only by arriving late to that grave in the cemetery, to discover that the headstone has your name on it.

---

P.S.:

The Adrian who writes here is an Adrian I accept. The one who as a very young child read Choose Your Own Adventure books to my sister and my neighbor. My neighbor is a historian and always remembers me for that. When things went badly with filmmaking (I won a prize to direct a movie, my dream project, and the production company wasted the money), I had to go back and find myself. And there I found myself, in that sepia photograph, telling a story to two little girls, which shows me who I was.

Who I am.

I didn't just want to tell stories. I wanted, with the magic set I never separated from, to surprise with living images and words.