Tempo di lettura: 9 minutiToxic people come into our lives with all their traumas, insecurities, beliefs, and leave us in a state of depression, anxiety, stress, lack of self-esteem, to the point where we doubt our own mental health. By the time we realise it, if we realise it at all, we are already pretty battered. Friends, family members, colleagues: we can meet toxic people in any context, have had relationships with them for a lifetime or have only known them recently. A few […]
Tempo di lettura: 4 minutiAll right, here we go again. My last flight was in March 2020. Then life moved online, and my travels between Italy and Bavaria were by car. I had no problem experiencing what was fancy called ‘SOCIAL distancing’ but which in fact turned out to be just that: the physical distance, instead of giving rise to new forms of empathy in this society already severely affected by the chronic indifference syndrome, only amplified the existing. Those who were lonely remained […]
Tempo di lettura: 3 minutiWhen I was a child, I was afraid of deep water. I used to swim on the shoreline, where I would wait for the waves to come and go, leaving me safe there, under the watchful gaze of my parents. It was only with them that I ventured a little further, both my small hands clasped between theirs. Squeezed until they hurt. As I grew up I learnt to swim, but for years I could not stay still and keep […]
Tempo di lettura: 2 minutiOn 8 December 1980, I was two and a half years old, and the family was probably putting up Christmas trees while John Lennon was murdered in New York. Too young to experience the world’s reaction, but the dismay and grief spanned the decades, so much so that I seem to cherish the memory of that cursed day. During this time, I have been lucky enough to be able to closely follow the experience of reading aloud to boys and […]
Tempo di lettura: 3 minutiYou can do what you can never do at Christmas, or you can do what you should do every day of your life, in order to make sense of existence: be aware that it is only through individual choices that you can bring about change and hope to reverse the course of a society that is dangerously slipping towards a degradation whose consequences can only fall on each and every one of us, bar none. If someone tells you that […]
Tempo di lettura: 9 minutiThere is no worse ignorant than those who find safe haven in their ignorance. Ignorance is a fence, a protection, made of certainties impervious to questioning, to the process of learning and evolution: one stands still and looks at the world exclusively through the fence. No one enters, no one leaves. Social dynamics change with changing times, changing technologies, changing knowledge, and therefore each era has its own means of spreading ignorance, its own strategies, its own languages, and this […]
Tempo di lettura: 8 minutiWhile observing a world in which we try to categorize and dominate emotions, to divide them into good and bad, beautiful and ugly, a world in which the hero or heroine of our times are those who do business, “make it on their own*” by exploiting anyone who comes within reach under the guise of the underpaid experience “that fortifies you”-an obsessive mantra that has entered the daily vocabulary, a testament to the cultural drift we are experiencing – I […]
Tempo di lettura: 3 minutiA dear friend said this some time ago, right when the funeral of a person who died by suicide was being celebrated, a very sensitive person, precisely. He said this while talking about the fact that it is complicated to be in the world if you are the one who carries the sensitivity that doesn’t know prejudice, that doesn’t contemplate boundaries or individualism, that moves the love of diversity, that doesn’t feel the need to label or judge. It is […]
Tempo di lettura: 11 minutiCATCALLING:”Sexual harassment, predominantly verbal, occurring in the street. The word catcalling names a series of acts (unsolicited compliments, vulgar comments directed at the victim’s body or attitude, whistling and booing from the car, intrusive questions, insults, and even outright insults) which, because they are considered an expression of a sexist and devaluing mentality, constitute a specific type of sexual harassment and street harassment. Called like pets. Like those creatures that reply to a specific sound and reward us for giving […]
Tempo di lettura: 16 minutiShe liked her house because when she entered it was clear that this was her home: every corner spoke of her, even a book resting on a stool, a magazine on the sofa armrest, a fifty-year-old carpet. Her studio was full of books, colors, notes, and photographs, which might seem to be in chaos, but for her they had a precise order and represented her perfect space for work and reflection. Every single piece of her home was there because […]
