Good evening.
Here I am again. I hope you are all doing very well.
I haven’t written in a while because I decided to take some time to visit my family and friends, whom I hadn’t seen in three years. I thought that going back would, in a way, mean returning to a familiar place. After so much time, I imagined that some things would have changed, that others would still be exactly where I had left them, and that, at some point, I would feel that same sense of familiarity again.
However, this trip truly put me through the wringer.
There were moments of great intensity when I felt that I no longer fully recognized what I had once called home. I walked through the streets of my childhood and had a curious realization: I remembered them as being much bigger.
The streets were small.
Much smaller than the way my memory had built them.
And as I walked through them, I thought about the fears I had as a child. Fears that seemed enormous back then, impossible to get through, as if they took up all the space around me. Now I look at them from a different place and I can see their true size. Some of them still matter, while others have almost completely disappeared.
Perhaps growing up is also this: returning one day to the places that shaped us and discovering that many of the things that once seemed enormous were only as big as our perspective made them.
This time, I felt like sharing something more personal. Something that feels especially mine.
I am becoming more and more convinced that what we leave behind in other people has an importance that is almost impossible to measure. There is something that happens when two people meet: a reaction, a shift, a small alteration in the way each person experiences the world after crossing paths with the other.
We never really know how long it will last.
Maybe a few minutes. Maybe a few years.
Maybe we will never know which part of us continued living in someone after we were gone.
I like to think that, in a way, we are like candles lighting one another. One person can awaken something in us without even knowing it. A conversation can change a decision. A look can stay with us for years. A friendship can teach us a different way of loving. Even a conflict can show us a part of ourselves that we had not yet been willing to look at.
And all of this happens while we are still human.
With our mistakes, our fears, our contradictions, our worries, and our wounds.
This summer, I went through almost every emotion.
I cried. I loved. I got angry. I laughed. I was sad. I felt deeply connected and, at other times, completely lost. Memories came back, people returned to occupy a space within me, and situations I thought I had already moved past showed me, by living through them again, that perhaps they still had something to teach me.
It was like a jolt of experiences moving through my entire body.
And something remained after each one.
A feeling. An image. A conversation. A question. An invisible trace.
For a long time, I have lived through very introspective years. They have been important years for me. I have learned a great deal by observing myself, questioning myself, trying to understand my reactions, and searching for a more conscious way of relating to myself and to life.
But there is a huge difference between understanding something when you are alone and putting it into practice when life becomes filled with people again.
When you are alone, many things seem clear.
You can think that you have learned not to react, that you know how to set boundaries, that you have understood your wounds, that you no longer need certain things. And perhaps that is true.
Until you find yourself standing in front of the people you love.
Until someone says something that touches a sensitive place within you.
Until an old dynamic appears again.
Until you feel fear, anger, attachment, joy, or desire all over again.
Then it is no longer about what you know.
It is about what you do with what you know.
And I think that is what this summer reminded me of.
Life is practice too.
We cannot spend all our time trying to understand ourselves before returning to life. At some point, we have to go back to the streets, the conversations, the embraces, the disagreements, the people who have known us for years, and those we have only just met.
That is where our ideas stop being ideas and begin to become experience.
Perhaps that is why this trip was so intense. Because for a while, I stopped observing life from a certain distance and stepped completely back into it.
And stepping into it means feeling.
It means that some things hurt.
It means laughing until your stomach hurts.
It means discovering that you missed someone.
It means getting angry and then asking yourself why you were so angry.
It means loving.
It means losing control a little.
It means remembering that you are still learning.
And perhaps it also means allowing other people to transform us.
There is something I find especially beautiful about this. We can never know exactly what effect we have on someone. We can try to be conscious of our words, our actions, and the way we treat others, but there will always be a part of it that lies beyond our knowledge.
We can leave a trace without even realizing it.
And we can also carry the traces of people who are no longer part of our lives.
That does not necessarily mean that we need to keep all of them. Some experiences need to remain in the past. Some relationships come to an end. Some versions of ourselves no longer make sense.
But having lived through them makes them part of our story.
Perhaps, in some way, we are an accumulation of encounters.
People who taught us something. People who hurt us. People who loved us well. People who arrived when we needed them most. People who were there for only a moment. People who forced us to change. People who lit up a part of us that had been asleep.
And we do the same in their lives.
Sometimes without ever knowing it.
That is why, after this summer, I feel a gratitude that is difficult to explain. Even for those experiences that shook me. Even for the moments when I had no idea what to do with myself.
Because they brought me back to a place I had been searching for over a long period of time.
Back to life.
To that part of life that cannot be completely understood, controlled, or anticipated.
And perhaps that is what I needed to remember.
That I am not here only to understand what happens to me.
I am also here to live it.
To allow myself to be affected by people, by places, by losses, by encounters, and by everything I still do not know how to name.
I know that every experience leaves something behind. Some traces will disappear with time. Others will remain for much longer than we imagine.
And as I keep walking, I try to receive them with a certain curiosity.
I do not know exactly where they are taking me.
I only know that each step brings me a little closer to the end of a chapter.
And perhaps, for the first time, I do not feel the need to know yet how the next one begins.