[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_50

Diary, Etty Hillesum, 1941 - 1943

While tidying up my bookcase, I came across a small notebook I used as a diary. Taken by a melancholy curiosity, I started leafing through it. Among the many texts, I found one that particularly struck me: it was written in one go, with tiny and almost illegible handwriting, and is dated 15 January 2017:

“I spent my adolescence trying to be present to myself, exorcising the moment in which I would wake up from oblivion as an adult, but I don't know how this awakening happened anyway: yesterday I was twenty,and today I'm almost thirty, and I have no memory of anything that happened in between, except in the words and references of others. I ask myself: what have I done so far? Where have I been? I was here, like now, waiting for tomorrow to arrive.

Tomorrow, change, salvation—but they never arrive. I got stuck in a very long day today.

When I look around, it seems that other people have something to hang on to so as not to get lost, to confuse themselves just enough to move forward: the list of things they have done.

Children and family, first of all. The house to live in. A nice job. But then also diplomas, degrees, certificates, prizes, grades, competitions; keyboard activism, the entire globe visited and experienced, vegetarianism to be brothers of the planet, door-to-door volunteering, the campaigns for future feminists to be emancipated, the propaganda for prevention, the parade of flags for world peace; processions to raise awareness, processions to remember.

I don't have all these things, because I can't believe it.

I want the comfort of satisfaction that inauthentic satisfaction that comes from the gaze of others, from their approval; that satisfaction which is social prestige, which allows you to demonstrate that you are a person, without actually being one, just by unrolling a CV; which will enable you to receive both the admiration and jealousy of others; which allows you to control the idea that others have of you and that returns to you as you have imprinted it in their mind. I want all these things so I don't feel like disappearing while still here. But this is condemnation and perhaps salvation.

I am 26 years old, and I do not have a degree, nor a suitable bank account, I do not have a house, nor a relationship, I have never done an Erasmus, nor any experience abroad, I only speak Italian, I have never done an art exhibition, and suddenly I was too old to start; my long work history includes only bars, kitchens, and hotels; I struggle to make ends meet, and I live to pay for my expenses; I thought studying philosophy at the university would be pivotal and gratifying for my education but I found myself immersed in the dynamics of a high school, in the competition for grades, in the competition for exams and for the attention of the teachers, immersed in an environment for which I don't have the talent, desire or motivation.

I am 26 years old, and I now discover that I am mediocre. I have spent my life making overly ambitious plans and constantly failing, mistaking for bad luck, which was only the counterweight to my disproportion. And instead of feeling disappointed, I feel scared; instead of defeated, I feel alone. It is a slow, dense, total bitterness. But it is dear to me.

Because that's all I feel; that's all that's left. And after so much taking away, after so much denying, it is no small thing to advance something. It's the first time that I've been able to focus on what I have rather than what I don't have.

I am happy with the pain I feel, even if this pain is mediocre: It is not excruciating, and it doesn't make me cry, struggle, or destroy myself; it's more like background noise. I am happy about it because I feel it. I feel it with all of myself, and through it, I realize that I am there, that I am real, that I am true.

I tried for a long time to live in an impossible dream, be authentic, and conform to everything I thought aboutwhat I did, to be, not to seem. But the more I chased coherence, the more I became entangled in roles, poses, contradictions, and naivety, to the detriment of what I cared about most: being a person. So rather than doing what I didn't want to and saying what I didn't like, I started not doing and not saying, so I ended up making apathy a system. I wanted to be pure without knowing what that entailed".

The day I wrote this text, I remember very well the anguish I felt, that of having to accept a future that horrified me. And anger towards all those appearances that I had always rejected but which seemed to make life easier. This text is not only the outburst of a person who realizes that being an adult does not give the power to self-determine, but it is also the mirror of a much more complex feeling: our relationship with time and with our choices.

We are all projected forward: we live to build a tomorrow in which we can finally live with joy and calm. But, in the meantime, tomorrows have not only become today but have already transformed into yesterday's, and they have done so without us. To avoid having to deal with ourselves, we often use others as a diversion and compare ourselves with their lives: it is a way of downsizing, putting one's life into perspective with those of others. But it doesn't work. To position ourselves in this frame, we use the idea we have of the lives of others - or the idea that others leave us of themselves - which does not show all the loneliness, fear, and difficulty behind every single choice, nor does it take into account how our starting points and living conditions are different. Thus, the paths of our lives become competitions: who goes further? Who is more successful? Who has the best life? Who got it all wrong? Instead of feeling close, lost in the same fascinating chaos that life is, we end up feeling like rivals. When I discovered Etty Hillesum, six months had passed since this diary piece of mine.

In her, I found a soul twin lost in time: while she was writing her diary, Etty was the same age as me, and many of the things reported in her notebook were the same that I wrote in mine seventy years later. In her pages, I found my anguish in the face of destiny and the will not give up on it; the same attention towards time: the desire not to waste oneself in thoughts that steal space from one's beauty. She has a touching desire to build meanings full of value in which to find refuge: "I need a roof to protect me," she writes. And her roof is words.

In the drama of the Holocaust and the deportations, Etty Hillesum seeks beauty within herself and, through beauty, the courage to be better than those who persecuted her. Several times in her pages, a mantra returns: "I want to be faithful to my best moments."