As I wrote, it was a long time since I started to desire to have a blog.
My first contact with the world of bloggers I’ve had it about a year ago because my boyfriend had decided to do so. His main purpose was to try to make it a source of income, so he wanted to write a guide; we started writing about the holiday in the U.S. that we had just done, and while I was writing my emotions during the trip and the most beautiful things we had done, he wrote very “focused” guides on how to do this and that, in which I could not find myself. So I gave up!
Since then, however, I was left with the desire … definitely a blog kind of “how to …”, it is more useful to the public and more profitable, but it was not what I wanted to do .
then when I found out I won this scholarship to an American college, I decided that I should do so, and that should have been as I wanted. And that’s it.
That‘s why I created it “separated” from my profile, and yet I have not spoken to anyone about it. So that the opinions of others could not influence me. Because knowing that a particular person could read it, would not “censor” me. So that it could be more authentic.
Let’s go to the name: my name is not “the girl with the suitcase.” I AM the girl with the suitcase.
The first time I heard this name it was from my mother. When I was 15 years old and living in Milan, my hometown, I fell in love with a boy in Florence. That was the time when I started to packing my life into suitcases, and since then I never stopped being divided between two cities.
Almost every weekend I prepared a large bag and took it to high-school on Friday morning, then went directly to the station to catch the train. I was less than 24 hours in Florence, and then came back. So for almost a year.
When the story ended with him instead of stopping I redoubled my efforts: I felt like everything revolved around me too quickly for me to follow it, I wanted to escape from my dramas and my loneliness.
I had a lot of friends around Italy, and so I began to follow my desire to travel: Brescia, Venice, Rome, Naples, Fano, Bologna … as often as I could, trying to reach someone and spend a weekend out, to live life as it is lived in another city, another rhythm.
Before one of these departures, as I put the shoes sitting on my suitcase in the hall of the house, my mother gave me a kiss and said, “I’ll call you the girl with the suitcase, you never stay still.”
I loved it immediately. At first I thought it was a genuine invention from my mother, who had just put together three words to describe me, that there was no one who had thought of it before. Ignorance…
Since then I have never considered the problem, and that name has stuck to me like glue. Traveling as much as possible, in Italy and abroad, for holiday or not, but what I always liked most was not going on vacation in a place … it was LIVING a place. Go somewhere where I knew the locals, do what they did, live the life of a common citizen.
To give you an idea, I was about 5 times to Rome, but only the 4th I visited the Coliseum and other attractions. All the other times I was just at the house of a friend of mine, went out with him and his friends, walked around with him, and from the car or behind the visor of the helmet I ran in front of all those wonderful works and those incredible views that make up Rome. And I was fine: no tourists, no attractions, only LIFE.
Throughout high school I kept a sort of love for the boy in Florence, but especially for the city itself. I could not forget it, that beautiful town on the river, small but great, ancient yet modern, which looked out over the green hills and protected in his home easy life but fun, intimate.
Throughout high school I wanted to leave. Even before, actually ever since I was a child and I went with my parents to Fano, the hometown of my mother and my grandmother, and I went with friends to the beach, cycling, I running on the beach and then on the hills surrounding, I was riding in nature and not in a cold and sterile handling. As a child I dreamed of living there, then growing that dream had been replaced by other options: Florence, Rome, Bologna … my mantra was “I’ll go to college here,” and I repeated it throughout high school every time I felt out of place, whenever the magnitude of Milan made me feel alone, whenever that gray city made me feel claustrophobic.
well when it came time to decide, my outlook had changed. But not enough to make me stay in Milan! I was in love with a boy from the Marche region, near Urbino, and when I went to visit the city I stood gasping in front of the tiny city surrounded by walls and surrounded by greenery, hundreds of smiling students around for streets, place to a “human scale” as the posters also described the university.
And in a quite natural way, after a year of history from a distance with the boy and the mad desire to leave home and find a new life, more suitable for me, I found myself moving in a shared apartment with 5 girls and enroll at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo.
3 years have passed since then. I’m still with that guy: it was not an easy story, ever. Too many times we were about to give up, too many times we have hurted each other, from every point of view, but then every time we could not separate and came back to try it together.
I‘m still living with roommates: I had a fight with two of the initial ones and thanks to (or because) of that I’ve learned so many things about coexistence between people. With one there is a relationship of love and hate, in which, however, always ends up winning the love. The other change from year to year, each time bringing waves of novelty and fun.
Urbino is small, even tiny. If I hadn’t the car, and the excuse of my boyfriend to go out often, I think I would hate it I admit :) but the way in which relationships are formed here, when you go out on an errand and you find yourself doing a aperitif with friends, to go to college just means a walk (uphill) into the trees, where it means to ride a horse saddle up and venture into the woods and nature … well, all this I do not feel too much is never a lack of a thousand possibilities offered by the overstated Milan.
Before deciding where to go to college, when all my friends were enrolled in Milan and even some of those that I visited in other cities were planning to move there, I often found myself asking, “What am I doing??”.
Are you just running away from your life? Can it really be the place where you live to influence your happiness, or your happiness that influence the place where you live? Changing location may be the key to finding a serenity that where you were born you can not know?
many doubts, so I had no answer. I do not know anyone who had done a similar madness. I felt alone and misunderstood.
Maybe someone else is faced with a similar choice; just in case, I’ll give you the answer that I wanted to hear then:
WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE ARE, ARE SUPERIOR CONCEPTS THAT DEPEND ON US. NOT BY OUR TOWN OR FROM OUR FRIENDS OR FROM OUR SCHOOL. IT DEPENDS ON HOW WE WERE BORN, THE ORDER ACCURATE AND ONE OF OUR BRAIN CELLS, FROM THE EXPERIENCE WE HAD AS YOUNG KIDS EVEN BEFORE WE STILL realize that WE HAD TWO HANDS AND FEET.
BUT THERE ‘S SOMETHING ELSE…PROBABLY IT’S NOT THE CITY THAT INFLUENCE US, BUT THE WAY WE LIVE IN THE CITY ‘YES’. CHANGE IS ALWAYS GOOD: NEW INCENTIVES TO YOU AND MAKE NEW EXPERIENCES THAT WILL CHANGE YOU AND TEACH YOU SOMETHING.
I am not a “happy” person now, in the sense that I did not find any greater sense of peace, nor an inner calm worthy of the Epicureans, nor in Urbino I have found the key to achieving the happiness. But I can assure you that I realized exactly what I needed: I put it to test myself, I changed my lifestyle, I became autonomous and independent, and I feel within me to be a stronger person, more mature, more aware than the one that three years ago came from Milan. And this is what MATTERS WHEN YOU GO: IF YOU FEEL BETTER ELSEWHERE, IF YOU FEEL THAT YOU NEED an EXPERIENCE THAT YOU CAN NOT DO BEING AT HOME, IF YOU FEEL THAT YOU ARE MISSING THE INCENTIVE TO BE ‘MORE’ “… THEN GO, ALWAYS. Will not go wrong.
We come to the last concept, which was then the initial one (it’s one of my faults, I dwell … easily.)
When the idea of opening the blog has been decided, I had no doubt about the name, “the Girl with a Suitcase” had been decided many years ago in my place.
But when he asked me what name I wanted to give my domain, I realized that it was occupied. PANIC!
I opened a page of Google, it was enough to type the first few letters to find out that it was a movie! I had no idea … among other things I am a bit ‘ignorant’ about cinema, but really I had not ever heard! And you? It ‘so famous?
From there it is a short step: it was enough to add the word “blog” at the end of the query, Google has dumped me in front of an infinite number of results.
Well, I do not go as far in originality :(
I spent a good half hour wondering what to do … change? add a few adjectives? number? put a completely different name?
But then I realized: the only name by which I wanted to be called while I was writing this blog, is that. No matter how many other people, or movie, it belongs to: it is mine. It’s also mine.
So I apologize to everyone, to all the girls who have a blog with the same name, to all the movie stars who have starred in the film and also the director. We are all girls with suitcase, all people looking for an identity, all brave and adventurous … and all deserve to call ourselves how the hell we want.