I found something I wrote years ago. I had completely forgotten about these pages, and when I started reading them, I expected to have that strange feeling you sometimes have when you meet an old version of yourself. I expected distance. Maybe even relief. I thought I would read those words and think, God, I remember feeling like that. Instead, I recognised myself.

I wrote about the nightmares. About seeing scenes from my past again, seeing the people who were part of it, feeling the same emotions all over again. I wrote about waking up with anxiety that took my breath away, followed by anger. Mostly, I wrote about the exhaustion of carrying something that had already happened and yet somehow kept happening again inside my head. At some point I asked myself: What else do I have to do to free myself from my past? Years later, I still don’t know. I still have nightmares. I still carry things I wish I didn’t have to carry.

Then I found this sentence: I am broken. I am a broken toy. And this one stopped me, because I wish I could say that I don’t believe it anymore. But I do. In fact, years later, I wrote an entire book called Io, Giocattolo Rotto — I, Broken Toy. Apparently that image never left me. It became part of the way I understand myself and, eventually, part of the way I decided to tell my story.

There is another thing I wrote in those pages: What you have lived remains what you have lived. There is no magic potion to erase it. I still believe that too. What happened happened. I can’t go back and change it. I can’t erase the people, the experiences or the emotions attached to them. And apparently my brain can’t erase them either, because sometimes it still brings them back while I sleep.

Maybe what shocked me about finding these pages wasn’t discovering how much I have changed. It was discovering how much of that person is still here. We like stories with a before and an after. We like transformation. We like the idea that eventually we will be able to look backwards and say: That was me then. This is me now. But my story doesn’t work like that. There isn’t a clean line separating the person who wrote those pages from the person reading them today.

Some things have changed. Some haven’t. Some things I understand better now, but understanding them didn’t necessarily make them disappear. Some wounds became easier to carry, others still find me in my sleep. And maybe this is something we don’t talk about enough: not every story of survival ends with becoming completely healed. Sometimes survival simply means that you are still here.

I still think of myself as a broken toy. But perhaps what I didn’t understand when I wrote those pages was that being broken doesn’t mean being finished. A broken toy can still move. It can still create. It can still be curious. It can love, make mistakes, change its mind, laugh, travel, dance, make music, write, build things and start again. It can have an entire life while still carrying the cracks.

Maybe I was right all those years ago. There is no magic potion. What you have lived remains what you have lived. But I was wrong about one thing. I thought being a broken toy meant the story was over. It wasn’t. The broken toy kept living.