Week 15 of 54 — The Suitcase

There's a phrase that's been spinning in my head for years. I don't even know where I picked it up anymore — maybe I made it up myself one night in an airport.

It goes like this: there's always time to go back. There's never time to go forward.

It's become my way of making decisions. Practically all of them.

And translated into real-life behavior, it's become: grab the suitcase and go.

Because if you got it wrong, you can always turn back. Forward, no — that's the only train that doesn't leave again. Either you catch it in the exact moment you think it, or it dies right there, inside your own paranoia.

And it's a real law, not just something I made up. Mel Robbins talks about it in one of her books, and it goes something like this: when you feel the impulse to act toward something you truly want, move within five seconds, or the idea will die forever.

Think about how many kisses you never gave because of those five seconds. How many sentences — easy ones, hard ones — ate at your soul for weeks just because you didn't say them at the right moment.

It's a real law. And if you use it well, it genuinely makes you happy. You just can't let those five seconds pass, because after them come the "but what if…", the "yeah but I…", and at that point you're done.

But let's get back to my suitcase.

I'm writing to you from Budapest — and more precisely, I'm writing from inside a sauna. Yes, I'm obsessed with saunas, in case you didn't know. I go in knowing I have fifteen minutes: either I use them to make a list of things, or to untangle a list of thoughts. And inside my head I tell myself: either I figure everything out right now, or I stay here and die from the heat.

I like seeing how the brain, pushed into a corner, stops going around in circles and gets straight to the point.

And I'm not joking. Once I stayed in for thirty-five minutes and nearly passed out. I'm serious about this stuff.

Tomorrow I have another flight. And this morning, here in the sauna, staring at the floor, something came back to me.

I've stayed in this hotel before. Two years ago. Three, maybe — I'm not exactly sure.

This photo is from that time. The orange suitcase, open on the bed: it's the same one.

That time, from here, I didn't bring the suitcase home. From Budapest I flew straight to Dubai — documents, residency, medical checks. The real move. I was changing countries at twenty-nine years old, and I was scared in a way I'm a little embarrassed to admit now.

Grab and go. I told myself that time too. And I went.

That decision too, I made in five seconds. It just took me nine years to actually make it happen.

At home, kept safe — which is why I can't show you the original — I still have a piece of paper, written in 2021. A list of things I wanted by the time I turned thirty. At the top: at thirty, live in Dubai.

(Which, once you actually live there, you realize it's a city like any other. But seen from outside, from Italy, it felt like that particular dream — a bit materialistic, a bit impossible. And somehow, it had gotten to me.)

Either way, I made it there. I checked the line.

But today, years later, I remembered the real feelings I was hiding from myself three years ago. I had just launched the company and already had twenty people on the team. And I was scared. A lot.

And now I'm back in the same hotel, with the same suitcase leaning against another door, ready for another city, doing exactly the same thing I did back then. Grab and go.

It's always the same suitcase. It's the only thing I've never put down.

And here I want to tell you something that took me years to understand, and it didn't come cheap.

For all this time, I tried to change the suitcase. I bought bigger ones, nicer ones, the kind people turn to look at in airports. I changed the clothes inside, made them cost more. I changed cities, beds, all those identical white ceilings. I changed everything that could be changed out there, convinced that eventually, by changing enough stuff, I'd finally feel ready to unpack it — that suitcase.

And it never worked. The suitcase changed, the clothes changed, and at the end of the day I was always the same. Same hunger, same fear, same emptiness in the room with the lights off.

Because the only thing that needed to change wasn't the suitcase. It was the one who carries it.

I know this because I wrote it down, at night, when there was no one left to convince. Once I wrote this:

▎ I honestly don't know if I'll ever manage to become who I truly want to be. All I know is that for now, I manage to be who I need to be.

— June 30, 2022

Who I truly want to be. Who I need to be.

For years I thought the suitcase would close that gap. Another flight, another city, another box checked, and eventually the two would line up on their own.

But the suitcase had nothing to do with it. It was me who had to become someone else, while carrying it.

And this is where I was headed all along.

The lie we've been told is that one day you arrive. You put the suitcase down. You finally become who you wanted to be, and you stay there, satisfied.

That place doesn't exist. I never found it, and neither has anyone you admire — trust me. I genuinely made it to Dubai, I call it home, and I haven't put anything down. There's the same hunger as when I wrote that note. There's the fear of falling apart. There are the flights, and the forced smiles you have to wear one after another, before arriving somewhere that then isn't really there.

But one thing has changed. And it's not the suitcase.

It's me. The one who carries it.

It took me an absurd amount of time to understand this, and it cost me: mistakes, bad nights, people left behind, pieces of myself forgotten in airports. It didn't arrive like some revelation, the kind you'd put in a post. It came slowly, a centimeter at a time, almost without noticing. Until one day you look at yourself packing the suitcase for the thousandth time, and you realize you're doing it with someone else's hands. Steadier. Less afraid. Someone who carries that same exact suitcase, today, differently.

I haven't arrived. I don't think I ever will. But I'm not the person who left this room three years ago, with a list in his pocket and terror in his throat.

The suitcase is the same. I'm not.

Last week I told you that identity gets sewn onto us by other people. Well, maybe the only real work of a lifetime is this: to slowly unpick the one they put on you and sew your own. And you don't do it by changing the suitcase. You do it by changing the one who carries it. It hurts like hell, it takes years, and from the outside no one notices. But it's the only thing that actually, truly, moves.

I don't have a clean solution — you know how these letters go. I have a question.

You, over all these years — what have you tried to change? The suitcase, the clothes, the cities, the job, the people around you? Or the one who carries it? Because everything else you can change endlessly and stay exactly the same. Only the last thing — the one you actually have the courage to touch — really moves.

Before I let you go.

I still have the 2021 note. There's one line at the bottom I haven't checked off. One day I'll tell you what it is. Not today.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the fifteenth. Best, Stefano.

Grab and go. I keep telling myself that. Only I've stopped asking myself where I'm going. I've started asking myself who's going there.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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