We looked at each other, and he was beaming with happiness. He is from Calabria. I recognised that satisfaction, it is the same I feel when I can give. There was a tacit understanding between us that is what any kind of healthy relationship is about, giving. “This is exactly what someone back home would do, just come and make themselves at home”. And in that phrase resides so much. He gets it. That to be able to give is an honour. To find people who do not feel trapped by the help or favours they receive. Kash, his wife and my friend did not understand why we were getting moved by this. She is Polish.

While I was going back home, I ended up in a loop of thoughts about generosity, about my country, about my people. If you are never entirely home anywhere, you have a very strong feeling that home can only be yourself, that the people in your life should be chosen around common values more than common man-made classifications and belongings. It is a gift and a curse that the life of a migrant is a deeply examined life.

“Generosity” is my passport. I belong to the underpopulated country of “giving”.

A month ago, I was minding my business at a cafe in the busy city of Tirana. I was writing down in my notebook and eating from a plastic bag full of cherries I had bought from a granny a few streets away. I was very happy with my life. There was a lot of buzz around, tourists laughing and commenting on what they had seen. But, at some point, I overheard a conversation at the table next to me: “Gimo, they are chasing away all our kids; can’t you see we are being made strangers in our own home? We welcome the world, but there is no host. We are guests serving guests” I lifted my head and tried to get a glimpse of the speaker, and it was the most tragic character I had seen in a while. A real face, one that is more and more difficult to encounter in a sea of plastic surgery. The face of someone who could play someone from the Odyssey. A certain aloofness, a great beard, the posture of a wise old father.

I stayed persistent and minded my business. But at some point, I hear him say, “She is beautiful like the cherries she is eating”, and my smile gave away that I was understanding absolutely everything. I never understood why, but my people like to compliment people by comparing them to food. I always found it funny, but it gives away how physical, material, and concrete we are about beauty and feelings. The two elderly people quickly took the chance to ask me, “So where is our Albanian daughter from? Come to our table”. They called the waitress “darling” and asked her to immediately bring me whatever I wanted.

I think I hid it well, but I was about to cry. They reminded me so much of my grandfather. The man I have loved the most. And trust me, it was mutual. This attitude of a genie in a bottle, always asking you about your desires and doing the absolute best, with a sense of urgency, to bring them to life. All those questions about my desires made me understand myself. Perhaps that is why, when he died, grief was so strong; I was too young to ask and command about my wishes by myself only.

In the space of two hours, since I was waiting for the next bus to go home up in the North, they told me about their lives. One was an Orthodox priest whose child had a heroin addiction, and for a while was hanging out with some “bad crops” in the Bronx. “I am so happy he is back here; I am so happy to have him back home. At home, his hurt is ours too. Back there, they could not care about his pain as much as we do”. The other one had returned after 20 years in Rome, because of a family dispute and decided to stay. They told me they had known each other since they were kids. When at some point the priest started to explain to me a part of the Genesis, the other one, amused, said, “I am Muslim myself, but I always go to listen to him at church so we can do the way back home together and have our coffee “.

At some point, I told them I had to leave and catch a taxi to the bus station. And a protest started: “No, you are not going to take a taxi to the bus station when we are here, and we can get you there without spending a penny”. I tried to tell them, “Do not mind, really. I can afford it; it is not a big deal”, but that made them even more appalled. Before I had time to even call a taxi, the two took each one, one of my luggage. And we proceeded to walk, me light as a feather, them super happy to be helpful and deep in a debate about Trump, the gays, the mafia, Covid and so on. They could not agree on much, and they kept insulting each other affectionately. I loved it.

I arrived at the station, and they gave me back my bags and paid for my bus. I protested that too: “I can, and I should pay”, I said, “you only have your pension”. They were almost offended, and they kept waving goodbye until I could no longer see them. Again, I had to fight back the tears of nostalgia. They were both dressed in suits on a very hot day, and when they said goodbye, they shook hands with me. Respectable and respectful to the dot, just like my granddad would act.

In the space of those couple of hours, they said so many things that made my brain go into ecstasy, and I’d like to unpack those too. Lots of advice about love and female-male relationships, a farsightedness I did not expect from two old Albanian men. “Do not be so afraid of time that you marry a donkey. Women truly know no time because they give life; it is we men that are terrified of death and we try to instill it in you so you can sort this feeling for us. But you create life, you are life itself”. DAMN! Take that, Instagram pop psychologists!

But I tell myself I need to focus on the subjects at hand in this article.

I returned home that night, and I was deeply sad. I went downstairs to my neighbour, whom I call “teta”, since I was 2 years old. She held the key to a new gate my parents had installed at home, which I did not have. There she was, very regal, with her hair perfectly done, in her garden full of roses of different types, waiting for me. Alone. Loyal to my memories of a child, with a few more lines next to her eyes.

Her husband is in Italy, on one of his periodic work permits in Milan. Her son is working illegally in Germany in a pizzeria, where the owner tries to make him work double, threatening to denounce him. For 4 days, we drank coffee together every morning and every afternoon in that garden. We’d spend hours talking until it turned dark. One evening, we heard the laugh of a child as his parents were parking. We love kids in Albania. She said, “Oh God, this is a medicine; you hardly hear any child anymore in this neighbourhood. Do you remember when we had to threaten you and my son for you to come back home from playing here outside? And the only thing that would work was the lies your mother would tell you to lure you back. She was dishonest with you guys but effective”.

I wanted to tell her that not only do I remember. But, that I have continuously subconsciously tried to rebuild in my heart, mind and life that level of trust and play I felt at those times. That back then, you could tell your friend that he is stupid and that Trump is a crazy nutcase of a war mongerer instead of a hero that is putting back order, and you will still show up at his church next morning cause you have to drink coffee together afterwards. Like those two, I had met a few days before. I couldn’t look her in the eyes, and I always felt on the verge of crying. My teta, who always wore the best lipsticks and would make us trek to some remote churches “so you know in this country we had God”. She does not deserve to be here in front of me, overly thanking me for spending time with her. Because most of the time, she is entirely alone, with her dog. This is not the old age I had envisioned for her.

She is supposed to be surrounded by lots of grandchildren. Her son, my childhood friend, isn’t supposed to be slaving away. She told me, “I remember that elegant French man you were with years ago. What went wrong? Could you not translate your heart to him? It is difficult to get us; we contradict, we are so full of pride while we have nothing, the only thing we consistently do is give. Maybe they think we are dumb for this”. I felt I was finally an adult because these were not topics we’d discussed before. But it also made me think. I just told her, “I believe the right person does not need translation, or at least he buys the dictionary himself. But it was my fault this time. I was not ready to be understood”. She laughed, patted me on my knees and told me “, You are really a woman now”.

Generosity is at the centre of our identity, and yet here she is standing in front of me, questioning if that is a weakness. I wanted to tell her that I had my doubts too at some point. But I arrived at a different conclusion. Perhaps when foreigners meet us can put a “naive” or “desperate” label on us. “Why are these people so eager to help, so eager to be involved? To find solutions? Even for strangers,” they might ask themselves. That is an intellectual explanation. A bandage that they put on the uncomfortable feeling we provoke in them when they notice that these people with so little in material terms display such a level of dignity. There is dignity and nobility in giving, especially if you have so little. I met nobility that did not have nobility at all. That makes them confront an incapacity they have. We cannot change ourselves for the worse, as a reaction to an incapacity in others.

Vince, my friend, gave with grace, and I received with grace. We did not magnify in each other a darkness, a lack, an incapacity. I did not think immediately of what I would have to give back; I did not think I caused an inconvenience. Perhaps the act of generosity is so intimate that it makes people uncomfortable. When you give, you are being involved; when you receive, you are being met with your need. It takes a healthy ego.

Social media and your feelings have a different timer

When I returned to Brussels, I was a bit down. I had lived the life of a wealthy divorcee in a summerly location, and yet I felt so empty. It was impossible for me, those few days there, to recognise my country. I kept looking for reference points. And I could not find them. Except, exactly for “generosity”.

The day I had to fly back home, silly me had made a mistake and found myself super late. The bus driver, when I asked him where I could find a taxi cause I was late, laughed and said, “Wait two minutes while I finish this cigarette in between shifts, and I'll come with you”. Along the way, he told me I was now his cousin and that his taxi driver friend would charge me less. When he found out we shared a strong dislike of our Prime Minister, he was even more pleased he was helping out someone “who made sense”.

And that’s how it went; I paid way less, although I suspect the taxi driver had understood by now that I was not at all related to the bus driver. I was twice his height and pale; he was super short and very tanned. And the taxi driver became another reference point just as much as the priest, his friend and the bus driver. He stopped to buy some water and bought a bottle for me as well, without asking. It was an instinctual move for him. He told me how once he got a huge fine in Denmark, and that he was helped to avoid an even bigger one by a Police woman in Copenhagen and that now they message daily with her and his wife, and she will come to Albania in July to theirs.

Who does that? Albanians do. I did not think it was crazy; for me, this is normal. But then it also made me so sad. Albania is opening up; it is receiving a flood of tourists every year. I increasingly worry they will profit, mock, take for granted and ridicule our generous hearts. I fear it is already happening.

For a few days, I soothed myself with the idea that the Albania of my youth does not exist anymore, that is a concept stuck in time, but it will survive as long as I keep meeting generous people. That generous people are what Albania is about. And I did not even have time to process these feelings, stuck in a Teams meeting, emails and Notion pages. When something I had been praying for for 13 years started: a revolution, that would finally show the world what my people truly are. I did not post much about it when it started; I still do not.

However, at some point, some lame girl who always followed everything I post and who has a private profile and a picture taken from some sort of manga wrote me, “Why aren’t you talking about the protests????????????”.

I wanted to tell her, “Relax bitch, it literally started yesterday. Go bother Dua Lipa, who is only focused on Free Palestine”. I just told her “I have bills to pay, and I don’t pay them with social media activism, nor do I owe a stranger a reply”.

Then I blocked her. I am old enough to not feel the need to be the bigger person. The bigger person is the one who preserves her peace and self-respect. I am too old, too centred, too self-assured, too mentally sane and have too much self-respect at the fine age of 31 to put up with a stranger on the internet who does not know me. I took it for what it is, a misplaced and misdigested respect for my voice.

Why would I need to explain to a stranger that I have been searching for a feeling of home since I was 6 years old? And I have paid the price many times for this search. Why would I need to prove to someone who gets a hit of moral rightfulness from posting, sharing, and liking that I have defended our country so much that the border between me as a person and me as a representation was so confusing? Why would I show that in the past 10 years, I have already explained that we were a de facto dictatorship, even to the European leaders and decision makers I was lucky enough to have access to?

She speaks the language of social media, which is one I am well-versed in too as well. One that you can potentially detach from with a deactivation. You can go on social media, put up a façade and live an entirely different life outside of it. Too easy. There is not nearly as much skin in the game. The language of social media is fast, reactive, and sensational. But sometimes the magnitude of change requires silence. A voice that never stops speaking has no power. Parrots never stop speaking. I want my silence to reinforce my voice, so when I decide to speak, it is clear, strong and precise.

I was emotionally destroyed from the week prior. I had no time to process it. Then the revolution started, and I was swimming in a wave of hope. How do you reconcile the magnitude of those emotions in a few days? We do not even have time to check all of our emails some days.

“Everything is political” except love

And this is why I am uncomfortable when my friends seem to love the motto “everything is political”. I don’t like it. I agree to a certain point, but I am not a fan of it. I wish I could make it clear to them that the love I feel for them is not political. The personal and the political can mix, intertwine, but it is the personal that should prevail. Be it because at least I can directly influence it.

Ironically, the only time I decided to end a friendship because of politics was because I could no longer see the person past the patch of slogans she had become. I needed to save the child I had grown up with in my memory; the grown-up she had turned into was deeply scared and needed a shield of “isms”. I could no longer access the individual; she had turned herself into a torch of symbols. I will always love her, but I cannot be involved in the way she is dealing with her fears. I deal with mines differently.

I tell my friends that it is when we go beyond politics, in that attempt at honesty, that I truly see them. And I hope they make the effort to see me too. That is at the core: “compassion”. I see empathy as “pasta in bianco” and compassion as “pasta with a good sauce.” I cannot empathise with them; I am busy being compassionate to them. I cannot occupy myself with the thought that they are political beings who fit into a system, and therefore every choice is mandated and/or defines the structure of this system at the same time.

The friends who hold very different political views from mine, when they cannot oppose my logic, say, “You are making it personal when you give those examples”. To which I reply, “You are forgetting that in those political systems of yours, there are human beings who don’t fit all the structures you set up to read the world”.

I wondered for years why it made me uncomfortable as a phrase. I cannot sleep tonight, and I have had this article in me for a month, so I am on a loop on Reddit. I finally want to sort this out. And I got it. For me, people are much more than political beings. There is so much that logic cannot explain. Take it from me, a master at rationalising and intellectualising any sort of feeling I have had since birth. We are much more than thoughts, structures, ideas, and systems. These can change. We actually can change the systems too. Our core cannot. I feel life is more interesting through this lens. Who am I if those structures and beliefs are taken away from me? I am a generous person. Undoubtedly, some systems encourage or discourage certain traits, but we are the ones deciding whether to continue to exercise them. Notice how it took me 2/3 to mention Trump, Rama, Kushner. Because to me, they do not matter; they too will pass. What matters to me is when a friend annoys me, and I find it in me to tell them the truth and still understand.

I never go to protests. I did my fair share when I was a teenager; I was the trade unionist soul of my school. But then I grew up. I never turned cynical; I just reinforced the belief that the only change I can bring about, my only locus of control, is me. And I trust that if people were more focused on bettering themselves, they wouldn’t focus on politics as much. Perhaps if we took the challenge of self-mastery, we would need less politics.

Yet, I went to this protest. I found myself among my people, lots of babies sleeping while we were asking for transparency, democracy, accountability. There was not a single excuse I could find not to go. It passed all my moral criteria. It gave me immense hope; I finally recognised my people again. I felt a feeling I rarely feel, that of belonging to a group.

I also believe that if their voice is finally heard, I will finally not be occupied with recreating the past of my country but living its present. I see these protests not only as a political revolution but as a spiritual one. Albanians are finally learning to demand things, to ask for their needs to be heard too. But most importantly, they are learning to be generous towards themselves. That is revolutionary to me. A crucial step in self-respect. Yes, we give, yes we welcome, yes we embrace, but you have to respect us. For decades, we migrated, our name counted for nothing, we had to grieve who we were, and we had to prove so much. Our only way to recognise ourselves was our generosity. And yet, I feel we were so harsh with ourselves. We asked for nothing; we did not even dare.

The fact that we are asking our leaders to be mindful of our generosity, on our behalf, is healing something in me. We are finally shedding any sense of inferiority, self-imposed or not. And I love that for us. One of my new Albanian friends in Brussels, after we were walking away from the protest, told me, “Vilma, I was so disappointed when I came here. Back home, we studied anything we could get our hands on to understand what was so fucked up about our country and how we could solve it. I came here, and these people have not read or tried to process anything. I can’t have a conversation of depth.” He is a software engineer, writer and philosopher.

I wanted to tell him that a fucked up political system made him a gem. That those raised in a state that feeds them at every step of the way did not have to question shit. Until now, it has been so wrong to judge ourselves for something we did not get to decide. What would people born into order have done with our chaos? Would they still display the generosity we displayed, although it sometimes was almost self suicidal? We will never know.

But I am excited to see what we will do with a newly found generosity towards ourselves and a battle to win, that of a healthy political system. We are so tired. But god knows how stubborn we are. Have you ever asked the Ottoman Empire about us?

Vilma Djala

The last time I had a close encounter of the third type with a male specimen was nearly 2 years ago.

In fact, the other day I was trying to calculate how long it has been without any “action” in my life and ended up more frustrated with my time blindness than by the lack of any salvific phallic presence in my life.

That is the propaganda; that without se…

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Men consume porn and then shame pornstars with scenarios where the pornastars’ children one day will have to face unbearable shame for the life their mother led up until their birth. Then stop jerking off videos of a pornstar, Manolo! Spare a pornstar’s child of this shame. It is the same logic that society applies to the role of cleaning ladies.

Nobody can, or has the time to, clean their own filth, and yet the one who is shamed is precisely the only person who takes care of it. All my childhood, I kept my mother’s job almost as a dirty secret. Mind you, my mother wasn’t sucking d**k on camera, but cleaning other people’s toilets. Yet, I felt so much shame about her honest job, which put food on our table every meal. Some of it was inflicted by society, some of it was fabricated in the family. I guess it is this interplay between inner and outer forces that made this shame so monumental. It took me hiring a person in flesh and blood to help me with cleaning my own house to overcome my shame.

I still do not go around shouting, “My mom is a cleaning lady”, but I guess that is the right thing to do. I do not see rich kids go around shouting, “My father works in Private Equity” either.

Yesterday I was having dinner with one of my best friends, and I confessed to her that I am going through a phase where I have the bandwidth for only a few people. That, for 95% of people, I no longer have patience. One of these people, whom I can count on the fingers of one hand, is Anna. Anna, who comes now every Tuesday of my life to sort my mess, and by doing so calms down my racing thoughts, allows me to focus on what most matters to me and gives me peace of mind. I can cope without a man in my life, but I can no longer live without Anna. Anna is my cleaning lady. Even writing this, I question, is it ok to say ‘my cleaning lady? Will people think I think she is my possession? Is the term ok, cleaning lady? Hiring a cleaning lady was not neutral ground for me.

A Belgian boomer, last summer, at a wedding, so badly needed to put me in my place just for standing there in front of him and being a puzzle to his narrow societal conceptions. A puzzle he could not solve. Perhaps I was not at an IQ Level appropriate for him. How could I be there in front of him, speaking his language well, understanding his codes, while in a long black Armani gown, looking anything but boring, like the rest of the guests? How could I read him and he could not read me? So he needed to punish me for it by reminding me that we Albanians are the help one hires at home. We are not those who hire help. I wrote all about that episode here.

And although I am not as mad anymore, that episode confirmed that even in my mind, hiring someone to help me clean did not feel psychologically safe at all. It required an identity shift that took years. It was like neutralising an emotional bomb.

A bomb made of different triggers.

1. First, there was the fact that I grew up in a typical Northern Italian town where money is abundant and moral codes are rooted in a sort of Calvinism, minus the emphasis on modesty. You knew if you were poor already in elementary school. I can name you a lot of products that at some point each one of us teenagers had to have in order to be part of the cool group. At some point, it involved a Balenciaga bag that - I just checked- costs around 2000 euros, double what our family of four paid in rent. There was this constant shame of being poor. Poverty was something you not only felt ashamed of but also guilty about. On one side, there were the rich; on the other side, the poor. Pretty simple.

   I found a similar environment at the Private University I attended in Milan. I will never forget being in a circle where my peers were discussing what type of nationality was more docile to have as help at home. DOCILE. DOCILE. DOCILE. For years and years, I could not stop thinking of that word. It would explode in my head. Docile is a word we use for animals we can tame. I could not think of my mother as an animal to be tamed. The best I could do was to think of her as a lion, back when she’d play with my brother and me, pretending to bite us. So fierce and indomitable. I was there with people who thought of the person I loved the most as an animal without consciousness.

   Hiring someone to clean my house required seeing myself on the other side of the court. And to be honest, I could not. It is silly because I am not rich whatsoever, but I would associate hiring help with wealth. Even spending on things that I could do myself with a lot of willpower required a gigantic mindset shift and coaching.

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2. Then the fact that my mother hated her job. She wanted more, and she passed that frustration to me. And that she was abused in those jobs. Sexual harassment, emotional discharge, and forgetting to pay her.

   My mother is the closest impersonification of Miss Rottermeir you will ever meet. She gives very strong “do not approach me” vibes, and yet this did not prevent people from overstepping her very clear boundaries. Although there is much I’d like to share, I want to respect her privacy. It is her life to tell or not tell.

   It did not prevent a lot of ladies from telling her some of their deepest sorrows, on a continuous basis. One of them even bluntly told her, “You must listen to me, you are here to listen to me”. A few times, I opened up about this with a few friends from a very different background than mine, people who have been hiring help for generations, and they did not get it. They did not get why this constitutes abuse for me. They told me, “Oh, but that means she is like part of the family to them”. No, it is not like that to me. These people use her as an emotional discharge of some of their biggest pains; they tell her things they do not confess to anyone. Not because they love her or respect her opinion, but because, in their mind, the cleaning lady’s opinion or judgment does not matter. She is an inanimate entity who has to take everything in and won’t judge them, plus she cannot leave; she cannot distract herself from listening. That is not a family member; that is a victim of your power dynamics abuse.

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   3. There is somehow the assumption that a cleaning lady is someone who is ignorant, someone who has not studied anything. Even my mother would say to my brother and me, “Study hard, so you do not end up like me”. And yet things did not add up cause my mother was the same person who’d finish a book a week. She had big dreams. Her job title prevented people from acknowledging who she had been and what she had been doing before the migration happened to her. I say it happened to her because most of my childhood, it felt like a calamity that had happened to her, more than a choice she had consciously made. It was harder for her than for the Albanian women in our community who had been tending to cows in their small villages back in our country, before moving to Italy. I recall her frustration because she could not truly connect to these women. Except for language, they did not share much. They were happy to be there; for them, it was an upgrade. They had learnt Italian from TV back home, dreaming of Italy. My mother, instead, did not fit this narrative that made Italians like they were the shit an entire people was dreaming of. My mother was always adamant that she had never thought of learning Italian, that she had never thought she’d need it. This annoyed some of the people she’d interact with. She did not fit a vision that shed a grandiose light on them. My mother worked for well-to-do families and less well-to-do ones. Over the years, we collected a cornucopia of human experience that she’d share with us. She had the codes and the vision to understand that people were placing her into a lower threshold, and it hurt. It hurt her, and it hurt us.

   

   So much so that I must confess that for a long time, my mother’s job has been my excuse to avoid love. I’d tell myself, like in a trance, “Who could love the daughter of a cleaning lady?” As a young adult, during the years I was in class with the kids of multinational companies’ CEOs, I even told her, “Nobody will ever love me because of you, because of what you do”. Anger, desperation, guilt and shame all wrapped together. I felt anger because I perceived this as an injustice. I believed I deserved love even more than others. I had worked so much at being lovable, and yet there was that one thing nobody would excuse me for. My mother’s job. Now I realise, love, the way I intend it goes past all these things. The rest is a cheap copy of what love means. I don’t want a copy; I believe I deserve the original. I truly have deep respect for who I am now. But still, back then, I would despair; it would drag me down to a darkness that is hard to put into words, not in a Substack article. It deserves a book that I am not strong enough to write. Shortly after, I’d go from anger to guilt. To imagine my mother working so much as she did those years and thinking of my words while she was doing work she dreaded, I felt like the biggest asshole on earth. And yet, the strength of a mother is in the fact that she forgave me instantly. I was not so fast in forgiving myself, though.

What Anna gave to me is normality. All of this dynamic is no longer so emotionally charged for me. There is so much I want to say about how we got to this normality. Each of those points could be expanded to infinity. But even writing so far this article has required me 4 snacks breaks and three coffees. It was not easy, and I am not ready for more. For now.

Vilma

In the meantime, I recalled that the Gauguin painting I included in that article was one of my high school arts teacher’s favourites.

He was, to our teenage eyes, a charming man. Self-assured, elegant, jacked (Justin taught me this new word, and I am determined to use it). He sounded so sophisticated to our young, inexperienced ears. He’d make some elusive sexual jokes. But apparently, those jokes did not creep us out because they were made by someone hot. Someone we assumed was, for sure, having a lot of sex. To our virgin teenage minds, he had had access to so much life compared to us. Plus, they were always made in connection with famous paintings, which, according to us, added a level of refinement and badassery. I do not think we would have reacted the same way if to utter those words would have been our big-bellied accountancy teacher, who could have made some extra money cosplaying as Santa Claus at the mall.

There you got it, a blatant example of beauty privilege. A very plain and clean example of it, because the holder of this privilege was not only a beautiful human being but also a man.

The thing is, there was always something about that professor that did not convince me. My school was predominantly female. My class was full of beautiful girls. And we all had a crush on him. The last year of school, rumours circulated about him having had an affair with one of us. Back then, many of our not fully developed mental lobes, teenage selves thought, “Why her? She is not even the prettiest”. The thing is, she was pretty but also the most fragile of us all; she needed that praise and attention. He decided to use his beauty privilege, the power of beauty, on a woman who had no clue of hers. Not yet, at least. She came from a broken family, from which she was always somehow trying to escape. She was never home, always out. The youngest of a lot of siblings, and a considerable age gap from all of them. We will never know if rumours were truthful.

I know from distant voices that after we left high school, she was a go-go girl for a while in nightclubs in Veneto. A place she had landed in because of a brief relationship. Then I lost touch with her story for a while. But, a few months ago, out of the blue, she sent me a picture of us together at a club back in high school. I genuinely smiled seeing that picture. I look extremely serious, and she looks so happy. I feel tenderness for both her younger version and mine. We were both pretending to be something we were not.

I have to admit, I was nasty to her back then. I even wrote to her at some point to apologise, some 10 years later. I felt guilty. She was this airheaded girl, and I was this “wiser than her years, intellectual, moralistic” type instead. She was drinking way more than she wanted or liked, and I was reading way more than I would have pleased living instead. I felt we both belonged to a club that she was dishonouring. She was ruining our collective female reputation. I regret that. She was just being a girl in a world that often weaponises our weaknesses. I regret that nobody told me to stop being so pretentiously serious and responsible. Why did nobody bother telling us?

“Please, G., allow yourself to be sad. Please, Vilma, allow yourself to be silly”

She was dealing with a phase in girlhood where you realise you can easily get attention, and you can easily mistake that for power.

Ten years later, I question if even the power that everyone recognises in us women, beauty, is truly power. I question the nature of that power itself. They call it “beauty privilege”, but I wonder if it is indeed a privilege if it can easily turn into danger for us women. Again, for women, beauty is far from being a neutral experience, a win-win situation as it can be for a man.

Do we assume a handsome man must be stupid? Do we assume he must have slept his way up? Do we immediately think his life must have been easy if he were good-looking? Does that beauty bring him unwarranted attention and fear for his safety? Does his beauty alienate him from his male peers?

As I drew these comparisons, I thought of my own experience with other women. I have often wondered why, as a good-looking woman, I have never experienced competition with other women. I was not on either end of the competition. Even though I was not jealous of the classmate I just described, I was mad at how I felt she was “underselling” the experience of being a woman. But competition among women is real. It is the closest example to a war between the poor I have ever witnessed. I have seen other women being victims of it. But why has it never happened to me, I wondered? Was it because I was not beautiful enough? Was it because men did not like me? I came up with a possible answer for myself in the first month of the gym this year.

After a very long time, I was again among other half-naked bodies. In the gym's changing rooms, I realised how disconnected I have been from my physical dimension, even more so than when gasping for air while exercising. It was there among so many naked bodies of other strangers, I realised I had not been confronted with my physicality in a very long time. I did not even recall being so prude. But it brought me back to high school years again.

Back to the beehive structure of the female changing rooms after physical education class. How much we examined and judged our bodies and those of other girls. I still recall how much we all admired a certain Carolina S. She was so beautiful, so conscious of her perfection already at 14. Her parents were separating, and there were rumours of affairs her father was having with someone much younger. That year, she had to repeat a year and change schools. A lot was going on in her life. But I distinctly remember our teenage selves believing she could not be hurting. She was too beautiful to suffer; we believed she was invincible.

Who needs a united family when you are beautiful? Right? It is crazy, but we seemed to think that back then. This is the power we instinctively ascribed to beauty in the phase when we were amorphous, no longer girls, not yet women.

I recall being star-struck when she showed us her bedazzled thong. None of us was using such sexy underwear at 14. But she was. We felt beauty was not happening to her; she was managing her beauty. Then there was us, constantly poking at our own flaws, sometimes voicing our insecurities, so we could be consoled by our friends, “no worries, I have those too”, “true, I have nice breasts, but look at my legs, look how disproportionate”. Let us double down on our insecurities so we can bond and not fear each other. Let us rise together through our perceived flaws.

In these memories, I found my reply. And it was confirmed by my present interactions with other women. I am at an inflexion point. I am changing my entire wardrobe. I am going to the gym. I am eating better. I am actively working on how I communicate and how I relate to others. I have always focused on relationships, but the focus was always on the other. I even changed therapists a couple of years ago. It was a coincidence, but I went from a beautiful woman to a beautiful man as a therapist. It is an interesting experience. I talk to him about safety.

He talks very little. Very, very, very little. But I have never met someone able to leave me speechless, or to say something that my neurotic mind has not considered before. And he does both. So he told me one day, “Do you ever feel you appease everyone? Are you afraid of being powerful?”

I realised why my beauty has never been an obstacle to relationships with other women. Not only did I never lead with it, but I never exercised it. I had no courage to exercise beauty, nor the power that comes with it.

But this leaves me wondering, how many of the relationships between women are truly empowering? We say men compete, that men are focused on resources. But until now, men were seen as a resource for us women. They were oftentimes a way to access a life we were not allowed or able to build for ourselves. This is changing.

I wonder if finally women will create relationships that are not based on staying safely grounded on common fears and insecurities. I already have it in me to see a girl with a nice ass in a bedazzled thong and say to her, “Wow, you have an amazing booty. Please drop your exercise routine”. What I do not have in me, yet, is to be seen walking around in my 100% Cotton white thong and be told the same by another woman. I would immediately start replying, “Oh no, come on, it is nothing. Look at my wobbly inner thighs.” I still bond with other women through self-deprecation. I elevate other women, but I still struggle to elevate myself. That is why perhaps they do not fear me as competition, but a lot of them do not understand me either. I am someone who could play certain cards, and I refuse to. Does this make me stupid or arrogant? Perhaps they wonder that. I certainly do wonder that myself.

Refer a friend

Nesting, Roisín O’ Donnell

I picked it up at the Edinburgh airport, where I felt awkwardly at home and started drifting, as per usual, in my never-ending reflections on belonging and home. So, it is safe to say I chose the book because of the title. Nesting. I, who feel I have been snatched from my nest when I was a child.

This is a gut-wrenching book, but it also strangely provides a great deal of hope.

It is the story of a young mother who is in an abusive relationship. It does a great job in describing abusive relationships. How the abuser works first to gain the trust of a woman and slowly works to undermine it, to isolate her, to gaslight her. How often do they seem perfect, law-abiding members of society? The perfect father and husband.

It also perfectly describes the opposite process: freeing yourself from such a relationship. How the psychological layer and structural layer are often reinforcing leashes. The book is set in an increasingly expensive Dublin, pushing its citizens to the outskirts, with endless queues to social services offices that always seem to be at low capacity.

8/10

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

First of all, if this title triggers you because you struggle to understand who the author is and what the title is, “Same!”

This is the most serendipitous book of the three. I was at dinner with new acquaintances, and I exhorted, saying that men seldom read books by female authors, while we women read a lot of male authors. I still feel I have a point with that theory, with no data to back it. But I was proved wrong at that same dinner when my new friend gifted me precisely this book. And he happens to be a man. He introduced me to an author whose mastery I did not believe could be possible. The more I kept reading and the more I kept telling myself, “How can someone write so damn well?” I was loving this book, the characters, the poetry in it and the mastery of the writing all at the same time.

How to describe this book? It is difficult to. It is a sort of collection of stories turned into a novel. I cannot stand short stories because they leave me dissatisfied, but this book managed to fool me. I felt like back when, as a child, parents would give you food that looked yummy, and instead it was made of broccoli. It masterfully threads together the very anonymous lives of people living in the same small US village. We find out as the book goes forward that a lot of grandiose things happen within those people, to those lives that are not so much in motion anyway.

It describes with such poetry the emotional turmoil of what we call small lives. No life is small.

11/10

Poor, Katriona O’ Sullivan

I found this through a recommendation from one of the most caviar-gouache journalists Italy has ever produced. I find her annoying as hell, but I am happy my determination to always mix my sources brought me to this book.

I think I have cried rivers over this book. And yet I have also felt good. It has given me hope; it has pacified something within me. This is the memoir of Katriona, now a PhD from Trinity College Dublin and an award-winning lecturer who survived a childhood raised by two heroin addicts.

Honest to a fault, there is no room for pity. Katriona does not need to be understood; she is not asking for permission to create and recall her story. This is a book full of dignity, poetry and accusation. The title is a provocation; she is not sugar coating it. She was poor, she was ashamed of it, she survived it.

This book should be the subject of debates in schools, universities, companies and public institutions. It makes you uncomfortable, it makes you tender, it makes you angry.

Gazillions of points/ 10

So small poll for men readers only:

And if yes, WHO?

I am testing you!

Leave a comment

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It finally hit me that I am to her something much bigger than myself. When I had to tell her I am a mess, that I could not call her back because I was crying in bed all past weekend, that I am still recovering from some darkness she knows about, that I have not found yet the balance I am seeking in certain things, when I do not reciprocate the gifts she sends me…I am feeding her need to save me.

She desperately needs me to be someone she can save. I need to stay the messy, entirely helpless and lost person she used to know. For her to find any meaning in me, in our relationship.

Because she has a sister in her life who is beyond saving. A sister who refuses contact with her, who is more or less my age and has given up on employment because she is chronically depressed. She lives with little means, together with a partner who tries to keep the boat afloat.

To my friend, I am not me. I am someone else in a different shape.

I was investigating within myself, why am I exaggerating how I am handling my dire situation in order to not to be in touch with her? Why am I rejecting this closeness?

I am not proud of my behaviour, do not get me wrong. But I have also patiently learnt not to be always on a self-imposed and self-made altar of righteousness that always ends up killing me or making me a joke. I am the only one not laughing in the end.

And I found it. I was getting tired of cosplaying someone else in her life.

In fact, contrary to her sister, I have not given up; although God knows how many times I wanted to. I am also learning to come to terms with how much appetite I have for more. What made me depressed was the hunger I felt. What made me so tired was the gargantuan mission I was going through, transforming my hunger into appetite. All my life, I heard that if I wasn’t fast enough, I’d be starving. Somehow, I was such a snob, without affording to be one. I always starved out of arrogance or decorum. But now I was accepting and assuming my appetite for life, then getting the right cutlery, then learning to eat. And deciding who the right people are to invite to supper? Will they help me enjoy it, or will they give me gastritis too?

The only thing I envy from rich kids is that while we are both learning to live, they have less to unlearn. They have one process, I have two to master at the same time. They never had hunger. There is something almost shameful about being so hungry in life. You can’t even confess it to yourself.

But fuck it! I love eating this life. Recoiling with little somewhere in the middle of nowhere, cannot be me. I was born there, and it often called me back like a Mermaid was luring Ulysses. “Come on, Vilma, come back, you tried this silly thing of being more, asking for more for a while, and it really did not work. Did it?”

I almost feel like I am confessing something terrible. But I want more, I have a gigantic ambition. Why does it feel like I just said out loud that I have an impressive dick?

So I cannot be the sister she so desperately needs to save. People can only save themselves. I have the deepest sympathy for her. I have been here so many times with other people in my life. I wanted to change their circumstances so bad, I believed in fact my life would be better if they felt better. What an impossible task. And one day, as soon as I am stronger, I promise to call her, I promise to do what I am good at: difficult conversations. I have been having them all my life. I never backed off.

So yes, I am telling myself that perhaps I haven’t been a coward. That perhaps I was, for once, wise enough not to ingurgitate the self-abandonment that would have come from being in touch with her at a moment when I needed to gather my forces to chew life properly, at the right cadence to digest it.

It is rare to meet in life a person who is not an archetype. Who is not a pattern that we repeat and that we hope we won’t repeat. Most of the people we encounter are unfinished lessons in a different body. Change a few features but not the core of them. Last weekend, I spent around 48 hours only eating and talking, eating and talking with my Godmother, who came to visit me. At a restaurant we went to on Saturday evening, we noticed people at the tables around us would not utter a word to each other. Nothing. An almost scary silence. And while my Godmother was joking about this, I was looking at her and thinking, “You are so new to me, Chia. You are no unfinished business from the past to me. You are you; you resemble nobody else. You are our entirely own language and territory. While I have brought to this friendship past fears, you gave to these fears new responses, new actions, and you killed them. You are a relationship not rooted in what scared me the most: abandonment. I was so abandoned, and it scared me so much that I never abandoned people who would have deserved abandonment. They themselves were proof of abandoning myself. You do not need me helpless, you gave me strength.” But I was eating chicken wings drenched in honey glaze sauce. I always keep it real, but I am trying not to be so pathetic anymore.

I have not been writing for a while. Well in fact, it is not true. I have just about 10 articles that are in draft version. And I am so ready to publish all of them. I am just flooded with deadlines at the moment. But tonight I felt my periods coming. I ate half a jar of strawberry yogurt, I cannot sleep and I missed writing so bad.

Now we have set ourselves a strangely ambitious task. To define beauty. Two women in their early thirties. Me, someone who has never made peace with it. Julie, someone who turned it into her work, her craft, her language.

She sent me her article a few days ago. I did not open it. I want to write this without being influenced, and then see where we agree, where we diverge, and what two different lives make of the same word. You can start either from hers or mine, or viceversa.

Julie on Beauty

Who am I?

My name is Julie Berghmans, image consultant, professional makeup artist and hairstylist, founder of the concept Déjà Belle. Since 2019, I have been guiding women toward a beauty that truly reflects who they are, combining technical expertise, kindness and humor. My approach aims to reveal what is already there, without transforming, without imposing, but with sincere attention to each personality and each story.

Through my tailored services, my self makeup workshops and my personalized guidance, I help each woman become aware of her unique beauty and make conscious beauty choices, for herself, not because of social pressure.

Below, I share with you a few reflections on conscious beauty, our priorities in life and the freedom to do whatever we want with our image.

Choosing what we do with our time

Let us talk about makeup, hair, clothing and beauty in general, and especially about the time we choose to spend taking care of our appearance, whether daily or depending on the day.

I believe the greatest freedom we have as women is realizing that we can decide what we want to do with that time.

To consciously choose: “Is this important to me or not?”

The freedom to be beautiful or not

I have clients who have told me they could never step out to buy bread without wearing makeup, never go to work or to the gym without getting ready.

Some feel the urge to buy the latest trendy sports outfit for their yoga class or run, while others are content with a simple tracksuit they reuse every time.

The question is not who is right or who does it better.

In my opinion, what truly matters in order to make peace with beauty and with one’s image is to stop doing it out of resignation.

To stop telling yourself:

“I absolutely have to put on makeup because I look awful.”

Or conversely, some of my clients have told me:

“I would really love to dress up and wear a beautiful dress to an afterwork event, but I am afraid of shocking my colleagues. They will say, who does she think she is?”

Blending into the background or daring to be yourself

I have had several clients who are young mothers, and they tell me that when they drop their child off at school, they run into the other mothers, sometimes arriving half in pajamas, hair tied in a simple bun.

And on some days, they would actually love to do a nice blow dry or show up in a lovely outfit with a beautiful lipstick, but they do not want to stand out or seem different.

And above all, they want to make friends.

Bonding through self deprecation

Let us talk about that too.

At least in Belgium, it seems easier to make friends by putting yourself down than by giving yourself compliments.

It often happens in the locker room of a gym. A woman looks at her reflection in the mirror and sighs: “Have you seen my stomach? It is horrible.” Another woman next to her tilts her head and replies with a slightly nervous laugh: “Oh, I have rolls too!”

Then, like an unintentional competition, they continue: “And my wrinkles, look how they are settling in…” “No, but my acne is way worse, look at this pimple here!”

In those few minutes, they laugh, compare themselves, half reassure each other, and through that small exchange of insecurities, they begin to create a bond, strange but real.

Try this. Sign up for a new activity, for example a gym, and you will see that even in terms of performance, it is the same.

During the class, women look for other women who struggle with the exercises. They search for pain in their eyes. They look for the ones who will stop the repetitions first, the ones who can only do eight squats instead of ten because their legs hurt too much.

So they can exchange a complicit glance and laugh together:

“It is hard, is it not?”

And then they will look at the girl doing all ten squats with extra weights and roll their eyes. She is exaggerating.

After observing these dynamics in sports, it is the same when it comes to self image. True self confidence and self improvement also mean being able to look at women who are more beautiful or more accomplished than we are as examples who lift us up. And to tell ourselves: “Come on, I can do two more squats too. If she can do it, why not me? I will train and I will get there.”

Beauty as a priority or not

When it comes to beauty, it is the same. Maybe that woman has more beautiful hair than I do because she takes care of it. She does very expensive treatments several times a week. She woke up 30 minutes earlier this morning to do a blow dry. Maybe, for her, having beautiful hair is an ultimate priority in her life.

But ask yourself:

Is my beauty, my makeup or my hair an absolute priority for me today?

In my value system, at the top of the pyramid of what is important in my life, is that what comes first?

No?

Is it your career, for example?

Or your children’s well being?

Your family?

Having a beautiful, well decorated and clean home?

Let go of the pressure or fully commit to it

Then give yourself a break. That is not where your attention needs to go. Continue focusing on what matters most to you and leave the mirrors aside for a while.

And if, on the contrary, you feel the need to improve your physical appearance, then truly dedicate time to it and place your attention there. Get moving.

Take care of your hair, your face, your body.

Learning the codes without being trapped by them

And if you need help with the colors of clothes and accessories to wear, the new hair color you could try, or the makeup techniques that will make your eyes look bigger, your lips fuller or visually reduce your wrinkles, come take a self makeup course at Déjà Belle and learn how to enhance your face while letting go of insecurities and discovering your strengths, because believe me, we all have them.

My goal is to teach women all the professional tricks so they can highlight themselves according to their color palette and body shape, but also to remind them that it is necessary to take a step back from all of this depending on the phase of life they are in.

Sometimes our priorities lie elsewhere, and if you wear makeup twice a year, on New Year’s Day and on your birthday, that is perfectly fine. Do what feels right to you.

Showing your true face

Accept your natural face the rest of the year, and feel free to do whatever you want with your uncovered face.

Believe me, nothing serious will happen in your life if you “show your true face to the world.”

On the contrary, you will probably attract, on certain occasions, less superficial people who also feel free to remain natural and live their lives as they wish, without being enslaved by the time their beauty routine demands.

Enjoy life, your life.

You are already beautiful just as you are.

Vilma on Beauty

While searching for a picture to go with the article I thought of Gauguin’s painting “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”. If I could, I’d add to this list of questions, “Are we beautiful enough to be happy?” Because how beautiful we see ourselves, how beautiful others see us, can add to our level of happiness. Or safety. Can we be happy if we do not feel safe?

Nothing is neutral in a woman’s life. Not even beauty.

Beauty is power. We can discuss whether it is just or not, but it is an ancestral reality. And now that I am older and wiser I try to digest what was taught to me about my own beauty. To cut the story long short, in my household I was not allowed to exercise the power of beauty. Chatting with some of the most magnificent creatures I know who happen to be some Albanian mermaid looking girls, they all confirm to me that they too had short hair and looked like boys until at least elementary school.

And when puberty hit I did not have to fight much with pimples, weight obssession or acne. I was truly beautiful, and if the fact I am saying it so openly makes you think “ewww she is so arrogant”, I invite you to explore those feelings, examine them. But then is when my battle to exercise my beauty started. My father would not allow me to pluck my eyebrows, to wear make up, to dress how I wanted. I was a vain creature since birth, that felt like suppression of my truest nature.

I never rebelled as much as to cause a scandal or be able to truly do what I wanted with my beauty. I was the first born child of an immigrant Albanian family. I wore make up from time to time in secret, but then I told myself “I don’t like make up much anyway on me”. I flirted with guys but remained a virgin until 21, I told myself “guys don’t find me attractive anyway”. I went into modeling but always made sure to add “it is to make some extra money for my studies, I study you know? I am smart.”. As if being smart and beautiful were mutually exclusive. I was just trying to come to peace with the fact I was not using all the tools God gave me.

Beauty is not neutral if you are a woman. And I guess my parents knew the power beauty has. One needs to know how to exercise it though, and I am just a tiny bit angry they did not trust me to learn how to master this power. In my family, beauty was seen as vain, as a distraction, as not serious. But beauty is damn serious, it inspires action, it is a vital force, it is transformational. It was frankly a capital I was not taught to use, and I did not invest in it.

Recently, I was talking to Veronica, one of the most beautiful friends I have and she mentioned how she always keeps aloof, with most people. She does it on purpose. And now that I am wiser and older, I know I have in front of me a woman who has learnt how to master her own beauty. To be an ugly woman in this society is very hard, to be a beautiful woman unaware of her beauty is life threatening. When you are ugly less is expected of you, mastery can cover up that. But if you are beautiful without the ability to put boundaries, to discern the intentions of those who approach you is putting yourself in danger.

How would I know? I am beautiful and I wasn’t aware until very late.

That beauty is power is an unspoken truth. Some men hate the power you have on them. Some women hate you for the power you have on men too. It is difficult to be beautiful, if you have no mental strength, if you want so badly to be liked, to be accepted, to belong. Along the way, I met some older women, what I recognize as alternative mother figures I picked up along the way, that prompted me to take more care of my beauty, to tend to it, to dress better, to use this power in essence. I never did. Was it fear? Was it a form of arrogance? I frankly would sometimes go around dressed like a junkie with a passion for heroin. I did not care.

Last year, I started therapy again. My last therapist was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Sometimes I’d cry and I’d joke with her “what would you know Barbara? You are an enchanting creature not a human like the rest of us”. With her I solved my father in my mind and heart. With my new therapist who looks like Kim Rossi Stuart and a mystic at the same time, I have to figure out my mother, a more complicated figure. With him I cannot much escape or be a jester. Yesterday he told me “Lei pensa che essendo bella rischi molto di più vero?”

“Do you think that, given your beauty, you’re at greater risk?”

I realise in retrospect I went to Julie 4 years ago, because I was depressed for a long time, because I felt powerless, because no amount of external validation was enough for me, because I was truly not taking care of myself. Julie I let you know that it took me 4 years to develop a new habit but now I never leave the house without mascara on.

I always have my eyes wide open on the world, I want and feel safe enough for people to notice that I notice a lot too. Thank you Julie! Next step might be lipstick.

I have eczema.

I used to have it everywhere. On my eyelids, my ears, my legs, my head. Everywhere. It would scratch, it would hurt. Depending on the days, the wounds would either ooze pus or develop scabs.

My mother brought me to every good doctor she could hear of in Albania. Once we went to see a doctor who was famous because he had practised for years in Russia. That and the fact that he was expensive gave him a certain air of prestige. We consulted him, only for him to tell my mother that I needed salt water and sun and to avoid humidity.

He added that “eczema” was the illness of the emotional ones. And that we could not do much to get rid of it. It would do its course, pretty much.

My mother, with the fierceness of a young mother, unbashed, was already planning to consult another doctor in North Macedonia. Our first trip abroad would have been for this reason. And that is when I witnessed the power battle of the century, my mother against my paternal grandmother. My paternal grandmother belonged to that generation of women in Albania who had no power all their lives, until they became mother in laws. Their law abuse. That kind of woman who was abused all her life in subtle or more blatant ways for being a woman. And for that, has turned into the most misogynistic creature on earth. Bossing around all their daughters-in-law. So logically she made a huge drama and convinced my father and my mother to let her bring me to a healer, “since those doctors did not work out anything.”

My mother, tired, gave in. That is how I found myself, aged 5, walking up a hill in central Albania, to be “visited” by an old blind lady who was a healer. Ahead of me was my grandmother, the most energetic woman I have ever met. Her fuel, hate and revenge. Behind me, my mother was blurting in a soft voice things against herself, “I have a degree, I have 16 years of studies behind me, and I am bringing my daughter to a healer”. Shaking her head in exasperation. All I remember of that healer is that she was all dressed in black, and had these watery eyes and a kind smile. At some point, she got out a knife, and she kept rolling it around on a plate covered in salt, murmuring words we couldn’t understand. Needless to say, my eczema was here to stay.

As a child, I kept thinking of what the doctor had said, “the illness of the emotional ones”. I did my math and figured out that if I manage to get rid of emotions, I would go to the root of the problem.

The year we finally got our passports for expatriation to Italy, my mother was advised by a cousin of a cousin of another cousin to buy a cream that helped a child she knew. My mother ran to the pharmacy. And that is how my longest relationship with a product started. The Betnovate cream tub. Over the years, the colour of the stripe has changed, and the format too. But it remains the single product that has ever worked for me. At some point, we found out it was to be bought with a prescription in Europe, and that doctors considered it too strong for me in Italy. It could cause asthma.

Well, what is sure is that I was vain since the day I was born, and I preferred some issues breathing to being constantly asked if I had been bitten by mosquitoes and seeing bewildered looks at my poor legs and arms. In Albania, people are very blunt. The concept of “body shaming is not there”. You will have your fat aunt telling you you put on weight. We are not high on the self-awareness department nor on discretion. So, I’d spend some summers with 38 degrees daily, in Albania, with leggings on.

My mother instilled in me the idea that I had to not give a single flying fuck and that I should spend a lot of time in the sea. Salt water would help my wounds, she recalled. That helped. For all the flaws I ascribe to the education my mother imparted on me, I am grateful to her every day for how much confidence she gave me in my body and my beauty as a woman. It might not be true, but to this day, if a man does not like my body, my first thought is that he is gay, and I love myself naked. Nobody can take that away from me. Years ago, precisely 10 kilos ago, an ex told me I was chubby and limp, and my immediate reaction was “I hope he can at some point accept his homosexuality”. But for years, as a child and young teen, my eczema was my shame, something to hide. My mother battled my shame with the “if someone judges you for an illness, they are ill in their hearts” mantra for years. And it worked.

Since then, since Spring 2001, one of my uncles or cousins has at some point run to a pharmacy in Albania to buy me a supply of the Betnovate cream. And then, he rushed to find someone who would be travelling to Italy to bring it to me in time. Someone at some point inconvenienced himself to bring me solace. That was community, perhaps the wealth of the poor. I felt its warmth while rubbing the cream on my wounds. Those men of my family, with their hardworking hands, full of calluses, bringing me this cream that would calm my pain down. That is “masculinity” to me; it is ingrained in my brain. Service.

But one year, all this slowly built up confidence was truly put to the test. I developed some huge, huge, huge scabs all over my tummy. It was like an explosion; I could not suppress it with the cream anymore. They looked like islands of scabs, and during the night, I’d scratch uncontrollably and end up with my PJ shirt attached to the pus and blood underneath. Often ruining some of my favourite PJs, the ones I got as presents for Christmas from the rich ladies my mom worked for.

Taking off my shirt was a super painful experience. One day, my physical education teacher found me trying to undress my t-shirt after class at the gym. I was getting late, and she needed to close the room. I will never forget the compassion in her face. 15 years later, I still remember her name and last name. She was one of those Sicilian teachers who’d come up North for a few years in the hope of being relocated back home. She stayed only a year with us. She was like a walking ray of sunshine. Long blond curly hair, bluest eyes and the enthusiasm of a human spring. Viviana, from that day, came to the end of each class with a natural ingredient ointment she would put on my scars and would slowly help me get the t-shirt off without ripping too much skin away. It was something that would have disgusted many, and yet she did that until the end of the year.

I will never forget what it meant to me. She gave me help without wanting to be thanked too much for it. She gave me help in silence. She would put the ointment on my scars and say nice, encouraging words to me. “Gioia mia, ahì ahì gioia mia”. Viviana loved me like you would love an ugly child. It left a mark on me. Those were tough years; my mother or father would experience humiliation daily and bring the heaviness of it back home. They developed the idea that the world was an ugly place, full of people ready to exploit you or fuck you over. And they liked to share it with my brother and me as a warning. Instinctively, I did not share their view, but I needed proof. Viviana gave me a proof. That humans can love ugly kids. That humans can be good to others. I have been collecting proofs of human dirt all along the way, but there has always been some other proof that wiped it out with the strength of a tsunami. A tsunami of goodness.

When Viviana left, at some point the next year, we went on a school trip to the seaside. Although my scars were getting better, I was annoyed. I felt alone with my shame, no longer able to share it with her. We were in Portofino, and now I had to swim and reveal my tummy full of bloody scabs to my peers. I look at the pictures, and I am always posing in a way that does not show my tummy. I found only one where showing my belly inevitably, I was getting out of the water.

(I suspect I gave it this filter back then, so one could camouflage the bloodied colour they had)

Now, a decade and more later, my eczema has almost disappeared. I seldom use my Bethnovate cream, although I always have at least one reserve tub of it. I haven’t stopped being emotional; I have not managed to suppress my emotions. In fact, I let it all out, more and more asI free myself from all the things I could not say.

But I have collected along the way people who were able to love a soul, and that has made all the difference for me. That is, I suspect, the medicine that dried the scars.

Vilma Djala

Judging from the type of comments I have started to receive on some of my pictures since I turned 30, I am inclined to believe that there’s a pedophile sitting silent within a lot of men. There’s something predatory and sick about it.

My Albanian mother never let me go to a sleepover at other people’s houses when I was a child. I used to think she was dramatic, she was imposing, she was autocratic…Turns out she probably knew men’s dirt better. Because I see the point now. I, now, at 31 years old, have to defend myself from men who think women at 30 suddenly die, they become zombies, and they can jokingly bully.

Now that the same women they drooled over, probably for years, are 30 and therefore close to their deathbed of desirability, men apparently feel the sudden urge to take revenge for all the attention they did not receive when they were ugly teens. The thing is, some of these men are just as ugly now as adults. The only leverage they have is thousand years old fears implanted in women’s bones, sadly, with the help of their own mothers. Fear that they're valuable only as much as they are desirable, fuckable, and they give birth to a man’s child.

Of course, whatever I am about to write does not apply to decent men and to love, as love has nothing to do with power and its plays. In the quiet of my room, I pray to God that He make me experience love. Contrary to popular believe I do not think “love happens to everyone at least once”. Love is not for the weak; power plays are for the weak. Sadly, that’s the best 99% can come up with. Here we are speaking of the murky and low vibration domains that seem, unfortunately, to be predominant in women-male interactions.

A few weeks ago, I unfriended a guy from Facebook. He is, or thought he is, what I consider a decent bloke. I liked his analysis on a lot of topics, never banal, always thoughtful and nuanced, and it helped we seemed to share the same political values. Which, to be honest, are not shared by many. Essentially, they revolve around the value of freedom.

Sure, whenever I shared something regarding love and relationships, or there would be interesting debates with other friends, he’d share how hard it was to connect to women nowadays. I tend to agree with that, as relationships are complicated for everyone today. And I always thought this is a man who went through a difficult divorce, probably with a difficult woman; let’s be lenient with his wounds. Now I am starting to think being lenient to certain men is a disservice to society. In my relationship to men, I am in my Mao Zedong era, which I wish had started even sooner. So this article is to punish one and educate a hundred.

3 weeks ago, he suddenly thought that it was a smart idea to comment on the picture below, taken at the wedding of some dear friends last December, with “date”? He ruined an almost perfect and immaculate list of comments full of stickers and emojis from all my boomer Albanian aunties. Now, it is not the first time a male specimen asks me when a good picture of me was taken since I turned 30, so I am starting to see a pattern. It looks like men start thinking they have to check on your expiry date as if you were food. I believe this type of man should never be allowed to eat a woman out, or decent food in general.

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Then I negotiate with myself, and it boils down to “Ok, I am going, but not for the entire thing, one week tops”. And it is precisely then, when I start to feel confident that 1 week is the right thing to do, 1 week is good, 1 week is “daughter who loves them to bits but has a life”, it is then that I always find myself dragging a big bag to the gate for Milan. Somehow, as if I had no will whatsoever.

A few hours later, I am waving at my father, who has called as soon as I landed to tell me, “You find me at the same place, ok? The one at the exit close to the end of the hotel”. I know where the damn spot is by now, because he repeats this phone call whenever I go back home, and he picks me up. It has been 7 years now, and we repeat this scene. My father is getting older; perhaps he needs a routine just like children. I wonder if perhaps he is not scared of me getting lost as much as he is scared of not being found. Are we playing hide and seek, Dad?. Then I think of the eventuality of a day when he won’t come to pick me up, he will no longer be here, and I try to cool off my nerves. This is the terrible thing about parents: their mortality dilutes the annoyance you’d rightfully like to show.

And while I change radio channels at an ungodly speed, I always ask myself what I am seeking whenever I am back here and why I moved km away, why did I put a language barrier? Perhaps to be finally attuned to myself? I needed silence, and there was none when I needed it back then, and there was too much silence instead when I craved for another voice to calm me down, when this room was my reign. I moved away to find a form of harmony between what they wanted and what I wanted for myself.

Study the past to understand the present, they say. And that’s what my teenage room is. It is a museum. The luckiest people have a museum that contains a blend of historical eras. The ones who found that living abroad was the only way to build their personhood, find only a room that reminds them how their past here was a long, unchanged series of similar days. The dullness of it. It was a series of nights and days fantasising about a life elsewhere.

This room asks now: Did you find the answers to those questions that pushed you so far away?

Nothing changes in your teenage room. Posters, some pictures stuck on the edges of a mirror, the books you liked and the ones you never returned to a friend, stuffed toys, old boxes with letters, and CDs. The permanence of it is always ready to measure you up.

Were your parents the tyrannical leaders who waged war on you? Or you waged war on the parents you needed, and they could not be? Are you ready to make peace with them, now that they are too old to fight? Are you ready to grant forgiveness they may never ask? Were they really the dictators you made them to be, or was it a battle against yourself? Were those friends who stayed wiser than you or just content with less? Is it wiser to be content with less? Or was their “less” something you had to earn? Like belonging and a group of people who’d finally make you feel understood?

That room asks so many questions, and if you are lucky, you can finally reply to it: “I went far enough to know, everywhere I go, I am home. I am the parent I deserved. I am the city that could make me grow”. That’s what happened to me. Now, my teenage room is a place where I eat way more than I should, where my Balkan father comes with freshly cut fruits, not the form of apology I craved, but the only one he can muster. It is a place where I read books without placing a timer. It is a place where I just am. After all these years and efforts, I managed to make this history museum of a room into a contemporary arts one. Contemporary art, for the most part, sucks, but it does not carry as much baggage from the past. It is a win.

Some of us earn our present. Some of us walk miles before our teenage room stops being a museum of sadness.

Vilma Djala

This Holiday season, I wrote nothing. For this reason, I have many new topics and ideas that came to me while eating and digesting and that I want to write about once I return home tonight. For now, you can enjoy this article I wrote weeks ago.

Ah, btw, January itself feels like an endless year.

The other day, I was at a new hairdresser's salon. Since last year, when I got the worst haircut in the history of bad haircuts, I have had a bit of trust issues with hairdressers. So I felt I had to document on social media that everything was going according to plan and I wasn’t being screwed over. I wasn’t being turned again into a maverick, between nun and French head of the workers’ Union.

Then I received a message from an acquaintance who not only told me that she had actually liked the “haircut of misery” but also dropped the bomb news that she had become a mom in a month. She sent me a picture of this little beautiful head with a few hairs like a Kiwi, her beautiful daughter.

My heart melted, as it always does, when I know a baby has come into this world. It moves me a lot. But it also exploded with skyrocketing respect for this girl whom I have been following for years and grew to think of as a friend. In the end, social media is a window into our worlds. Depending on how realistic the window opening view people are giving, we can grow a certain affection for them. It is her ability to keep something so intimate private that amazed me. Not a single photo of her belly in 9 months, and not a single photo of the baby either.

I define it as the ultimate sophistication. One of my “aunts”, an ex-Diplomat, told me that a few people manage to hide in saying everything. But that is rare and so much more difficult. I think she was just trying to comfort me. I was telling her how difficult it was for me to cope with being so instinctive and always wearing my heart on my sleeve. I often had shame and withdrawal episodes right after oversharing in an attempt to connect with someone who had the emotional capacity of a lobster.

My respect for her ability to keep this privacy did not stem only from an admiration for something I lack. It was something else as well. Social media has accentuated our idea that life is all about great events. And now we are going through a phase of withdrawal where we are asked to do also the opposite, to “romanticise the small things”. But romanticising “small things” is a requirement for performance as well. It is another layer of pressure. And we can also debate whether the small things are small at all. For example, my version of small things that bring me joy are flower bouquets. That would be 20 euros per week, 80 euros per month.

Culture also prepares us only for the big events: marriages, engagements, breakups, births, deaths, graduations, new jobs and so on. It is no wonder we are not prepared for all those times when nothing happens. And most of life is nothing happening. Life is more about the liminal spaces, which feel eternal. In between, there is boredom, apprehension, and restlessness. We put all our efforts into making “life” happen. And by “life” we often mean “big events”. We end up putting so much effort into making those big events happen that it becomes taboo for many to confess that those big events perhaps were not the “shit” that would make us happy either. So many perpetuate a lie.

I am convinced that a lot of people around me have made some life choices haphazardly, just to get the seal of approval and the attention from society that comes from making those “life events” happen. And making them happen in the time society tells you is right, if possible, too. Nobody teaches us how to grapple with the anxiety that comes from life not happening, from it being dull, from not having much to report. Nobody prepares us to face the fact that perhaps some of those big life events won’t happen to us either.

Try to say to people around you with a lot of calmness, “I am not sure I will ever marry” or “I am not sure I will ever have kids”, and you will see for yourself how people will rush to tranquillise you by saying “don’t say that” or “you never know”. They will have more anxiety than you. You whispering those phrases will give them panic.

And social media hasn’t helped at all in making it obvious that sometimes a normal life is all that there is. And it is still fantastic just for being life in itself.

Vilma Djala

When I hear people saying that boys are easier to raise, I flinch. In fact, I do not think boys are easier to raise; I think we often ignore the emotional world of our boys. Yes. God didn’t hand emotions out by gender, and it’s on parents to make sure their kids’ inner worlds are nurtured, not neglected. It’s the kids’ emotional world that often will dictate the material reality they will attain in adult life, and not the other way around. If you think this is too woo-woo, I want to remind you that there is something called psychosomatic medicine. Our emotional world impacts our health so much.

I have heard many times some female friends saying, “Oh, I hope I will have a boy, boys are simpler, you just need to tire them out physically by playing with them, and that’s it. Girls, instead, oh God, they are so irrational and sensitive”. I am always baffled when I hear such claims because they sound like they are talking about pets and not children. And, because that kind of claim is the result of internalised misogyny.

Girls are often seen as more “difficult” because once they hit puberty, the burden shifts on them: they’re the ones expected to manage contraception, carry the risks of an unwanted pregnancy, and face most of the consequences of sex. So we become stricter, setting limits on what they can do, wear, or even feel. In doing so, we end up sexualising them long before sex is part of their lives. We fear for them, and in that fear, we hand them a responsibility that should one day be shared. But in setting those limits, girls have the opportunity to communicate with the arbiters of their freedom, parents. They can question, fight, disrespect and question those limits and in doing so discover themselves.

It does not make me feel better when men say they’d rather have a boy, either. The fact that a fully grown ass man feels uncomfortable at the idea of having a daughter one day puzzles me. It makes me wonder how much work they have done to come to terms with their feminine side. It also creeps me out that he might already feel uneasy with the idea of having a daughter because he is aware of how men think of most women and how they misbehave. This type of man shouldn’t have boys either, I think. How will he approach teaching his hypothetical son how to treat women? He probably won’t. He will let his partner do the job.

Ironically, the assumptions that girls are inherently more emotional and irrational serve girls well because their emotions are at least acknowledged.

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A few days ago, I had a call with a lady whom I admire a lot. I often wondered what draws me so much to her. She radiates calmness. She is relaxed. A calmness and sweetness that my mother wasn’t allowed to display. She is my mother with better circumstances. At the end of our call, she asked me if I, contrary to her daughter, would allow her to give me some advice. She told me that we intelligent girls forget that beauty is a gift to be cultivated too. That to be well put together is a form of self-respect. I smiled, my mamma has been telling me this too, for years.

This morning I woke up early, face swollen and decided “today I am going to start paying attention to this face of mine”. I started grabbing things from the basket of creams I have. I landed on what is now a pale memory of a lipstick. It looks like it went through a war; it is badly mutilated. For years, it was at the bottom of the handbags I owned, always pressed among notebooks, pens and books and, at best, ignored. More recently, it went through Ines's small hands, and her need to act fast in hiding from me. Yesterday, I used it for the last time and gave it its deserved rest in the plastic trash bag. But this lipstick gave me a glimpse of what kind of mother I one day will be to a daughter. I will struggle to put up a serious face when I need to reinforce some limits; I will encourage their need to be seen or express themselves. Perhaps what would be more difficult for me as a mother is handling a shy child. So far off from what I am.

Is this what mothers grapple with? Allowing us to be what they could not allow themselves to be?

I took time to look at that lipstick. I focused on it. It made me smile thinking of Ines. She looked like a clown with it all over her face. How proud she seemed to be of herself, anyway. I thought of my mother, back in time when I was Ines’ age. My mother was incredibly beautiful, and she never left the house without makeup on. Always a bright lipstick shade on. I was so proud of my mom’s beauty. Then we arrived in Italy, and she stopped wearing make-up. She sensed that her dressing up made her employers uncomfortable. I once asked her, and she got annoyed, “Are cleaning ladies supposed to dress better than the people whose houses she cleans, Vilma?” I never poked her about this again.

I felt so guilty all the time for how much my mother has sacrificed for me. Now I see that destroyed lipstick, and I do not care one bit. Perhaps that is motherhood, being happy with being consumed? I often told my mom how guilty I felt, and she has always told me, “Do not be silly, you and your brother are my life”. That made me feel even worse. I realise now, although I am not a mother yet, that this willingness to be consumed might have also been a propellant for her, something that made her stronger, not weaker. They only tell us about the hardships of motherhood. I hope one day to become one, so I can be honest about the entire experience.

Then I also wondered why a woman in her 30s like me still has lipsticks that she bought more than 5 years ago? Barely used lipsticks. Why am I not using my beauty? Is it a sort of alliance to my mother’s pain? Is it because she could not be beautiful in peace, so I feel I cannot be either? Or is it because I felt intellect was a far less risky tool to use? Or was it because I wanted to escape miles away from the clichés of Eastern women people seemed to trap me in whenever I managed to obtain something or someone they could not?

As daughters, as children, do we sometimes feel venturing into scenarios our parents could not?

Then I thought of the person who gifted it to me. I went to the Instagram stories archive to unearth a memory. And bingo! It was indeed my friend who is new to motherhood. Her mother lives on another continent. She is there, in Europe, yet again doing something new, completely on her own. Nursing her 3-month-old boy. Although I do not believe in the concept of self-made, she is someone who gets very close to that expression being true. I love her, yes, but my admiration for her is even bigger than the love I have for her. She is someone who has built herself and pretty much everything she owns. Without much backup or guidance. She built herself without a map handed by someone else.

So I wonder if the gender battle we are going through is precisely because we are the first generation of women who are not following in our mothers’ footsteps without putting up with some questioning first. We are discerning way more about what we want and do not want from the female experience, compared to our mothers and grandmothers.

Funnily enough, the lipstick was titled “Ambitious”. We are the first generation of women to not have to hide their ambition. What will we do with it? I do not know. But let me apply another layer of lipstick.

Vilma Djala

It is no secret to anyone who truly knows me that I have a soft spot for the UK. It is my soul country; I am positively biased. Seeing some recent news on internet surveillance taking place there makes me very sad because, to me, the UK is about freedom, individuality, openness, and originality. Arresting someone who is just dumb enough to write something equally dumb, perhaps while they are taking a shit, doesn’t match the ideal of a truly free society that I have associated the UK with throughout my life.

It is a country where I feel I am, if not understood, cherished. I love the Brits and their curiosity. Not even having the worst boss in my life being English changed that. I told myself it was because she grew up in the Canary Islands and wasn’t truly British.

When Brexit was happening, I was a BlueBook trainee, that is to say, a trainee in the EU institutions. It was a dark and scary time for me personally. I realised I had wasted the one shot my parents allowed me, and I had fucked up. I did not like working at EU institutions; I did not particularly admire the people working in them and was appalled by their intellectual platitude. And yet, when I expressed this big deception that I felt, caused by noticing such a huge gap between my expectations and reality, adults kept reminding me about huge salaries and making me feel stupid for not being cynical yet, and my peers were scared I’d rub these doubts on them too. I felt like a pariah for saying that, for this divorce, the EU was to blame too and that it would be a huge loss to not have the critical voice of the UK in.

Why am I writing about it?

• Rory Stewart is an unlikely conservative MEP, in the sense that what he truly is is a centrist. I like centrists because they manage to equally displease everyone, in their fondness for personal freedom and integrity. It often comes at the cost of never truly winning.

• This book made me realise what the other side of Brexit felt like. While on the EU side, I felt people were too quick to absolve themselves, calling the UK just crazy, I realised with Rory’s recalling of events that the UK leadership, from all sides, was no less uncritical, arrogant and shortsighted than the continent’s one. So the book felt like finally listening to your mother open up about how your father truly was after you moved out from home to go to college, and she is no longer afraid to ruin your father’s image too soon for you. That's how I imagine it, my parents are still together. But if you had asked me before this book, I would have told you the blame was much more on the EU not appreciating the UK’s approach and impact nearly enough. Now I know, the UK was slowly losing the value that made it the UK for me. They were fighting an internal battle while being in an external war.

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Let’s get the premises right: I am not a Lana Del Rey fan, per se. I like her aesthetic up until a certain point because her old Hollywood aesthetic scarily smells of cosplaying, which I abhor as a practice.

If you are a high-potential nerd who is single, on the brink of founding the next PayPal, and who is into cosplaying, forget what I just said. I am your girl. I can cosplay whatever you want, to your heart. And I think I’d look pretty good as Fujiko or Jessie (from the Pokémons).

Her songs sound awfully the same litany to me; I wouldn’t be able to distinguish one from the other. Yet, she is better than the epitome of average, that is, Taylor Swift. I prefer Miley Cyrus, who I think is overlooked compared to the impact she has had, her artistic breadth and the evolutionary arc she has had as a woman and as a human being.

What I find the most interesting about Lana Del Rey, though, is her taste in men. I had a quick recap of who she dated, and none of them had anything in common except being white males. It puzzles me, and I like that; it speaks of freedom to me. Her marriage to a Louisiana tour boat company captain is confirmation of that.

The mimics of struggle

Recently, she showed up at Valentino’s Paris Fashion Week with him dressed in a “work suit” that apparently got everyone mad because “he wasn’t respectful by dressing LIKE THAT at a Valentino show”. Which is silly because the work suit IS from Valentino and I do not dare to check how much it costs. But this is the point, elitists are not mad that someone dressed down in a work suit at Fashion week, they see celebrities dress down every day, they see celebrities mimic normality, and relatability. What they cannot stand is when a person is truly unashamedly humble because they are not even intellectualising their lived experience. That is Jeremy Dufrene, Lana’s husband, for you.

These people see rich kids with trust funds, sporting the detested (by me) blue worker jacket every day in their gentrified neighbourhood and yet they are unfazed by it. Although these are kids who avoid work like pests. Again, they mimic a working life aesthetic. The new hobby of rich people in this economy is to seem poor. You can see it across all levels of the rich: aristocrats wearing old cachemire sweaters with holes, tech moguls wearing the same t-shirt every day, trust fund kids dressing like starving artists.

I have accompanied my farmer uncles to work; they use whatever old piece of clothing they can find until it has worn out, and then repeat. They have never gotten even close to wearing a work uniform. The ones who do wear a uniform are handed one by an employer. It is an obligation. People who do not have to work because they are born into generational wealth, who mimic this lifestyle, are offensive. Seeing Dufrene wear something he probably wears daily, but upgraded, feels right to me. Because in this era, poor people have been robbed even of the dignity of being simply poor.

This is where it stops being about Lana’s husband and starts being about our collective obsession with other people’s morals.

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I recall finding out about Han, the Korean-born philosopher who has a knack for criticising our century, at a time when I was constantly complaining our era is too pornographic and yet not sexy at all. That there is no vital force in male-female exchanges, and therefore, there is only mediocre sex. That in most conservative and poorer societies, paradoxically, people are having way more sex. Because there is less constant contact with the other sex, the mystery is intact, and times are stretched longer. The other is not so much in proximity, and its presence is not so much in abundance that it becomes a product we think we are entitled to.

That was my way of justifying my abstinence. I still stand by it. I do not think sex is like pizza; I do not believe that even when it’s bad, it is good. I do not believe in casual sex; there is nothing casual about sex with me. After all, people seem to have forgotten that sex is about intimacy. People have become increasingly good at faking intimacy to get sex. Still, true intimacy is built with time, with the danger of being rejected for who we really are, with the risk of being discarded after investing said time. That is why, when a person tells me sex can be just about sex, I wonder why they need to find a new playmate constantly. Is it the game that sucks or the player? Or both?

Sex and love are about danger. No one in their right mind is ever ready for love. It is the most transformational, gut-wrenching, scary thing to do to love another person. And never before have we been so sheltered from danger and, at the same time, so unprepared for love. Love is more than ever a market; the most resembling one is the job market. Before, love used to be a bit of a fatality; you met someone and had less information to judge the other person, and perhaps because of this, you had more time to attune to the feelings the other person provoked in you. As such, love was truly an encounter that trained your ability to attune to your feelings. It was a form of meditation.

Funnily enough, in the yoga society we live in, one where we are supposed to be very in touch with our feelings, everyone needs to know as much as possible about the “CV” of a person before going out with them. And that does not help you to attune to the feelings another provokes in you. Mind you, a real encounter might bring out feelings that are not always pleasant, simply because they are new and unexpected. They are new and, so, require stretching an emotional muscle that is atrophied.

Before going on a date, we want to know as much as possible about the person. Where did they study? What do they do for a living? Do they stand for Palestine? Every information possible that will confirm the person is of our liking, just like a product. And yet, since we are so shielded, people do not become luxury products that we cherish, but more and more products we use and throw away.

The surge of apps like “Tea Dating Advice” is proof of what I am saying. The app allows women to post personal data about men they are interested in or are currently dating. The app rose to prominence in July 2025 after it was the subject of three major data leaks in July and August 2025. It is a sort of rating of men by ex-partners. It didn’t take long for men to create another mobile app, called TeaOnHer, in response. It was described as the male version of the Tea app. The app also reported a data breach in August 2025. Ironically, what we crave the most about a person is data on that person. Can data leave room for imagination and fantasy? No, because “data”’s role is to protect us from a real encounter, one that might disappoint us or truly surprise us.

Another detail that after all it is not a detail at all is that we are a society that does not cope well with change. Perhaps it is a normal reaction to a world where we are forced to change jobs, cities, and people around us so often. We do not believe people can change within, only their circumstances. So this is why we get an app where one gives a rating to a person as if he/she was a restaurant. Forgetting that people can get better, people can learn from their mistakes, and people can transform. And often the way they do that is through love.

And what is a red flag exactly? Because last time I checked, colours can change. And we can choose to put that flag down. Love is about a territory whose borders need to be outlined together, with the risk of this “country” collapsing at any time. There is no protection from that.

Vilma Djala

For months, I’d go on visits. I’d look so unkept, rushing there by Bolt or Uber, often trying to connect my work phone to the work computer, trying to be online until the very last minute I’d have, before I’d be in one of those spaceships they use in Radiology. That was truly the only time I was forced to go through with some sort of meditation. I could not move, nor check my phone. It was me and I, and I cried more than I would like to admit. I’d be weak and go for the tartelette with framboise at the Hospital’s bar, each fucking framboise on it costing a euro at least. I’d sometimes sneak in at the hospital’s chapel for a quick chat with the Lord and to read what the patients had written in the guest’s book at the entrance. Death and the prospect of it can make people very poetic.

I could feel deep down the suspicious tone of my colleague when she’d say “oh wow you have a lot of doctor appointments lately”, to which I would have liked to reply “I wish I were just looking for another job, like anyone saying they are going to a doctor appointment one time too many, but I am just trying to find out if this lump in my throat can potentially kill me or it is a just plain ugly protuberance”. For months, they could not tell exactly what it was, so we let it grow. And it did grow; it doubled in dimension over a few months. The doctor advised me to get it removed as soon as possible. I postponed, we had important deadlines at work.

There are a few things that going through a 4-hour operation taught me, and I’d like to talk about them. As seriously as my courage will allow.

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If you’re new here: Welcome!
The Contrary Mary is for misfits and overthinkers who want to laugh their way through modern chaos. I write about class, ambition, family, and the oddities of being human, with humour and a healthy disrespect for elitism.

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• Family & Patterns: “Daddy issues” are a societal issue — why we keep centering “good fathers”
• Personal Note: Loving life to death — coming back after a long pause

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Contrary-ly yours,
Vilma

This wedding in the Belgian countryside was my last lesson, I promise. In retrospect, I could have followed my intuition instead of silencing it. I kept telling myself, “Mmm, I know these types of parties, I know these types of people who look at you like a UFO because they do not know you since they were 4, do I want to be there bored to death?”. And I have silenced it because I wanted the pleasure of being surprised. Damn huge slap on the face from life. But damn it woke me up.

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