September

A fresh start

September has always been a charged month for me: it signals the beginning of school, at any academic level and in my case, it had the same meaning up until 2023; last year I started writing my dissertation during this month and now, having graduated, I am realising this is the first year of my life I have no obligations. I have no new teachers to meet, new subjects to study, nor new exams to worry about. I knew this day would eventually come and a part of me really looked forward to this moment; however, now that it’s here, it feels a little weird and I guess I still have to really wrap my head around this newfound freedom (if we can call it that).

Because of this routine, September has long coincided with the idea of a new year, a fresh start and personally, it made more sense than considering January as the beginning of a new era, mainly because my life better aligned with academic calendars, which all started sometime around this month.

This is the reason why I always took up new sports, set (unrealistic) goals for myself, tried to become the best at something in the span of a month and so on. Spoiler alert: it does not work, it never has and never will, at least for me. I am pretty sure this can be explained by my defining (and incredibly opposing) traits of being a perfectionist high-achiever and an extremely lazy procrastinator. Very few things I attempted to turn into new (healthy) habits have stuck over the course of the years; as of recently, I guess the most consistent has been working out, because I finally found a form of exercising that I genuinely like and that excites me and it’s actually the third September I go back to the same gym and manage to attend courses on a regular basis.

This year, being the first time I have nothing pre-planned, I am trying to be more realistic and accepting of my limits, by setting lower expectations and simply waiting for my life to unfold, one day after the other. As I’m writing this, I am currently homebound because of bronchitis; I am hoping to recover as quickly as possible to go back to my (pretty filled up) daily schedule, but I have come to learn that life is truly unpredictable and trying to control every aspect of it is nothing but useless.

Having said all that, I would like to address the elephant in the room (or at least the one I perceive): I haven’t written a single post in more than two months. I have shared a couple of notes where I essentially said that I was busy and that I would write as soon as I had more free time but I guess that was just an excuse (or at least not the whole truth) and now that I am coming back to Substack (though on different terms than the previous ones I had established for myself), I’d better get some things off my chest.

If you have been following me since the beginning (or shortly after), you probably know that I used to post once a week and that I only took a break to prepare for my trip to Paris, a topic I have extensively talked about in many previous posts. These last publications did not even begin to receive the same attention my past articles had got and I honestly didn’t take that really well. I had always imagined I would write about all the stories I collected from those two weeks away, alone in the city of Light and that people would want to know about them, just as they liked to know about my deep connection with music, which is the main topic I tackled on my newsletter when I started this profile. Seeing the numbers plummeting down was hard, but I decided I would try and get over it, because I had so many ideas for new pieces and I still wanted to write.

By then, I knew that publishing weekly would be too hard to keep up, because I had already postponed my newsletter multiple times and because the consistency I had nurtured in the first two months did not reward me in terms of numbers, not nearly as much as I had anticipated. I understand that it is arrogant to talk about statistics when I said on multiple occasions that I wanted to write for myself but let’s be honest for a moment: everybody wants to be perceived, seen, appreciated, liked or even admired for their work and I am no better than that; I never expected to become famous off of this platform, but I did want to grow a following, an active one who was excited about all my posts. I also fantasised about having a somewhat viral piece, something that would be cool to talk about in conversations, but even more so to demonstrate to myself that by doing something completely new and scary and I was being rewarded. I think that my initial goal was to be read by someone other than my close friends and to be able to share what was on my mind; however, as the weeks passed and the newsletter slowly grew, I felt I could aim higher and reach more and more consents. I do not blame myself for thinking this way, I believe that both purposes can co-exist and I have accepted that.

I wasn’t lying when I said that I was working on a long piece back in July, I had already sketched the outlines of what I would be talking about and written a third of it, but I suddenly stopped when the possibility of working part-time came up. I had been looking for a job for more than a month by mid-July and I was desperate to find something that would fill what my dull days had become: what people don’t say about gap years is that even if you take one right after graduating, you still need money to exist (in this economy more than ever lol) and once I settled back in after Paris I knew I would have to start applying for different positions. I wasn’t (still am not) interested in finding a 9-5 job, but what felt like freedom to do whatever I wanted with my days at the beginning of January was slowly becoming asphyxiating: after 6 months I wanted to dedicate myself to something, to occupy my days and weeks with more than coffe dates with friends and running errands with my mum. To cut a long story short, I started working the last week of July and from that moment on I kept on postponing my return to Substack, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t writing for a good reason (spoiler: I wasn’t, I was just being lazy).

Now that I have settled in at my job and my sister is finally married - I was her best man and I had to overlook some aspects of her wedding, a task I took extremely seriously, which resulted in a couple of sleepless nights and unjustified anxiety (I love you, I know you’re reading me!) - I have no more plausible excuses and I am writing this piece to make a promise to myself: I will pick that pen up and no matter how hard I find writing something, I won’t quit. I still want to share my thoughts and feelings, I have lots of ideas and I won’t allow my laziness and my procrastination to get the best of me this time. I started Davide’s gap year to challenge myself and I intend to keep my original word for once, without abandoning this project halfway through out of lack of consistency.

So yes, I am coming back, for sure. I can no longer guarantee a weekly submission, because I know that sooner or later I’d skip a deadline and feel bad about it, but I am determined to keep my thoughts flowing and I really hope that someone’s always going to be interested in them.

Thanks for reading and thank you so much for waiting, I hope you’ll stay a little more.

Davide <3