Chapter 23: Building from the Inside Out
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Shaya sat across from HHM in the small study lined with seforim. This session wasn’t about lawyers, or criminals, or the car parked down the block. It was about Shaya himself.

“You can’t control what’s happening out there,” HHM said calmly, “but you can control what happens in here.” He tapped Shaya’s chest. “That’s where the real work starts.”

They reviewed the tools again. A daily structure: clear wake-up times, learning first thing in the morning before touching a phone, and honest check-ins twice a day. Real accountability: calling HHM whenever he felt an urge to slip back into his old patterns, and installing every safeguard without excuses. And most importantly, learning to pause to stop and breathe instead of reacting to fear, temptation, or despair.

“Every urge, every panic,” HHM explained, “is really a signal. It’s your soul saying, ‘I need something real.’ When you run to the old escapes, you numb that signal. When you stop and face it, you grow.”

Shaya nodded slowly. The last few weeks had been brutally hard, but something was shifting. He noticed that the same pressure that once drove him deeper into hiding was now forcing him to open up, to reach out, to change his habits. Even the frightening messages and the black car outside they were pushing him to be real, not fake.

“Sometimes,” HHM continued, “Hashem sends us fear not to crush us, but to wake us up. What feels like the worst thing in your life can become the very thing that saves you if you use it as fuel to do the right thing.”

Walking home that evening, Shaya felt a strange gratitude mixed with the fear. The external danger had stripped away his illusions. It left him no room to play games or pretend he was fine. And in that raw place, he was finally starting to grow — not just avoiding mistakes, but learning to live with honesty and strength he didn’t know he had.