54

The truth is you shouldn't have read any of this.

It's not meant for you, it's not really meant for anyone. I've been writing this kind of thing for years, in places where nobody knows me, at tables where nobody sits with me, in cities I change before I can call them home.

But today is different, today I won't close these thoughts in my drawer.

For a long time there's been a feeling I can't name. It sits between the chest and the throat.

It's not anxiety or fear. It's that silent certainty of not being in the right place wherever you are. That whatever you've done, it's not enough. That there's a version of you that you haven't reached yet, and maybe never will.

Second place. Always.

Not compared to someone else, but compared to who you feel you could be. This distance doesn't close. Not with work, not with money, let alone with cities. It doesn't close with anything.

I've felt this distance for as long as I can remember.

---

I come from a place where questions are a euphemism. Not because people don't think, because the answers are already written. You're born. You work. You sit at the table on Sundays. You die.

The rest is noise in a village of a thousand people whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.

As a boy I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes and olives. Not to buy something. To leave. I didn't know where but I knew my place wasn't there.

I also worked as a waiter. I carried plates to people enjoying their evening and what for them was a Friday, for me was a test. Of patience. Of endurance. Of something I didn't understand yet.

My mother used to say: "stop playing the adults' game." It was her way of telling me don't get hurt. The world is like this. Accept it.

I never managed to. Not out of courage, but out of inability.

---

Then at seventeen someone told me a sentence I shouldn't have taken seriously. Luckily, I did.

The next day I was in front of a screen unaware of what I was looking at, but aware that something was starting to move.

From there, thirteen years of beginnings.

Trading. Forex. A blog. Videos. Social media. Travel. Every time I saw the wave before anyone else and every time I climbed on I got off before it reached shore.

Not for lack of talent. For something worse. A chronic impatience disguised as intuition. The belief that if something doesn't explode immediately, it's not the right thing. That the next beginning would be the breakthrough.

The "beginning" was the drug. That feeling of newness and magic of being able to be or get anywhere you want. An evolution I still didn't understand was the exit signal, the escape.

One night, I wrote it in a hotel, in a country I don't even remember, in a notebook nobody has ever read: "I never got one wrong. But I never pursued any of them. I always waited for an easy result and then quit like an idiot."

Thirteen years to understand something I already knew from the first night.

The problem was never outside. Never.

---

I won't tell you what happened next. Not now.

I'll only tell you that at some point I stopped getting off the wave. Not because I'd become someone else. Because I'd seen and understood the pattern.

At every beginning, curve and the same damn exit the only constant was me.

And when you see it, when you become aware of it, you can't pretend anymore.

---

Today I'm sitting in a restaurant. Alone. As always. With something to say and no one to say it to.

But this time I won't leave these words in the notebook.

It's the first letter of fifty-four. One a week, from wherever I am. I won't teach you anything. I have no lessons. No formulas. Just what really happens when you live with this constant hunger. When you don't stop. When it's never enough.

If you know what I'm talking about, you already know.

If you don't, this message is not for you and that's fine.

These letters are born for those who still believe. For those who despite everything are sure it's possible. For everyone who keeps searching, door after door.

For those who know that life can be hard, difficult, but despite everything it's still here. Under a wonderful sky full of possibilities waiting to be seized.

These letters are born for those who don't know when, don't know how, but know the why well.

Because what matters is that we either make it or we die inside our goals.

---

Fifty-four attempts to be better.

This is the first but never the last.

Best, Stefano.