[listening to Ludovico Einaudi: Seven Days Walking]
I know I wrote about this before, somewhere. But here it comes again: I don’t want to be the one cleaning ashtrays. I remember being in a hotel in London, on a school trip in 1986 and clearly thinking [and probably saying out loud too] : I don’t want to be the one cleaning ashtrays. I want to study, to get better, to have a decent job, to make money, to make a name for myself. I want to be someone. In 2000, after watching Paul the Apostle, a movie starring Johannes Brandrup who was an ex schoolfriend I studied drama and acted with on the same stage, I had a full week-long melt down in which I stomped my feet on the floor, pacing up and down, cursing life, destiny, and fate and demanding the gods to give me what I believed was rightfully mine. In 2015, during my Diploma in Counselling I cringed when I heard myself blurting out: I want to be famous.
I don’t want to be the one cleaning ashtrays. But the truth is, I was paddling furiously, trying to steer my life in a direction I thought would give me the recognition and validation I craved. I was caught in a storm of striving, believing the destination — a PhD, fame, success, acceptance — was where I’d find peace. But I see now that, just like in sailing, there are no guarantees of a straight line. There is no perfect wind to carry you exactly where you expect to go. Life is much more like a boat out at sea — sometimes you paddle, sometimes you drift.
Little did I know, that my desires came out of an endless loop that I was painstakingly creating since birth: the perpetual loop of self-improvement instead of self-acceptance, with an undercurrent fear of failure, and a pinch of this incredible fear of being a fake accompanied by the risk of being found out. This evolved into or stemmed from my fear of unworthiness with victimhood, poor-me mentality and self-sabotage as my safe ways out. There you have it: my personal concoction.
And off we go, round and round again.
Of course, I have learned very well from my very early days that love, belonging and safety were conditional to how much I did and how well I did it. I never felt safe or that I belonged anywhere, instead always questioning my place and even my right to be in the world. Always striving for perfectionism and validation-seeking played a significant role in my life. The need for external approval always present: do you like me? Am I good enough? Do you want me with a BA, and MA, a PhD? How many PhDs do you want me to have so that I can feel loved and accepted by you? Instead, here I am : always doubting my achievements, always down-playing what I have gotten; always setting extraordinarily high standards for myself and for the others around me [yep, I am watching and judging you…] and constantly triggering the same experiences I tried so carefully to avoid.
In all my analysis and observations, visions and images of sailing boats appeared, constantly. In May 2020, when I published “A Thousand Names”, Georgia my character said:
“this would mean that I must have faith, no! hope that tomorrow, or next week, or next month things will change, the wind will turn, and I will set sail somewhere. I have been on that boat for so long, having left one shore and not yet reached a new harbour. In-between, the story of my life. I have been lost among high waves and then there were none. Flat. No wind. I have been paddling, oh! you should have seen me paddling and trying, and moving, and wallowing, splashing, and rocking the boat. To no avail. No wind, dead sails, not moving. Fate didn’t want me. And there I was, at the mercy of nothing.
[…]
That boat was in the still waters. Floating and not going anywhere. The moorings I knew I left behind me could barely be seen; and I could imagine the new shores ahead, full of promises. I left everything and packed this boat and here I am, again, on another journey. Just floating and not going anywhere. There is no wind, there is no current. Anything I tried, and I know I worked so hard, did not work. I know I need to ingratiate the gods, so I clean the boat, I scrub and polish and wax; I check the chafing of the ropes, I look for stress cracks and any deck leaks. And then I focus on the timber: that loose caulking, or plank splitting; I stitch sails and check the riggings. I want to be ready. But I am only tired.
Part of me must have understood that there was only one job, and one job only, for me to do: stay. Wait. Maybe enjoy the sun in the meantime, fish, cook, put your feet up and read a novel and then nap. Trust that when the time is right, you will have the wind and current you need. That’s all. Of all the fretting and messing and sorting and doing and making and breaking and re-doing and planning and organising maybe I simply had to learn to wait. Learn to do nothing. Learn to disconnect.”
How often do we, too, find ourselves paddling furiously toward imagined shores of success, only to realize the true work lies in how we navigate the open sea? Whether I was paddling, cleaning, staying, swimming, sunbathing I should have always been the best at paddling, the best at cleaning; even the best at staying. Never perfect, with always something else to do, to learn, to prove. Never unique, always bland.
In my late explorations of Nietzsche and Jung, and through the creation of paleophenomenology, I realized that my striving for perfection was not unique to me — it echoed deeper existential questions that Nietzsche himself posed about the human condition. Nietzsche challenges us to embrace life in all its imperfection, the 'eternal return', suggesting that our greatest strength comes not from avoiding hardship, but from saying ‘yes’ to it. Jung, too, teaches us about individuation — about becoming whole rather than perfect. This means integrating our shadow, the parts of ourselves we’d rather deny or suppress. In my case, it was the fear of being not good enough, always striving, always seeking approval. Through these philosophical lenses, I came to see my paleophenomenology not just as a methodology, but as a way of understanding this very human tension — how our ancestors might have navigated the unknown seas of their own existence, carving symbols, marks, leaving traces to prove they were here, that they mattered. Just as I have struggled to make my mark in the world, so too did they. But in both cases, the journey — the learning and adapting — is what makes us whole, not the arrival at some imagined place of success.
I am already perfect, I repeat to myself the other morning.
Hear me out. This is not what my mother defined as megalomania or her way of saying that I haven't tried hard enough in order to be loved and accepted, and that I should not desire to be unique [while putting me back into my place of undeserving], instead I am on that sailing boat. I am learning to sail. Every day I wake up, make myself a coffee, sit in front of my maps, compass and sextant in hand, and listening to the weather forecasts. When I go to bed, I don’t exactly know what the weather is going to do tomorrow nor how the sea will react. I am adapting and learning. Which means that I am not perfect, because I don’t know nor I can know everything. At the same time, since I am an observer, researcher, and then writer, I am actually already a student. I have always been one. Which means that I am perfect for the role.
I repeat that again: I am perfect for the role.
And since I am perfect for the role, I am accepted, loved and kept safe by the Universe. I don’t need to prove myself. I am already ready for this role. I only need to show up everyday, check maps and weather forecast, and remind myself I am perfect by simply being a student.
There is nothing else I need to do. Just be a student.
Just be me.
Everything else is trusting: trust the wind, the waves, Neptune, my boat, the fellow seamen I will meet along the way. I only know that I have to go from A to B or, better, from B [birth] to D [death]. All the rest in between is learning. I will stop along the way to visit, repair, rest, refuel, refill. There will be detours, storms, amazing sailing days, swimming, and many many ever-shifting horizons.
And for now just allowing the current to dictate my next course…
earnestly, yours.
mx
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