A pinch of change: Erasmus as a break from the shell

There's a specific sensation, a sensory interference that precedes major changes. It's a tingle on the palate, similar to that of overripe eggplants, loaded with seeds and solanine. A small allergic reaction to the familiar, a tickle that forces you to smile and wait for it to pass.

I glance at the rankings and see my name: Germany .

Here it is, the tingling, which this time spreads all the way to the stomach: the taste of a beginning that burns and massages the heart at the same time.

The dictatorship of the stopwatch

Up until that point, my life as a student had been shaped by a rigid, almost geometric mindset . I lived with the specter of "overdue," a shadow that haunted me, whispering to finish quickly, to outrun everyone else, to not waste a single second. I was immersed in a constant competition that sapped my ability to genuinely help someone—or to allow myself to be helped—held back by that paralyzing afterthought: what if they think I'm stupid?

Mine was a fucking race against a time that didn't belong to me, as if my worth as a person was measured only by the speed with which I crossed the university corridors.

I fed on pure theory and books consumed under neon lights, postponing contact with the world—the real one—to a future that I always perceived as too far away.

In that context, Erasmus seemed like a concession. I saw it as a small soap bubble, iridescent and fragile, with the return ticket already pressed between my fingers like a safety amulet. It was a taste of independence that I accepted with anticipatory melancholy, convinced it would only be a parenthesis between two acts of the same play. I didn't yet know that that bubble, instead of bursting, would swallow up the rest of my life.

Geography of the Soul and Neapolitan Coffee

In that new space, my identity began to blur. I discovered that I could inhabit a paradox: listening to familiar voices while the steam from the Neapolitan moka pot wafts through a kitchen filled with curry and sauerkraut.

"Don't worry, six months will pass quickly," my mother said to reassure me. Those words were an anchor, a toy to hug in moments of deepest loss. But the days began to grow gentler, and the weeks began to snip the edges of those feelings, letting me drift away.

Those six months stretched, became twelve, and then slipped into an existence that has lasted eight years: the beginning of a slow dissolution of the ego. It was a forced exit from that comfort zone that wasn't a physical place, but a mental and cultural habit. A social prison to which I was convinced I belonged.

The privilege of anonymity

I still remember the echo of my fears, those questions that loom large at night: "How will I be able to build relationships? How will I be able to explain who I am in a language I don't speak, if my thoughts still stumble upon Italian?"

And then, the first night at the airport. A place that the collective imagination paints as a no-man's land, dangerous and cold. Yet, among those uncomfortable seats, I found a cradle of pure energy. In the silence of the terminals, I discovered the power of sharing with strangers. When you're far away, the moral obligation to be the person everyone expects vanishes.

Far from your lifelong friends, from your parents' gazes, and from the expectations that have been sewn onto you like a dress too tight, the mask finally falls. You are no longer the "son of," the "good student," or the "shy one." You are a blank slate. You are no one, and in that void, for the first time, you are free to be anyone. It's the moment you understand that roots aren't there to hold you down, but to give you the sap to flourish elsewhere: Valar Morghulis .

The end of a solid beginning

Erasmus was the end of an "I" too solid, too granite-like, which finally agreed to become liquid, to melt and be shaped by the north winds. It was the first, necessary breaking of the shell; the initiation into the Art of Being .

A suspended bridge, a broken parenthesis in which I understood that home is not where you were born, but where all versions of you can finally meet, walking freely within themselves.

Maybe, after all, we should all allow ourselves the luxury of being "nobody" at least once in our lives. We should let that tingling sensation on our palate—whether from Erasmus or simply from small new beginnings—burn away our certainties, to discover that beneath the surface lies a way of being that requires no competition, but only presence.

Because it's only when the shell breaks that we really begin to breathe.