7 Men Chasing me, I turned around and did the crane pose

I had just turned 18 when I went to prison.

One month into my apprenticeship as a carpenter.

Six months it had taken me to get that apprenticeship. Gone.

New Year's Eve. Two fights that night. The second one went too far.

I beat someone with a glass bottle. It didn't break. So I kept hitting.

I ran from that party into the night with seven men behind me.

I stopped. Turned around. And standing there in the street I did the crane pose - yes, the one from Karate Kid - and every single one of them stopped.

I don't know if it was crazy or if something in them recognised something in me.

Probably both, and the truth is I was ready for all of them.

The day after the rumour had spread.

The week after the police called.

I was 17, due to the slow process, I only went to court at 18, old enough for prison.

Losing that apprenticeship was the proof I had been looking for.

The system and I were against each other.

And so I swore my allegiance against it.

I started building an identity around being the worst of the kind. Ruthless. Untouchable. I got close to a gang of bikers - felt the power of that belonging, of the darkness, that all it took was to be careless enough

They all went to jail in one case.

That was my free pass.

I remember feeling ready to go with them.

I remember the power that came with that feeling.

What I understand now that I didn't understand then -

I was not a criminal.

I was a young man with enormous power, no container, and nobody showing me what to do with either.

The rage was real. The hunger was real. The need to belong to something that felt like it meant something - that was real.

It just had nowhere to go except against.

Four years later I was standing on a grey concrete construction site on the fifth floor of a building in the most windy part of Copenhagen.

August. Cold. The summer of 2011 that never arrived.

I had been complaining all day to my friend and coworker Nicklas. Let's get out. Leave this place. Stop working for the system.

That Thursday I was supposed to go to MMA training - the highlight of my week, the one place I felt alive.

Instead I went home, got under the blanket, and looked up a Visa for Australia.

I had never done that before. Stayed home. Stopped.

But something in me was exhausted.

Not from work.

From life.

I was closed back then.

I didn’t go to the mall alone. Couldn't speak easily. Didn't say much.

The only thing that moved me was the weekend - parties, drugs, MMA, the edges of things.

And underneath all of it - since I was a boy - sharks.

White sharks specifically. Ever since Jaws. I had made school projects about them. Studied them. Dreamed about them.

An obsession and a magnetism toward the thing I was most certain would mean certain death if you ever actually met it.

I didn't understand then what that meant.

That you can be drawn toward the very thing that terrifies you.

That the fear and the fascination are the same, just different clothes.

I booked the ticket and left.

One and a half months later I was standing on a beach in Tasmania.

The sharks were somewhere in that water.

And I made a decision - standing there in the wind on the other side of the world from the life I had left -

I was done being afraid of anything.

​

That is where this story starts.

Not with wisdom. Not with a plan.

With a HELL NO so loud it put me on a plane to the furthest place I could imagine.

True change never arrived for me from inspiration.

It arrived from pain.

The pain of staying where I was finally became bigger than the pain of leaving.

That is the only equation that ever moved me.

I will tell you what happened next in part 2.

‘Keep Up and you will be kept up’

Casper Veda