I remember sitting in Professor Balk’s class during my junior year at the University of Utah. I was staring at the chalkboard, not understanding any of what he was saying or writing.
Our homework that night was three problems. Just three. A problem set like that would often take me four or more hours to solve. The answers were never neat. So often, I would crumble the paper up in frustration—exactly like in the movies—and throw it forcefully in the metal garbage can by my desk in my grandparents’ basement.
I would often write out page after page of “solution” until my hands ached. Finding the right solution almost always felt like trying to carry boiling water in my hands.
Incredibly, the worst part wasn’t even the math. It was the language. Professor Balk was brilliant, I’m sure, but his English slipped in and out, and half the time the lecture dissolved into sounds I couldn’t parse. I’d sit there, pencil poised, hoping for one clear phrase that could anchor me; help me understand. Instead, the problems kept running away. By the end of the semester, I limped out with a C-, salvaged only because I haunted his office hours until he took pity on me.
That feeling — that mixture of exhaustion, frustration, and a strange sense that the answer was always just out of reach — isn’t all that different from my life now. The thoughts don’t stop. They run circles around me: deadlines, payroll, cash flow, onboarding new developers, being the kind of father my kids deserve, the kind of husband my wife deserves. Each role pulls me in a different direction, and I’m supposed to find the solution set that satisfies all of them.
I tell myself if I just work harder, sleep less, push a little further, I’ll catch up. But the truth is, I never do. It’s like chasing an equation I don’t have the right tools to solve.
Sometimes I imagine my work like a Potemkin Village — those hollow facades built to impress passing dignitaries. From the road, the houses look perfect. Paint on the shutters, smoke curling from chimneys. But walk behind them and you’ll find nothing: no walls, no foundations, just empty scaffolding holding up the illusion. That’s how my business feels most days. Clients see deliverables, invoices, progress. My team sees direction. But behind it, I’m bracing the beams with my own shoulders, patching cracks with duct tape, hoping no one notices how flimsy it all feels. And hoping I don’t get crushed when one of the walls finally falls.
The cost is high. Sleepless nights. A body wired with restlessness. Conversations with my kids where my brain is still running numbers in the background. Moments with my wife when I want to be present but I’m not. Anxiety that crackles like electricity through my whole body.
And underneath it all, the words that echo: fraud, charlatan, imposter. They slip in when I make mistakes, when I feel my team looking for guidance I’m not sure I can give. They whisper that I don’t deserve any of this, that sooner or later everyone will see I was faking it.
The one thought I keep trying to catch, the one that always runs just a little faster than me, is simpler: You’re enough. I can almost see it, almost hold it, before it slides away again.
Maybe someday I’ll learn how to stop running after every equation, every impossible variable. Maybe I’ll learn to believe the thought that keeps escaping.
Maybe the cost of chasing peace is that, somehow, I keep running past it.
For now, all I can do is keep reaching, keep trying, keep holding onto the hope that I don’t have to prove my worth by solving every problem in front of me.
And that is enough.
Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .
I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.
If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.
If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.
You can check it out here:
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