Now I get it!

13 Monday Feb 2012

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Last week I had dinner with a friend of mine. In some way we ended up telling each other stories about our “teenagerhood”.
Funny and complicated stories that made us think on how that moment of our life was so difficult for both us and our parents, that no matter how good they were, everything would look wrong to us.
They say:”It’s a moment and it will go away”.
True. It went away in the end, but how painful was that?
Oh my gosh! Very painful. Everything looked so wrong, I felt always in the wrong spot. I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, always fighting to find my space.
Talking about this, at some point my friend told me that some weeks before a documentary on this special stage of life was on TV.
A research conducted by the Youth Center of Excellence showed that the maturation of the brain doesn’t stop at the age of 10 but goes on during our teen years.
Before this research, it was believed that all the connections in our brain were developed during the first 3 years of life and that the brain would keep maturating till the age of 10 and be fully matured and stable after that age.
But what this research enlightened is that during teenager hood the brain, not only doesn’t stop, but even goes under a new “restructuring”. All the unused connections wither away, while the most used ones remain and get stronger. This is called “pruning” process.
What basically happens is that somehow the brain reforms and an overproduction of grey matter happens again. The huge difference in this second time is that teenagers have a part in this process. They could control how their own connections are going to be and surely they do, something that is not possible in the first years of life where the brain activity is completely determined by the parents and the environment.
Teenagers react to these changes, communicate verbally the way they feel, try to find their own way through this process.
This research gave me a completely different point of view on the matter.
It’s worth reading it!!
Adolescent Brain Development

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Since I paid for this ticket…

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

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Dear me,

It’s been so long. I thought I was done with writing emails to myself, but let’s face it: I’m the only audience of this movie…of my life. I’m the only one that can rate, applaude, being disappointed or simply getting up and walking to another cinema.
And this is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to get this movie in a different cinema, a better one.
They say that adults tend to recreate in their relationships the emotional patterns that they have learned during their childhood, expecially when these patterns where difficult or distressing. Freud called this behavior “Repetition compulsion“.
There are mainly two reasons why this happens. The first one is that the relationship feels familiar and no matter how painful that is, it is the first form of connection that we have learned and most likely the only one since we have kept repeating it. The second reason is the hope that we can change it, that this time is gonna work and end differently.
I keep being driven to men that help me in living again and again the relationship with my father. The aggravating circumstance is that my relationship with my father did change at some point. He did become the father I always wanted to have, what I probably didn’t registered in my mind is that that happened because he went through his own personal growth. He changed because he wanted to change. It wasn’t me. I didn’t change him. 
Now I’m an adult with many many failed relationships on my account (and I gave my huge contribution to almost all of those failures) and I keep being actracted by those men that can’t be who I want them to be, simply because they don’t want it. Writing this down makes it so simple and clear, then why do I keep doing it? Why do I wish for something different instead of choosing something different? 
Actually what I should first understand is what I’m wishing for… I say I don’t want a relationship because I’m not ready, but then when a man shows “some” or “no” interest in me I start feeling used  in the first case or abandoned in the second. Basically even when there is not apparent reason I find a way to get to those feelings, those so familiar feelings. The ones that had accompanied me during my entire childhood.
When I started writing, I thought this would end with something like “I’m going to choose different men from now on”, but while writing I realized that this won’t fix the problem. I contribute everytime in my own way to recreate that relationship, also when the man I choose is the opposite of what my father was.
I’m not changing cinema for the moment…I will first try to work on the colors I’m giving to this movie and if the cinema is still so cold as it is right now, then nothing will stop me from finding a warmer place!!

What’s your label?

22 Sunday Jan 2012

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Yesterday was meditation night. After dinner I got out of my apartment and joined this group of people for half an hour of guided meditation. This was my second session. I have never been a fan of those things. To be more specific, I have never really believed in them. I always thought those people were a bit too “hippie” for me (nothing against them!). But in this special case, the guide is extremely good. I really like her. She is a psychologist and she always tries to give a scientific sense to what we do beside the more “spiritual” one.
So yesterday before we started meditating she gave to each of us an object and asked us to look at it like it was the first time we had seen it.
I was impressed by the meaning of this exercise.
Two posts ago I was complaining of getting so easily bored, always looking for new things that would keep my mind busy and so on. How blind am I…
The secret and the power don’t lie in the ability of finding new things, but in the capability of looking at the same things with new eyes!
How do artists create?How many times have I seen the same object in different paintings? It’s the same object but it’s every time different.
“Look at the world with children’s eyes”
I have heard these sentence so many times during my life, but I guess I wasn’t ready to get the meaning of it. I hadn’t gotten to the point where my boredom could represent a “problem” for me.
How many times do we label things? Food for example, the very first time we eat something we give to it all our attention. And the second one? We just eat it. But have we ever wondered if we really know everything about what we are eating? For us it’s just “food” and what about people? Same thing. We get a first impression of somebody and we use this first impression as a label.
Some time ago I had in my mind to write a post. That post has never taken off, but I made an experiment. I sent an email to all my closest friends asking them to give me one word that they would use to define me. They were allowed to pick a single word, no two or three, but only one that would represent me in their mind.
They all picked words that were synonymous of “strength”. This result was honestly unexpected. I was just recovering for a very bad breakup. It had been more or less 4 months that I had been crying almost non-stop. I was in pieces, unable to put myself together, pretty much the opposite of “strength”. I was grateful for that result, very, but it was also a surprise. I might be a strong person, but I am a person. This means that no matter how strong I can be, I’m also vulnerable and fragile, but they couldn’t register it. OK..this is a bit of an unfair statement. I only gave them the possibility to choose one word and they chose the most predominant part of me, which makes completely sense. Then, let me reflect this on myself, how many times do I label people and after that I am not able to see what is behind the label I chose for them?
Sometimes I think that nothing happens by chance and what we find is more or less what we were looking for, even if we did it unconsciously.
Yesterday I got the answer I was looking for.

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I’m not playing anymore.

13 Friday Jan 2012

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Ok, something is wrong here.
Now that I know people are visiting my blog, I don’t feel the same anymore when I write.
What a weird feeling…
I woke up this morning and I knew I wanted to write what happened to me yesterday and all the insights I got from the experience, but now that I am in front of my laptop… it feels like I can’t do it or to be more specific I can’t let it flow out of my mind the way it is.
I’m questioning myself.
I always need to write my thoughts down when they become too chaotic. It helps me to avoid that my mind spins too fast and out of control. When I was a kid or a teenager I used to have my secret diary and then becoming an adult I started writing emails to myself.
At some point I thought I could have a blog. I didn’t think there was much difference between writing an email to myself or publishing an anonymous post on the Internet. Today I see that difference.
Nobody has ever read my diaries and my emails. I was the only one.
Now it’s me and I don’t know who else. I can feel the power of this. I want people to like me so badly that it scares me. It scares me to the point that I forget to be myself. I’m afraid of being judged.
I have never seen it so clear. I have always thought: “I am the way I am and I don’t care of what others might think“.
But I have never gotten to the point of sharing so much with somebody else. I have never had to face the fear of allowing somebody to look into the deepest “myself”.
I have read somewhere that the best way to overcome your fears is to face it.
I have found a new challenge. I have many fears. It’s time to start facing them.
Hide and seek is a “game over” for me.
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What have I done?

09 Monday Jan 2012

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Am I a drama queen? Maybe. Or at least, that’s how a friend of mine defined me during brunch last Saturday morning. The main point is that it wasn’t the first time that I have heard something like that. Someone else years ago told me the same.
I wondered what is the exact definition of drama queen. I did a little research on the internet and apparently a drama queen is somebody that overreacts to everything. I normally don’t, but I have to say that I have had quite some drama in my life so far. For sure more than what would be called “normal”.
At this point I knew this was going to be a difficult post, but I also knew I couldn’t take it back anymore.
So I thought about it…It’s not only drama. I have had many many boyfriends, many many friends, done many many sports,changed three jobs in two years etc etc. I could go on and on. Basically I always need to have something new and going on in my mind, more than in my life.
“Racing thoughts” refers to the rapid thought patterns that often occur in manic, hypomanic, or mixed episodes.
This is the definition you can find in Wikipedia. This is one of the Bipolar Disorder Symptoms. I’m not bipolar cause all the other symptoms are missing, but I can’t stop thinking. At a very high speed my thoughts jump from a memory to an idea, or to something I have heard or seen. This starts the very moment I open my eyes in the morning and ends the moment I fall asleep in the evening. Sometimes it goes on in my dreams. The only way to stop this process is to sing a song in my mind. But in the definition of racing thoughts that is also part of the game.
I’m not bipolar, I’m a thinker. Probably you are wondering what is so difficult or special about it. Well, if something bad happens in my life, my mind will replay it over and over and over. It won’t let me breath, it won’t let me move on. It will always drag me back to that. This would explain the drama and this would also explain my tendency to depression. Sometimes I just can’t handle what is in my mind more than what is outside of it.
So it’s time to make a plan to properly feed my head and I must say this blog is already a big help :)

“We can never turn back the pages of time, though we may wish to relive a happy moment, or say goodbye just one last time, we never can, because the sands of time continue to fall, and we can’t turn the hourglass over.” – Unknown

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Law of Polarity…what is the opposite of two?

05 Thursday Jan 2012

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The Law of Polarity states that everything can be split in two extremes that are equal but opposite and everything in between are varying degrees of the same thing.
It makes me think of one of the Netwon’s laws. The third law states that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.
Basically the entire world, either you think of it as static or dynamic, is made of equal opposites.
Every feeling has its opposite, love and hate for example.
Or every experience in life like success and failure.
Or every color, dark blue and light blue and so on.
And every action has an equal consequence.
Where we stand its our choice. I know this might sound a bit naif, but we can choose among feelings. If we are deeply in love with somebody and this somebody breaks up with us, we could keep loving him/her or we could start hating. In the end it is the same. We simply can’t stop have feelings for that person so we transform them. Extremes meet as Blaise Pascal says in Pensees and they have much in common.
I’ve been giving thoughts to this theory.
Love and hate are part of the same pole. Two extremes which represents the same thing. But if this two are one thing, what is the opposite of that thing? The opposite of this pole is indifference.
Indifference is the worst that can happen. Indifference is emptiness. There is nothing in there.
Oscar Wilde in the picture of Dorian Grey wrote “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about”.
Or Elie Wiesel in his speech “The Perils of Indifference” said “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
But for the law of polarity everything has a bad and a good part.
Indifference has a good part too. We can choose it. We can choose to be indifferent. When something hurts us, we can choose indifference. When somebody breaks our heart, we can choose to be indifferent. When a friend betray us or when somebody at work is bad at us, we can choose indifference.We can protect ourselves being indifferent.
I dislike indifference, I always have. But thinking of it, it might be helpful sometimes.
Wondering how to do it? I haven’t totally figure that out yet, but Hannibal once said “We will either find a way or make one!”
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Let the sun rise…

03 Tuesday Jan 2012

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Back to my desk.
Yesterday I spent the day traveling. It wasn’t easy to say goodbye and leave
but now I”m back to my life ready to start again.
I’m in my office and outside is bright and sunny.
What a beautiful way to be back in Zurich, a place where the sun is too often shy to show up.
I’m still in “vacation” mood trying to figure out what I should do first.
So, headphones on my head listening music.
It’s time to give a better sense to this day :)

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Goodbye and good morning!

31 Saturday Dec 2011

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Let me be free...

Today is the last day of this long 2011.
I should make the point of this year. Should go back with my mind and see the good and the bad…
But I don’t want, at least I don’t want to write it here. In my mind I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help going through everything again, but I don’t want to make a list here on this blog.
What I want to do is looking forward to what is ahead and I want this badly.
Today is the last day of the year. I know what is behind and I have no clue of what is in front.
Usually what is unknown scares us…for sure it scares me. It’s like being a child in the dark thinking of monsters that would disappear when the light is turned on. I used to feel that way often. It was always easier to look back, but this time I’m going to do something different. I’m going to look forward to something I don’t know. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. It’s new. It’s like an empty white page. I’m free to write what I want.
This is the feeling I’m gonna start the 2012 with and this is the feeling I wish to everybody.
The sense of freedom.
Happy new year!!!!

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Tango and Love

29 Thursday Dec 2011

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This Christmas is apparently the time of meeting people I haven’t seen for decades.
After ten years we hadn’t seen each other, yesterday an ex boyfriend of mine and I went out for dinner. Clearly there were other people with us, but we were sitting close to each other. It was so easy to talk to him and we both felt like time had never really passed. We didn’t date for very long but it was intense and I must admit he is one of the best memories I have of that time. We used to have so much fun together.
He is a tango dancer now. I couldn’t believe it!
He used to be a musician when we were together. A guitarist to be more specific. I used to go to the concert of his band and wait for him. It was so cool at that time.
I felt so important when he would come and kiss me after the concert with all the other girls looking at me jealously!
When you are 20 years old these are the best things :)
The entire dinner was a lot of fun, exactly like it was ten years ago. At some point joking a little bit, I asked him to teach me some steps of tango. He said:”yeah…maybe..in the next days…”
At the end of the evening on the way back home he stopped in a parking place, put some tango music on and asked me to get out of the car. I thought he was going nuts :D
Well, he taught me the basic steps of tango. We had to rehearse them a number of times before I was able to “dance”, but at some point when he thought I was ready he put his cheek on mine and we danced.
Everything around us disappeared.
Weird…very, but at the same time so comfortable. We are not stranger. We used to be in love, but could we fall in love again? I can’t answer for sure, but I don’t think so. We are not the same anymore. Even if it feels like yesterday, there are anyway ten long years in between and too many things have changed.
But still, all the chemistry is there. What brought us together in the first place hasn’t changed.
What is it? Is it true that a bit of love always remains?

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The day after…

26 Monday Dec 2011

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Christmas

So Christmas 2011 is already over.
And as usual, since my life is never flat, I have my little story to tell about it.
At some point in the past days a friend of mine brought me to this English church service.
I didn’t have a clue of what that meant, but I hadn’t seen him for a very long time so I didn’t bother to ask and I said yes.
He brought me to a protestant church and the service was basically a special mess.
I was born catholic and that was the first time I had attended a non-catholic mess.
My religion wasn’t really my choice, but more of the place where I was born (Italy, shall I say more?).
Growing up though, I took distance from the church (but not from my religion). I just couldn’t share or accept their “way” of looking at things. I’m not gonna go in details about it. One day I will explain my point of view and what brought me to disagree with them, but not today. So I’m catholic but in my own way and I don’t go to mess.
When the service started I was skeptic, but already after five minutes spent in there, I saw that this was going to be an interesting experience.
A protestant church is different from a catholic church. The first one simple and poor while the second one so huge and always so rich.
The mess was basically a collection of songs. A sort of karaoke. The lyrics of every song was projected on a big wall so that everybody could sing. I sang as well, at least the songs I knew like Silent Night. It was fun!!
Then the priest started the sermon. A pretty young black guy. I must say he was a little bit too excited for me, emphasizing every single word.
He talked for very long about San Joseph that needed so much money to carry around his family and feed them…I really tried to understand what was the point but I couldn’t get it. He really counted all the money that Joseph needed for everything. I found it a bit awkward.
I honestly didn’t dare to ask my friend who looked so inspired by the priest’s words, so in the end I gave up.
But I had and still have this question in my mind. How do we choose our religion? Is it because of our parents?
Because of society? Or do we really deeply believe in our religion as our choice?

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