Like that song by BADBADNOTGOOD

Whether it’s planned or not, I travel alone some times. This time it’s in Japan. Two years ago it was Sevilla. Some years before then, it was a trip to Denmark where I exclusively slept on Flixbusses. It was a silly choice, but you can afford silly choices when you’re twenty-something. I’ve started traveling alone as my inner peace increased, but it took almost this full life to enjoy holidays.

The worst phobias came up while I was traveling. They were always there, obviously, nothing about my trip manufactured fears, but while on “holiday” (which until recent years never felt like the wonderful exception to routine that everyone seems to look forward to) they emerged with such potency that my time away from home often felt like torture rather than an occasion to be grateful for.

I can barely remember the things I saw, my itinerary, the food I ate, but I remember exactly where I was when certain fears hit me. The exact crossing of streets in front of me or the car I was sitting in. You might call them irrational, because anything we’re not facing at that exact moment or that doesn’t have high chances of happening basically is. Some times you are able to predict exactly what will happen although it is not based on any data, just on sensitivity to potential danger. You make a guess and you guessed right. Then you can upgrade those intrusive thoughts to the level of rational worries. I’d like to tell you that satisfaction is worth it but for me it never was.

What a nightmare it was to inhabit my skin during those vacations. A similar but worse nightmare than it usually was. To be fair, in fact, it was hell to be myself a lot of the time back then.

Leaving has been a theme for the longest time. I wanted to leave so bad I asked my parents while in middle school if I could go away for high school. If I could go to that cool place I saw in tv series: the United States. They told me that was excessive (they told me many things I did or said or wanted were) but they promised I could go away for my forth year. I was thrilled. I spent those three years looking forward to it. Then the day came, I was sent to conservative Texas, cried the whole time on that very long flight (which I was about to miss because I had never taken a plane by myself) and had the most miserable year of my life. Not like I wasn’t miserable back home, but I managed to experience a very different flavor of misery: equally tasty.

During that year I accumulated what I’d call now a depressive state, and a firm conviction that I’d die on my way back — I was too eager to leave: something had to go wrong. I was overlooking the fact that everything else was already disastrous, so maybe this one thing would succeed. It did. I managed to land on Italian grounds. All the fears came back with me, luckily my parents had brought extra luggage.

I left many more times. And looking back, none of them were happy moments. In Rome I found some peace, but also some more torment.

It became easier to leave as I grew and healed, but it was always tough. On so many school trips I had symptoms of things I still can’t put a name on. Yet, I kept doing it even if it was miserable. Leaving was more important. There’s that song that says that running away is easy, but leaving is hard. I was running away more than leaving. Escaping gave some relief when contemplated, but the place I ran towards quickly became just another place to run away from. And leaving, for a holiday, was almost unbearable. Choosing to go, with the idea of coming back, as an exercise of movement and exploration. Excruciating.

You know about attachment, right? How they found out some of us are secure and others are not. You can be secure in just one way, but insecure in many. It all has to do with how you deal with departures: Can you leave? Can you say goodbye, then come back? Can you trust others will come back after they leave?

Leaving, as BADBADNOTGOOD said, is very hard. It’s hard when you have no place to leave from (which is somewhere to come back to). When the people who raised you taught you to be suspicious of others’ presence, their ability to stay, their desire to come back, you become a child who learns to either be nonchalant, barely noticing when they’re left alone, or you become agitated, constantly wary of signs that might imply being left. When you’ll learn to move your legs, you’ll run away, or you’ll never even walk to the other room. You’ll have eyes in the back of your head, to check if home is still there, if someone’s looking out the window.

During this holiday, I had a flashback. I have traveled solo before the most recents trips, how could I forget? How did I not think of the first real trip I planned that included no one but me? It was so obvious. Ten years ago, I bought a ticket to Amsterdam, decided to spend the summer in Utrecht by myself.

Ironically enough, I never came back.

I had to go far enough to find a place I miss when I leave, but I’m sure is still there when I return.

Being nothing

There might be hundreds of worse jobs out there, but being an actor has a cruel, confronting element to it that always made me see it with a bit of pity. Imagine auditioning for the one who’ll be, more or less explicitly, the ugly and undesirable friend in the movie.
Imagine how Harry Dean Stanton must have felt while shooting Lucky, where he plays an old man who’s about to die, exactly like he was in real life, so much so that he would pass away before the release date. I vividly remember this sadness I took home with me from the movie theater.

Then I’ve seen an interview where he talks to David Lynch and he is painfully and wonderfully nihilistic, replying to the question “how would you describe yourself?” with ”as nothing, there is no self”. He seems unbothered by any confrontation, untouched by life’s cruelty. Without self there is no ego, and without ego there is no unfairness. He played an actor who’s about to die. He is dying. So what.

If I had to pick, I’d also say there is no self. But I’m a wishful thinker and like the idea of one, so I decided to adhere to the cult of selfists. To allow myself the possibility of still having friends outside of it, I’ve decided that I’m one of the moderate believers, and I don’t really practice. I’m fine with having a frame around my life that says “this is Benedetta La Rosa”, but I’m also fine seeing how I’ll wake up tomorrow: so far I’ve never been a fish or a chair, but I’ve definitely been a lot of humans. Memory and controlled surroundings give us a story to follow and it’s easier to do so than to embrace chaos, but it’s pretty obvious to me that Stanton has a point.

If they asked me to describe myself, until quite recently I would have certainly mentioned how structured I am. If I looked around me, I’d see how much more fluid the people next to me were, compared to me. How organized I was, compared to them.

I invite you to look around yourself, among the people you chose to be in your life. Do you recognize a trend in how you see them as opposed to you? Are the people who are the closest to you all similar in something?

Mine were often more scattered and free spirited than me. Losing things, being late, talking to strangers (which often was what made them late), getting sidetracked, spacing out, tote bag falling off their shoulder. That’s how I saw the Other. At least until recently.

Then a series of events served as wake-up call. Am I really structured, or am I simply a mess who learned, at a very high cost, to make up for that messiness with control? And if that is true, had I delegated to others in my life the representation of those archetypes, so it was clearer who was which? So that in our complexity we were all quite explainable?

I’ve learned, just as I’ve been doing multiple times a year since I’m able to think thoughts, that I am so much different than I thought I was. In a way that adds, and doesn’t contradict, in a way that makes things fuller, yet very unpredictable.

The other night, while sleeping on tatami mats in the Japanese mountains, I watched a movie called Hypnosen. In it, a couple of young professionals takes part in a workshop with other fellow start-uppers to learn the art of pitching their project. She has undergone hypnotherapy to stop smoking, but lost inhibitions.
It’s a hilarious watch at times, and very uneasy at others. What I noticed is how weird she looks when others are rigid and taken aback. When she is surrounded by judgement, the level of her strange behaviors increases, becomes grotesque. When they go along with it, it doesn’t seem so weird. Not because they are all acting strange, but because she softens: the weirdness is distributed now, she doesn’t have all of it on herself.

This dynamic between people is very well depicted in the movie: building individual selves through collective work. It opposes well to the environment they’re in, where authenticity and unique stories are emphasized to the point of delusion.
If we leave just one of us to be that one thing, everything collapses. That’s why the end of the movie works so well.

At the core, we’re all the same: nothing ready to become something. And it’s not so bad to be nothing. It’s not about void or emptiness, it’s just undefinable.

I am a moderate selfist.
If there is a self, it’s only there for a second. Its main role is to open the door and let the next one in. If we allow them this, to be kind door-openers, instead than self-promoting creators, then we can keep all our stories about ourselves while changing perspective on them.

Instead than a stubborn contest of line-drawing, a collective participation in my-self and your-self. How every particular combination of people made this self possible. How even writing on tatami made these word come out a different way than if I was sitting at a desk, or anywhere else.

If there is a self, it’s a community. If there is a self, it’s a convention. If there is a self, it’s a game we’ve decided to play. If there is a self, it’s there to invite us to imagine, but also to stay grounded in the flesh.

Playing games

As I empty the bathtub (at the moment my only option for showering), I keep my feet in the water. The residue of soap and body is easily washed away if I use them to move the water around. Similarly to electric toothbrushes that by fidgeting on my teeth manage to clean better than static ones. I am getting you used to completely baseless theories in my posts so I thought I’d start with one to make you feel at home: does movement clean?

I was opposed to rereading books and rewatching movies, but recently I’m finding pleasure in this repetition. What felt like a waste of time (as if time could be used properly, ha!) now turned into a pleasurable form of consolidation. Noticing what I didn’t before, finding myself in those pages, catching myself in those scenes.

I am introducing loops in my classes. I move through poses (A-B-C-D) and then revert the order to go back ‘home’ (D-C-B-A). Been there, done that. In such an unpredictable world, can’t a woman have some predictability? How nice is walking back from where you came from?

Repeating isn’t really following in your footsteps anyways. It’s just an illusion that facilitates feeling comfortable enough so we can focus on aspects of the journey that are not map-related.

Downward facing dog, lift the right leg, step it forward, twist to the right, place the right hand back down but inside your right foot this time, place the left heel down, lift the left arm towards the ceiling, open towards the left side, straighten the front leg. Good. Now stop. Go back. Triangle. Extended side angle. Easy twist. Runner’s lunge. Three legged dog. Downdog.

See? While you were distracted with predictability things changed name. I was moving the water around.

We don’t have much in this life other than the sequences inside of it. The structure is illusory, the form is temporary, anything we cling on and long for is there for a bit so our gratitude has to be built on crumbly grounds. We’re left with playing and fighting. With pretending we have been here before, so we can ease the response of our senses.

The other day a woman I follow on Instagram said she’s been sober for years. She was assuring non-sober listeners that life is already a trip, a chaotic and psychedelic experience that defies boredom. In our collective (the one where all my Selves get to speak about hot topics in weekly meetings) we discussed this and didn’t find an agreement yet. Some selves were debating the flatness created by the over-availability of things, and I can’t blame them. Others were advocating for the right to encounter chaos and micro-dosing it with their preferred methods, and I certainly can’t disagree with them either. Then there were the ones who had the same opinion of etimofuggente. They added that the only game really worth playing is the one of adding pretenses of sameness. To add that bit of comfort to an intensely unpredictable experience.

As I move the water around I realize cleaning is nothing more than sending filth elsewhere. What I don’t see doesn’t exist. I play with that. To defy the fact that another truth of life, another tragedy and blessing of existing, is that things move around but never evaporate. Nothing disappears.

I move from a pose where I support myself with the left hand to another where I use the right one. I make life easier by pretending that if I shift my focus, only this exists, not the stuff behind my head. It’s another game worth playing.

It’s just a game.

At some point, as we embrace adulthood, we forget we’re still just playing with clay. Not everyone becomes an adult even when they look like one, and the ones who don’t might still forget the rules of playing. They’ll treat clay as clay, they won’t make anything out of it, they will put a label on it so everyone knows what it is and agrees with them on its definition, they’ll never give themselves permission to touch it. They’ll believe things will stay the same when left outside of reach.

Aren’t they just as crazy as the ones who believe a cat made of clay is really a cat?
Perhaps even more.

The curse of greatness

I have for part of my life dreamt of fame — I was a teenager, mentally not doing great, and thought rockstars were the coolest thing you could be. If born and raised in some other place than one where alcohol and promiscuity were the main occupation of people that age, I might have channeled this desire to burn guitars and roll on stage into playing with a band and maybe kept playing an instrument into my adult years, instead than dropping it when I felt being palatable was more important. If I had done all of this, maybe my talent would have not just guided me, but forced me into fame. Hear the screams of the crowd?

I would now be dead, or in the best case scenario not writing these posts. I realized, soon enough, that that grandiosity was replacing other, more authentic self-esteem, and was something that needed healing, not encouragement.

People become famous accidentally, when doing something they love, or they plan this greatness and pursue it obsessively. In the first case they often regret that fame, in the second they become addicted. Is this data I found somewhere? No, these are my conjectures.
Similarly, other people might become very successful in what they do (thanks to talent, dedication and luck), and end up gaining enormous power (thanks to systems that barely tax who has a lot). For them that fame and power end up engulfing all other purposes: they become the purpose itself.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day (if you’re reading this, thanks: this was a lesson for me). She was doubting being enough, after having collected greatness for most of her life — this second part I’m adding, she was not so pretentious. She questioned her ability to reach a certain top. Tops are relative, they are just mountains we set to climb.

I told her that, maybe, that was a good thing — I prefaced this with a beloved sentence of mine: “I’ll say something controversial”. That we strive for greatness, fixate on a mountain, to the point of forgetting everything else, including how much we really care about that mountain in the first place.

What if greatness was a trap? I am convinced it would be for me. I am (very) good at what I do. The things I’ve just started I’m less good at, the ones I have experience in I am much better at, but mostly I recognize I have talent: a moderate amount in some areas. I recognize I like to get better at things and I have personal and smart ways to do that, mostly linked to who I am and what I like. And it’s not that I get no joy out of feeding into my strengths, there’s something naturally empowering about it. I like to keep practicing, I like to move forward, I think humans need a certain amount of stepping up on a ladder to somewhere higher, better, more nuanced.

Expertise is about nuances. The more you know, the more you see. Who wouldn’t want that? Only someone who’s choosing to spend their time elsewhere.

Thank God I’m good and not great. Let me aspire to better without ever reaching top. Let me look at it as a nice view, something that gives me direction and makes me eager for knowing tomorrow something I don’t know today.

But please, don’t give me greatness (at this point this sounds like a prayer, I don’t know who I am asking this to but if anyone’s listening you can treat these as wishes I’d like to fulfill) because I’ll become a victim of my own potential.

My friend is afraid of not being chosen, and although I hope she will be, I also think it’ll be a curse. Being chosen makes you feel like you have to respond. And say “Yes”. Enthusiastically. With a big smile and a lot of intentions to confirm the validity of that choice.

There’s a lot of people on the internet who are locking in at the moment, waking up at 4 and not letting anyone or anything distract them from their goal. And I’ll never tell anyone who was born with nothing that it doesn’t make sense to want to be great, because greatness is quite practical: it pays the bills.

But.

To all the rest, who had good and made it great because their talent enslaved them, let me be controversial for a second: I’d never want my talent to distract me from my life. From the mediocrity of reading a book without thinking about how many pages that was or how many books I read this month, to sucking at something, to loving someone who doesn’t love me back, to being genuinely proud of having climbed a hill, even a Dutch one.

I’ll keep watering the pot with my talent and have thousands of goals that I’ll abandon or pursue, but I see my calling a lot like a romantic relationship: it can take a lot of space in my life, but I need my friends too — even more. I’m a huge fan of honeymoon phases, but at some point I need to go back to my books,

my friends,

my movies,

my courses,

my job,

my other job,

my other job,

my walks,

my travel,

my home,

my cat,

my cat,

my other cat,

my music,

my podcasts,

my food,

my mat,

my mind,

my body…

I lost my train of thought

Keep the feet on parallel tracks, I’ve heard yoga teachers say to help with balance in poses like lunges or allow more dignity to our legs in warrior one.

Parallel tracks make movements consistent: one line, two directions. I can do that with my thoughts: let them move forward, from cause to consequence, or move backward, from now to earlier, from because to why, from then to if. Trains move, stop, cross each other. Sometimes you’re on one, and looking outside you see someone in the window across you moving. Is their train moving or is it yours? It can be unsettling. Yet, if you think about it, it’s a doubt with a binary choice: it’s you or it’s them. A controlled environment, a predictable route. Trains are made to be well-behaved. When they misbehave, it’s a tragedy. Derailing is not as harmless as a detour.

This intro has nothing to do with what I’m about to say, other than providing an image for you. You’re thinking about trains now, right? You’re thinking about them as a reliable means of transportation. A train comes from somewhere precise, it stops inside a station (or, in Italy, often in the middle of nowhere), you hop on it, it continues its journey, it drops you off at another station. A train has a certain authority, I’m sure, in the world of transports. I’m sure a train gets looked down on by a plane, both literally and figuratively, but it’s not touched by it. It secretly considers planes childish and boastful. It respects bikes but can’t really bother waiting for them. It despises cars and their instability masked as independence.

Nothing fantastic here. Just facts.

Now let’s use our imagination, starting from a sentence I hear a lot during sessions.

“I’ve lost my train of thought”.

Using the images we’ve evoked, it’s easy to see how disoriented we feel when we’ve failed to hop on such predictable and sturdy machines. We look lost, we stare at the countryside with no directions.

We departed from a clear station to arrive to a clear statement. We relied on our thoughts to take us to destination. Let’s not diverge from the story, let’s stick to the track of our own narrative.

Last time I’ve heard this I had an immediate response, an invitation. “Wait. You’ve lost this train, let’s see what you caught instead.” Maybe another train going somewhere different? Maybe you’re on your feet? Maybe someone picked you up? A friend? A stranger? Yourself? Where are you taking you? What alternative reality have you stumbled upon?

Let’s quote one of the greatest: “Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer”.

The good ones teach you that unpredictability can be coped with.

The great ones say unpredictability is where life happens and thrives.

When you lose your train of thought, follow yourself into the alley: you might find all of the stuff you were not looking for yet desperately needed.

Seeing what is not there

I’ve always felt close to writers. Sometimes, when psychologists become the specialists of data and criteria, I feel closer to writers than to my own colleagues.

Writers imagine what it is to inhabit worlds that don’t exist.
They have perfected the ability to relate to what is not there — my bio on substack is: “I’m here for the hole, not the donut”. I love to look for what’s missing, and find pleasure in exploring shapes through the sign they leave on the sand once they’re not there anymore.
To be totally honest, it’s also because if I see a donut, there won’t be any more donuts.

In the episode ‘Stefano’ of Heavyweight, the podcast host is on a video call with his colleague, and asks her what’s that ladder behind her. It’s a ladder, she says. It leads to nowhere, it’s just decoration. They are also going nowhere with their search of Stefano, climbing a ladder leading nowhere. They see the irony in it. They see what hides behind, above and beyond the ladder: their own frustration, the pointlessness, the search for answers.

As psychologists we sometimes need definitions, but rushing to use confines deprives us of the tremendous power that artists have: imagining.

Induction, prediction, probability, that has all been vital in the things we know today about minds and people, amongst other things. However, sometimes it feels like we didn’t know when to stop taking these at face value. We rely on facts and truths, and we’re left as a result with shapeless sand. Looking too close, sand is made of infinite grains. Taking some distance, we can spot the shapes.

In my workshop ‘Get Unstuck’, that just ended this January, I asked participants to think of their dilemmas and then express the options in a pose. Often there was a safer-but-more-boring option that was seated, and an open-but-off-balance one that meant exploration, with its advantages and its risks.

What I found the most intriguing (and the real core of this workshop) was the role of smaller parts of the body. While the structure is so visibly challenged by gravity, what is that hand doing? What does that finger mean?

It didn’t only interest me because details are beautiful — if the devil is in the details, angels must be there with him too — but because it was the voice of those holes.
The obvious (a tree pose) is not to ignore, it’s not irrelevant. It tells something, often conscious, about where we stand (one or two-legged), and how we own our feelings.
The less obvious (the hand on a knee) deserves another kind of attention, a more cautious one, a more curious, a less structured. It won’t benefit from insidious investigation, but it needs to see patience.

When we step away from staring at the grain of sand, we are confronted with the reality that shapes mutate meaning as soon as the light changes, or if a wave approaches. They also change based on what we are prepared or willing to see, and if we look too closely the’ll shy away. Back to information. Back to data.

As you are standing on your leg, while one is bent and lifted, what’s your hand doing on your knee? Did the knee rise to raise a question? What kind of question is it? Did the hand answer to that question?

The person whose knee was up told me at first: the hand is reassuring those doubts. At the end, when we were cleaning up the space, they came to me and said: I am thinking, I am not sure it was reassurance. I think my hand is telling the knee to shut up. Shh, I don’t want to think about your doubts.

Imagine what a disservice I’d do to those evoked images if I said: what’s the data to back this up?

Our body speaks the language of our unconscious more than we’d think or like. A quick blush crosses our cheeks as something embarrasses us whether we want to make that public or not. The knee lifts and looks like a question mark whether it even knows what a question mark is. We follow invisible guidelines without us knowing.

That’s why it can be so insightful to notice what we see in an ink spot, or even picking random cards and leave the elaboration for later. It shows us something we don’t see. It shows us how much it’s actually there, although we can’t see it.

What’s behind the candles

On December 30th, 2020, exactly five years ago, inspired by an interview between Tlon and Paola Maugeri, I posted a candle, with this caption:

“Lighting up torches to avoid waiting for sunrise”⁣
[…]
⁣As nature withdraws, our December becomes filled with lights, decorations, sweets, festivities, music and celebrations. ⁣
⁣While on the one hand it’s important to foster a sense of community in dark times, on the other it feeds us with easy, ready-to-consume, sugary satisfactions that satiate us but don’t do a thing for our real joy.⁣
⁣The distinction between contentment and happiness lies here: one is the placation of our immediate needs, the other is the acceptance of emptiness necessary to plant seeds for later blossoming. 🌼⁣
⁣🌚 Joy can lie in the quiet exploration of the darkness, the acceptance of life’s cycles and the observation of a profound, natural sadness of a world that dies, or subsides, to bloom again later.⁣
⁣I wish all of you a great new year’s eve, an even greater beginning of the next one, and a moment to sit where you are and ponder how beautiful a night can be, when all the lights are turned off. 🕯⁣
[…]
⁣
(Inspired by a beautiful conversation by @tlon.it and @paolamaugeri which is only available in Italian.)”

I remember clearly what happened after it. Darkness took over my mind and my life, for the following months. The descent had started around a month before this post, and continued, until I reached a very painful pit of despair, panic and loneliness. November-December-January often comes up as a package since then, as one word made of three months: first anxiety appears in my dreams, then it takes over my waking hours, lastly it freezes me.

Being alone in the world, in an utterly unspecial way, surrounded by fog. Quite literally, it was at the time of curfews, it was dark, cold, grey, and I lived high enough that I only saw the sky (or lack thereof). A world populated by ghosts, where nothing is recognizable. The walls haven’t changed, you know it, yet they look alien. Derealization they call it. You think it’s psychosis, they reassure you it isn’t. Surely it feels like existence has changed taste. Identity is a matter you can’t grasp anymore. You’re not even sure you ever did.

I am not going into the details of my own personal struggles. That fallout was the best thing that happened to me, while at the time I thought it was the worst. I desperately looked for ways to go back, shocked at the betrayal of my mind, while at the same time I couldn’t remember anything that had a taste of normal. I was not even sure anything before that existed, and I was terrified nothing after it would.

The future, however, existed. It started as I gave up trying to artificially reinstate the past. I dropped my weapons and surrendered. And slowly, with a lot of effort, and a lot of help, I decorated my abyss. When I became ready, I climbed out of it, and built a house right next to it. What humility it teaches you to know there are no clear lines between crazy and not crazy. What respect it gives you to know you’re not inherently immune to anything.

Don’t get me wrong: things don’t happen in a vacuum. Nothing that year was born that year, and no crisis is an out-of-the-blue event. My whole life anticipated this and built up to it. Nonetheless, it didn’t predict what would have happened. We can react in a multitude of ways. I had the luck of supportive systems around me, being in therapy already, being a psychologist with a deep belief in the necessity of confronting our monsters if we want to help others — and live as ourselves. This, and a lot more, made me trust there was something beyond that despair.

And there was. There was life. Life not as an actor interpreting myself. Life as a fragile, precious, cruel thing. Life as someone who can look where they’re walking.

Five years have passed and a lot has changed, while also having always been like this. All of this, all of the stuff that I found inside my hands once I opened my fists, was already here. It was already my life, I was already myself.

“The acceptance of emptiness”, not just for later blossoming, but for emptiness itself. For the revelation that nothing is empty, it’s just pregnant with space that refuses to bend to our forceful acts of prediction and filling. Emptiness, darkness, loneliness, they are not absences of their counterpart. They are bricks of meaning. To observe, to respect, to welcome.

I am finally looking at the night as something that stands on its own, not the before nor the after (or the lack) of the day.

A room full of mirrors

It’s hard to meet someone more selfish than a person who suffers. Pain — a certain kind of pain — can transform us in the blindest to others, dressing every event around us as a personal attack, and everyone else as an enemy who’s there to hurt us. This explains (without excusing) the worst things we end up saying or doing when we suffer: they are necessary to protect us.
Our mind decides rights and wrongs based on feelings, especially if it hasn’t learned clarity about those same feelings.

So in this emotional chaos where distinctions are hard so walls are arbitrarily built as a defense, and constantly moved around, the strangest paradoxes take shape. I can feel like everyone knows best, while also feeling I’m the only one who knows best. I can feel like no one understands what a good heart I have, while also thinking I’m the worst person in the world. It’s hard to make sense of these paradoxes if we don’t understand something crucial. What is called narcissism in psychodynamic terms (so not what qualifies as a narcissistic disorder) is at the core a sense of uniqueness.

It’s only me in the world. I am special.

This brings along a series of oxymorons. I’ll die tomorrow but also I’ll never die. People are better than me but also so much worse (because ultimately I even doubt they really exist). I despise and adore the same object and how much I need it. I am awesome and I am disgusting. It doesn’t really matter whether that difference has a positive or negative sign, that’s purely based on mood oscillations. What’s constant, what’s sure is that nobody suffers like me.

Nobody is like me.

This uniqueness has nothing sweet about it, it has nothing to do with recognizing ourselves as never identical to someone else. It’s like talking in a room where the only answer we receive is our echo. It’s a deep rooted loneliness, a sense of pure existential isolation.

Let’s get back to narcissism for a second, not the one that we find in the diagnostic manual, but a psychic structure shared by every human toddler. When we are born, we exist in a world of Me-ness. We don’t see any needs other than our own, not for selfish reasons, but for mere survival ones. This developmental narcissism can protract its life into adulthood if that request for help and nourishment was frustrated and caused a so called narcissistic injury. That injury causes people to remain attached to their own needs and perception in the absolute way newborns are, without an ability to feel safe when others show they also exist and have needs. That’s something our mind does often: it makes us fixed at stages that we haven’t fully lived and elaborated. In trauma, that’s also true.

Being the only one in the world is something that from functional becomes alienating when prolonged after its natural lifetime. So an adult incapable of a compassionate and empathetic gaze toward another human will live an amputated life, devoid of its lymph.

In this big room with no end, where every noise, even the subtle ones of digestion and heartbeat, are monstrously amplified, the self is surrounded by mirrors, in the hope they’ll serve as company, but with the grim result of simply showing how alone it is.

The room has a door and the door has a knob. But the point today is not to find a hopeful note. Suffice to say there are ways out of this loneliness.

I am more interested, today, in the mechanisms behind not leaving this room and not finding a door. In what makes us linger in childhood, avoidant of the world of adults. What’s outside that door?

Mostly, a complex world, with others suffering.

A complete chaos with copious amounts of beauty that have to be searched and worked for.

An intersection of needs where shortcuts don’t work.

Being the only ones in the world tells that part of us that weights 3 kilos and has no clothes, that outside of this room, if anything exists, there’s a painless world, there’s salvation, there’s warmth and embrace, there’s finally peace. Once for all. Nothing to fight for anymore, no needs, no frustration, no embarrassment, no humiliation. We’ll sit on a cozy chair, and look at things unravel beautifully in front of our eyes.

I am not here for hope today, because sometimes it’s vital to be grounded and honest before being hopeful.

Outside of here, it’s still a mess. Even messier than a room with mirrors. Me-ness saves us from the hard truth of life being ruthless, hard, layered, contradictory, unexpected, sharp.

And it works in saving us from that.

Anxiety invents a scenario, invents a room of possibilities, to avoid confronting the endless other things that can go wrong.

Paranoia invents thoughts that puts in other minds, to pretend it can know what’s there, because even the worst thought I can imagine is better than the one I can’t.

I am not here to argue that these unknowns are not scary. I am not here to open the door for you. I am not here to get you out of that room by lying about how sunny it is outside. I know it’s scary, and I know how lonely it is in there. I have my own room some days it’s harder to find a way out of, or nice furniture to put in.

Yet, I haven’t met a single person who’d like to go back to that room once they have found a knob.

Dot dot dot

December asks few words and gives even less. It’s cheap with images, thrifty with sounds, neutral in smells.

I’m inhabited by a sense of quiet wait, patient suspension. Things will have time to happen, and underneath everything there’s an invisible fertility that has just slowed down but never stopped. If you pay close attention, you can hear smaller noises. If you look attentively, you can zoom in and see the yellows inside the grey.

Don’t let December fool you, let it convince you. Be there fully with body and mind, where death and decadence can sit next to you without pretending to be opposed to life and fullness, but hand in hand with all that’s moving.

Don’t let December confuse you, let it shock you to your core and then hug you back to sleep.

Don’t do it, or you, the disservice of comparing. December stands on its own.

Don’t utter anything other than words that will fade into oblivion.

I become the size of nothingness

I walk on the verge of aliveness

I find relief in shapelessness

I surrender to the abundance of emptiness

It can help sometimes to take existence a bit less seriously, with the utmost respect.