Lessons from 2010 I am glad I did not learn

This ‘new decade’ thing seems to be affecting people on levels I was not expecting. For example, people are writing letters to their younger self and ‘roaring 20s’ all over the place. The 20s are great and deserve more notice, reflecting on the past is also great, but do we need to wait for a decade to pass to do so?

Thanks to Facebook, I could look back on some photos and remember what was going on inside that head of mine ten years ago.

So, here’s a letter to my younger, just kidding, I couldn’t do that to you.

What I would like to do, instead, is to bring back a few moments that could have scarred, I mean, shaped me deeply for the future, instead had zero effects onto my decisions as I proceded to make the same life-choices with unexpectedly positive results. 

With visual contribution from Facebook. 

In 2010 I was very much into a specific Japanese street style fashion to the point I thought it was a good idea to wear it to my cousin’s graduation at a very fancy private university in Rome. That morning, I put on my newest dream-dress and waltzed into this marble-floored palace just to have one of her dinosaur professors address me as follows:

‘I hope you’re not graduating today because you wouldn’t get your degree dressed like that.’

A few months later, my street fashion group of online friends decided to organize a National meeting near my hometown and I put on my favourite skirt and attend, despite not knowing anyone in person and despite the horrible impression the outernet has had on me while wearing the fashion.

Turns out, not everyone is a douchebagle and most people are either curious or completely ignore our colourful style because, you know, it's just clothes. I am glad I did not let that dinosaur convince me that my style was bad and inappropriate under all circumstances, or that I could not graduate if I liked alternative fashions. I even went to a few comics and games conventions where, again, nobody questioned my sartorial choices. 

Looking back at 2010, I am surprised it took me until recently to figure out that there are three kinds of friends: friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime.

2010 is surrounded by memorable New Year’s Eves spent with my high school friends. To begin the year, we travelled to Bologna and had a blast around the city, and I ended up sleeping under someone’s desk. To close the year in style, we were all together in our hometown playing Twister.

I also spent a weekend on the mountains with my university friends, that was brutally interrupted by my internship professor who forgot to tell me one of the authors my thesis was based on was visiting our university that day.

Years later, that desk in Bologna became my desk as I moved into that very apartment. And those high school friends are still my closest friends even if I moved halfway across the globe.

I haven’t seen those university friends since I left the cabin in a hurry that morning.

I kept talking online to the whole group of street style badass girls for a long long time, mainly about our mutual passion for Japanese fashion.

I am glad I did not learn that you have to be friends with everyone forever and that you should pick your friends over your career, significant others, study, hobbies, etc. If they're in for the long run, they will be there no matter what. I am also glad I didn't learn that I will never be able to have any more friends for a lifetime, or that friends for a reason and a season are not real friends.

In 2010 I travelled to England for the first time. Having already been to Japan, at that time, London didn’t feel like something that required preparation or fanfare. I enjoyed the shopping and got in a relationship that motivated me to go back to England to study.

A few years later, I spent 300 days in England.



Image: via