Here we are again, with another year about to end. You have to excuse me for my silence in the last couple of months, but some things in my life needed particular attention so I haven’t had enough space in my mind to sit down for new writings on this blog.
Even now as I write these words, I am somewhat disconnected from the blank page. In my defense, 2025 has been an emotional roller coaster that I haven’t overcome yet, and I’ve got this bad feeling that 2026 is going to be a hell of a ride for quite some time.
This is to say that this year’s recap won’t look as my usual year’s recap. I’m going to highlight few, memorable things, but that’s it. No lists of any kind, then, just what was worth my while.
work
I lost my job this year, but I was prepared and in September I joined Verlata as a member of the IT department. For the first time in my life I’m working for a social cooperative, which gives a different value to my work. It also asks me to get accustomed to the fact that I won’t be providing software to car factories, banks or insurance companies.
The more I embrace my new career the more it looks like this is a change I was in dire need of. Perhaps it would’ve happened anyway, even if my previous company didn’t shut down. Or maybe not, maybe I needed to be forced into it. Whatever the case, I’m ready now.
education
Thanks to Ribellione Animale I fell in love with nonviolent communication and the world of facilitation. This has led me to join a proper course where I can challenge myself all the time with a new set of skills.
Facilitation is as much about working with a group of people as it is about discovering yourself. It’s a paradigm shift in that it pushes me to look at the world within and around me with another pair of eyes altogether.
What’s more, I’m not even halfway through the course yet and I can safely say it’s going to be a transformative experience.
music
One thing that’s been sort of constant throughout 2025’s most turbulent days is Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, revealed to me in all its intimacy by Warren Zanes’s lovely Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.
It’s hard to explain why an old record combining tales of murderers with its author’s past has meant so much. Springsteen’s true intentions here aren’t really clear to me, for instance. Is he trying to sublimate his own experience through the lives of ambiguous characters? Are their stories the evil side of what his conscience is telling us? Is he just a great storyteller and there is nothing more to it?
I don’t know and frankly I don’t care either. What I do know is that Nebraska tells me something relevant to me with every song. And by the way, Scott Cooper’s film inspired by Zanes’s pages is gorgeous.
the end
It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain … remember, remember, this is now, and now and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I don’t want to blot the fear out, and blur the edges of living now. I want to become acutely aware of all that I’ve taken for granted.
— Letter to Edward Cohen, Sylvia Plath
Happy New Year.