Write and heal

Perhaps at its root lies shame for where one comes from. Perhaps, behind the aversion to what is different, there is, disguised as pride, a resentment towards one's own origins. It can be frightening to realize that we are ordinary. Hostility towards others already suggests the impotent awareness of our banality.

An American friend once told me that, when she looked back at her childhood pictures, her characters, her interiors and wardrobe, and the faces in those photographs, she had discovered how ordinary her own family was. It was the first step towards a more independent life. Almost thirty years later, she was proud of her discovery, but not of the solitary path she had lived in suffering.

Today I think about this form of autonomy, which few people get to know, the moral and emotional emancipation, with respect to parents and families, and by extension the emancipation of one's origins. As necessary as moral autonomy is with respect to others, it is as important as not being ashamed of our own people and where we come from. I don't know if my friend from back then managed to find beauty in the vulgarity she spoke of. Aversion and hatred for others are mere substitutes for aversion to oneself and one's own.

Strange as it may seem, being curious about difference, being open to its strangeness, seems to depend on the extent to which we are at peace with the place we come from. At peace with our common origin, with what is familiar to us: only in this way can we reveal the community in others.

For a few years, I asked older, more experienced people for advice. I let them read the first drafts of my texts and drew on their teachings. I gradually became more independent of my own people, replacing my ties with those close to me with imaginary ties with strangers. Ties that intensified my primordial aversion to what was close to me, that brought me into conflict with what was my own within me.

Today my teachers are retiring, while one by one my role models are growing old, retiring and dying. What will happen when none of the men and women who taught me are left alive, when it will be just us here, with no one to ask for advice? When it will be up to us to give it to others? How will we ever know how to advise someone? What a delicate thing it is to advise, guide, and lead someone at a strange and difficult age like your twenties and thirties.

And I think that at a certain point we stopped counting on the advice of strange friends long before our teachers got old. We took our steps exactly like blind people solving a puzzle , but with the enthusiasm of someone who was happily following an enticing landscape. The teachers stopped, and only then were we able to start creating something of our own, when the advice stopped, making room for us to remember the place we had come from, to stop being ashamed of it, to transform the wound into something beautiful that we could look at attentively and without repugnance. And for this, which has been, until today, the why, the how and the in what form of our strength, we did not count on advice or warnings or lessons from any master, but only on our intuition and on the delicacy revealed by the place we came from before our eyes.