personal stories

important pieces from my past

If you had asked a couple of years ago, I would have told you my earliest years were relatively normal and reasonably happy. When I now look back at those first memories and feelings, I instead find this sense of loneliness looming over, like a shadow following the victim just around the corner, with the people in the movie theatre holding a sense of suspense.

I have this picture in my head of me playing in the bathtub, with little buses as my favorite toys, and feeling the winter just around the frame, but somehow totally there too.

Putting together the puzzle, those first memories laid on a period of incredible stress. Close to zero money in the bank, a day to day survivorship, very loving parents but broken as a couple, a dad working on ships and out of home most of time, stressed as fuck and inclined to rare but big burst of anger, a mom in a country not of her own but fully on her own, barely speaking the language, far away from friends and family twenty hours of flight away, and with a first child to grow. It all might have done the trick for my little self to sense that something was off.

I brought that seed of loneliness with me across the years. Loneliness, surely the physical element of it, became sort of a default for most of my childhood, a situation worsened by us moving to a somewhat remote town on top of a hill in the countryside.
More than a town, with fewer than two hundred inhabitants, a settlement would be more of an accurate word.

I did spend a lot of time alone, not all of it as depressing as these lines might convey of course, but enough that today there is no bigger craving for me than to be in a house with people. I am ok too in not talking to each other for the full day, each minding their own business, as long as we are together. The adult me loves it for all kinds of reasons, most adults do, but I suspect there is a part of me who loves this, in the most visceral feeling, specifically because, well, at last, it can finally rest, physically not alone.

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A time came when I started feeling genuinely and quite effortlessly better than others. A seed had been planted in me, that I was different, that I was just built in a particular, unique, almost-superhero way. Not cocky and arrogant, tho I reassure you that, writing these lines, it comes difficult even to not see myself as that.
The best way to describe that feeling would be, in adult terminology, inevitable.

A big part of it was surely fabricated, a classic self-fulfilled golden child prophecy. You’re a by attitude a tranquil kid that loves to stay on his own, never breaks the room, stays quiet and plays, loving parents need to flex that to other parents while you’re there pretending not to hear, other parents and people start reasserting what they have just been told, so they approach you every following times giving for granted that you’re a great, ahead of the curve.

It does feel very nice, of course.

So you go on repeat, and it’s very easy to repeat the mechanism across school and whatever you find in front of you. Give me something, and I’ll gently smash it with love and prove once again that I am the best. Not in the way of being better than others in relative terms, I never had that sort of competitive feeling within, and to this day I consider my level of competitiveness close to zero, but in the way of, I am special. Do add some systematic advantages, like a natural inclination to math, a cultural setup where it’s easy to be different, speaking three languages at nine years old, the experiences very few kids live just because of me having to visit the other side of the family in Indonesia, and you have a kid that all in all, how couldn’t he not think he was built special?

It’s the golden child prophecy that turns into a curse the moment you discover that maybe you were not so special after all.

It was quite dramatic and literally the first strong emotional memory when I started uni. All of a sudden, I had teenagers younger than me having had already real full time jobs, lived in seven countries, spoke six languages, plenty of seemingly close friends after two weeks of lectures, with me having to take pictures in a club at peers holding funny huge classes and a huge teddy bear for fifty four pounds a shift, and feeling blessed to be given sixty cause the owner didn’t have change.

You strive and you persist and you make it work, whatever that means, and you’re on top of the world again. When I joined my first full-time startup it was heaven on ego, although of course, if you had asked me back then, I would have told you the situation was super in control. Twenty-two, coming out of nothing, spearheading a new country launch, earning more than the average thirty-five years in Italy, not that that’s a high benchmark anyway, with peers still making sense of their masters and their life direction.

I, instead, had it all figured out already.

And then, you realise you’re not so special in the end again.

When I quit and started venturing into an unknown world not of great employees but of great builders at heart and entrepreneurs, I realised how much of a local maximum I had simply landed upon and how much of a secondary game I was playing. For all the hyper-growth career I thought I had, I met peers and younger managing millions more, working in companies doing insane things, and people who simply did shit instead of waiting with starting points not so different from mine. Actually, with starting points way less privileged than mine. And so you strive again, you persist, but this time it doesn’t work once with my first attempt at launching a company nor it works on the second attempt.

And at this point, you really understand that yes, you might have been special a long time ago, and you did special things, and you were ahead of the curve, but obviously today, well, you’re not as special as you thought you were. There is a world out there of people who have been, frankly speaking, way better at putting in the work, being smarter, and seeing things. Obviously of course. But that hurts, and as a golden child, you’re not used to things not working out at the first attempt, can’t even imagine the second. You’re not used to having to deal with things outside of your control, to you not being able to figure, to having nobody telling you you’re doing well, to you not only not winning the game, but realising you were playing a secondary game after all.

One of the most humbling comparisons I have in my life is when at the beginning of my career I met this dude, now one of my dearest friends, and I vividly remember thinking that fuck, I truly had it all figured it out. Same age, he an intern, me a country manager. Now he is the CMO of Vimeo, and with friends we always joke that he literally shat on my head standard career trajectory-wise.

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I’ve spent the last two years of my life exploring, discovering, and integrating parts of me I was not even aware existed.

The biggest thing I had to do was to acknowledge and face the consequences that all of my teen years were completely fucked up. People around me who knew my story would lightheartedly say that it was a miracle that I didn’t end up being a drug addict, but it’s only recently that I realised that maybe there was a slightly more serious tone in their words.

My dad was near mental and physical collapse around my second year of elementary school. He had three jobs to make ends meet: a courier most of the time, with extra shifts in a fancy Swiss pastry job and the fast ferry service between Genoa and Sardinia. Sometimes I’d go with him on weekends, and I would deliver the package with him in the hope of getting a tip. Although I liked spending time with dad, and I loved the thrill of getting the tip, I hated all those hours in the van, I hated them so much that I couldn’t stand U2 for ages as that was the default music option. Going back to my dad, the situation was so tense that I remember having him not stressed for a couple of days in a row and me asking, “Dad, so weird, why are you not angry today?”.

That question breaks my heart today, both for me, for him, and for mom.

Everything changed when my bigger cousin, who years before had an accident and my dad helped her come back to normal life after being in a coma for not sure how long, proposed that he would go to Indonesia and open a few bungalows. She would lend him the money as a sign of gratitude.

The thing happened, and fucking took off, and suddenly we were living like mid-upper middle class citizens, with mom and I living in Italy six months a year, and then reuniting with dad in Indonesia for the other half thanks to a kind concession and agreement with the school.

Let’s talk about mom.

Mom came from a comparatively rich family. Rich, because grandpa was a private bodyguard to Suharto, the former Military General and dictator of Indonesia, and grandma had an all-in shop similar to the all-in modern Chinese shops but not as fancy nor as cute. Comparatively, because it’s easy to be relatively richer when the rest of the population lives on five dollars a day.

She met dad on a ferry between Bali and Lombok, with dad approaching her with the lamest approach ever, “Do you have a cigarette?”. The thing worked, incredibly, and soon got pregnant with a man who had absolutely no plan of having another child (tho he had always liked the idea of having many children) and absolutely no proper long-term career stability.

In less than two years, she finds herself with a kid, a surely not movie-like romance (though you could argue it was movie-like, but more of the kind where you scream at the protagonist to run), on the other side of the world, barely speaking the language, little money, and a disloyal absent husband with big part of emotional work never done and prone to stress, high pressure, and jealousy. Now multiply that by eight years, and you rightfully have a pissed off woman who feels like her best years have been robbed from her, and she now demands compensation and revenge.

My memory is blurred, but her first signs of apparent insanity came to be in a summer either in my second last or last year of elementary school. She disappears for a month and a half, she calls every now and then, but the whole thing is suspicious but not to the point to be too worried. It’s 2008 in Indonesia anyway, internet is not a proper thing, she visits some relatives in Borneo, an underdeveloped island covered in thick jungle, and in an attempt to fit the story in, who wouldn’t have troubles getting in touch?

But when she is back, she starts behaving weirdly, something is off, oddly strange. She feels irresponsible, reckless, and a bit mad in the sanity sense of things. To this day, I still don’t know if with everything that had happened it was simply her not giving a fuck anymore about anybody or if something went wrong for real (she had just had a breast reduction surgery and dad always speculated that maybe it was a wrong dosage of anesthetics that kicked it all off, I don’t know).

That summer marked the first time she said she was not going to be back in Italy with me, which meant as a natural consequence that all of my life back at home would be immediately erased. The telenovela and the drama would go on for years, directly with dad bribing her with the purchase of a land for her or something, until she left for good, and indirectly with legal charges and court fights over ownership of business until her death, which I witnessed post-mortem through an Instagram comment under a picture of mine. To this day, one of the most bizarre, for a lack of a better word, experiences in my life. I do of course remember all the details of it.

2022, I was 25. I go on Instagram for a break during work, and in the notifications I see a comment, “Luca check my messages Rita is dead”. Sunny day, standard messy office room with two other people, completely normal hours, taken aback. I rush to delete the comment, and realise she had sent multiple messages hidden by Instagram where she explained that, well, Rita was dead.

I don’t know how to explain this, and I guess that the best way would be with something simple as, not finding your phone, realizing you lost it, and staring at the dreadful nothingness of the irreversibility of the situation. The phone analogy unintentionally works very well because as much as you need your phone, it’s ultimately just a thousand bucks away, couple of headaches and a backup, and you’re back to point zero again. I guess that what I am trying to say, it didn’t feel like an existential loss, because so it felt with Rita, which is how I started calling her the moment she left home and our relationship drowning to the bottom of the sea. I hadn’t considered Rita as my mom for more than ten years, and as much as I was concerned, I had lost her a long time before. Not in a tragic sudden way, but as a slow maturing realisation, an unconscious preparation that had started when she decided, in her own particular way, to own back the life she felt was robbed out of her.

I do finish the work, meanwhile reach out to my best friends, I wait to inform my dad, who had also not heard from her in years, yet a bit more in touch through lawyers and notaries, and try to make sense of it all. To this day, I have no proper clue how she passed away. Apparently she got sick, and was gone in a few days. There were rumours she had a tumour, she had indeed started to drink quite a lot, so my best approximation is that maybe it was a combination of that and some form of Covid. But, who knows.

I had long wished for her death, especially throughout my middle school years, when I seriously thought about how reasonable it was to hire someone and get her killed. Desperation leads to desperate attempts to get out of things. I could no longer bear the constant back and forth between her and dad about me living here or there, I could no longer bear her daily insanity times, throwing and breaking things in front of clients, climbing the reception as a mentally gone gorilla, breaking into my dad’s house and not wanting to leave, firing people at her mercy with no reason at all. I could no longer bear being 15 years old and having to separate my parents from fighting each other after my mom had attacked my dad after her ten times trying to break into his house, with me having to push her on the ground and scream in her face to get the fuck out. I could no longer bear my dad’s savings being quickly eroded, a situation worsened by a fucked up legal system, fighting at a rhythm of twenty thousand bucks at a time to avoid her taking control of the entire business and the entire land he had bought with my grandma's inheritance. I could no longer bear her stealing toilet paper from the gym and not buying fruits because dad didn’t send us enough money, a story she had made up on a monthly basis while hiding half of the amount to send it out on a second secret personal account.

During my first year of high school, I went for a small holiday with my dad in Spain during Easter, and when I came back, she was gone. Disappeared.

The house seemed empty but unsure of what, with a piece of paper left with something like, “I am sorry Brando, I love you”. Not sure if I even tried to call her, but there I stayed, looking at the message, numbing myself out. Like a person losing his phone, I guess.

As soon as words spread, which might have taken five minutes, my older brother called, saying that everything would be fine and that he could pick me up if needed. I heard everything, and my biggest worry was to make sure I conveyed my strength and that it was clear that I had the situation under control. There was no need to rescue me, there was no need to treat me like a child, there was no need to be worried, because I owned it all.

I felt the need to cry, I restrained on the call, and suck it all up, until I couldn’t anymore. But I had numbed myself out so much throughout the years, that even when tears wanted to be shed, they wouldn’t. Rational Center Control had taken over. It had been in preparation and production for years, ever since the perceived Cold War had begun, and so there was no logical reason why I should despair. I could cook, I could go around, I could money money, I was after all a twenty-year-old who had found himself in the body of a pre-teen kid. A way of being and a way of reasoning made and perfected out of inclination and hidden desperation to survive, a way to take control of any rage from mom and dad, of any broken glass and plates thrown at the wall on the other side of the garden in front of passing strangers, of any situation where adults around me couldn’t deal with their own, while other adults gave for granted that I was ok because I was a golden child anyway.

My aunt came living with me, so in a way I did grow up like Peter Parker, which fully aided my internal narrative of being superhero different from others.

After a few weeks while cleaning around I found a folder hidden behind the heater and it was full of receipts. Mom had been making transfers to a secret bank account for years, so for every amount dad would send us, she would grab most of it, expenses were low anyway, and put it aside. We estimated she had taken directly over a hundred thousand bucks of family money and kept it for herself. During uni I would work in a private club until five am in the morning, and on the way to throwing the trash out to close the night, I would always think, “Fuck that bastard woman”.

But then it all came crashing down in the last two years.

The fucking bastard woman became a fully rounded human being, with all of her reasons, traumas, and backstory, my to-a-certain-extent innocent dad also became a fully rounded human being, with all of his fuck-ups and self-inflicted consequences. I realised there are no angels in the story, even me. And it all came crashing down because now that I fully understood mom, and all the suffering she had, both before, during, and after the decisions she took, I see now a wasted life, a woman who had given everything to me until she could, and must have felt surely betrayed by her own son, who couldn’t understand anything of what she did, and took side with the man that robbed her of the best years.

I never felt and elaborated her loss before the last two years, with all that it comes with it. Her not being there for never again for real, the irreversible inability to make peace and tell her that I now see what she went through, all the love the she gave me and all of her pain, and that I am sorry for not being there when she needed it. I would think about the birthday wishes she sent me, and my most cold-hearted replies. I would think about me meeting her after years, at a lawyer meeting, and her not even standing up to greet me. I would think about the classic transition to the teen years, where in a first subconscious effort to assert myself in the world and separate from my parents dependency, I would indeed become cocky and arrogant, but only with her, and in her loneliness after giving everything she could, cry in front of me not understanding why I would behave like that, and me telling her, “you’re only worsening the situation”. What the fuck I meant with that sentence, I still don’t know. I would think about waking up on the first of January of maybe my fourth year of high school, with dad literally smashing things around the house and screaming at her cause she had gone partying the night before. His jealousy was a desperate attempt of his own fucked-up childhood to not be left alone again, but with no right on her whatsoever, considering the in-house de facto divorce. I don’t remember what mom did, but I remember waking up, suppressing reality around me, going to the bathroom, taking a piss, brushing my teeth, and getting the fuck out of the house like nothing had happened. All while the Rational Center Control was updating the software in my head, hardcoding that I would never allow myself to even feel an ounce of jealousy, that I would never lose control, and that I would analytically model the world by taking into account all possible variables to make the most logical next step.

One of my best friends tells me to this day that we are both world-class in modelling a world with infinite variables. To no surprise, our upbringings are worryingly similar.

The last two years have been a successful attempt to uncover and make peace with this all. In one breathwork session, during the few minutes of natural high you get, I saw mom again and desperately started trying to tell her that I was sorry, that I loved her so much, and that I felt so wrong that we lost this life away. With gentleness she told me, “Why are you so sad? There is no reason to be worried. Life is not what you believe it is, the universe is an endless cycle. There is no reason to cry this life while infinite ones await us after”.

That time, I finally closed the circle with her, or maybe, I should say, finally reopened it.

It is as well so easier now to see dad in the way that I look at my inner child, cause the older he gets, the more often his child in him takes space. So easier to see through his story, for why he does and did things, and it’s a miracle he was able to create the conditions for the beautiful life I now have. I surely got his prime years, something my older brother and sister, and my young sisters too, can’t unfortunately claim.

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After these last two years, I feel it’s now time to lead.

I’ve clawed back my inner world, played around with the outer one, made peace with the internal council of Brando, a not-so imaginative way for me to see the different parts that coexist within me, and all that is left is to properly reconcile it all. A Shackleton expedition that feels more like a flower blooming amongst others, while the gentle breeze blows through the field in the first week of spring.

I feel the need and the inevitability I happily embark on leading the family. My sister will be lucky to have dad until the end of high school, but it will be a grandpa, and the masculine vitality she will need to develop whole can’t come from anywhere if not from me. Dad is to be taken care of as his declining years, as measured by proxy by how many times across months he tells me the same story, had officially begun some years ago.

There is no space for fight, conflict, or resentment, but only unconditional love, understanding, and giving back. He has lived this life for the first time too after all. I carry the magical sword to break the generational trauma so that my twelve-year-old can grow like a normal kid. I am excited for that.

This applies to my romantic relationship too, which turned five years a month ago. I used to awe at people happily staying in relationships for five years, and it’s kinda crazy that I am now in one of them with relatively low effort. And I really mean that, my relationship with Serena is probably the highest return on effort I have, cause almost everything feels so easy with her. And I apologise for my Central Rational Control kind of terminology, but I mean it in the most romantic way.

These years of getting to know and owning my feminine energy have opened up doors I didn’t know existed. Gut feeling and creative spirit aside, I am amazed and truly happy for how much emotion and space I can now hold for both of us. I used to be able to put the pieces together, but mostly through rigid if-logic conditions and next-step actions inside my head, not exactly the definition of empathy and emotional intelligence. It feels effortless now. Time to take the relationship to the next level.

All in all, the chokepoint is the ability to lead myself. Attune myself to what feels right and alive, with the spiritual grace of a monk, and then go for it, with the energy of a rocket breaking through the stratosphere.

The more I do this, the more I see, and the more I see, the more I expand.

All else will follow.