[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_98

Caliban and the Witch, Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Silvia Federici, 2004

How can we be inspired by the people we admire without feeling overwhelmed? How can our dreams guide us instead of paralyzing us? How can our passions enrich our lives, even if they don't lead us to achieve the goals we hope for? These are questions that I asked myself, rereading some passages from “Caliban and the Witch,” especially when considering the long academic and activist career of Silvia Federici. While scrolling through the list of her publications and collaborations, I started to feel a pressure on my chest, a kind of breathlessness, as if I couldn't breathe. It was anguish.

Anguish is an emotion that has visited me almost every day since I was a child and which has become one of my closest friends, especially starting from my 25. When I reached that age, I suddenly felt incredibly old; I used to say, "Well, I'm practically 30!" I was already starting to feel nostalgic for a youth I was still experiencing. I feared not physical decay or the loss of the age of enchantment. No. I feared the “showdown”; I feared those five years ahead of me, the ones that would take me into my 30s, because I perceived them as the decisive years for the critical choices in life: finding a "good" job (being a bartender wasn't), making my sacrifices in my studies pay off (otherwise having graduated would have been "useless"), redeeming my economic situation (going from a desperate working class to a promising "something else"). In my head, turning 30 was like the final stroke of midnight for Cinderella: both a deadline and a radical change of scene. Just as Cinderella had a few hours before midnight to have fun at the ball and make the prince fall in love, so I had those few years to enjoy my ephemeral youth and leverage all the tools I had accumulated in study and experience to achieve my goals in life, before magically finding myself an adult. The problem was that I had no idea what the future I wanted to do was! The me of the present wanted to continue studying, writing, drawing, meeting new people and having adventures, living on rent with a bartender's salary. This desire contrasted with a future that required non-precarious work, stability, and life as a couple. Who knows? Maybe motherhood.

The result? Years of confusion, paralysis, anguish, depression (a lot of self-flagellation and people who blamed me as a selfish Peter Pan) and then arriving at 30 and finding myself the same person as always, full of energy and curiosity,... and without any desire for routine stability (permanent job, home, family) which had been indicated to me as essential for adult satisfaction. It was as if I had lived believing that after the decade of my twenties, something would change in my brain chemistry and that I would become the "serious" and "diligent" person who loves balance, calm, a safe, and modest life. It wasn't like that. At thirty, I was a state school teacher with an educational and working path that was not linear nor consistent, without a penny in the bank, but with a head full of dreams and great desires to make noise.

Of course, when you are in your early twenties you still don't have a clear historical-economic awareness (for example, I reasoned as if we were still in the years of the economic boom, where social mobility was within reach), much less a clear awareness of who you are (I couldn't even understand what I desired) and you are not yet free from many stereotypes that are transmitted as dogmas (I believed in meritocracy, I was convinced that with my talents and a lot of commitment, I would eventually get somewhere); but I think that the intense social pressure we are constantly exposed to from an early age prevents many young people - like me from the past - from having a more honest and confident look at the future; such pressure profoundly conditions the perception we have of ourselves and of what we want and always makes us feel "out of time."

Right-thinking people repeat that age doesn't matter. Still, everything around us seems to indicate a "best before" label plastered on our foreheads (especially on women): in Italy, the concession for "young people" in museums and theaters concerns the under 25; anti-aging cosmetics target people over 30; the period of maximum fertility of a woman is between 20 and 30 years old; many books and films celebrate the great personalities of history as geniuses who achieved success before the age of 30. For this reason, many clichés reiterate that the 20-30 age group is the most important from a creative and productive point of view; a literary and academic competition that allows good recognition and job placements are open only to those under 30; the same applies to job vacancies abroad; on television older people are mostly men; older women, if there are any, are always exceptional and brilliant personalities (astronauts, Nobel Prize winners, etc.).

In your family, your parents remind you that you have to find a good job and then give them grandchildren and that "you can't wait that long to do it"; your friends organize the life choices of their 20s based on how to buy a house to raise a family even if they have never had a partner and at 30 they already have their second child. The University tells you that you must have your mental health at heart, that it comes first, even before studying. Still, then it bombards you with deadlines, exams, and competitions and tells you that to reach your academic goals, you cannot stop and you must excel (note that so-called "mature" students are not accepted everywhere; nor are "mediocre" students: only a high grade allows you to continue in specialization). Even to start a new job, you need to be of the "right" age and have the "right" CV with a list of the "right" things done in the "right" years.

Age matters, and even children know it very well when, at 13, they are forced to decide which high school to attend. They are left to believe that this choice determines their destiny, that if they make a mistake, they cannot go back because they will be "too old."

Age matters because we live in a context that only recognizes measurable parameters: how you spend your time, how you invest your years, and what counts is the result you get (only if it is also quantifiable). It is paradoxical to think how everything that makes life worth living, everything that gives it meaning, beauty, and depth, is placed on another level, the qualitative one, the level that does not fit into the calculation dimension and therefore makes it useless.

A look of complicity between two people who like each other is quality as well as the warmth of the sun on the skin, the sense of wonder watching a sunset; quality is the sense of comfort of a hug, the joy of a laugh between friends, the creative power that is perceived by doing something you like, the energy that you get from listening to a beautiful song, the sense of liberation of going against rules that were made for others and not for us. Time is also quality, even if it is measured in centuries, years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds, even if we pigeonhole it into calendars, curriculum vitae, objectives to be achieved, because everyone has their perception of their own time and everything that enriches our life - everything that is quality - happens in time, not outside of it. Very often, people are unable to escape the quantitative balance and cave into compliance with social expectations, building their lives under the pressure of a pretend natural countdown, "counting" the things they have done in the period they have lived (work goals and children included) in the throes of an absurd horror vacui. People are afraid of having wasted their time and, therefore, a part of their lives; they are so scared of facing the consequences of poorly thought-out choices: an unwanted and lackluster future.

This is partly what I also felt when reading about the career of Silvia Federici, an Italian-American activist, academic, and philosopher whom I greatly admire. I compared my life to hers to see her choices and path. One of my dreams was indeed to be able to contribute to research, to write something that could add meaning and help people's lives as Federici did, so I looked at her in search of inspiration, a positive model to follow, and perhaps also in search for a bit of hope; looking for some traces that would give me confidence, like "Silvia Federici was a barmaid for many years and then began a bright career as an activist," but what I found was a long list of actions all very coherent with each other, which started from her early youth: one of the co-founders of the International Feminist Collective; teacher and researcher in Nigeria; active in the anti-globalization movement and the US anti-death penalty movement; one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, etc. According to her bio, there had been no "deviations" in her path, nor moments of "uncertainty": Silvia Federici seemed to have always known what she wanted to do and had always pursued it, without changing direction, at the right time.

This gave me an immediate sense of inadequacy, "I'm not trying hard enough," I said to myself, mentally scrolling through the scant list of my activities; “I made all the wrong choices,” I replied bitterly to myself, thinking about how heterogeneous my education was, that is, “non-linear” and “non-coherent.” Then came the anguish: “I'm already 33 years old; I'm too old to realize my dreams. Maybe I'm too old to dream in general." And finally, the horror: "Maybe I don't have any talent, which is why, at 33, I haven't accomplished anything in life."

Although I was aware that this way of thinking was a consequence of the capitalist system that shapes our psychology using the mold of economics, which makes us consume our very existence in the anxiety of a production whose fruits we often fail to enjoy and which makes us identify with what we have not yet achieved. Although I was aware that my way of thinking and my suffering were common in many people of my age around me, and even though I was aware of my background, of all the difficulties I had gone through to be the person I was, and of whom I was proud; despite all this, I fell victim to anguish and intense feelings of frustration, both at 33 and at 25. How come?

I understood why a few days ago, consoling a colleague who had received negative feedback for a job on which she had placed a lot of expectations.

My colleague told me that she was used to getting the best, that she had always been the one who excelled, from when she was little through to university, that she had never failed any challenge, and that the negative result she had just received that day called her very existence into question. “If this is the feedback on my work,” she told me in tears, “then it means that up until now. I have never known how to work, so everything I have done up to now makes no sense”.

She identified entirely with what she did up to the point that a single less-than-excellent job could completely erase the value of an entire life. Her anguish was deep and lacerating: it was the anguish of someone who feels everything she has been given and believed in taken away, the agony of those who think they are nothing.

Although her pain was very familiar to me, the reasons that caused it were profoundly different from my own. She grew up in a family with good economic opportunities, attended private schools, and continued from diploma to diploma and from distinction to distinction, also in a "linear" and "coherent" way, exactly as the system requires, exactly like Silvia Federici's biography. Yet, even though she had all the proper credentials to be suitable for the normative system that regulates us - having been born within the norm and embodying it without wanting to - something still prevented her from feeling suitable or adequate. There was a panic in her that was foreign to me, that of not knowing who one is. As if, despite all the books read and all the excellent grades, she had lost the "Instruction Manual for Life" and found herself exposed to her existence for the first time at 30, completely naked and disarmed.

Witnessing my colleague's pain was painful for me, too, but it allowed me to look at my suffering from another perspective. Despite sincerely criticizing the normative-capitalist system, I realized I had used the same tools to measure my life. I realized how the anguish I felt was born precisely from the contradiction of trying to quantify achievements that could not be quantified because they were placed within the sphere of quality, and how this led me to believe that many choices that made my life unique and precious were useless – precisely because they were not measurable.

When I found myself in professional contexts, where most of the people around me identified with the money they had (or with the recognitions obtained, as in the case of my colleague), I felt like I was living in a schizophrenic situation, of being one and nobody, because despite having my strong identity, there it seemed that no one was calculating it or that it was worth nothing. Not being able to match who I was with what I did transformed me into a cumbersome, invisible person in the eyes of others. I say cumbersome because I often had the feeling of annoying those around me as if the contentment of being as I was despite being nothing was naïve or entirely out of place for those around me. So, little by little, I started to think that maybe I, too, should find my way to conform to the world; if I had conformed a little, I too would have had something to offer – or to show - and I would have felt better.

I also started to follow the line and make consistent choices. But it doesn't work. This type of perspective leads people to follow parallel lines, looking at each other, competing for who gets the furthest or who runs fastest, and it leads them to forget why they are moving forward and why they started. This is how our self-love collapses due to negative feedback on a job because we have built an image for ourselves based on the constant reference to others and made our person coincide with that image. We look for inspiration to move forward in the biographies of authors we love and end up paralyzed in senseless comparisons that confirm our inadequacy instead of giving us the stimulus to overcome it.

How can we be inspired by the people we admire without feeling overwhelmed? How can our dreams guide us instead of paralyzing us? How can our passions enrich our lives, even if they don't lead us to achieve the goals we hope for?

I do not know. But perhaps reclaiming one's age without the "best before date," the qualitative dimension of one's time, and the pleasure in everything that is not a matter of calculation, perhaps can be a good start.