Not long ago I watched a film that left me a little shaken. Thoughtful. Melancholic, in a way I couldn’t quite trace back to its source. Cinema itself doesn’t contain emotions; it merely evokes them. Which means that if something stays with you after the credits roll, it’s because of you—your history, the dog you had as a child whose death first taught you what grief felt like, your parents’ messy divorce, or the abandonment you experienced during your first heartbreak.

What’s on screen is nothing more than a mean little kid with a stick, swinging wildly. Most of the time he misses. But every now and then—very rarely—he lands a blow exactly where you never expected to be hit, on a day when you thought you wouldn’t have to deal with anything remotely like that. That’s the magic of cinema—and storytelling in general. That fucking kid. The one I’d happily slap across the face and snap his stick in half. Wonderful.

The film revolves around a road trip that lasts only a couple of days. Two old friends, permanently drunk, always having “one last drink.” They know how to savour life’s small pleasures. They laugh, and they make you laugh. It’s genuinely hilarious. And yet there’s this quiet melancholy humming beneath it all. The life that could have been and never was, mostly sacrificed at the altar of relentless hedonism.

I don’t want to spoil the film, and this isn’t meant to be a film review anyway. But it presents two sides of the same coin. Hedonism—the endless chase for one last drink, one last trip, one last high, whatever form it takes—has its obvious appeal. The question is: when do you stop?

That’s where the kid with the stick caught me right in the eye. The little bastard.

To Stand in Awe

I’ve said countless times that I love simple solutions to complex problems. The other day I came across one, recommended by Arthur C. Brooks.

Brooks argues that, in order to be happier, we need to shift from being the constant object of observation to becoming an observer:

“The trick for well-being is balancing your I-self and me-self. But most of us spend too much time being observed and not enough time observing. We think constantly about ourselves and how others see us; we look in every mirror; we check our mentions on social media; we obsess over our identities.”

Hrvoje Šimić’s latest article made me think about this too. He shares a similar intuition when he says he’s grown tired of all the navel-gazing he’s subjected himself to over the past few years and wants to turn his attention back to the outside world.

I couldn’t relate more.

Sometimes introspection doesn’t illuminate us—it hollows us out.

Brooks suggests one way out of that loop: to stand in awe.

Maybe that’s why the protagonists of the film, despite having so little by so many standards, manage to have the time of their lives over the course of forty-eight hours spent drifting from one bar to the next. They genuinely appreciate what’s in front of them: a cold beer, a slice of prosciutto, a shrimp cocktail. Simple pleasures.

So why did I walk out of the cinema feeling so profoundly sad? Because the protagonists reminded me of the old nomadic wolves I've met throughout my life.

Old nomadic wolves

There’s a particular type of person who has always fascinated me—and, to a lesser extent, repelled me. I don’t know why, but I’ll call him the old nomadic wolf.

I met my first old nomadic wolf six years ago on a road trip through Bulgaria. We were sitting in a beach bar in Varna. It was summer. Good music was playing, we were drinking cold beer, and a man in his sixties overheard us speaking Spanish and struck up a conversation.

I can’t even remember where he was from anymore because he belonged to the world more than to any country. He spoke six or seven languages—he casually threw in a few sentences in Catalan, which impressed me—and lived from hostel to hostel. He worked as a graphic designer. He drifted from bar to bar, from woman to woman, from drink to drink.

Even back then, at eighteen, I had mixed feelings.

Part of me thought it was extraordinary that this man exercised his freedom so completely, living exactly the life he wanted, outside the script everyone else seemed to follow. That part of me admired him.

The other part couldn’t stop asking the uncomfortable question:

What are you still doing here?

Shouldn’t you have put down roots by now?

Since then I’ve met countless old nomadic wolves, in every shape and form.

I make a real effort not to judge the way anyone chooses to live. Most of the time I succeed. But I struggle with the old wolves. Because they awaken something in me that’s frighteningly familiar.

Fuck, am I gonna be one of them in 30 years time?

The Nomadic Self

It’s in the title, folks. The whole reason this Substack exists is my desire to face uncomfortable truths through writing. One of the biggest ones is that I can’t stand fucking still.

Whenever life starts asking something permanent of me, I get the urge to leave. I’m a cliché with legs, I know.

Almost two years ago, I found myself in a situation not unlike the one I’m in now. I was in the Balkans, broke, paying cheap rent, trying to write something that might shake someone up.

The biggest difference is that back then I lived with the constant anxiety of missing out on life. I never really gave Athens a chance. It’s not that I regret leaving, but I can’t honestly say I ever lived in Greece—and that still pains me.

I was just passing through, the same way I passed through Newcastle, London and Edinburgh, no matter how long I stayed in each place. Or maybe it wasn’t the same way at all.

What bothers me about Greece isn’t that my time there was temporary. It’s that I was never fully there. My mind was always exploring alternative ways of living. A little more acceptance would have brought so much lightness. Had I surrendered to the reality around me, I’d have appreciated the movie nights, the cats that came to visit us, the wonderful flat I was living in, all the delicious spanakopitas, the views from Lykavittós.

And that’s the main difference with my current situation. I’m done with retroactive appreciation. What’s in front of me? What can I be thankful for today?

I'm in Ljubljana. I don't think I'll stay forever. But for now, this is where I come back to. I have a few commitments — my flat contract, the job in a hostel I have for the summer — that force me to embrace the reality around me.

Where a couple of years ago I saw a prison, I now see liberation. When I come back home after a long day of work and I ride through Tivoli Park at full speed or I go for a drink with one of the guests I'm reminded of how good it feels to be alive. I'm learning to stand in awe.

Making a living. Meeting people from all over the world. Getting to create every day. All this nature around me. It’s enough. I can stop searching for now.

We’re all just passing through in one way or another. Maybe the problem isn’t moving on. I think it’s more about not letting fear decide when you do.

That’s the distinction I’m still trying to figure out.

What do you guys think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Like a sunrise or sunset, anything so ephemeral. Just like our life - we appear and we disappear and we are so important to some, but, we are just passing through.

-Before Midnight (2013)

My writing’s been getting sloppy. Cause you see, we are all aware how precious is your time and how your beautiful little monkey brain will decide if this is worth reading or not only after the first 2-3 sentences. Let me save you some time when taking that decision: hell yeah it is.

The reason why? Because immabout to reveal an inexorable truth. Yes, I will and I’ll do it for free. Today for you, tomorrow for me, innit how that goes? But it’s not even about that. It’s pure altruism. This shit provides me meaning.

Anyway, the other day I was reading this novel where the protagonist meets a homeless dude that guarantees him he can cure his thromopheblitis —or any other condition really — by taking this simple action:

He was very concerned about wheter counting up to five hundred made it three minutes, the protagonist says. He guesses it’s because he’s reminiscing about his arithmetic record back in school. Isn’t that hilarious.1

The protagonits vowes to take his advice because that hobo was Buddha. The result was that in three months his phlebitis disappeared completely and never showed up again, which, he claims, was amazing. Every doctor he told about it afterwards thought he was crazy, but who cares.

This whole thing made me think about how in the pre-internet era this is really how information would be transmitted. Someone would have read something somewhere, mentioned it in a party, and suddenly we got a whole gang of people on their heads drinking milk and honey. Isn’t that beautiuful. I imagine y’all upside down and it almost brings tears to my eyes.

So yeah, before going to bed, hot milk with honey and a 500 hundred second headstand. You got it. Remember to breathe through your nose too. And read some Rachel Cusk. Won’t help with anything but her literature is real nice.

Growing up, I was always terrified that at some point the experience of growing would stop. It happens quite often: when people are young, life happens and they learn from it at a dazzling speed until one day everything slows down, and the days suddenly become weeks, and the weeks months, if you know what I mean. It’s almost as if time units lose value — fewer special things happen on a random day. People start looking forward to their weekends. You follow me.

I think the whole point of growing up — no matter your age — is trying things, making mistakes, and learning from them. That’s what we all do when we are kids and teenagers. Later on, though, one has less space for mistakes. Isn’t it funny that in these kinds of contexts people usually say that instead of fucking up, you gotta grow up? How’s the later gonna happen if you don’t give space to the first?

I don’t think the key to actually doing well in life is simply doing what you rationally know is good for you. Or maybe it is, but I never managed that way. I need to make the same mistake over and over again until my whole system interiorises that it ain’t the way to go. That’s how I’ve been slowly but steadily eradicating toxic behaviours: by getting bored of the part of myself that keeps repeating the same patterns.

Again, you dummy? Didn’t you learn from last time?

With time, and after tripping over the same rock way too many times, I started noticing that I no longer feel like taking the same toxic decisions in similar contexts. Which may sound obvious, but it’s been a huge psychological shift for me.

Because it has allowed me to fully embrace those same choices that at one point felt like the biggest fuck-ups of my life. To finally come to terms with the fact that I adore feeling alive, and that I’m not afraid of taking big decisions and learning from them. Because that’s the only way I know how to keep moving forward.

And the best part of it all: it just keeps getting easier. No decision feels like life or death anymore — because it isn’t. I’m slowly teaching my body that we’re good: we’ve got a roof over our head, food on the table, cool people around, music, and amazing literature for the rainy days. No need to stiffen up or stress or tense up or fight, freeze, or flee.

I come back home after a nice day alone — reading and thinking — and see this graffiti that reads: “How long is now?”

I stop for a second and realise that, since I first crashed this party, I’ve squeezed every drop out of the 24 rounds this planet has made around the sun like a crazy motherfucker.

Now is forever.

I love my new room. I have space to be, to exist, to do and not do, to feel, to flee overwhelming encounters and go in search of elusive realities. It is a space that, for now, lacks personality—long white walls, a bed, a desk, an armchair. I want to add controlled chaos—not disorder—splashes of life. I want it to be a refuge for my friends and, at the same time, to be only mine. I want a projector, a sofa, a bookshelf. Another desk just for producing music. One of those old, beautiful coffee makers. I love coffee.

Not long ago we spent a weekend in Graz and, above all, we drank a lot of coffee. The host had sent us a message saying we could drink as much as we wanted; we had Starbucks capsules, three different kinds, a coffee maker and a milk frother. We drank in bed, at the living room table. Between episodes of my favorite sitcom. Watching a Barça–Madrid game. Reading.

I surprise myself wanting all these completely unnecessary things for my room. In renunciation there is freedom, and yet here you have me, manifesting a wooden bookshelf or a sofa my friends could crash on. Trifles that keep me entertained.

You know when you see the reality that surrounds you from the outside? You see yourself living in another city, walking its streets with different people by your side, in other apartments and other rooms, and for a few seconds you see that everything is an absurd game. Depersonalization, it’s called. But what is my person, when do I feel most myself? Let’s assume everything is a lie, that it is, indeed, a game. Everything moves so fast, the board spins, now it’s good and before it wasn’t. There is no starting square because time doesn’t exist. Everything is simultaneous. I am 23, 16, and 42 at the same time. I see myself from the outside and I’m amused. I don’t give a shit.

In a restaurant in Zagreb we talked in the group about the Museum of Broken Relationships. Clo says that a specific object—a letter stuck to a pane of glass that was later smashed into a thousand pieces and placed in a container—seems performative to her. I turn that word over in my head. So well chosen. Performative. And I think, I wonder, whether I too am being performative when I write, now. Am I trying to project a specific image of myself? If so, which one?

This isn’t about pretending that I don’t care about anything, that this city is freeing me and driving me crazy in equal measure.

I still care about what you think and that pains me.

Friday, 30th of January

I finally finished the master’s applications for next year—I want to study again, maybe not necessarily a master’s but I do feel a hunger to learn and go deeper—the article I had to write at the end of my volunteering, a video I had to edit where I spoke to camera, a website my aunt asked me to make, an email I’d been asked to write with exhaustive recommendations on volunteering and ways of doing nomadism, and on Thursday I did my last workshop for BOB.

And now, after having finished all that, I have time. I’ve been using it to numb myself, ignoring my social limits—since when did it become so easy to make such good friends?1—to the point that I’ve barely felt like doing the things I usually do alone. There’s always someone to think about, or to see, or to fall in love with, or to marvel at, or to use to confirm my worst nightmares.

After running my workshop I came to the conclusion that I need to stop and observe. My life book lacks chapter endings, the beginnings of others. And I want to draw them using this momentary freedom I possess, that rara avis in the society we live in: time to do nothing, without responsibilities, places to go, things to do or goals to meet. Far from Cartesian divisions, to make myself indivisible and indistinguishable from life itself, paraphrasing Pablo D’Ors from memory.

I decide to step away from everything and everyone for a while in order to understand how to move closer to them. I decide to walk a one-way road toward the country of return. How? Through renunciation, stillness, and surrender.

Saturday, 31st of January

After 12 to 16 hours of fasting, the system begins to “eat” old cells, replacing them with new ones. Significant levels are reached between 16 and 24 hours. This process is triggered when cells are deprived of nutrients, reducing insulin and recycling damaged components to obtain energy. It’s basically a process of cellular cleansing and recycling in the body. This phase is called autophagy because, literally, one begins to eat oneself. Whoever came up with the name had the soul of a writer.

Several weeks ago a childhood friend of mine was visiting me here in Slovenia—if you’re reading this, hey. We were walking through the streets of Ljubljana and I was telling him how disappointing the English term “climbing gym” is—not to mention “climbing shoes2.” In Spanish we say rocódromo, made up of the lexeme roc—from rock—and the suffix -dromo, used to designate places intended for an activity. I told him that although the Spanish word was much more interesting, surely we could come up with an even better one ourselves. We looked up how to say “to climb” in Latin or Ancient Greek and started playing with the options. Scandarium. Anabation. Petrodomos. Rocatorio.

We laughed and proposed words, each stranger than the last. Shortly after, I realized how, with that friend, we tended to play with language and ways of communicating ideas, sometimes to the point of exhausting those around us. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this; I think it’s because yesterday someone mentioned him and I called him, so he must be fresh in my memory. In any case, it seems interesting to observe how one can be creative in any activity one undertakes3, in this case a conversation.

Lately I think a lot about creativity. Beyond one’s hobbies, or whether one has a more artistic side or not, I think creativity is indispensable for each individual’s fulfillment. I’ve never felt this as strongly as now. I’ve mentioned it several times already, but these past months I’ve felt considerably more creative than usual. And it’s not that I’ve been killing myself creating. I’ve achieved a certain regularity with these posts, I keep writing new songs every month, I’ve edited a couple of videos recently. But I’m not talking about all that. I’m talking about a way of understanding the reality around you. When one feels connected to the source of creativity, everything takes on a different relief. Solutions appear to problems that never even become problems. Life seems, in essence, simpler. You’re one conversation, one hitchhiked ride, one call away from accessing a door you didn’t even know was there before.

Sunday, 1st of February

Today I thought again about a trip I took last summer. My friend Eugenie and I went to the Alps to hike for a week. That trip served two purposes: the first, to make me realize I wasn’t in as good shape as I thought. The second, to access a level of concentration I didn’t know I had. I say this because, despite my great passion for literature, I suffer from the same ailments as most of my generation—a tiny attention span—which translates into the fact that although I have a developed reading habit, it tends to be characterized by short periods spread throughout the day or the week. There’s nothing wrong with that, if it weren’t also for the fact that, in addition to not being able to read for long stretches—which I think is normal, since we weren’t designed to read but to live—it makes me bored easily and leads me to avoid dense literary mountains. The problem is that years ago I grew tired of superficial literature or pure entertainment—nothing against it, it just no longer says anything to me or entertains me—which means that precisely the books that attract me most are the ones I never finish.

Going back to that trip, seven days with just one other person is a long time. There’s room for many fantastic conversations, but also for a lot of time when you simply wish not to interact with the other person. That time before going to sleep, after hours of walking and observing my surroundings, I used to read on my e-book. I surprised myself by seeing that, having removed the jarring stimuli from my life and having dedicated my days simply to walking, observing and, to a lesser extent, conversing, I plunged into the—virtual—pages with voracious interest. I read for hours before collapsing into my sleeping bag. And these weren’t obsessive reading episodes like those of my youth, when I could devour huge fantasy novels in days without pulling myself away from them. No. On that trip I read slow chronicles, interesting but everyday. Yet they took on a level of depth I hadn’t been able to see before.

One of the things I want to recover now that I have time is that way of reading.

Wednesday, 4th of February

Today I learned that Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville, that iconic photo by Robert Doisneau that I once had hanging in my room in London, was the result of a staged setup4. I remember studying that photo closely—I had it above my pillow, alongside other travel memories—and wondering about the lives of its protagonists.

By Doisneau I also love Le violoncelle sous la pluie. I wonder whether that, too, was the result of a vision and the participation of a willing collaborator, or a product of chance and the ability to look. I want to think the latter, although it really doesn’t matter. The photograph is still beautiful and it still portrays a Paris that no longer exists. I looked for that Paris—with tenacity and desire—and I didn’t find it.

Now, however, I find myself in a great city like Ljubljana, and I only know this Ljubljana. I never read stories of the capital in the 90s, a hotbed of culture, live music and clubs in which to lose one’s darkest shadows, according to people from my parents’ generation that I talk to. That specific period interests me—and the time before its independence, when it was still part of Yugoslavia—and how it was lived by its people. Perhaps it’s time, once and for all, to let curiosity turn into research.

But as I say, I only know this Ljubljana. And to me it doesn’t seem expensive, nor overrun by homelessness, nor dirty, nor more boring or less alive than that of the 90s, as most locals assure. Which makes me realize two things: first, that the feeling that living conditions are worsening is a generalized sensation both in Western and—central? eastern? — Europe. Second, that we’ve normalized levels of prices, dirt, pollution and gentrification in cities like Barcelona, Paris or London that are far removed from what should be acceptable.

Today’s world invites you either to surrender and accept that everything is worse—that it will take you much longer than your parents to buy a decent home, if you ever manage it at all—or to understand life as a game in which, through hustles outside what’s conventionally established, one can, if not escape, at least coexist with the system. Those who choose the latter will live a life of frustration but also of adventure. An exciting one. And they will be precisely the greatest artists, entrepreneurs, leaders. That’s why, all things considered, I have faith that our generation will be one of great revolutionaries. Because discomfort does that: it bends some and pushes others. And the selection is never arbitrary.

5th of February

Dry January is over, and proof of it is that it won’t stop raining. I catch glimpses of a life of absolute uninhibition, with no need for alcohol or dangerous highs.

I’m very young, but I’ve already put myself in so many unfamiliar and alien situations that the future doesn’t scare me. I know what it is to drift too far from everything, to get too close, to lose yourself and find yourself again, to love badly and to love too little — which is the same thing — to free yourself, to lock yourself up, to stress out, to surrender to euphoria, to sadness, to dependence and to detachment.

I know what it is to walk with one hand tied in front and the other behind, always looking for shade, avoiding the rain or soaking in it. I know what it is to lose, to win, to give things up. But above all, I know that I know nothing, and that everything I write in these pages is irrelevant bullshit — and that literature has been built, more than anything else, on top of exactly that.

And I can’t stop laughing about it.

But self-destruction no longer suited his new clothes. Maybe that’s why he started to feel happy. The boy had to find new hobbies. Here, an enlightened person might have suggested self-discovery. Don’t all those gurus see the trap of self-discovery? The only way to reach areas worth exploring is to try without trying, without resistance but also without drowning in the waters of laziness or the self-destructive habits I mentioned earlier. What is the difference between indifference and self-discovery, you ask. The former is the key that unlocks the latter. But there is no key, so stop looking for it. Or don’t, for all I care.

So the lad says to himself, alright, now I’ve got time. I don’t have money, but I’ve got time. A room overlooking snowy streets, near an inmense park. And all the time in the world. A certain calm envelops the room, the books that weighed so heavily in his rucksack when he moved. And the lad thinks about what he wants to write – songs, novels, essays. He’s always thought about it and never done it. He has always talked about the past, and the past has spat in his face. So he says to himself, enough, I won’t go down that path anymore. I will write without writing and live without living. He will enter the realm of absolute indifference. Come on, guys, I’ve been talking about this for the last few articles, so pay attention. The boy is managing to take some weight off the human experience!

And yet he still has insecurities and days of anxiety that disrupt everything. Tears that flow of their own accord and relationships that break down without him being able to do anything about it. But everything is getting smaller and smaller and only a couple of things remain: art and love. Only those two remain and the rest doesn’t matter. The boy feels loved, he is still learning to love but he tries hard and lives, at last, surrounded by art and creation. Little by little, the boy stops thinking about money, resolutions or goals. The goal has already been achieved. He never thought that day would come, and yet look at him. He is a little boy, playing with his toys. It is ironic that he has never been so close to becoming a man as when he plays like that. I watch him fail and succeed and play again without too much care and think of Bukowski’s Bluebird. The cage’s been opened and the bluebird’s flying.

i have a box at home back in bcn full of old diaries and letters i used to send to people i thought i loved and today i opened the box and maybe i shouldn’t have i don’t recognise myself in them and i don’t recognise barcelona what anguish i don’t understand the reason for so much anxiety when is my brain going to relax when is it going to decide that that’s it it’s going to shut off let it shut off leave me just enough neurons to put one word after another to play four chords on the guitar and to read simple stories about people living extraordinary lives

when i go back home i always go crazy what is home anyway i’m not going to say stupid shit like my backpack is my home or my people or my body or my soul i don’t know what home is half the time i don’t recognise my mind there are patterns to avoid that i recognise things that make me sad or anxious and things that help me deal with sadness or anxiety i have to remind myself to remember to stick with the latter and not let them turn into mere memories of conversations with my psychologist or mentor truly there is something that isn’t right in my head and that’s okay

“today my mother has died or yesterday i don’t know”
(Camus)

what a beginning to a novel
paradigmatic

opening the box i realised that before i used to look on screens and in books for meaning and everything devoured me alive i remember newcastle the streets leading to monument square which indeed had a monument in the centre sunsets that cried and asked for my attention i walked a lot three four times a week to the angel of the north an hour there an hour back walking and listening to music was one of the few things that made everything bearable even if i wasn’t happy i always managed to see the beauty

in the box there was also paris and edinburgh paris was me slowly falling out of love with it —it wasn’t how woody allen or hemingway had told me— edinburgh was working in a hostel where i lived dealing with all sorts of people having an amazing plan for the night one convo away and missing her if i learnt something from that box is that i’ve spent most of my adult years missing someone

there was palermo this mercurial city where everything feels possible and athens so much athens where even if it was brief i had a home i still don’t know what that term means but it’s true i had one there i laughed i loved i couldn’t find a job or maybe i didn’t want one i felt extremely lost and now looking back maybe i didn’t try hard enough everything is in that box

london too working making money spending money thinking about money feeling isolated in a huge city and excited about the opportunities gardening in my neighbourhood keep making human castles meeting people i still think fondly of even if i might never see them again

everything is in that box

all about my declining mental health all the sessions all the heartbreaks all the loneliness and spiritual crisis and lack of belonging and mistakes and successes

and all of this comes back now that i return to bcn and open the box and realise that yes now i am happy but yes i run along an edge and i look at the precipice and i’m terrified of falling again and that’s why i make risky questionable decisions i remove those commas of sanity of composure in an attempt to laugh at the precipice to tell it you don’t scare me but it’s a lie it knows it terrifies me and it’s on days like today that i think no there are things that never leave chronic shit that not even playing with punctuation marks of life can eliminate a certain cadence always stays

conversations move things and now i’m fine and i talk about the past and it doesn’t bleed and i can remove commas and write nonsense and publish it and fall in love with life again or with others i can feel gratitude i can read bukowski and lament dario fo and laugh or joan didion and think i’d love for her to be my friend i can walk through the streets of ljubljana or ride my bike at full speed i’ve finally learned to ride without hands i can get drunk every weekend and tell myself it doesn’t matter find at the far end of my bed a refuge where i can rest or i can find her in it and feel at ease knowing there’s time reorder words eat slices of pizza at 1am i can create chess rivalries fuck i can even get in a car and cross the balkans i can make music every week and i can be happy and open the box full of letters in my old room in bcn or burn it down for all that matters and have pandora with nothing she can do about it

but it won’t change the unappealable reality

the precipice is still there

I once read Stephen King asking himself what the fuck writers who only put out two or three novels in their lifetime did with their time, and it made me laugh because I was asking myself the opposite: how can someone like him spend every day of his life writing? I love writing and reading, but they are nothing more than a way of recording life, that life that goes on out there while you’re writing. In some way one has to make a trade with one’s finitude: accept that one is going to spend hours not living, seeking another kind of posterity through literature. I suppose if you’re Stephen King it’s worth it. But mediocre writers are just introverts who spend too many hours at home.

I’m now reading a novel about a group of poets, young Latin American hippies who live through literature in a performative way. They want to break with what is established, and the kind of literature they produce is… well, I’ll let one of the characters in the novel explain it to you:

There is literature for when you’re bored. It abounds. There is literature for when you’re calm. This is the best literature, I think.There is also literature for when you’re sad. And there is literature for when you’re happy.There is literature for when you’re eager for knowledge. And there is literature for when you’re desperate.The last one is the one they wanted to make.

That’s me. A desperate reader and writer, wishing that literature would shake me as much as The Catcher in the Rye did the first time I read it as an early teenager. I think my adulthood has been characterised by that search for intensity, not only in literature but in life, in my travels.

On the other hand, over the past few months I’ve been subconsciously feeding a narrative that undermines that nomadic desire: I beat myself up for moving, for not settling down or cultivating steadier ties, tell myself to stop, and read my restlessness as proof that something’s wrong. Maybe something is wrong, but that isn’t the point; if I’m going to keep going anyway, I may as well do it with my head held high and while enjoying myself.

I’m tired of saying A and doing B, of living in permanent contradiction. The solution, in the end, is simple: drop the narrative — silence the voice that judges every step — and keep rolling with the punches.

The truth is I’m 23 and the only thing I want is to take on the world. To seek my truth in Bolaño or Salinger — I'll have time for Tolstoy or Proust later — to write badly, impulsively, desperately, and to live the same way, until I get tired, until the weight of my experience is too much, I say that’s enough, and then I’ll simply sit somewhere with a good view, I’ll stop walking and, as I say, I’ll sit knowing that I did it, fuck, that I lived, and even if I still won’t be a writer for not having spent all those hours shut away writing, it will be because I will have done other things, many mistakes, yes, but good things too, after all I tried, wherever I went, to have a positive impact; it sounds cliché but that’s how it is. And maybe then I won’t be a writer, nor anything at all, and the shadow of regret will threaten to settle on me, but by then it will all be the same. It’s all the same already.

By then, what I do hope is to live generating nostalgia. That’s what I want to do. But then to not feel it, to stop looking back. To put it in a box called literature and throw it to the bottom of the sea.

I suppose then I’ll be what I would call a creator of unlived nostalgia.

That’s what I want.

We were sitting in a bar in El Raval that I had chosen, thinking — from its shabby, worn look, the old ladies at the entrance sitting on plastic chairs, even its name, Las Marinas — that it wouldn’t be a tourist trap. When it came time to pay the overpriced beers I realised I was wrong.

There were five of us: Javi, an Argentinian I’d first met in Slovenia; Luca and Romeo, Italian and French, from a project in Hungary; Ciccio, a Sicilian I met in a small town near Palencia; and me, the point connecting them all. Them, and the other six people who had come to visit me those six days. My intention was to create a space to connect many of the people who had played a central role in my projects, travels, and experiences over the past years.

We were all listening to Javi with full attention. At the end of the day, he was the one who had been at this the longest — chasing alignment, wherever it might be found. I suppose it was about breaking the conventions of how we thought a life should look; being able to see beyond, and then follow through.

For me it’s always been about understanding interpersonal relationships.

Connecting with people

If I added up the time spent with each person at that table, it averaged maybe two months apiece. And yet, in many ways, I felt closer to them than to people I’d known for a decade. Someone else who came to that gathering later told me the same thing over the phone: they had just been at a party with their lifelong friends, yet somehow felt more connected to those who had gathered at my place — even if they had only known them for a few days. My friends are less honest, they said. They’re not mean, but you can just tell everyone’s pretending. They’d put into words something I’d felt my whole life.

It’s not like the people I met travelling or volunteering abroad weren’t “normal people” living their normal lives. Still, I’m pretty sure that if I had met some of them in ordinary circumstances, we would never have become friends. Is it all just a matter of context? I hope not — otherwise it would mean one can only form these meaningful connections while travelling. Which isn’t ideal for maintaining them, given how transitory those encounters are.

But maybe that’s the key. Maybe I felt more like myself around them precisely because I knew our time together was temporary, stripped of the weight of social conventions. And maybe nothing needed to be maintained at all. Maybe the real key was simply to enjoy those connections fully — and then move on.

Why do I think about this so much anyway? I do suspect I have trouble understanding interpersonal relationships. Maybe I’m autistic.

Am I though?

I remember vividly my first solo trip, when someone first suggested I might be. I was lying in bed at the hostel where I was volunteering in Sofia, reading a book, when a colleague said it out of the blue. He wasn’t joking; he truly meant it.
“What makes you think that?” I asked, slightly offended.
“The fact that you’d rather spend the night reading than going out with us.”

The real reason I didn’t want to go out was because the way he and his friends approached women struck me as predatory and made me uncomfortable. Still, that doesn’t mean he was wrong — about me being autistic, not about him being predatory.

But that’s beyond the point. No one really cares if you’re autistic unless you’re too autistic about it — like making it a big deal by writing a newsletter about it, as I’m doing now. Hell, maybe I’m not even autistic. If I’m not, then I’ve just offended a whole community. Never mind.

Free therapy

Once, while working at a hostel in Edinburgh, I checked in a lovely South American woman in her forties. She lived in Madrid and was a therapist. We had a warm conversation about our lives. The next day, one of my colleagues texted me to say she was at the front desk needing help but only spoke Spanish, and I was the only one who could assist. When I arrived, she was swollen like a balloon — a massive allergic reaction. It was my day off and I was tired of socialising with guests, but since she didn’t speak English I accompanied her to the hospital.

While waiting to be called, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to get free therapy. She couldn’t exactly run away, inflated as she was, and that way I could at least salvage something from an otherwise wasted free day. I know — I’m a terrible person.

After listening to my litany of first-world problems, she delivered her verdict: Maybe you’re autistic.

You thought the autistic thing was over, huh? She didn’t actually say that. I just wanted to see your reaction.

What she really said was that I should take advantage of the professional opportunities the UK was offering me, instead of “chasing a chick in Eastern Europe as soon as she told me to move in with her”. Ouch. I didn’t like her advice, so I ignored it and left the country a few weeks later, as I’d already planned. But guess who came back a few months later to England to work in a “respectable” job?

When I told my grandmother I was going to stop travelling for a while because I’d found an office job in London, she reacted as if I had been a heroin addict announcing I was going into rehab. She nearly cried with joy: Marc’s finally settling down!

The therapist was wrong — not about the ‘chicks’, but about the nine-to-five office job. I tried, and it didn’t work. Which brings me back to what Javi said: it’s all about spending every day doing something that aligns with yourself.

In a quest for meaning

I have never felt more lost about what the key to a fulfilling life might be as I am now. Not life in general — I’m not here to solve your problems, buddy — but my own. I know it’s not expected of me, a self-absorbed, privileged twenty-three-year-old Western European, to have it figured out already. But still: I just want to be permanently in peace, do cool things constantly, and, if possible, get paid for them. Is that asking too much? Is that desire shameful, considering how privileged I already am?

Which brings me back to what I was saying at the start: the only difference between the people I’ve met while travelling or volunteering and those in “normal life” is that the first group aren’t afraid to admit they have no clue what they’re doing with their lives and trying to do something about it.

The streetlight effect

I’ll finish with a story that is somehow connected to what I’ve been explaining:

A man loses his keys at night. He looks for them under a streetlight. A passerby asks if that’s where he dropped them. The man replies, “No, I lost them in the park.” The passerby, confused, asks why he’s searching under the lamp. The man answers: “Because this is where the light is.”

That night, under the streetlight outside the bar in El Raval, I felt I had a vague sense of where my keys might be — and at the same time, no clue at all. After all, the park is enormous.

In any case, I can start by stepping away from the streetlight.

If you read until here, feel free to drop a comment and tell me what you think about all of this. I’m genuinely curious.

Thanks for being there :)

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