Journal — Jozef Môstka

The tool I didn't finish a year and a half ago

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A year and a half ago I started building myself a calendar for building habits.

The reason was simple. I was fighting an addiction to sweets and it occurred to me that it would help to see how many days I had managed it. Not a list of rules, not a diet. Just a calendar where I mark the day it worked.

I never finished it.

I got it going, built a skeleton, and then it stalled on things I had no time for. It sat there half-built and I never used it even once.

Why I am coming back to it

Because I have the same problem again.

It is not something I overcame and left behind. Sweets are a long-running thing with me, one that keeps coming back — right now it is current again, and I am trying the same method on it that I tried back then.

The only difference is that this time the tool is finished.

What is different

The first version I programmed myself and never pulled off. This one was written in large part by AI, which took it through to the details I had neither the time nor the appetite for back then.

Calendar sync, so I can mark a day straight from there. An app on the phone without installing anything from a store. Notifications. Badges for the days collected.

None of it is essential. But it is exactly the layer my first attempt ran aground on — not on the idea, but on the fact that it was not finished enough to be used every day.

One rule

Only the days that worked get counted. The rest are ordinary days.

No red crosses. No broken streak glowing on the screen. No "you didn't do it on Tuesday".

Ordinary habit apps do precisely the opposite — they show you how many days you did not manage. That never helped me. I know it did not work out without an app telling me, and I do not need it written down.

A different number interests me: how many times it did work. That is the only thing that counts and it never goes down.

When a streak snaps and you build it back up, that is the same feat a second time. That is how it is counted here too.

What I have in it

I have been using it a week. Three little calendars.

One for sweets. One for reading a book. One for writing a book — precisely the one I am finishing, and yes, I need to tick that one off too.

A week is too short for me to tell you whether it works. I will say that in a few months.

If you would like to try it

It is at budem.sk. Free, it runs in the browser, no app to install. Only you see your calendar, until you decide otherwise.

One thing is true regardless of any tool: the calendar will not do anything for you. It only shows what you did.

Don't Give Up on Dreams Just Because They Are Big

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A long time ago I pictured myself going trekking in Nepal.

It did not last long. I threw it away almost immediately, because I was too fat and it was obvious to me that it was impossible. Not hard, not far off — impossible.

That is the fastest way a person gets rid of dreams. They do not even think one through properly and already know it is not for them. They do not even have to fail at it. It is enough never to let the dream into their head at all.

The hanger

I took the first of these photos on 12 November 2023. In it there is a wooden medal hanger and one single medal — from a five-kilometre race in Zakopane, my first.

Seven empty rows and one ribbon.

I bought it right after that race. I was beautifully fired up and I knew it would keep going. A medal hanger when you own one medal is a fairly cheeky gesture — but back then I had exactly the kind of enthusiasm in which such things get done.

I had it engraved: Don't give up on dreams just because they are big.

I no longer know whether I found it somewhere or thought of it myself. Probably thought of it.

What matters is when I wrote it down. Not at the end, when there is something to show. At the beginning, when it was still entirely open and nobody — not even me — knew whether anything would ever be added to that hanger.

Dreams I never dreamed

The second photo is from this morning.

But what happened between those two photos is not about the number of medals.

When I started doing sport, dreams began opening up that I had never dreamed before. That is the strange part — it is not that I longed for something and it would not come. It simply never occurred to me.

That I would run? Me? That was not a discarded dream. That was a thing so far outside me that it does not even get dreamed.

Nepal was the only notion I allowed myself back then, and even that I threw away within a few seconds. Everything else I have lived through since arrived without my having dreamed of it in advance.

I write about it several times in the book. There is considerably more of it.

And now the part that belongs with it

Right now I am not running.

I did not finish my last half-marathon in June. For health reasons — what exactly happened I write about in the book and will not go into here. The doctors told me to take at least a month off completely.

I took it. Then came the holidays. And then the writing of the book got going in earnest, and with it the family, the music school, the gym — and running simply did not fit in among all that.

I did not stop moving. I have the gym four times a week, I go to the mountains, in winter I get into ice water. What dropped out was running, not everything.

Every now and then I still go for a run with my girlfriend or on my own. Not regularly. And every few weeks I tell myself that from now on it is for real — and nothing ever comes of it.

I am writing this here because it is exactly the type of sentence people think and do not write, because it sounds like failure. I have no neat point to make out of it.

Why the motto stays

Because it is not about medals.

It is about a dream not being thrown away on account of its size — and about the best things having come to me at a time when I was not even dreaming of them.

The hanger stays on the wall the way it is. Seven years back it would not have been hanging there at all.

I Let a Computer Draw My Own Life

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote myself a program that takes a book and turns it into a film.

It reads the text, comes up with pictures for it on its own, then draws them, reads the whole book out loud and assembles a video out of the pictures and the voice. You then put it on like a bedtime story, except the story is your own book.

The sample above comes from my entry about the painting with the cuneiform writing. You know that text — it is the one about the sentence I had on my wall for years without knowing what it actually said.

I originally built it for something else, but it worked well enough that I am using it on Seven Years to a Life as well.

Where the catch is

Getting a computer to draw one nice picture is something anyone can do today. The trouble starts when you need six hundred of them and the same person has to be in every one.

And in my case it is worse, because that person is me.

Over the course of the book I pass through four different bodies. A skinny child. Then a man who got down to a hundred and ten kilos and thought he had it under control. Then a hundred and fifty-five kilos and a man who had stopped weighing himself. And at the end skinny again, but no longer the same as the first one.

If the program did not know that, it would draw me the same man in every picture. And that is worse than drawing nothing at all — the text would say one thing and the picture another.

What does not work

The first thing that occurs to you: I will draw one picture of myself and then show it to the computer as a reference.

It does not work. The computer redraws that reference a little every time it uses it. A slightly different nose here, eyes set slightly differently there. One at a time you do not notice, but after two hundred pictures you have somebody else entirely on the page. And the worst part is that you have no way of finding out when it went wrong.

It is like ten people whispering a sentence into each other's ear. What comes out at the end is nonsense and nobody knows who made it.

What works

I stopped showing it a picture and started describing it in words.

Every character of mine has two descriptions. The first is the face — its shape, the eyes, the eyebrows, the nose, the skin, the hair. That one never changes. The second is the body and the clothes, and that one changes depending on which part of the book we are in.

So the face stays mine, and the only thing that changes is how much I weigh.

It is exactly what an illustrator would do if they were drawing the book by hand. They would keep a sketch of the face pinned up so as not to forget it, plus a note on what that person looks like in this chapter. All I did was write it into a file.

The interesting part is that I could not tie those phases to age. Between the chapter where I weigh a hundred and ten and the one where I weigh a hundred and fifty-five there are two years, and I look like a different person. And between the first chapter and the last there are twenty years, and the weight is almost the same.

So not age. Where in the story I happen to be.

The parts I enjoyed most

I spent most of the time chasing mistakes that would never have occurred to me.

A plate instead of a watch. In one book an object was described as something about the size of a pocket watch. The computer doggedly drew it as a brass plate lying on a table. I wrote "small". Did not help. I wrote "pocket-sized". Did not help. What helped in the end was having to add, on every single picture, that the whole thing fits in a palm and that it never, but really never, lies on a table like a plate.

Children who age. An eleven-year-old child kept coming out as fifteen. Every time. It turned out not to be my fault — all these programs lean towards drawing children older than they should be. I had to spell out for it what not to draw: no adult proportions, but no toddler either.

The word "he". This one is my favourite. For one unnamed character the program noted down that it is referred to as "he". Two chapters later it ran into an entirely different unnamed character, also "he", merged the two and drew them with a stranger's face. The fix was a stupid one: I told it to ignore words like he, she, man and woman.

A voice that stops reading. The program that reads the book out loud sometimes simply stops in the middle of a paragraph. Or instead of reading the text it summarises it back to you in its own words, as though you had asked it a question. I had to deal with that by checking after it how much it actually read, and when something is missing, telling it to try again.

Words that are not allowed. Some pictures it refused to draw for me. Not because there was anything improper in them — it just did not like the words in the brief. In one case it was enough to swap out the words examination, nurse, uniform and shower curtain and everything was fine.

What it costs and how long it took

This is the part that tends to surprise people.

One picture comes to a cent and a half. One chapter, including twenty-five minutes of spoken word, costs about seventy-eight cents. The whole book — six hundred pictures and ten and a half hours of audio — came to eighteen euros.

The video itself is assembled on my laptop, and that costs nothing.

Reading the book out loud can even be done entirely for free. There are Slovak voices that are freely available, and Seven Years to a Life is read from start to finish by them. Zero euros.

I worked on it in the evenings and over weekends. The first version came together at the end of July in a single day, and back then it could only do the audiobook. The rest is four days' work in the middle of September.

The best part

That it works while I am not working.

In the evening I start a batch and go to bed. In the meantime the program reads the chapters, draws the pictures, reads the text aloud and assembles the videos. In the morning it is done.

From one overnight run: eighteen videos in an hour and a half. Then it waited ten hours to see whether another chapter would turn up, and since none did, it shut itself off.

I slept eight hours and in that time somebody illustrated a chunk of my book.

And one more thing I should not keep quiet about: I did not write that program entirely on my own. I wrote it with Claude Code. What was wrong, why it was wrong and how to do it differently — that was mine to work out. But the lines of code were not typed by a human hand.

45 kilos in 27 months. Not a single weigh-in.

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have had a scale connected to my phone since the autumn of 2017, and everything I have ever weighed is stored in one file. It can be exported into a spreadsheet and looked at as plain text.

It is not a record of my weight. It is a record of when I was willing to look at myself.

Autumn 2017

I weigh myself almost every day. Sometimes twice — in the morning and then once more during the day, as if something could change in a couple of hours.

The numbers hold between a hundred and five and a hundred and seven. I have my first big weight loss behind me, and a few months earlier I ran my first race. Back then I thought of myself as an athlete.

A man who weighs himself twice a day has it under control. Or at least he thinks so, which in that moment is the same thing.

Then it thins out

End of November. Beginning of December. And six weeks of nothing.

In January 2018 the table says 111.8. Five and a half kilos up in six weeks.

I remember exactly what I told myself then. That it was not that bad yet. That it could still be turned around.

I kept repeating that sentence for a very long time after it stopped being true.

Three more measurements. February. February. And March 22nd, 2018, 110.3 kg.

Then nothing.

Why I stopped

Not because I forgot.

Every step onto that scale was a message that things were not getting better. And I had nothing left to balance that message with. Every time I stepped on it I lost a piece of hope — and a man who is running out of hope starts to ration it.

So I stopped. Not with a decision, not with any kind of declaration. I simply stopped getting on that scale, and that solved the problem for a while. I stopped seeing it.

Stopping weighing yourself is far easier than stopping gaining weight. That is probably the only thing from that period I can state as a lesson.

Tomorrow

Every morning I told myself: tomorrow. Tomorrow I will get up and start. Tomorrow I will quit sweets.

It was not a lie. In that moment I truly believed it. That is why it worked — that "tomorrow" let me get through the day without having to look at what I was doing.

Tomorrow never came. Not once. For two and a half years straight.

June 11th, 2020

The next entry in that file is from June 11th, 2020. 155.3 kg.

Between those two lines there are twenty-seven months and forty-five kilos. There is not a trace of them in the diary — no rising curve, nothing to follow. One dot at the bottom and one dot at the top.

That is not an error in the data. That is exactly what happened.

That empty space in the graph is the period when I did not want to know anything about myself. And the number 155.3 is not there because I was documenting my fall. It is there because after two years I finally stood on the scale.

Three days earlier they had delivered the treadmill.

I am writing about this in the book — chapter A Glimmer of Light That Vanished in the Dark.

But You Are Not an Addict

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first person I told that I go to an abstinence club was my mother.

Her reaction caught me off guard. An abstinence club? But you are not an addict.

It was not an objection and it was not disbelief. She genuinely did not know. At that time nobody knew about my addictions.

I am writing this because most people get their idea of abstinence clubs from films, and that idea puts off exactly the people a club would help the most.

Is it like in the American films?

Yes and no.

We sit at a table and we talk. That is the part the films get right. Nobody stands up, nothing is recited, and nobody is going to want anything from you.

The first visit

When you come for the first time, you sit down at the table with the others and you listen.

You do not have to say a single word. You can leave at any moment.

All the members tell their addiction story in turn, one after another. Every one of those stories is completely different, and they have one common denominator. Alcohol. Slot machines. Gambling. Pills. Pornography. And other diagnoses.

A new person listens to it and can take a pinch from every story. Even taking one single thing from one single story is a success.

At the end we ask whether they want to say anything.

Some say only their name and that they have a problem with alcohol. Some say more. If they say more, we try to advise them how to start abstaining. But nobody has to say anything, and nobody will push them into it.

The second visit and every one after that

That round is not repeated. We deal with whatever we have in our lives right now.

One of us was wound up by his boss. Another is not enjoying anything at the moment and does not know how to get off the spot. The next says he went running again in the morning and how running is changing his life.

I usually boast. I say what I went through that week and that I was a little happier again than the week before.

It is not therapy. It is two hours during which you sit among people who know what you are talking about, and you do not have to explain it to them.

What it looks like in there

A room with three tables pushed together into a square and chairs around them.

Our chairman is the kind of man who makes everyone a tea or a coffee as they arrive, offers mineral water and lays some treats out on the table. It is not a formal meeting. It is a table with coffee.

People of all ages go there, though mostly the older ones, thirty and up. Professions completely various.

What it gives me

A reminder.

Every time I sit there and somebody new comes, we do that round and I listen to those stories again. And again and again I remind myself of one thing.

Between me and ending up in that derelict house in Bratislava, on an old mouldy mattress with a needle in my hand, there is one drinking binge and one line.

Nothing more. Years of abstinence change nothing about that. That is exactly why I still go there today, when I have not had an acute problem for a long time — because the feeling that I do not have one is precisely what tends to be the beginning of the end.

If you were thinking about it

There is nothing you need to be afraid of.

Nobody will find out you were there. We have strict rules that nothing ever leaves the club. That is not a polite phrase, that is the condition the whole thing stands on.

And if you are afraid somebody will find out that you are an addict, I will tell you what I learned on myself: usually everyone around an addict knows it long before the addict does.

Clubs are fairly widespread in Slovakia. Every larger town has one, and in Orava even smaller villages do. Around here they are in Námestovo and Trstená, and my home club is in Tvrdošín.

You will find a list and more information at askas.sk.

You can come without announcing yourself. Sitting down and saying nothing is allowed too.

I Didn't Decide to Write It. I Decided Not to Delete It.

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I started two years ago, I made myself an outline. I wanted to know which chapters were ahead of me and in what order they would come. I will write about how I organised the writing some other time — right now something else matters.

Today I opened that outline, and it bears no resemblance to what is in the book.

There is not one line in it about my childhood. Nothing about what actually got me to a hundred and fifty kilos. And nothing about drugs.

When I sat down to the first sentence, I had no idea those things would be in the book.

How it got in there

The first manuscript was a few pages long. Literally a few. I gave it to my mentor to read, and his reaction was clear: you have to write far more about what came before.

In that version I dealt with my entire childhood in two sentences. I thought of it as an introduction. Something to mention before moving on to what mattered.

The first chapter is now 7,946 words and 37,734 characters without spaces.

That is the whole difference between what I meant to write and what I wrote.

How the writing went

Badly.

I have nothing to add to that, except that I sat there and kept writing. Several times my eyes flooded so much that I could no longer see the screen. I waited and kept writing.

The whole time I did not know whether I would ever let it out. I was not writing it because I had decided to be open. I was writing it because once I had started, I did not want to lie — and leaving it out would have been the same as writing that nothing had happened.

But I was nowhere near at peace with it.

When I accepted it

Only when the second manuscript was finished did I read the whole thing from beginning to end.

Then again some time later. And then once more.

It was on that third reading that something shifted. I stopped sitting over the text as the man it had happened to and started reading it as text. Only then did I accept that it could go out. Only then could I step outside myself.

I do not know whether it works this way for everyone. For me it was three readings and some time in between.

What is in the book

I am laying myself bare. My childhood is in there, and it was not a pretty one. Adolescence is in there. Crystal meth is in there. And there are things I will not give away here, because that is what the book is for.

I decided none of it in advance.

I decided not to delete it. That is everything that can truthfully be said about this decision.

I Can

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This photo is from 10 September 2023. That was the first time in my life I stood in the high mountains.

I was 36 and weighed 111 kilos. That is a number that looks frightening today, but in that moment it meant I had 44 kilos behind me, gone. And above all it meant I finally could.

Three hours uphill

One sentence kept repeating in my head the whole way. It was nothing made up, I did not come up with it on the way home. It was there while I was walking, and the higher we got, the louder it was.

I can.

I can climb uphill in the Tatras for three hours straight and still have it in me. I am not tired at all.

A man who weighed over a hundred and forty kilos and spent his evenings in front of the telly does not say a sentence like that just like that. That sentence is not about performance. It is about the body suddenly doing what you tell it to, and not what it allows you.

I remember that thought more precisely than the route.

For the First Time with People I Did Not Know

It was my first trip with KST Nižná, the hiking club. For the first time in my life I went somewhere with people I did not know at all.

For somebody that is an ordinary thing. For me it was the biggest barrier of the whole day — bigger than the climb.

All my life I said about myself that I was a hopeless introvert. That I do not belong among people, that it drains me, that it is simply not my thing. I took it for a trait. For something that is given and that nothing can be done about.

That day I found out it is not true.

I am not an introvert. I had just never met people I had something to share with.

And how could I have. Until recently what interested me was the telly, the computer and the state of a washed-out brain. Who am I supposed to talk about that with? What is a man like that supposed to talk about? For years I explained that silence by my nature, when it was the silence of a man who has nothing to say because he does nothing.

When you suddenly walk uphill with somebody for five hours, you have a shared topic automatically. You are on the same path, in the same weather, with the same tiredness. The talking comes on its own.

What Changed

The mountains changed the way I see the world. It does not sound like a great discovery, but for me it was one.

Until September 2023 my world was made of four walls, two cats and work. After September 2023 there were also people in it who wrote to me about where we were going next, and scenery that got me at every step.

It was an immensely happy time and I know exactly when it started.

Back then I still had no idea that in under two years I would be standing on Elbrus. At that moment it would not even have crossed my mind. It was enough for me that I got to the top and that I was not tired.

I am writing about this in the book — chapter The Mosaic of Life, subchapter The Mountain That Took Me In.

The Weekend I Did Not Write a Single Word

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I was at the Slnko na skalách festival with friends. The whole thing runs on the theme of extreme hiking — talks by people who got somewhere on their own two feet, and a programme built around that. Since hiking changed my life, I could not be missing there.

I took my work along.

On Deadlines

The manuscript is supposed to be finished in mid-November. Nobody gave me that deadline, I set it myself, because without a finished manuscript nothing else can start — not the editing, not the typesetting, not the campaign. That works out to a pace of a chapter and a half a week.

The week before I wrote one. So I was already behind before I left, and I told myself I would catch up at the festival. Where is there a better place to write a book than in a forest under the rocks.

This is a delusion I believed entirely of my own free will.

On Sleeping in a Hammock

I wanted to get the full of nature, so I did not sleep in a tent. I hung a hammock between two trees, with a view straight up at the sky. I justified that with work too — that it would be inspiration for the next day of writing.

And I have to tell you, when you fall asleep in the lap of nature you hear things you never catch in a busy city. Grasshoppers. Wind in the treetops. The net rocks slowly beneath you and above you there are stars.

At three in the morning it started raining. Nothing dramatic — I quickly pulled the tarp over the hammock and slept on. I listened for a while longer to the drops landing on the tarp and the wind hitting the trees, and then I fell asleep again.

In the morning my laptop was completely dry and completely unused.

On Why I Wrote Nothing

Because I was enjoying nature, spending time with my friends and going to the programme. That is the whole explanation and I have nothing to add to it.

Part of me is annoyed and part of me is not. Writing a book about how I learned to live can get to the point where it stops you living. That weekend was exactly what the book is about — and if I had sat it out over a keyboard, it would have been a little ridiculous.

That does not change the fact that I am behind. Half a chapter, exactly. I am catching it up this week.

On the Talk That Got Me

The ones who hit me hardest were Michal Tlelka and Sofia Bočeva and their talk called 215 Days on Foot Across the Himalayas.

The Nepali Great Himalaya Trail is 1,700 kilometres long and is called the hardest trek in the world. In its whole history about a hundred people have walked it. Michal had the idea of extending it by two more countries and linking the westernmost eight-thousander, Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, through India and Nepal with the easternmost one, Kangchenjunga.

The first three hundred kilometres in Pakistan he walked alone. Then Sofia joined him and together they walked it all the way to base camp under Kangchenjunga.

From May until Christmas. More than 3,600 kilometres. 160,000 vertical metres. 62 high mountain passes, twenty of them above five thousand metres.

On Small Stories

I sat at that talk and it occurred to me what exactly I think I am playing at with my small story. They crossed the highest mountain range in the world. I lost weight and stopped using.

It held me for a while and then it came to me that I do not have to cross the Himalayas to reach somebody.

Michal and Sofia inspire me. I will never go where they went, and even so I left that evening a different person than I came.

My story will find its people in exactly the same way. There will not be as many of them and they will not be the same ones — but somewhere there is a person sitting at home between four walls telling himself that this is normal. And maybe that book will change his life the way I changed mine myself.

That is why I am writing it.

Half a chapter behind. I am catching it up this week.

For Ten Years I Thought the Painting Said Something Else

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I took this photo on 8 June 2014. That is my room back then — the couch, the wardrobe, the alarm clock on the little table. And above the couch the painting I had had made a few months earlier.

There was nothing deep behind it. I wanted my place to look nicer. I found a local painter on Facebook, Zuzana Kolaďová, and wrote to her. She sent me sketches of what she could paint for me, and when I spotted a tree among them, that settled it. Bonsais had fascinated me forever, like probably everyone.

The reference picture had some sort of inscriptions along the edges, and right then it occurred to me to take it one level further. I don't want an ornament there, I want a sentence. And I wanted it in hieroglyphs.

I googled a professor who works on ancient languages, wrote him an email and asked whether he could help me with the translation. He replied that hieroglyphs are not his field — but if I wanted, he could do it for me in cuneiform.

I agreed. The document he sent me is dated 20 January 2014 and I still have it. It holds the same sentence in three forms: Ugaritic, Hebrew and Akkadian. The Hebrew comes with a transliteration into the Latin alphabet, so it can be read without knowing the script. The Akkadian version went onto the painting, in cuneiform. The back of the painting is signed and dated 2/2014, so Zuzana painted it a month after the translation reached me.

Why That Sentence

I was completely lost back then. I had nothing in my life except work and programming. No friends. Work, TV and food — those were the three things my day was made of, and nothing in between.

In the morning I would set twenty alarms. Not two, not five. Twenty. Otherwise I would not get out of bed.

And it was exactly in that period that I went back to meth after two years. It was not the first time, and that is the essential difference — it was a return to something I already knew, I knew what it did to me. Nobody knew about it. Not my family, not the people at work. That weighed on me more than anything else. Not the using itself, but being alone with it.

That was the state I was in when I picked a sentence for my wall.

What I Thought Was Written There for Years

That it was something about helping others. Either "help yourself and you will help others", or "help others and you will help yourself". I could not remember the exact wording, but I was sure it was about giving.

Over the weekend I opened that old document again and read it properly.

The Hebrew version reads ʿazor li, taʿazor lecha. That "li" means to me. That "lecha" means to you. The Ugaritic version is built exactly the same way.

Help me and you will help yourself.

Not others. Me.

What It Means

A man who had not told a single living soul about his problem hung a plea for help above his couch. In the first person. Direct.

And had it written so that nobody would read it.

The strangest part is that it was not even my idea. I wanted hieroglyphs. The cuneiform was the professor's suggestion, because hieroglyphs were not his field. So the hiding place became even more perfect by accident — a script that maybe a few dozen people in Slovakia can read, and I am not one of them.

I am not the kind of person who would see fate in this. I do not think somebody sent it to me. All I think is that back then I was asking for help in the only way I could allow myself — one where there was no risk of anyone hearing me. And that I then rewrote that plea in my head into something harmless and lived with that version for ten years.

It took another six years before I asked for help out loud.

The painting still hangs in my living room.

I am writing about this in the book — chapter 1, subchapter Sadness in the Soul.

Nobody knew about the meth

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My aunt Majka took this photo on 22 February 2019, a few minutes before we left for the ball. She suggested I go with them. It felt like an invitation to have fun, and I accepted.

The costume theme wasn't my idea. I didn't lift a finger for the costume. Nothing. I just let myself be carried along — exactly the way I worked in everything else back then. No conscious activity, no effort. When other people take care of everything, thinking up a costume is fun.

The belly on that costume is padded. Only a little. The rest isn't.

In the end I went, with my cousin, and I had a decent time. I even danced. I had never danced before — and what I did that evening couldn't be called dancing either. But back then I thought it could.

I was going to work at the time. Repetitive work, but I went. I sat among colleagues, talked to them, went to lunch with them. I wasn't shut in at home. Shut in only in the evening — four walls, two cats, crisps and some series. Sometimes a bottle of wine with a woman I knew, who dragged me down more than I admitted to myself. It was thanks to her that I went back to meth.

Nobody knew about that. I want to write it precisely, because it matters: at that time not a single person knew about my past with meth. Not my family. Not aunt Majka, who invited me to that ball. Not the people I sat with in the office.

How much I weighed then, I don't know. Those were the two years when I stopped weighing myself completely. At home I have an exact record of every weigh-in since 15 July 2020 — date, number, everything. Before that date I have nothing. Not because I lost the notes. Because I never stepped on the scale. A man who doesn't weigh himself doesn't have to know where he is.

I have four or five photos from that period. This is one of them.

I don't remember what I thought looking at it back then. Maybe nothing. Today what strikes me is that this is how I imagined my future — sadness hidden behind a mask I don't even make myself.

Nobody in that photo can see what came before and what will come after. All you can see is a guy in red dungarees, smiling.

What the editor found wrong with my first chapter

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

First editorial feedback

Having a finished manuscript is one thing. From there it is still a long way to a book.

When you write the last sentence, you feel like you are done. You are not. You have raw material. Then comes a series of stages I knew nothing at all about two years ago: developmental editing, copy-editing, typesetting, cover, print. And the first one is the most unpleasant of them.

Developmental editing does not mean fixing typos — that comes later, in copy-editing, and a different person does it. The editor deals with whether the text works. Whether the chapter is built right, whether you get bored somewhere, whether what I want to say is actually what I am saying. She reads the manuscript and then tells you how bad your book looks. That the content is interesting, that it has force — but it cannot go out like this. Not a chance.

How it started

I went through this for the first time a year ago. I sent the manuscript to the Publico publishing house. They read all of it and got back to me fairly positively. At the same time they wrote that a lot of rewriting would be needed.

At that point I had just finished the last chapter. I was at the end of my strength, and when I imagined how much work was still ahead of me, I lost the will. I closed the document and left it at that.

A year passed. I gave the manuscript to the people closest to me to read, and they told me one sentence that started the whole thing up again: that it should not stay in a drawer.

So I dusted it off. I googled editors, wrote a few emails. Most of them never replied. To one of them I sent samples and she liked them — she even wrote that she saw places where I could write it even more rawly. That was the sentence after which I knew I wanted to try working with her. We agreed on a trial edit of one chapter. She would see whether it made sense. I would see whether we understood each other.

Last week she sent me the comments. Today I sat down with them.

What that kind of feedback looks like

I had imagined a list. It is not a list. It is a document with my text in it, with notes written into the margins — somewhere a single sentence, somewhere a whole paragraph. In places she wrote out how she would rephrase the passage, so I could see the difference and compare. Not so that she would write it for me, but so that I would understand what she meant.

Most of the comments are not about style. They are about what is missing from the text.

What she found wrong

Moments dealt with too fast. This is the biggest weakness. I have the most important events summed up in a few sentences. The first dose. Addiction taking hold. Losing control. The start of treatment. It all goes by so fast that the reader does not even get to live through it. She wrote that these are exactly the places that would call for a concrete scene — not a summary.

An opening that gives away the whole chapter. I open the chapter in italics. Except that italic passage tells the whole arc in advance, and the main text then walks the same road a second time. She suggested the opening should build tension instead of dissolving it up front.

Repeating the same devices. This surprised me the most, because I had not noticed it at all. Short standalone sentences. The "not… not… but…" construction. Over and over "and I…". Metaphors of dark, light, rock bottom, voice and silence. When there is too much of it in one paragraph and everything carries the same dramatic weight, the result feels contrived. The exact opposite of what I want.

Sentences that contradict themselves. In two places I wrote something that means almost the opposite of what I wanted to say. While writing I never once saw it. She found it in a single evening.

A list instead of an experience. One paragraph is an enumeration of terms — delusions, fear, collapse, diagnosis. I named it but did not show it. And the paragraphs that follow show it very convincingly. So the list only weakens them.

The ending is the weakest part. After very concrete and unpleasant experiences the text slips into general motivational sentences. She wrote that they are true, but interchangeable with any other story. That hit me hardest. That is exactly what I wanted to avoid, and it still happened to me — in the very place where it shows the most.

What is ahead of me

Half a year of work that is not writing but rewriting. Those are two different things and the second one is harder.

I have to finish the sixth chapter. I have to go through the remaining five knowing that the same mistakes will be in them too — Lenka wrote it out explicitly in several comments: "this is throughout the text". So it is not fixing one chapter, it is changing the way I write.

Concretely: go back to the places I dealt with in summary and write them as a scene. Add facts I have in my head but not on paper. Break up the repeating sentence constructions. Cut the endings that sound like a poster.

Then comes copy-editing by a different person, typesetting, cover, print. But that is later.

Today I sat over it for several hours and fixed maybe three pages.

It is hard. And when I imagine what is ahead of me over the next six months, I do not know how I am supposed to feel. But I am looking forward to it anyway. Really looking forward to it. I am probably being naive.

Getting through today is enough

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Somewhere in the middle of my transformation, Mino said to me one day: "Want to try boxing?"

My first reaction was the same as it was to everything else: impossible. Me and boxing? But I let it turn over in my lazy head. Somehow it settled there.

When I finally decided to give it a go, I had no illusions. I knew it would hurt. Fifty minutes of hard movement without a break — that is not something my body was going to handle easily.

The first session was exactly what I had pictured. Fifty minutes that felt like five hours. The whole time I was hunting for excuses — why I had come here at all, that I didn't belong here, that I should have stayed with the weights, where nobody was looking at me and where I wasn't standing in the middle of the floor.

But what got to me most was that clock on the wall. Every time I looked at it, I knew exactly how much pain I still had to take. Thirty minutes to go. Twenty. Fifteen. The number kept dropping and it made nothing easier. If anything it was worse — I knew I couldn't talk my way out of it, that the time was real and that I had to go through it.

When it was over, I was proud of myself. Not because I had changed and would be better tomorrow. Not because this was the beginning of something big. I was proud only because I had got through today. Today, when I didn't want to. Today, when I knew I could walk out and nobody would judge me for it.

I went home certain that getting through today is all I need.

A Few Years Later

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I wanted to sign up for a dating site. I was obese back then and I knew exactly what would happen — nobody would be interested. So I went looking for a photographer. Someone who would shoot me "in a better light". I knew it wouldn't be me. I knew I was making myself into someone else. And I wanted it anyway.

That's exactly what I write about in the book — how I lied to myself. How I lied to myself and to everyone around me.

Now it's different. I'm publishing a book and I need photos. Not for a dating site. For the website, for the media, for people who will read about how I spent all those years lying to myself.

When someone goes to mostka.sk, they'll see two photos — the old one, where I weigh 155.3 kg and I'm on meth, and today's. It has the potential to draw them in or put them off. Both are fine.

So I went looking for a photographer. I'm often in Czechia at my girlfriend's, but the photographer who caught my eye was forty kilometres further on. That choice won. When I arrived at her studio, the first thing she asked me was: what do you have in mind?

I hadn't expected that. I wanted it to be natural. But she told me it doesn't work that way — when you go to be photographed, you have to have an idea. So we sat down and scrolled through Pinterest. When I liked a photo, we tried to imitate it.

During the shoot I felt relaxed and calm. I was a little afraid of smiling too much — I know that when I smile, I come across as naive. But I also didn't want a serious face in every photo. I was aware of all of it at once, and sometimes that's actually freeing — when you know what to watch out for, you can work with it.

A week later it was done. Seven photos. I'm completely happy with them.

The difference from the dating site? This time I wasn't lying to myself. This time I was just myself — exactly as I am. And the photos show it.

Same Hills, a Different Man

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It was just in passing, during training. Mino said something like: in the evening we're going for a walk up Skalka. As if it were nothing at all.

I hadn't been on any hill since I finished school. Not Skalka, not anywhere. I couldn't imagine what that would mean, how hard it would be. But I had some idea — that's why I didn't much want to go. I went anyway.

Skalka near Medvedzie is a small hill below Javorový vrch. Kids go up it on a Sunday walk. By the time we got to it, I'd had enough. I wanted to turn around and go back. Mino just said: come a bit further. And I went — but really, just a bit.

It doesn't look like much. It's an ordinary hill, no mountain, no achievement worth talking about. But that's exactly what shows how hopeless my life was back then. How completely lost I was — in a body that didn't want to obey me, and in a head that couldn't imagine it could be any other way. This, and a lot more, is what the whole first half of the book is about.

The first entry from the smart scale I bought around then is from November 9, 2017: 106.5 kg. Between that evening on Skalka and that number lies half a year of grinding work.

That grind can't be summed up in a sentence about progress. It was a series of evenings when I didn't want to go, and I went. Just like that first one.

How much does printing a book cost? 14 quotes

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The book will exist physically, so someone has to print it. And since I'm self-publishing and the campaign needs an exact target amount, I needed exact prices upfront — not estimates.

I wrote to fourteen Slovak printers, from Bratislava to Košice. I didn't send a mass email — each one got its own inquiry with ten specific questions: price for 200, 300 and 500 copies, reprint price in six months, lead time, file format requirements, surcharge for a colour insert, delivery to Orava, possibility of a proof before printing.

The brief was identical for all: A5, soft perfect binding V2, black-and-white interior on offset paper, full-colour cover with matte lamination, 16-page colour photo insert on coated paper.

Cheapest quote for 500 copies: €1,345. Most expensive: €2,202. Difference: €857, that's 64 percent — for an identical book. One printer sent me a quote with the wrong VAT: 23% instead of 5%, which has applied to books since 2025. Another had an obvious typo in their quote — 300 copies came out more expensive than 500. Without comparing, I'd never have caught either.

But the biggest surprise isn't in the printing costs. Printing is less than half of what actually publishing a book costs. Add to that typesetting — laying out the text into its final page form (€220–400), cover design (from €100), proofreading (€1.50–3.50 per normopage — a normopage is 1,800 characters, the standard unit of text length) and separate copy editing. Copy editing and proofreading are two different crafts and should be done by two different people — that's also something I didn't know six months ago. And then postage: shipping 200 books through the printer costs roughly twice as much as through courier services.

Along the way I learned a vocabulary I didn't know existed. Bleed: a three to five millimetre extension of graphics beyond the page edge, so that after trimming there's no white strip. Proof: a test print before the full run starts. PUR adhesive: more flexible than standard glue, the book opens more easily — and needs 48 hours to dry before it can leave the printer.

I'll choose the final printer once I know the actual print run after the campaign. Quotes are only valid for a few weeks, so I'll be coming back to this. For now, one thing holds: a book can be printed for a reasonable price — if you put in the work and ask more than one printer.

The Myth of Silence at the Mountain Hut

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, August 15th, I walked from Medvedzie up to the Útulňa hut below Magurka. A laptop in my backpack, one goal in my head: to write a piece of the book somewhere other than my own desk.

On Wednesday I wrote here about the first time I ever sat down to write away from home — in a café, with tea and a laptop, while I waited for Hanka. The hut was the next step of the same experiment, just a bit higher up and a bit further from civilization.

The picture in my head was clear — mountain, silence, nobody around. Reality was completely different. On the way I met people from Žarnovica who asked what I was doing with a laptop in the middle of the forest. I told them the truth: the mountains changed my life, so I figured I'd get a bit of their atmosphere into the book. And they weren't the last. Over the whole day so many people passed through the hut that I felt like I'd sat down to write on a bench by the main road, not up in the mountains. I exchanged at least a few words with almost everyone — who are you, where are you from, where are you headed, what am I doing here.

It's something I'd never thought about before. When you imagine going to write a book somewhere like a mountain hut, you picture solitude. In reality it's one of the busiest places I know — and that surprised me more than anything else that day.

And yet — or maybe exactly because of it — by early afternoon, around one o'clock, I was done. The longest and rawest part of the book I've written so far. I won't reveal here what it's about; that belongs to the book, not to a writing journal. I'll just say it was a chapter I'd been carrying around for a long time, and writing it surrounded by strangers talking to me about completely ordinary things was a strange contrast. Maybe exactly the one I needed.

I packed up the laptop, took one last look back at the hut, and headed down. On the way I realized one thing: I'd imagined writing the book in silence. In the end it's taking shape among people — in a café, at a mountain hut, everywhere I thought I'd be alone, and wasn't.

The Day I Pretended to Be a Writer

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

January 6, 2025, Monday, 11:11. That's what it says in the corner of the screen in the photo I took in the cafe that day.

I was waiting in town for Hanka to finish work, and I happened to have my laptop with me. So I went into a cafe, ordered tea, and told myself: I'll pretend to be a writer. Who wouldn't want to feel like a real writer at least once? Sitting in a cafe with a cup of tea and writing a book?

I wrote the first subsections back in early December 2024, at home. This was the first time I wrote somewhere other than my own desk. And right in that cafe, I finished the last subsection of the first chapter. The chapter is called The Life of a Homebody and that subsection is The Turning Point.

I also write in it about a video that gave me a boost back then — [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0](Shia LaBeouf, "Just Do It"). If you've seen it, you know it sounds weird, affected, and unbelievable. A guy shouting into the camera to go after your dream. But back then, it became a mantra for me that I needed in that exact form.

Yet I never had a dream of sitting in a cafe and writing a book. A dream came true that I hadn't even dreamed of. I describe more such fulfilled undreamed dreams in the book, especially in the later chapters — and they are the best things that ever happened to me.

The biggest one of them came to meet me after work that day. I closed my laptop and we went for a walk together in the castle park.

Bib number 29 — first race

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

17th September 2017. Beh Zubrohlavským chotárom, second edition. I have bib number 29 and in the finish photo I'm holding a medal in my hand.

Half a year earlier I started training with coach Mino. In those six months, twenty kilos came off. For the first time in my life I felt like I was moving in the right direction — so I signed up for the race spontaneously. After all, I'm an athlete now.

I wasn't. On the course I was cursing myself. What did I get myself into. That I can't do this. That all this exercising, all this weight loss was one big mistake. I finished almost last. Mino was waiting there, holding out his hand. All I could manage was one sentence: "Nobody told me we'd be running hills!"

Everyone praised me. I didn't feel good about it. Outwardly a success — twenty kilos down, finished race, medal. Inside I was completely lost. Childhood fears dragged me down even when from the outside it looked like I was winning.

My mom and stepfather were there too. It was the first and last time my mom saw me do sports. She didn't know what was happening inside me that day. And today I'm glad she didn't know — and that she saw me cross the finish line.

The chapter in which I write about this day is called A Glimmer of Light That Vanished in the Dark. That name didn't happen by chance. My last weigh-ins from that period are recorded in February and March 2018: 109.6 and 110.3 kg. Then the records end for two years. The next entry in my weight diary is only from June 11th, 2020 — 155.3 kg. Between those two numbers are two years that I will write about another time.

The 2017 race was a glimpse. What came after it is the reason why I'm writing this book.

The Third Subchapter

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week I wrote one of the most difficult subchapters in the entire book. In the final chapter I am currently writing, there will be more like it — it is a chapter where everything I have described so far begins to come together.

I wrote about the therapy I started because I didn't believe I could love. Not because I had never thought about it — but because I have been alone all my life, and with that comes the conviction that it will stay that way. I was afraid my feelings remained buried somewhere in childhood, in moments no child should experience. The first chapter of the book is about exactly what happened back then.

This final chapter is different. It is not about what happened to me, but about what I did with it decades later — how in therapy I regularly returned to the same place, to the little boy I once was, and learned to be in the same room with him without running away.

Gingerbread Cookies I Wrote About

When I posted a photo today of the gingerbread cookies I baked last December, I wrote that I was thinking about my last therapy session while making them. Now I know why that session stayed in my head for so long — I was writing about it right then. When I was writing that scene down, I had tears in my eyes. Exactly the same ones I had back then over the baking sheet by the oven.

And right after that came something else — a smile I hadn't had on my face in a long time. Not because everything was resolved or perfect. But because for the first time I truly felt that it was okay, exactly as it is.

What Remains of It

I learned a lot while writing this subchapter — about how a person can return to the same place over and over again until the pain becomes just a memory, not a wound. Everything I learned is written today in the third subchapter of the final chapter of the book.

This passage is from the chapter The Demon Who Changed All Masks, subchapter Return to Little Jožko (working title, subject to change).

Aunt Majka and the Hole in the Ice

jozef@mostka.sk (Jozef Môstka) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2021, I stood waist-deep in the cold water of a frozen lake, holding a piece of ice, surrounded by people I regularly met with that winter for cold-water swimming. In the photo, it looks simple — a guy in the ice, a somewhat amusing shot. But behind it lies a journey worth telling.

My first entry into the icy water was different. I was there, filled with fear and shame about my own body. On this day, a bit later, I am already part of a group — and that is exactly what this part of the book is about.

Behind all of that beginning stands my Aunt Majka. At a time when I was at rock bottom — physically heavy, inwardly broken — she accepted me exactly as I was, without conditions. She never pushed, she just gently guided me towards movement. Eventually, she pushed me all the way to my first cold-water swim. I had no idea back then that this very step would become one of the turning points of the whole story.

That first, terrifying entry into the ice gradually turned into something regular — and with it came something I hadn't experienced before: a sense of belonging. A group of people who cared about me was a stark contrast to the years of loneliness before.

Part of this journey was also the moment when I allowed myself to ask the coach for help — and was initially rejected. Instead of breaking me, it strengthened me. I realized that I wanted to protect this new, real life. And that the key to progressing further in it was learning to say "yes" to new opportunities, even when feeling scared.

This passage is from the chapter A Glimpse of Light That Disappeared in the Dark, subchapters Majka – My Greatest Anchor and The Spark That Ignited Hope.