I have always been a daydreamer. I have been writing since I learned how. I lived in and created my world. As a child I lived in the moment and created. My world never hit borders until I started going to school where the universe grew smaller and smaller around me, a world where possibilities started to shrink and dreams were not realistic. I was impressionable and yet it took a long time to crush my artistic spirit. Teachers would knock on my mother’s door with raised concerns and unfounded diagnoses or they would use physical and emotional violence against me in the name of education. School felt confining and terrorising to me, a backward-faced, creativity-killing vocation-slaughterhouse that restricted my imagination and tried to tame me and everything that mattered to me and that I was good at.
I dreamed about writing, painting, acting, singing, performing, anything to do with the arts, but the point is that I stopped at one point and felt incapacitated, blocked, dreaming away, wasting away, conforming in destructive ways, not listening to my own calling. I didn’t write anymore. I didn’t paint. I was told to forget about my dreams. There’s no money in it. It is impossible. Repetitive limits, limits, limits. I believed against myself. And I suffered tremendously. I lost my voice and the contact with my inner child.
Everything changed when I entered a certain grade and met those teachers that woke me up again and inspired me with their passion and knowledgeability, when I could choose which studies I wanted to pursue and deeply resonated with me: literature in English, German, French and Italian. What a game-changing blessing. I felt seen and heard.
Gradually I collected all the meaningful sentences of encouragement that I had heard in my life and started to write again.
I write the way I write. I write what I want. I write.
I write because I was quiet.
I write because I have a lot to say.
I write because it heals me.
I write because it exorcises me.
I write because I am listening.
I write because I am paying attention.
I write because I don’t forget.
I write because the dead are still alive.
I write because there are so many things that I couldn’t say.
I write because the past still hurts.
I write to transcend.
I write to liberate myself from the worlds of people that held me captive.
I write because I live within a field of nuances.
I write because I empathise.
I write because there are things we don’t talk about.
Croque-Melpomene
There is a French expression, “croquer la vie (à pleines dents)” which means living life to the fullest, having an appetite for life.
Melpomene is one of the nine muses.
The way I see her is that she metamorphoses a traumatised self into an artful self.
Creativity and destruction fuelling one another relentlessly.
Fingers on the pulse.
Transgenerational trauma turned into transgenerational health.
Tragedy and comedy, life and death mould her.
She breaks the mould and rebuilds it.
Croque-Melpomene 