When do you stop living someone else's script?

Where it started

I wrote the beginning down in early 2017, in a book manuscript that never came out. It starts in primary school. I sang after the lesson and I was in love, and I was laughed at for both. I wrote the girl love letters, painted her pictures and announced that I would marry her. She thanked me for every letter and never answered. On one of the first school trips a club was founded against me, and my best friend joined it. From there it was six years.

For six years I did not hear what I was being told every day. In the manuscript I call that the call I refused to see. I did not want to say that I was being bullied. It came close to me simply fitting in.

There came a moment when I said: enough. I will not tolerate being a victim any longer.

The week it all came together

It was a class trip to Vienna, in my fourth year. Three classes went along, and that week I understood that I had nobody in any of them. I was passed around, from the boys to the girls and back. In the evening I sat on my bed, done. The manuscript keeps the sentence I said to myself after that long day: I really have nobody at this school who stands by me. Then someone came in with a plastic bottle and started hitting me on the head.

I asked him politely two or three times to stop. In all my school years I had never hit back, because I did not want to hurt anyone. He laughed and carried on. So I took the bottle out of his hand and set it down. He picked it up again. I took it once more. The third time I picked him up as a whole person and laid him on the floor. Then I started laughing, and the room laughed with me.

I can change something. I can stand up for myself. I can live my life.

What matters about that scene is the half second before I reached for the bottle. I knew I was stronger, and that is exactly why I had done nothing for years. A decision happened there, and it was bigger than the evening.

I am not going to put up with this any longer, this is not mine, this is not right.

Everything was not fine afterwards. I said so plainly in the video, and it holds. But for the first time I had the courage to stand up for myself. Shortly after, I asked something I had feared for six years and got a no. I grew through it anyway, because the decision underneath was made.

What came after

The first reach outwards was audiobooks. I went online and downloaded audiobooks about personal development before anything else changed. I had nobody to ask, so I found strangers who talk, and listened. Then I changed schools. That was the second decision and the more expensive one, because it was visible.

In upper school I spoke in front of a group and founded a club of my own for personal development. On a family holiday where I was bored, I walked up to every teenager on the campsite and started a group, more than twenty people by the end of the holiday, who kept meeting again in the years after. Six years earlier a club had been founded against me. After that I founded them myself, and I think it is the same muscle.

What I called the switch back then

In September 2016 I recorded two videos about it. The switch was a picture. On one side lies the vision other people hold for you, parents, school, society. On the other side lies your own. Flipping it means letting the first one go. You do not need a clear vision of your own yet. Letting go comes first, the picture sharpens later. That is the most useful part of the videos.

I named the price in the same videos.

I have now done six years of personal development, every day four or five hours of watching videos and listening to audiobooks.

A large part came out of the American self-help market, much of it from Tony Robbins. I listened to his course ten times and still did not get it into my daily life, so I built myself a one-page life plan. I am far from the language of those years and close to the observation underneath it. Whoever once stood up for himself decides differently afterwards.

• Someone says what they want without first checking who in the room approves.
• Someone keeps a commitment that nobody is checking.
• Someone accepts criticism of the work and still refuses treatment they do not want.
• Someone can say where they stand without their worth hanging on it.
• Someone stops asking permission for something that is theirs anyway.

What follows from it for a school

The switch is a good moment and a bad plan. Mine arrived through a plastic bottle. You cannot ask children to spend eight years excluded so that one day they stand up. In the school we try another route to the same result. Paideia gives belonging first and builds responsibility on top of it. Since 20 August 2026 the maturity stages start at a stage zero that nobody has to earn. Belonging, attention, breaks, movement and a voice in the morning circle apply from the first day, described in Is belonging something you have to earn?

The second part is harder. Belonging alone does not make a child stand up for itself. That needs responsibility a child can lose, and adults who bear a consequence instead of clearing it away. A mentor builds the world, sets a challenge, holds the consequence and does not deliver the solution. The hero story belongs to the child. What that means day to day stands in What should school achieve today?

It also needs a way of handling criticism that does both. An objection that holds up from first principles gets built in. Fear is answered precisely. That distinction is what I lacked at fourteen. I treated cruelty as a truth about me and honest feedback as an attack. It stands in When is criticism a gift and when is it just fear?

One sentence from the old video I would cut today. I said that anyone can flip the switch right now, in this minute. That is true for the decision and far too little for the life after it. What helped was the years of work that followed, with plenty of steps backwards. The difference between you and the role you play stands in Are you the player or the character? What an uncomfortable feeling reports in the moment beforehand stands in What is an uncomfortable feeling trying to tell you? What became of all this twelve years later stands under Paideia for schools.

Sources and links

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Deepened with the manuscript "Unzerstörbares Mojo" from early 2017: the beginning in primary school, the six years before, and the groups afterwards.

2026-09-03: Planted from the two switch videos and the book announcement, September and November 2016.