Coming back
On Substack fatigue, language and words, fashion and love and trust and books.
My Instagram feed and news apps are bombarding me with content about the Olympic Games. I cannot escape it. I live in Milan and I’m from Belluno, two of the places, together with Predazzo and Livigno, where the Games take place. Reading and re-reading the same concepts expressed with different words has made my brain tired. Nonetheless, I believe that this concise article by The New York Times reassumes all the main discussions around the event.
Despite the fact that I would love to talk about Giovanni Franzoni’s performance and about Milan being invaded by tall, fit athletes—both of which are good news—I’m back today, after a while, without talking about any of that, even though I probably should.
Lately, I’ve found myself writing in English. I recently wrote a piece about the gentrification of the mountains and while I was structuring it, some sentences were popping into my mind in this language. This doesn’t mean that they were articulated the way I wanted, nor that the grammar was perfect. Words just rolled out.
A study showed how it’s easier to talk about personal matters and feelings in a non-native language. There’s a distance, some steps that the mind has to take between the thought and the spoken words. And I remembered what Rachel Cusk writes in Outline about expressing yourself in another language. There’s always an insurmountable gap between you and the language you were not born with. There’s an indissoluble link between language and identity, and when you speak another language, there’s always something left behind, and something else has the space to sprout.
A friend of mine, a couple of weeks ago—her in a long black coat and perfect hair, me with my old military bomber and bangs that do whatever the fuck they want, fighting against gravity—told me, “We’re all waiting for your words,” and then I remembered a quotation from Renata Adler’s Speedboat, one of the best books I read last year. A nervous, cynical, funny prose, a piercing gaze, fast thoughts without a plot. “That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
I drink, I rant a lot, I phone a lot recently, calling a swarm of poor friends who listen to me trying to order reality, but I don’t sleep much, and I don’t write very much either, except for random short notes on my phone, in English, of course. But here I am, back again. Who knows if I’ll be able to finish this newsletter? Why writing? Why write about fashion? To write is to place yourself inside the world. To let the world come in, to allow it to come closer, and to throw your thoughts to people in the hope of sparking conversations or, more delusionally, of being understood.
Yesterday I saw my friend Cami for breakfast. While I was walking to the bar, I looked at my reflection in a glass and I saw my same old self in my uniform: the Valentino green bomber, the Jil Sander boots in brown nappa leather, the dark blue wool pleated skirt, the black hoodie, the ROA bag. Cami and I recently found ourselves talking about the fact that we wear the same, worn out clothes. We’re selling our wardrobes. I wear the same two pairs of jeans, the same boots and sneakers, the same two bombers, two skirts, and a coat.
Why write about fashion when I’m alienated from the object I’m supposed to write about? I said I was wearing a Valentino bomber, a pair of Jil Sander boots, a ROA bag, a pleated skirt, and a black hoodie. I got the bomber from a friend who works as a nanny. The mother of the family she works for gave her some clothes she wanted to throw away, and the jacket was among them. I bought my boots at a stand at the market one cold, early morning, for a ridiculous price, negotiating it with the seller, finally using my dialectics and all my university degrees for something useful. The sartorial pleated skirt is a second-hand find. The ROA bag is the only real investment I made, bought when I was drunk, after seeing it on a friend at my book club. The hoodie is UNIQLO, and its fit is as great as my shame for buying a fast-fashion item. Some weeks ago, at a party, a friend asked me if it was The Row, and I found it hilarious, considering that a The Row hoodie costs more or less as much as my wage.
Why write about clothes when I’m wearing the same things and selling my precious wardrobe, built carefully throughout the years? Maybe because, even if the fashion industry is collapsing, the clothes we wear, like the words and the language we speak, reveal deep, intimate truths about ourselves. There are times when our world allows us to have huge wardrobes, couture dresses, and archival Prada and Alaïa, and there are times that ask you to be light, ready to pack and go.
This space, like all writing territories, is invented. It exists only in my mind. It can crumble and expand under my own will. That’s the threatening beauty of it: freedom can be disorienting, and in these past months I’ve been disoriented, asking myself why I wasn’t writing in Italian, why my brain was thinking in English but the sentences weren’t as fluid as those in Italian, why I wasn’t passionate about the fashion shows anymore, why I was wearing the same consumed pair of jeans, with stains I cannot clean despite all my efforts. But here I am again, because if this space is invented by me, it must as well reflect my inconsistencies and the sheer precipices of life, and take whatever shape it must take.
Writing reflects life. Writers drink, rant, phone, and sleep because they know they cannot tame their writing just as they cannot control their lives. Every time you give yourself a structure, it breaks down; every time you give your life and your words definite boundaries and timelines and an outline, unexpected words, ideas, and people come in, and you have to build everything again. And that’s probably why writers can be incredibly stubborn and persistent.
When this happens, that’s the time when you have to declutter your wardrobe and face reality and who you’ve become. Today, I’m probably in between dry English and tumultuous Italian, and I’m not the archival Prada high heels anymore, nor the Brooks Brothers vichy shirt. I’m the UNIQLO hoodie and the Lemaire longsleeve I bought late at night crying, in the hope of becoming as light and soft as its ribbon.
A friend once told me that we were similar because we’re difficult. For many reasons (no doubt!) but especially because we’re always ready to doubt ourselves, but deep down we always know what we want and what’s best for ourselves. We both write. We both have big egos, obviously, and defend our private space like rabid dogs, but at the same time we can be easily torn apart by other people’s pain. Maybe, that’s what it means to write: to be continuously broken and yet remain intact just enough to give your words to the world and write about the same old stories.
“Is it always the same story, then?” asks Adler in Pitch Dark. “Somebody loves and somebody doesn’t, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, proliferations, endings of the line, until there is death. Well, no. I have a wonderful, fond memory, about love and trust and books.”
So, well, no, it’s never the same story. I, too, know about love and trust and books, and I will try to write about them, with what I have at the moment. An in-between language, a bunch of clothes in an empty wardrobe, broken, intact words in my brain. A candle-like future ahead, trembling, bright.
ps: If you enjoyed this post and want to support my project, you can help me buy 1/3 of a book or 1/500 of a Prada bag — two essential things for the success of this newsletter, which teeters between minor dramas and incredibly important nothings.
bellissimo <3