The months have slipped by quietly, and somehow we’ve already reached the middle of the year.
I’ve spent this time learning to live with yet another change, one I consciously chose.
I came back to Italy. Just for a while. To see what it would feel like.
To reconnect with the part of me that longs for human connection, a part that had grown far too quiet.
Sometimes we choose change not because we know where it will lead, but because something inside us whispers that it’s time to move.
I’m still listening to that whisper.
In the meantime, I studied, planned, built, and met new people.
I searched for a way to enter or perhaps re-enter the Italian market.
I read and wrote. I smiled and cried.
I hoped, and I despaired.
There were moments when I felt out of place, out of sync with everyone else. I searched for the right platform, the right software, the right service, the right way to present myself.
And there I was, someone who helps others recognize and navigate performance anxiety, finding myself right in the middle of it.
Only yesterday, melting under yet another heatwave that some people still insist on calling “unusual,” I realized I had been looking in the wrong direction.
Nothing truly resonated with me.
Because I don’t want yet another platform where I’m expected to perform, promote, and sell what I do.
I want something else.
I want a place where people can meet.
A place where we can meet even if I’m a little here and a little there.
A non-place, as someone once called it.
Or perhaps, as I prefer to think of it, a place where we can appear, disappear, and find each other again.
A little while ago, the name for this place finally arrived.
Before I tell you what it is, I’d like to tell you how I found it.
As a teenager, I always had what we call heart friends; those friends you meet almost every day, the ones you can talk to for hours. We shared dreams, disappointments, first loves, endless fantasies, and all the emotions that belong to that season of life.
I was always the one people confided in. Looking back, I probably should have understood even then what would later become my work.
This happened throughout the school year, but even more during the long summers I spent with my grandmother on the Ligurian coast.
There is one memory that still feels almost sacred.
After lunch, before we were allowed back to the beach (never before 4:30 p.m.!), we would gather in the courtyard beneath a tall palm tree that seemed to grow as quickly as summer itself.
It was a small patch of shade.
Each of us came from a different doorway, yet we all knew that, at that hour, someone would always be there.
Someone to tell about the person we’d secretly fallen in love with on the beach that morning.
Someone to share our plans for September.
To complain about our parents.
To invent silly games with words.
To talk about the book we were reading.
To discuss the letters published in Cioè, the teenage magazine that, in its own imperfect way, introduced us to relationships, affection, and sexuality.
Can you picture it?
That place still exists within me.
Today, it has a different name.
It’s called Under the Birches.
Not beneath a palm tree anymore, but beneath the birches of Sweden, a country that has become part of my soul.
There is something about the sound of birch leaves moving in the wind.
To me, it is the closest thing to the voice of God.
If you stop and listen, it almost feels as though the trees are trying to speak to you.
That’s why the palm tree has become a birch.
A place to sit.
To feel safe.
To remain curious.
To stay open to other human beings.
Bring a cushion.
I have many stories to share with you.
And just as many that I’d love to hear.
Over the coming months, Under the Birches will become a place where we’ll explore conversations about:
- moving to another country;
- changing careers;
- losing our balance—and finding it again;
- rediscovering ourselves;
- reinventing life after forty;
- learning how to live with uncertainty, and perhaps even making peace with it.
I’ll share my story.
Perhaps you’ll share yours.
Together with a small circle of women.
Never too many.
I’ve never really belonged to large crowds.
If you’d like to find a place beneath the birches too, I’d love to hear from you.
Send me an email.
In just a few weeks, we’ll begin.
g.