Seek, and you shall find

When I get desperate, I find something to keep myself busy. My husband looks at me with dread every time he sees me, frowning, in front of YouTube tutorials, searching for a new challenge to silence the beast inside me that scratches at the walls of its prison – my body – longing to break free, without knowing how. It’s funny: when I met C, quite a few years ago now, he used to silence his beast by walking up hill and down dale through the streets of San Francisco, but he stopped doing that (the walking, I mean). I suspect his beast is sleeping peacefully. I ask him about it, and he tells me he now has three (P, CA, and E) and that walking doesn’t work to silence them.

But let’s get back to my beast, which I call my demons in the plural, because they make too much racket to be just one. My demons these days complain of being bored. Last year, I sacrificed myself at their altar and burned them with a blowtorch, throwing myself into ten thousand work projects. The fire scorched me right up to my eyebrows, and I can still smell the charred flesh of my insides. So, now that the demons have risen from the ashes like a phoenix, I have to be very careful about what I undertake.

I invoke my mother, who takes a plane to spend Easter with us (it seems this is all about quasi-divine sacrifices), and she listens to me rant about how disappointed I feel at the lie my ancestors sold me: that if you work hard, you’ll be rewarded. She listens as I reproach her, saying that, in reality, I inherited my nature from her– and what a legacy that is: always asking questions, always seeking new challenges.

My friend M turns up in Copenhagen to see the city, and I ambush her, only to end up talking about God’s plans and my questions to the Universe (all washed down with Aperol Spritz, which isn’t very Danish but is absolutely delicious). I suspect she came to discover ‘hygge’ and left with two bags full of doubts. What a rip-off. She also declared that people who ask themselves questions ad nauseam tend to die asking themselves questions. I don’t know whether to weep at the prospect that awaits me or laugh at the irony of wanting a long life.

I send my sister– supreme priestess of common sense and my personal confessor–mile-long voice messages, taking advantage of the fact that she’s at work (I’m really good at ambushes), to express my discontent with the Parable of the Talents. I end up crying to her on Signal: “I want to say to God: dude, go to hell, because you’ve given me these talents, but you won’t let me do what I want, nor do you tell me what I’m supposed to do with them.”

But this isn’t about my talents. The parable isn’t about personal abilities, but about the responsibility entrusted to you and what you do with it. As I was saying, this is about what I do when I feel trapped – not in the sense of a lack of space, but of excess energy with no outlet – in a place where I can’t do as I please. I go around looking for problems.

When P was born, the problem was figuring out how a baby worked (spoiler alert: nobody knows, which is why there’s so much literature on the subject). I read so much to crack the code that C suggested I write a review for a scientific journal. I knew it all, only to discover I knew nothing.

When CA was born, the problem I got myself into was saving the world from global warming. By 2018, you’d find us every Saturday hopping on the train to a ‘zero waste’ shop to buy pulses, sugar, flour, and other non-perishable goods in cloth bags. C, who enthusiastically supports all my initiatives, told me he drew the line at veganism after trying to make a pizza with plastic mozzarella and spending his nights in terror that the authorities would come and strip him of his Italian citizenship.

When E was born, I was determined to regain control of my pelvic floor and, whilst I was at it, become Nadia Comăneci. I didn’t manage to do a pull-up, but I did run a half-marathon for the first time.

You might wonder why the demons come creeping up on me with the birth of every child. But it’s not the babies; it’s the maternity leave that I find unbearable. Instead of relaxing and taking naps, the lack of intellectual stimulation that comes with looking after a human being 24/7 leaves me exhausted.

Lately, my demons have been nagging me again, and I suspect it’s because the children are now independent, I sleep through the night, and I’m really good at my job. Where on earth is the challenge?

When I told T about my problems, she got it perfectly: “You sound like a drug addict, Ana.” This addiction to challenge, this friction as the driving force of life that consumes me.

Since I decided that 2026 would be the year I’d say no to all extra work, I find myself looking for a challenge at home, because watching Bridgerton on repeat just doesn’t quite do it for me. So I decided to find myself a new problem.

The thing is, C and I are looking for a house, and in our search, I fell in love with a house built in the early 1900s, and although it’s not perfect because it needs (a lot of) work, whenever I go inside or look at the photos, all I see is potential. C is much more sceptical and wonders why we’re going to pay an exorbitant price for such a dump. Obviously, I got really angry with him and his lack of enthusiasm. When he told me how much work (and money) the renovation would cost, I knew immediately: this is exactly what I need, I thought, to renovate an early 20th-century house. In my mind, I’m already the love child of some DIY queen and Gaia, because I haven’t mentioned that this house has a large garden with a current appearance that borders on the deplorable.

How can I prove to my husband that I can handle this? I’ll start small: refurbishing the kitchen chairs and planting a few flowers on the terrace. I’ve equipped myself with a sander, paint stripper, scrapers, a face mask, gloves, soil and seeds. Everything.

Today I’m spending the day stripping paint off the first chair (my sincerest respect to furniture renovators) and, to take a break, I’m planting bulbs, hoping they’ll soon become flowers. Whilst listening to ROSALÍA in the background, LUX on repeat, I hear ‘Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti’ and I notice I’m crying without realising it. I remember that grain of wheat that must fall and die to bear much fruit.

I can’t decide which LUX song I like best.

Let’s go for Memória. Have a listen to the whole album.