Falling and getting back up isn’t just a phrase, for me. It’s a specific sentence I’ve been telling myself for years, whenever I need it, and I’ve never written it down anywhere before now.
Hey, you dumbass. You screwed up badly, and it’s entirely your fault.
It’s not a reproach. It’s the only way I’ve found to actually get back up, instead of pretending I already am.
For years before that sentence, I was someone who had everything under control — or at least that’s how it looked from outside, and a little from inside too. I wanted something, I bought it. I wanted to travel, I left. Nothing was ever handed to me, that much I’ll say: I’ve always worked hard, sweated for everything. But when you’re always in the right mood, when you’ve never really had to set yourself a limit, you get carried away without even noticing. That state starts to feel like normal life, not a phase.
Then the mistakes came. Not a small one — the kind you can see from a distance. I broke something important with my own hands, and instead of dealing with what I’d broken, I did the stupidest thing possible: I spent more than a year trying to fix it by erasing myself. I accepted whatever was demanded of me, including leaving my job. I thought disappearing was the repair. It wasn’t. The break came anyway, complete, and this time with nothing left to offer in return.
From one day to the next I found myself alone. No home. No money. No belongings. No job — I’d also left the bar my friend ran, where I used to work with him, the one I’ve already written about here. I went back to live with my parents, at my age, with a suitcase and little else. And they took me in the way only real families know how: no extra questions, no judgment, just the space to get back on my feet when I needed it.
The motorcycle, that I hadn’t lost. It had stayed the one thing I still carried with me from one chapter of my life to the next, even when everything else was gone. I didn’t notice it then. I only notice it now, putting the years in order to write them down.
Hitting bottom wasn’t a single moment. It was a long, confused stretch of time that my brain has deliberately made blurrier than it probably was — a kind of anesthesia that time creates on its own, to protect you. But somewhere in that fog there’s one day that never blurred: the one in front of the mirror.
I don’t remember exactly where I was, or what time it was. I only remember the face I saw — more tired and older than I expected, with the eyes of someone who’d stopped believing his own excuses. It’s to that face that I stopped lying to myself. It wasn’t the situation, it wasn’t the timing, it wasn’t other people. I told it that sentence, and I meant it.
It’s not comfort. It’s the exact opposite: it’s the only way I know to take full responsibility for a mistake without being crushed under it. Looking at yourself, telling yourself the most uncomfortable truth, and from there — only from there — finding the push to get back up. Falling and getting back up isn’t something that happens once. It’s a movement that repeats, whenever it’s needed, again and again.
From that point on, things didn’t go back to how they were. They started over, different. A job at a motorcycle shop in Varese, a small salary and a rented flat paid for with real effort — but it was my independence again, earned piece by piece. Then an unexpected interview with an automotive company, a selection process, a sales role that seemed written for me.
Then another change, a career leap I took without hesitating — and at work I met someone who became first my partner, then my wife. That wasn’t just good news arriving at the right time: she’s the clearest proof that getting back up for real takes you somewhere better than where you fell from. New plans, a home together, and a life that today, with all the honesty I can put into these lines, I call happy — thanks to her too, who reads this blog, and to whom I’m writing this here, this time, instead of only saying it out loud.
The lightness of those years — the guy who had it all, the life of the party — hasn’t come back, and I don’t want it to. It would be easier, sure, to live without thinking twice before every choice. But I’ve learned to recalibrate every time life asks me to, and that’s something that lightness never taught me.
I’ve always been a modest person, sometimes to a fault, in a world full of people who celebrate themselves loudly. A friend — the one who shares his name with a wine, who I’ve already told you about — heard me say not long ago that I felt like a bit of a failure, because I couldn’t keep up with the pace of the people around me.
He told me the exact opposite. Not to comfort me, but because he meant it — and you don’t need to know someone for a lifetime to recognize who’s worth something. Some kinds of validation you have to learn to accept, without vanity and without needing the comparison — because the comparison, that one, is worthless.
It was hard. Thinking back on it to write this piece was almost as hard: there are pieces of those years my brain pushed away on purpose, and that’s fine — not everything needs to come back into focus.
But it was also, in a way I only understand now, beautiful.
If you’ve fallen too — and sooner or later it happens to everyone, in one form or another — I don’t have a recipe for you. I only have one sentence, not elegant, not made for social media, that I repeat to myself when I need it, and that I’ll repeat again the next time I do.
Hey, you dumbass. You screwed up badly, and it’s entirely your fault.
It’s not a condemnation. It’s the only way I know to actually get back up.