Where are you from, and why?

I took the wrong tram. I know where I am but I don't know where I am going. I meant in life. [Shared on Twitter - February 10, 2015]

Is this what a quarter-life crisis is supposed to look like?

Waking up at noon because my circadian rhythm was stuck in my university days, and going out with friends almost every night didn’t help, but every day felt like a Saturday in this Limbo. During the day, when I was not sleeping, I was driving from office to office, talking about questionable work prospects with so-called experts and trying to pass my theoretical knowledge as useful to anyone who’d listen. All while wondering what I had done wrong, and why was everyone walking securely on their chosen path while I could have a panic attack just thinking about the deep grey abyss that was the future. And it didn’t even have to be far in the future: wondering where would I park my car for the next pointless appointment with government employment agencies did the trick just as well. Until now, my life has been abyssless and nobody prepared me for this.

Great start Barbara. What a positive and bubbly first impression.

In all fairness, I hadn’t been bubbly since the age of twelve, but recently it got to the point where a trip to the grocery store would cause a family feud. It’s like dementors were sucking happiness and motivation out of my pasta-filled Italian soul.

I still remember a time, way back between butterfly hairclips and my first Marilyn Manson t-shirt, when the most important thing was my friends’ validation. One day I even sent out an SMS, likely during a summer unlimited text promo, asking for the adjective that, in their opinion, would best define my teenage self. Breaking news: poll results are in! I was ‘nice’.

Someone who mustn’t think I am nice, rather that I am weird, was the unshaven guy wearing a misbuttoned plaid shirt at the employment agency, who literally pointed at my lack of work experience right after a double degree in Philosophy and asked me if I’d be willing to brush up on my German language to pick up some summer shifts in our local hospitality sector, like serving ice cream on the lake shore. I politely declined, unsure if laughing or crying, and I left clutching my new professional bag. That was the bag I bought right after my first graduation, motivated by all the job interviews I would attend and all the corporate positions I would be offered.

Sorry plaid-guy, I know you have a job and you’re technically the expert, but I do not want to do any of that. I would like to sit at a desk and type things and read stuff, maybe send emails. Look, I don’t know what a job is, okay? All my work placement credits came from working in libraries during the summer, which hardly qualifies as a learning experience. But my dream job, since I was sixteen involves some kind of corporate environment, not Germans on vacation.

Courtesy of Canva PRO, a proudly Australian product for creative pistachios.

Later, I cried in the privacy of my car haphazardly parked in my hometown’s furthest free parking space because I didn’t know where the office was and I was running late. My life in a nutshell.

Truth hurts and I often wondered what would my friends have said if I asked them a follow-up question to that SMS:

Okay, I am nice, so what’s my ‘but’?

Clearly, my motive back then was far from existentialist. At present time, I feel like my ‘but’ would be that I have panic attacks on ladders, I go into fight or flight mode at the supermarket, and I utilise Harry Potter as a coping mechanism. I don’t know if this is a ‘but’ but I’ve also let my mother convince me to join her in attending a neuro-linguistic programming (aka life coaching) weekend workshop, which felt more like a cult, in a questionable hotel just outside Milan, right on the highway.

The course itself was actually not too bad.

Is this what people say when they genuinely thought something would be utter crap but turned out to be remotely bearable? Like when someone gives you something unusual and exotic to eat and you try it out of politeness, already regretting all the life choices that brought you to that point in time, and the food itself turns out to be not as bad as you thought it would be? Yeah, that.

Most importantly, it uncovered an approach to life’s challenges I have not considered, like being positive and shit. Although some of the people there were way too much into it. Hence the cult alert. They cheered and had books written by the speakers to get autographed. I know, it could have been worse, it could have been human trafficking or drugs, but instead, it was just a bunch of overly motivated extroverts. Some may call them Gen Xtroverts.

Did you get it? Because they’re mostly over the age of 40 and that’s Generation X? I promise you I am funnier in Italian.

It amazed me how some people can find the inner motivation to do things like fighting crime or going for a jog on Saturday morning, yet I couldn’t find the will to brush up on my German. But here I was, spending my Saint Valentine’s weekend learning about life coaching that felt a lot like self-bullying and brainwashing.

“What do we say?”

“YES AND!”

“When do we say it?”

“ALL THE FREAKING TIME!”

One of the ladies at the course asked me what brought me to this event, I pointed to my proud mother next to me, and then she asked me what’s my plan now that I’d graduated. Honestly, I came here for the free breakfast and now I have this weird reflex that makes me say “I don’t know yet, but I can find out!” instead of telling people to leave me alone. I blurted out something about maybe travelling to Australia to see my boyfriend and working abroad for a bit, and she simply asked what was I waiting for.

Good question, overly involved stranger. I guess I’ll find out!

Once back home I spent some time going through my notes from the weekend and I uncovered a convenient piece of information that, I didn’t know at the time, but will shape the way I live my life for years to come.

Long story short, for those of you who are curious, there are two kinds of motivation: one is towards something you want to achieve, and the other is away from something you want to avoid. The aim of self-motivation is, of course, to improve your quality of life by growing and evolving, so the ‘right’ way to motivate oneself should be the first one. That comes with having a vision and performing all the necessary steps in order to reach a goal. You know, like a normal human being. But when the motivation is directed away from an unwanted situation, then it doesn’t really matter what the end goal is, as long as it’s not this and not here. Coaching snobs that go to weekend workshops may argue that ‘away’ is not a direction and this is not a sustainable nor reliable source of motivation.

Well, tough. I am not a coaching snob, I am more like a coach blob.

And would you like to know what looks to me like a direction? Australia.

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With tremendous concern and poignant suspicion, I bring you, the artificially crafted podcast version of this article. My first article. Dissected, highlighted, conversed, and presented by two absolutely non-human entities from the deep notebookLM intelligence.

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Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence:

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Writing about my literal life journeys

Bonus: The Postcard Club on Substack