Part 001 · ~2 min read

Rome, summer 2009

Dear readers,

Welcome to a journey that started many years ago in the narrow lanes of Naples. Today is an important day – the day I take back my narrative.

I started writing a story based on my experiences in the late 1990s. It is a tale of fight, identification, and vulnerability within human connections. It attracted the attention of a TV production company, which offered to dramatise my words for television. Another string of bad luck meant the rights expired, and my story was back in my lap.

So here we are, five years to the day, ready to lay this story out as it always should have been — raw and uncut, in my own words.

Through this blog, one will see a woman’s journey treading choppy waters in her mind: a proud Neapolitan, a conflicted lesbian, a rape survivor — all in one devotee in distress. You follow her down the rabbit hole of avoiding therapy, a doomed mind game with an egomaniac and strange friendships.

But you will perhaps ask… why English for a story that belongs to the bowels of Italy? This alien tongue works — for me, at least, as a smothering net to separate my naked feelings from the outside world. It’s therapeutic, enabling me to bring forth truths that might otherwise simmer at the bottom of my mother tongue, Italian.

Come with me on this adventure of figuring out who I am, what soothes my soul, and how to navigate through one of life’s messy, emotional ways of addressing things. This story begins in the late 90s, but it was blogged in 2009 using the new dates, matching exactly the original ones…

The author, on behalf of Simona.

This piece, in first person, was written based on truth but with different names and changed details for privacy purposes.