A sudden change of life, even a positive one, carries a kind of vertigo.
You fight for it. You prepare for it every day. You hope, you manifest, you pray. And then success finally arrives, and nothing is the same. The ground under your feet changes texture. People look at you differently. And yet you are still you. Except everything around you has moved.
I had this conversation for hours with a friend in Los Angeles. He has lived that shift too. He’s an athlete, he reached the highest level in the world, in performance and recognition. A path that commands respect. We found ourselves speaking without filters, without the mask our professions demand.
He asked me if I remembered what it felt like to be a kid and have nothing. When resources are missing and nobody is waiting for you, you have no choice but to decide, by yourself, exactly what you want. A certainty settles in, almost animal: you move forward to survive.
We grew up in distant worlds, in different disciplines, with many points in common. The feeling of being different since childhood. Of seeing the world with an offset nobody around us could name. And of turning that difference into fuel.
We talked about that hunger, waking up every morning with the burning desire to give yourself more than anyone else. Nobody was going to do it for us. And every day won, every day of progress, even a small one, was one more day closer to that new life, the one that could have never existed.
Then the conversation changed its tone.
We spoke about loss. About how someone you miss is felt even more strongly at midnight, when the city sleeps and the stars shimmer above the hills. About how victory tastes different when the person you wanted to show it to is no longer here to see it. There is a before and an after in the life of anyone who has known loss. The world continues. Days go by. But at midnight, alone, you feel an absence that nothing fills.
Do we really deserve all the good things that happen to us? And if so, do we also deserve the bad? I don’t know. I don’t believe life works like a system of merit. But the question itself says something about us. It says we never fully made peace with what we received. Or with what we lost. And maybe that peace doesn’t exist. Maybe living with that tension, between gratitude and doubt, between pride and the guilt of having survived our own story, is proof that we haven’t forgotten where we come from.
On my next album, you will hear the piece that crystallizes that conversation, those reflections. It’s called Midnight In California. It captures the thoughts of those whose destiny has been shaken by a sudden ascent, and the questions that remain when the lights go out.
Sincerely,
Sofiane Pamart
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