S.am a twenty-eight year old currently abroad for work reasons. If I look at my current professional life, even if it is still precarious and in constant evolution, it seems to me that I have built more than I rationally thought I could do. I have had various moments in which I felt on the brink of the abyss, I always had to get up on my own and, every time, the strength to do it I got from the commitment I put into building my future of study before and career then.
In Italy I have a story underway, a guy who he wouldn’t let me go for anything in the world. We can’t even argue, because as soon as we fear the idea that some cloud could obscure the relationship, it becomes very sweet, minimizes, changes the subject, always reaffirms the same concept. “I love you, maybe I’ll show it my way, but I’d give it all for you.”
However, when I think about our story, sometimes, I wonder what I’m doing in his world. I don’t feel able to play the wife who leaves starched shirts on the bed, I don’t even think I want to be a mother.
He has often implicitly demonstrated that he longs for a more peaceful, bourgeois life, in which work only serves to give prestige in society and access to leisure. As latent hope, the one that I let myself be fascinated by what money can give and desist from my constant challenges. Criticism if I am busy, it makes me weigh the little free time, but if I try to bring out a comparison of points of view, here the poor innocent puppy reappears, trying to make me understand that it is me, who think too much.
Abroad I met a colleague, who works permanently here, not passing through, like me. He is cultured, present, affectionate, less sensible than me at work, but understanding, at least because he knows the rules, tests their renunciations. They weigh on him, they thrill me, but the result is the same. Less focused on a future of babies and Sunday lunches with the family. We all know, however, how these things turn out. At first everyone admires me for what I do and how I do it. One day everyone they end up complaining about the same thingsto demand more attention, not to understand, and the complicity and open acceptance of the early days dissolves.
The questions I ask myself are essentially two. The first is the most obvious: what should I do? I have to believe the cliché that if the first were really love, the second would not have found space for access, or else I really have to give in to the call of safe lovewhich is already a goal in itself and shouldn’t be wasted?
The second creeps in like a worm, in gray moments like this: What if the wrong one was me? What if they were right? What if all this passion for my work actually hides a problem to be solved, rather than the solution to all the worries of existence? I would be ready to swear that this is not the case … but all the options must be examined in order to make prudent choices.
Thanks in advance for your patience,
C.
Ester Viola’s answer
Ester Viola
Dear C.,
But what problem, what patience. What are you doing here? You’re doing great, can’t you see that studying working being ambitious are the stars that lead to the kingdom of Oz: the excess of alternatives.
You have one who wants you, the other who also wants you and you in the middle who want nothing at all except to be left alone to make other dreams come true and decide later.
But you know how many twenty-year-olds with great loves even self-proclaimed happy would pay to change places with you. The 1999 myself would have asked you for an audience.
The love? I do not care
You look great, you see everything and understand everything, I don’t even know what you write to do.
For love – let him come or let him pass him or find the best bet between two you like – it takes the time it takes, nobody knows how much, like the witchcraft of fairy tales. Nothing can be done until the spell is broken, the French said.
Love and regrets
Try asking anyone what regrets they have. The answer is that everyone would come back, but only as a matter of personal investment. Study this instead of that, leave the small country first, start working elsewhere. In short, at forty you would go back to do, not to hear.
The 12 good practices
Want the impossible dozen back in your twenties? The catalog of good practices written by an old woman, here it is again:
1. She studies
2. Quickly find a city that has streets as welcoming to you as the walls of your home. The city you would not leave as you would not leave a family.
3. If you realize that what you have studied is not good for you but it is too late to make the revolution, do everything. Do what you started and do what you like as well. Both of you will be fine. If you find a crossroads, take it, he wrote it Nora Ephronis the solution I do not say to everything, but almost.
4. Don’t be fooled by yourself when you think that nothing can do everything well. There are no unsatisfied destinies, there are only heavy asses.
5. She studies.
6. As long as you are not you, no relationship can work. Love announces itself in a precise way: you weren’t looking for it. Relationships of steel always precede the six months of life in which we say “I’m fine so I don’t miss anything”.
7. Make an effort and avoid complexity. Never let the heaviness pull you under.
8. In case of total and desperate love, remember that love always elastic does not exist, every couple loosens, and it is good news. It means that you can also dedicate yourself to something else besides watering the log of happiness.
Read here all the bad relationships of Ester Viola.
9. When you meet a good person who is compatible and suitable for interlocking for every edge you have, the one who after careful analysis and a very careful review is an excellent candidate and on paper could make you happy, and yet does not make you happy, give him all the same a possibility.
10. Also give him the second chance.
11. When every attempt has failed and your friends advise you to let it go because if one doesn’t feel anything, she certainly can’t impose it on herself and you have to resign yourself, because love wants what it wants, at that point give it the third chance.
12. She studies.
Let me know how it goes, even though I insist that your “I feel like I’m not throwing away my 20s as I should” deserves a medal, not an answer.
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