What Happened Yesterday

Matthew Sturniolo is a YouTuber and content creator best known as one-third of the Sturniolo Triplets, a channel with millions of subscribers. In this memoir, he traces his lifelong struggle with anxiety from childhood through his rise to internet fame, framing the book as a thank-you note to the people who helped him rather than a complaint.

Matt opens with his family's story. In 2003, his mother learned during an ultrasound that she was carrying triplets. Matt, Nick, and Chris joined their older brother Justin in a close-knit household in Somerville, Massachusetts, where the triplets shared everything: friends, clothes, and even a single bed made from two bunk beds pushed together. Summers at a Cape Cod house their grandfather had bought offered rare peace, and Matt describes the woods and water as the only places where he felt free from the anxiety that would soon dominate his life.

In March 2014, at age 10, Matt experienced his first panic attack at a restaurant between Little League games. A pit formed in his stomach, sweat poured down his face, and he fled outside, standing by a wire fence convinced he was dying until his father found him. His mother later explained he had experienced a panic attack, but Matt could not understand how ordinary situations could feel catastrophic. For weeks, he dreaded the next attack rather than finding reassurance in surviving the first.

Shortly after, Matt's maternal grandfather died of lung cancer. A Portuguese immigrant who had arrived in Massachusetts without shoes, he had worked his way up to owning Dunkin' Donuts franchises. At the funeral, Matt saw his father cry for the first time and grasped that his own parents would not live forever. A neuropsychological evaluation also revealed attention difficulties, effectively ADHD, and Matt was placed on an individualized education plan (IEP). Pulled from Spanish class for reading sessions two grade levels below his peers, he felt ashamed, privately calling them his "stupid kid classes."

Matt's mother worked at his elementary school, and her physical presence became his primary coping mechanism: Whenever panic struck, he left class to find her in the hallway. Even outside school, separation triggered crisis. Asked to wait at a grocery store deli counter while his mother shopped nearby, Matt panicked the moment he lost sight of her and ran through the aisles to find her. That summer, he reluctantly began therapy with Jessie, a therapist who diagnosed him with separation anxiety and depression, but the process felt ineffective.

Seventh grade at a larger middle school proved devastating. Daily drop-offs became scenes of crisis, with Matt banging on his mother's car window and refusing to enter the building. His mother waited in the parking lot for up to an hour, making herself late for work. Walking to school with Nick and Chris eventually helped Matt get inside, though once there he dissociated through most classes. His refuge was Ms. Summers, his extra help teacher, who advocated for him with other teachers and made him feel normal rather than broken.

When Jessie recommended ADHD medication, a bottle of Concerta appeared on Matt's kitchen table without explanation. The medication numbed his emotions, letting him attend school more easily but stripping away fear, sadness, and joy alike. At his lowest point, Ms. Summers and the vice principal physically carried Matt from his mother's car into the building while she watched in tears. Matt quit both Concerta and therapy, concluding that losing happiness was not worth eliminating sadness. A doctor then prescribed fluoxetine (Prozac) to target his anxiety directly, but it produced no noticeable change.

Bright spots emerged through relationships. Nick befriended Nathan, a younger hockey teammate, and the families grew close. After months of avoiding friends' houses, Matt visited Nathan's home and found it surprisingly easy. Nathan's parents became the first adults outside Matt's family with whom he felt safe. Matt also took up lacrosse, volunteering as goalie to avoid the running that triggered breathing-related panic, and he, Chris, and Nathan later co-founded their high school's lacrosse team.

Before eighth grade, Matt tried therapy again with Shelly, a new therapist who sat beside him on the couch, played board games, and taught him to manage the present moment rather than search for root causes. Through drawing exercises, he learned to visualize his emotions as separate characters. For the first time, therapy worked. But Shelly left for another job, and Matt, feeling abandoned by every therapist he had opened up to, quit therapy and medication entirely.

That summer, Matt shadowed Chris, copying his clothes, music, and social habits to bypass his own anxiety. Chris tolerated the imitation and actively coached Matt through panic attacks. In high school, Matt depended on his brothers for social connections, their local celebrity as triplets sparing him from initiating friendships on his own.

On August 9, 2019, a lit cigarette discarded by Matt's aunt ignited yard waste beneath the family home's back deck, and the resulting fire destroyed much of the third floor. Firefighters initially estimated the family could return that night, but the timeline kept extending into a nearly two-year displacement. The family moved into a cramped two-bedroom apartment where six people and a dog shared a space with no privacy.

Despite the upheaval, Matt earned his driver's license, viewing it as transformative: He no longer needed his parents as an escape route. During sophomore year, Nick came out as gay during an argument at home, and Matt realized his brother had been fighting his own silent battle for years while the family's attention centered on Matt's visible anxiety.

Just as Matt entered junior year feeling confident for the first time, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Trapped in the apartment, he reverted to all-night video games and sleeping through classes. The brothers' lifeline became nightly drives to their burned childhood home, where they sat on the gutted kitchen floor and talked for hours before heading to a McDonald's drive-thru. COVID also reignited their love of making videos: They filmed their car conversations and posted them to YouTube and TikTok, gaining rapid traction.

The triplets graduated on June 7, 2021, with 25,000 YouTube subscribers and signed with a manager in LA days later. They struck a deal with their mother: one gap year to reach 100,000 subscribers, or they would pursue traditional careers. They hit the target nine months early, reached 1 million by April 2022, and had 3 million by Labor Day. They launched a merchandise brand called "Let's Trip" and bought a house in LA.

Fame brought new challenges. Matt's separation anxiety shifted from his parents to his brothers, and he tracked their phone locations each morning. In LA, he avoided driving for over a year until volunteering to drive friends to a restaurant broke the cycle permanently. A fan named June gave Matt an essay at a meet-and-greet describing how his openness about anxiety had inspired her, and Matt kept the essay to reread whenever negative comments overwhelmed him.

Inspired by his mother's journaling habit, Matt began writing daily to work through his mental health challenges. He created color-coded emotional characters, assigning yellow to paranoia, red to anxiety, and blue to depression, while excluding positive emotions so that happiness would remain his core identity. He expanded his mother's advice that "tomorrow is a new day" into his own philosophy, "Yesterday's Problem": The idea that past struggles should not control the present. Matt concludes by addressing his younger self and framing the book as proof that progress is possible, even when it looks as small as waiting at a deli counter without panicking or making it through a single school day.