Feelings of guilt and new resolutions

This article is published in number 2 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 20, 2021

In the first days of the new year that phrase from Dostoevsky always spins in my head, which says: “Despite all the losses I have suffered, I ardently love life, I love life for life, and, truly, it is as I still am. I was about to start my life at any moment. And I still cannot absolutely discern whether I am nearing the end of my life or whether I am just about to begin it: this is the fundamental trait of my character; and also, perhaps, of reality “.

It is nice to find new new ones, in these first fresh days in which we pretend that this year we will not fall into the trap of good intentions and we cultivate them a little. Mine this year is only one: “Fuck the guilt.”

It took me about thirty years to process those for my parents, and I’m not done yet. On those involving children and ex-husbands are at work. Here I want to symbolically share with you at least one full victory, a point in my favor with which to start the new year: the victory over the sense of guilt for how well in the months of the first lockdown, soon it will be a year, I was fine. I have explained this to myself in many ways and I have also written about it here: perhaps the privilege of having a job that you can do alone at your desk, of not having small children to worry about too much, perhaps the adventure, which gives I am always interested in a front row seat in a drama – in March the one in Lombardy undoubtedly was – perhaps that residue of anxiety that makes me more relaxed if I don’t have to socialize with new people as it used to happen to do in normal life.

But if I absolve myself, Judge, for my not thinking of the year just ended as a bad year, it is above all because I finally understood what I found deeply familiar: I grew up in a lockdown.

When I was in Ferrara with my I’s I didn’t know that the isolation in which the combination of my mother’s obsessive anxiety and the Po valley fog made me grow was not so normal: I was just there. From the age of five to fifteen, mostly spent on the sofa, I read all the books at home three times and some afternoons when I had nothing left to reread I took the Motta encyclopedia that my father had bought in installments and happily scrolled through the last volume, the one with the words from Tredi to Zyg. I think I was a very happy child, in my personal lockdown (above, at 8 years old). And since, as another Russian, Tolstoy, wrote, whoever is happy is right, I think it is for that reason, in addition to the things I have considered before, that I am unable to join the chorus of those who hail the past year as horrible. Never as this year have we learned firsthand how sensible is that famous prayer of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who says: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; savoring one moment at a time; accepting difficulty as a path to peace ”.

To subscribe to Vanity Fair, click here.