In such a particular, insecure moment, when it is vital to think about the aftermath in an encouraging way, we ask three pieces of advice from those who, in our opinion, have the right to offer.
Francesca Sanzo is a writer, author of, among others 102 kilos on the soul, A stone's throw from the goal, You are your story. He is forty-seven years old and lives in Bologna in a small apartment that he has created for himself in which, in his “yellow corner”, he teaches autobiographical writing courses. Francesca's job is this: to help people and companies to tell each other effectively. But it doesn't do it with cold slides and presentations, no. It does so around a table with ten participants, in the course of meetings where warmth, gaze and contact are a living source of lessons. Talking about oneself is important, both for a person and for a brand. Telling one's own story, one's experiences and what one has learned from them, helps the writer but also the reader who must be able to find himself in the written one. Because the stories are inhabited by messages, dreams, inspirations. One can find the strength to change, to overcome an obstacle, a challenge. This is what Francesca believes in, what makes her love her job, which she talks about with a twinkle in her eye.
And what we are experiencing today according to Francesca is a situation with a high narrative potential. “We are all immersed in a great challenge that is putting us in front of our ghosts, our weaknesses. And it is up to us to learn from all this trying to make the best of it, trying to look to the future by putting all our skills, the desire and the effort to learn new things, to reinvent ourselves. Because anything can happen to us; the only freedom we have is to choose how to deal with it ”. In this period, of course, she is not allowed to hold the courses as she thought them. But she, far from extraneous to the concepts of resistance and resilience, did not want to give them up: she transformed them. Every Friday here she is again with her students, on Skype, a glass of wine in hand, hours together to read stories. A way not to be annihilated, not to leave to the wind what he built with sacrifice. Waiting to get back together, to the table, to his relational courses, in his yellow corner. And while waiting, also a way to find the right recipe - mixing adaptability and stimulus to react - to restart, to be reborn.
Restarts and rebirths
In fact, his story speaks of restarts and rebirths, delicately told in 102 kilos on the soul - which this year will have new life with the addition of a chapter. To be reborn in another form, to start again lighter. It is the story of an obese and bulimic girl, "With 102 kilos on the soul and hips", as he says with a smile, who decides to change, to live a "wetsuit". But facing such challenges is neither easy nor immediate. To begin with, you need basic assumptions: stop scolding yourself, treating yourself badly, seeing yourself ugly, believing you are not enough. Learn to love yourself, accept yourself, forgive yourself. Only after having metabolized all this was Francesca able to begin the long journey that led her to lose forty kilos in one year. And to be reborn, to leave again, to learn to walk again and then to run, to live a new, healthier relationship with food. But no change happens without pain, "No change occurs without inner revolutions, without an effort, no change occurs without applying a little discipline, without having to reconfigure one's sentimental geography, that is to understand how we want to live our relationships, how we want to live our relationship with ourselves and with others, understand what authenticity is for us ".
Francesca's life experience, her story, makes her the ideal interlocutor for us because, in search of advice to offer to readers on how to approach tomorrow with courage, her voice seems to us as kind as it is authoritative. Something precious these days, to be treasured.
Francesca's three tips on how to look forward to tomorrow
First: Listen. Listen a lot, empathize with people.
Second: Recognize our social role: each of us, even when we work, even when we do something that is only apparently functional, actually has a very important social role.
Third, fundamental: Never think that afterwards it will be a war. They told us that now we are at war but probably, economically, afterwards we will feel at war. Here, we always think that afterwards we will all be people who will want to regroup around a new identity, which none of us yet know what it will be, because we should first process the collective trauma. We will all have some sort of frustration, but those who will emerge will be those who will be able to tell and interpret hope.
