As a young girl I imagined a different future and being an artist (I don’t get high nor smoke or drink, I’m an atypical artist I know) I thought that my skills, both artistic and intellectual (I always had excellent grades in school) would have me taken far, in every sense. I have always dreamed of a life off the cursed island, Sicily, because as soon as I grew up a little and became old enough to understand certain social dynamics, I felt suffocated in my aspirations. My parents wanted me to finish my studies, find a rich husband and get married and bake some grandchildren for them. Instead I didn’t do any of this. I have not followed any rules of social life that tradition imposed. Immediately after high school I went abroad to pursue my artistic dream but I was forced to return because my mother was sick and I took on my responsibilities as a daughter and still do it today and in return I do not receive than criticisms and always negative judgments. In part you are right, I have not been able to get even the minimum of what I aspired to in my artistic life but on the other hand I have a situation that everyone envies me.Of course, after having understood how things are going, after having discovered that “either you follow the rules of the market or you stay out of every field”, the choice to continue on the difficult and fruitless path of art is truly crazy. But I can’t turn my back on myself and my fantasy, and especially in recent times if I hadn’t had all these dreams with me yet, I think I wouldn’t have been able to go on. Sometimes instead I say to myself, trying to convince myself, that it would have been better not to have these dreams at all and not to have all these creative abilities, since up to now they have not brought me anything concrete because I do not compromise for any reason and I do not I want to sleep with anyone to get credit. This crisis due to covid pays for itself first of all precisely those sectors of genres that are considered unnecessary, and art is one of them. Certainly having a nice painting hanging on the wall does not fill people’s stomachs so even I wouldn’t feel like persuading someone to buy a painting rather than buying groceries. First of all, I myself have had to give up those beautiful things that make life more pleasant (dinners out, accessories, hairdressers, cinema, theater, concerts, cosplay fairs, …) and so why shouldn’t others give it up too ?! The covid spared no one. So what’s the point of creating so many beautiful things if they have to remain closed in a box or drawer? Being an art therapist seems nonsense. Working with autistic children seems inconsistent. Yet it requires a lot of patience and a lot of control. But I never talk about my passion for saving children.
I’m not a huge fan of the idea that men and women are fundamentally different in what they value and how they approach relationships. To me, the ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ mindset seems as outdated and irrelevant a way to understand men as ‘The Rules’ – the ones that say you should never call a guy, never accept a Saturday date after Wednesday, and in general, play hard to get. Both of them stem from books that were on the bestseller list more than twenty years ago; haven’t we come a long way since then? Here’s the thing, though. The Rules work. And many men really do operate on a totally different playing field than women do, when it comes to relationships. As much as I’d like to deny it, and not to pigeonhole men and the way they behave, it’s true that there are certain things about men that seem to be true across the board. If you try to deny it, you’re likely to end up frustrated, with a string of failed relationships to show for it. I’m not saying you have to subscribe to every theory out there about how men and women.
