CANTILENE

oh, va bene, ti giuro che va bene, se prego, poi, magari Dio interviene, va bene, ti giuro che sto bene, malgrado le intemperie, e va bene, dai, mandiamo tutto all’aria, tanto, prima o poi, col vento tornerà…

There are some things I want to talk about in this post. It might feel a little all over the place at first, but hopefully by the end it makes sense. It’s a lot and I hope you’ll stick with me.

I’ve been doing a lot of breaking patterns, and it’s really fucking difficult. It’s not easy to reprogram 40+ years of survival, but I’m doing my best. Most days include laughing so hard I cry. Or just crying in general.

I’m not spiraling as much anymore- and I say that very loosely. Spirals still happen, but the amount of time I spend inside them is getting shorter and shorter. Unfortunately, I am not at the point where I can stop one before it starts. But being able to stop it before it completely takes over feels like a milestone worth noting. I’m still not sleeping. I still don’t fully feel safe or at peace in my body. I have faith that will come eventually, but I’m not there yet.

In my last post I talked about running a race I never signed up for. And honestly, I thought it was one of my best posts. I was humbled pretty quickly – it got 8 views. EIGHT. My reach isn’t very big right now. But the whole point of this space is to share honestly and maybe make people feel a little less alone. And I trust it will find the people it’s supposed to find. I’m not trying to stress about it. I know this blog has a sad girl vibe most of the time, and not everyone is into that. It’s fine. I’m not for everyone, and I’m finally becoming okay with that.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I’m going to do my best to put it into words. It kind of piggybacks off my last post, so here we go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

Little backstory: I fucking HATED this movie when I was young. My mother loved it and would gush about it every Christmas. And it is extremely on-brand for me to hate something completely out of spite. Honestly, it was one of the only forms of autonomy I felt like I had back then so I fucking HATED it. Hearing George Bailey yell “Zuzu’s petals!” would send me into a rage.

Recently though, I’ve become hyper-fixated on this movie. Teenage me would FOR SURE be disgusted with me. But the fixation has less to do with the ending of the movie and more to do with what happens after. I promise I’ll do my best to explain why.

The thing about George Bailey is that the movie allows you to watch an entire lifetime of self-sacrifice unfold in a single sitting. We meet him as a kid with big dreams. He wants to travel, build things, leave Bedford Falls, experience a life that feels larger than the one waiting for him at home. And then little by little, those dreams keep getting postponed. Everytime he gets close, something happens that requires him to stay.

Just this once. Just until things settle down. Just until someone else is okay. Just until the next crisis passes. Over and over again. And obviously, helping people you love is part of life. Sacrifice is part of being human. That’s not what I’m questioning.

It’s because all of this happens within the contained structure of a movie that you can actually see the pattern clearly. Over the span of 130 minutes, you watch someone slowly build a life around responsibility while drifting further and further away from themselves.

In real life, it usually happens slowly enough that compromises start feeling normal. The exhaustion becomes part of your personality. And I think that’s part of the reason why this movie hit me so hard at this point in my life and what makes George such a painful character to watch. Because none of his sacrifices are meaningless. The people around him genuinely benefit from his kindness. Entire lives are better because George Bailey stayed. But somewhere along the way, George himself disappears. I think two things can be true at the same time.

Watching George got me unconsciously thinking about all the times I pushed something I wanted aside because something else seemed more important. All the times I chose what I was supposed to do instead of what I actually needed. Not because my life is bad. It isn’t. I’m genuinely grateful for my life. But over the years, the last few specifically, something snapped. I’ve run myself completely into the ground in ways I didn’t even fully recognize. I’ve tied my worth to what I could do for the people in my life and completely lost myself in the process.

What makes everything more complicated is that when you spend a long time in that role, it doesn’t just become something that you do. It becomes something that people come to expect. And when you finally step outside of it, even a little, it can feel like that shift gets noticed immediately. The unspoken expectations are the hardest part. Because once you become the person that takes care of everything, it can quietly create a system where your availability becomes assumed. Where your capacity becomes relied upon. Where your presence is counted on in ways that no one ever explicitly said out loud.

And that’s where things start to feel invisible but heavy at the same time. Because you’re not just managing what you’re doing for others, you’re also navigating what they’ve come to expect from you without ever having agreed to it directly. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for everyone. Again, this is part of life, being there for the people you love. But I also think that a lifetime of doing has gotten me to this point emotionally because some part of me is calling out for a little more.

Not more success. Not more things. Not some dramatic reinvention. Just more connection to myself. More honesty. More presence. More aliveness inside my own life instead of constantly moving through it in survival mode. Because helping people isn’t the problem. Loving people isn’t the problem. The problem is how easy it is to slowly disappear inside of constantly being needed. And I think somewhere along the way, I stopped realizing how much of myself I had quietly handed over. And maybe that’s why George Bailey suddenly felt less like a character and more like a mirror.

Thinking back on it now, what stands out to me most, is how often George’s sacrifices happen without real acknowledgement in the moment they occur. You can see it on his face – the disappointment, the frustration, the split second where his own plans shift again. But almost every time, life just continues moving forward. The situation gets resolved, the responsibility gets absorbed, and George returns to the role of the person keeping everything together.

Even when people are grateful – and they are in their own ways – it doesn’t always translate into awareness of what those patterns are costing him over time. And what makes that even more complex is that he isn’t unloved. There are people who genuinely care about him. Mary, especially, deeply loves him and never stops believing in him, even through the years of stress and exhaustion. That matters. But love doesn’t always equal awareness. She sees him and supports him, but she doesn’t see every internal fracture that builds through the years of constant self-sacrifice. So the weight of it ends up being something George carries entirely on his own.

Uncle Billy losing the money becomes the clearest example of the dynamic – not because it causes everything, but because it reveals how long George has already been operating this way. Cleaning up messes. Absorbing crises. Solving problems. Carrying responsibility that others don’t always fully register as heavy. And that’s why the breakdown feels so real. Because it isn’t really about the money. The missing money is just the final crack in a foundation that had been under pressure for decades. And that’s where the bridge exists for me.

It isn’t one moment that creates the collapse. It’s the accumulation of moments that don’t feel like collapse while they’re happening. Things build quietly. Repeatedly. In ways that don’t always have words attached to them in real time. Not dramatic or visible. Just a slow internal chipping away where your own needs are no longer as immediate as what everyone else needs. Until eventually there’s a point where something in you says “I can’t keep doing this the same way anymore”.

There is so much to be grateful for at the end of this movie. George survives. His family is together. The financial crisis is resolved. The community shows up for him in the same way he spent his entire life showing up for them. That matters. But I can’t help wondering what happens when the adrenaline of that night wears off. Because yes, the money problem gets solved. That was huge. It was the immediate crisis threatening to destroy him. But what actually changes for George Bailey after that? That’s the question I keep coming back to.

Clarence changes George’s perspective. He forces him to see just how much meaning and impact his life had even if it didn’t look the way he imagined it would. And maybe that realization saves his life. But what struck me was that the experience is completely internal. No one in his life knows what actually happened on that bridge. They don’t know he went there intending to end his life. They don’t know that Clarence intervened. They don’t know he was shown an entirely different version of reality where he never existed. That entire collapse and reconstruction is exclusive to George. It only belongs to him.

So everyone only sees the aftermath. They see him come home a changed man, having no idea what he went through to get there. And that’s where I stopped and really thought a lot. Do the people around him actually change? Do they suddenly stop depending on him? Do they suddenly realize what he’s been carrying all these years? Probably not.

That was a private breaking point. They did’t experience the moment where his entire identity, everything he believed about his value, was stripped down and rebuilt in a single night. To them, George came home grateful. Relieved. Renewed. But internally, I believe it was far more complicated than that. Because the external conditions of his life are still the same. The responsibilities are still there. The unspoken expectations are still there. The town still needs him. His family still needs him. And even if now he carries all of that with more perspective, perspective alone does not undo exhaustion. Being needed is not the same thing as being held. And that is where this movie feels so painfully human to me.

The ending isn’t false to me. I think George truly feels joy in that moment. I think he genuinely understands, maybe for the first time ever, that he matters. But I also think that healing from a lifetime of self-sacrifice would take far more than one beautiful night surrounded by people who love you. I think the next morning he is still George Bailey – maybe a little lighter, but the same nervous system, same patterns, same accumulated weight of everything he’s been carrying. I would like to think that in the aftermath of everything, it made people pause just a little before immediately handing him the next problem to solve.

And maybe I’m thinking too deeply about all of this. But George Bailey has become very near and dear to my heart. And it’s because I see a lot of myself in him. Not in obvious ways, but specifically in the quiet resentment that builds when you spend too long tying your worth to what you can carry for everyone else. And I think the reason I keep circling what happens after the movie ends is because I’m always trying to understand what happens when you stop surviving and start living. What do you do when you finally realize your life mattered, but you’re still left holding years of grief, shame, anger, responsibility, and unmet needs? How do you begin again after spending so long emotionally abandoning yourself just to keep going? And I think, in some strange way, I keep harping on what George Bailey would do next because I’m trying to figure out what I do next.

And this is where my thoughts expand beyond George Bailey. Because most of us are living on autopilot in one way or another. Not in a dramatic, movie scene kind of way, and not necessarily in visible crisis. But in the routines, responsibilities, and identities we build that keep us moving without ever really asking if they still fit who we are. So the question for me becomes: what does it actually mean to be living?

You can be functioning, productive, needed. You can be “fine”. And still feel completely disconnected from yourself underneath it all. And yea, maybe the rest of the world isn’t sitting in the kind of emotional breakdown that I’ve been experiencing, I understand that. Most people aren’t actively trying to rebuild their entire internal structure. But I do think most people are carrying at least one thing they don’t fully know what to do with. One question or one quiet uncertainty that hasn’t been resolved yet. And maybe it doesn’t have to be more complicated than that. But I also think there’s a point in life where something shifts – where something cracks open in a way that can’t be ignored anymore. And it doesn’t have to be this big, dramatic thing, but it’s enough to get you thinking.

For me, it felt like my whole internal structure got destroyed. And when that happened, it forced me into a space of figuring out what comes next. And it’s fucking scary. The things that used to keep me safe – even if they were just subconscious patterns, survival strategies, or ways to keep moving – just don’t work in the same way anymore. Or they stop working completely. And being dropped off in an unfamiliar in-between place where the old structure is gone, but the new one hasn’t formed yet, is fucking strange. It’s a place that’s disorienting and hard to explain unless you started walking through it. You can’t go back to how you were before, but you also don’t know how to fully exist as who you’re becoming yet.

And that’s what the last few years have been for me. It’s what my entire body of writing has been circling. My life isn’t bad – it’s actually full of things that I am so incredibly grateful for – but whatever way I was functioning before does not work for me anymore. I still carry all of the things, but it feels like I don’t know how. There have been moments where I have felt completely overwhelmed by my own mind. Moments where I’ve seen myself in that same place metaphorically – on that bridge – more times than I can count. Of course there are much bigger problems in the world. I know that. But this is still my experience, and it’s the one I’ve been trying to make sense of.

All of this has been an attempt to rebuild something while it’s still standing. To fix a foundation that I can feel shifting under me while still trying to function on top of it. And most days I feel like I’m failing. Like I’m letting people down. But watching this movie at this particular point in my life was unexpectedly important. It reflected things that I hadn’t fully been able to articulate in my own experience until now. It made me see patterns I didn’t even realize I was living inside of. And getting through this – whatever this ultimately becomes – is really the only goal that feels honest right now.

And I’m sure the director of It’s a Wonderful Life thought he was simply making a feel-good holiday movie. I don’t think he imagined that decades later, a 40-something woman having something of an internal crisis would be sitting here dissecting it and thinking of the aftermath. But maybe that’s the point. Stories don’t stay where they’re written. They meet us where we are. And sometimes you don’t find a movie when you’re ready for it. It finds you when you finally are.

For all the times in my life this movie was forced on me growing up, I think maybe this was the first time I truly saw it, and the first time I truly saw myself.

Maybe it really is a wonderful life. Maybe sometimes a shift in perspective is enough to help us find our way back to it. But I also think it’s okay to admit that we don’t always have it all figured out. That we are human, and sometimes we break. Maybe we all need a little more grace — for ourselves, for each other, and especially for the people quietly carrying more than anyone realizes.

As always, thanks for reading. I’m always here if you need me…

va bene pure se va bene, solo se a te va bene…

Song name: CANTILENE/ Artist: JVLI (ft. OLLY)/ Year: 2026