The truth is you shouldn't have read any of this.
It's not meant for you, really it's not meant for anyone. I've been writing this kind of stuff for years, in places where no one knows me, at tables where no one sits with me, in cities I change before I can call them home.
But today is different, today I won't lock these thoughts in my drawer.
For a long time there's been a feeling I can't name. It sits between my chest and throat.
And 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 exists 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 what 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 Sunday. You die.
The rest is noise in a town of a thousand inhabitants whose name, Galluccio, means nothing to you.
As a kid I picked hazelnuts, chestnuts, grapes and olives. Not to buy myself something. To get away. I didn't know where but I knew my place wasn't there.
I also waited tables. I carried plates to people enjoying their evening and what was a Friday night for them was a test for me. Of patience. Of endurance. Of something I didn't understand yet.
My mother would say: "stop playing grown-up games." It was her way of saying don't hurt yourself. The world is like this. Accept it.
I never could. Not out of courage, but out of inability.
Then at seventeen someone told me a sentence I shouldn't have taken seriously. Instead luckily I took it seriously.
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 others and every time I rode it I got off before it reached shore.
Not from lack of talent. From something worse. A chronic impatience disguised as intuition. The conviction that if something doesn't explode immediately, it's not the right one. That the next beginning will be the breakthrough.
It was "the beginning" that was the drug. That feeling of newness and magic of being able to be or go anywhere you want. An evolution that I still didn't understand the exit signal, the escape.
One night, I wrote it in a hotel, in a country I don't even remember, in a notebook no one has ever read: "I've never gotten one wrong. But I've never persisted. I've always waited for an easy result only to 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 after. Not now.
I'll just say 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, every curve and the same fucking 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 find myself. I won't teach you anything. I have no lessons. I have no formulas. I only have 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 know, this message isn't for you and that's okay.
These letters are born for those who still believe. For those who despite everything are sure it's possible. For all those who keep searching, door after door.
For those who know life can be hard, difficult, but despite everything are still here. Under a wonderful sky made of possibilities waiting to be seized.
These letters are born for those who don't know when, don't know how, but know well the why.
Because what matters is that we either succeed or we die inside our goals.
Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the first. Best, Stefano.