No fear! year 2014. I just graduated from school. In the Russian Federation there is a boom in training on masculinity, femininity, self-development, efficiency, and esotericism. I consider weakness to be the root of my difficulties. It seemed to me that I had not become enough of a man. I don’t get along with girls, I want to find myself, I strongly criticize myself for mistakes, I don’t understand who is my friend and who is not, it’s difficult to set goals and achieve them. I brought teenage problems into adulthood and found new ones. “I need to become more self-confident, courageous, successful, and then I’ll live!” — I thought. Then I would have found a normal psychotherapist, but, unfortunately, I found the “Sparta” training. Now there is a lot of revealing information about it and it is deservedly called a psychocult. But in 2014 there was less psychological education. “This is what makes men out of boys!” — I thought and gave some of the money there from my grandmother’s gift for my 18th birthday and asked my mother to take me there. What did I do at the training? Oh, a lot. You’ll stand on your fist there the longest. And make a list of what your child would brag about you in the sandbox. And in a circle of people like you, you will tell a story about how you showed up worst in life, and they will shout at you that you are terrible, and then you will do the same. It was customary to call fears and doubts the “Inner Bitch” and simply shut it up. Resorting to the “one-two-three, do and don’t ****” mantra. Now I understand that sometimes it is the voice of the Inner Critic, and sometimes it is a vulnerable part that needs to be handled differently. But it’s simply dangerous to shut up. And you jump with a rope, and in the arms of sweaty men you shake your abs for 2 hours, and you beat each other’s faces, and at McDonald’s you shout at the food that it’s tasteless in order to overcome social fears. For the word “I want” you will do 10 push-ups, because the man says “I intend.” You will pay $100 to Anton Razor for being 3 minutes late. And the cherry on the cake: one shouts “what is important to you?”, and you, with a deep voice in an altered state of consciousness due to 3 hours of sleep, distributed over 3 days, yell at everything that comes in the head. Wow, my neuroses intensified then! I set myself a goal for my father to stop drinking. I did things in the name of approval and saved screenshots of me being praised in a folder on my computer. He did push-ups if he said “I want” in order to punish himself for it, because the man intended. He ran if he was late, even for something not particularly important. Because honesty, responsibility and maximum contribution. No fear! These are the slogans of Sparta. I continued to go to fight clubs. When I couldn’t become more successful, I thought: “I think I’ve begun to forget the lessons of Sparta!” Well, I didn’t die - that’s good, such things happen there. But something went wrong! I didn’t become a man in the end. How I “screwed up” this mission is in the next article.