i've spent my whole life trying to find myself again.
twenty years of group analysis. a psychology degree. three years of bioenergetica. i studied the scientific side of human behavior and the magical side, and i refused to choose — because the longer you look, the more you see they're describing the same thing.
today, with enough years behind me to stop apologizing for what i know, i've figured something out.
people don't get lost. they get misaligned.
in the beginning, you are you. then a second version of you — the one everyone needs you to be — starts walking a slightly different line. at first the gap is invisible. by the second compromise it's an angle. give it a few decades and you're a stranger wearing your own face, the light in your eyes turned almost all the way down.
but here's the part i didn't tell anyone for a long time.
before the theory, there was the magic.
it was in my mother. i lived in one city, she lived in another. i'm a deep creature of habit — there are small things i simply never reach for, that have no place in my days. but every so often, for no reason, a wish for one of them would quietly surface in me. and if she happened to be visiting that week, she'd arrive holding exactly that thing — the one time in a year — though i'd told no one, though i'd barely admitted it to myself. she did it again and again, catching the wish before it ever became a word, from a city away.
it was in my father, who spent evenings teaching me to bend a spoon with my mind, the way uri geller did on television back then. years later i'd watch that same image return in the matrix — neo, handed a spoon by a calm child who tells him the secret isn't to bend it: there is no spoon. it's not the spoon that bends, only yourself. my father had me reaching for that truth long before i had words for it.
and it was in a car.
i was a small boy. i'd had a furious fight with my mother, so full of that wild, helpless energy that i thought — really thought, with everything in me — i want that car to break. a few minutes later, it broke.
i was terrified. not of the car. of me. of a power i couldn't understand and no one could explain. so i did what misaligned people do: i made myself smaller. for decades, every time a dark thought slipped out and scared me, i'd whisper a private formula to switch it off — what i thought must never become true. a lifetime spent defusing myself.
that, i understand now, was my first misalignment. the brightest, strangest thing about me became the thing i hid. you don't lose your light in one moment. you talk yourself out of it, one quiet formula at a time.
thesmallmediacompany was always there too, in the ordinary things — the first desktop publishing software i ever touched, my olivetti m19. the school newsletter i built before anyone asked. evenings spent typesetting at a real publishing house, learning that what you make can matter. thirty years of communication for companies full of people who'd switched themselves off. years inside italy's biggest television network, watching how stories move millions.
and it was in a photocopying room, decades ago, when the man i worked for walked in and said: il mondo è di chi sa fare le domande, non di chi ha le risposte — the world belongs to those who know how to ask the questions, not those who have the answers.
i didn't know it yet. but that was the whole thing.
there's an old reading of aladdin's lamp that never left me: the lamp will give you anything you ask — but only if you still know what to ask for. lose touch with your own desire, and infinite power is useless in your hands.
and now ai can suddenly do what we do, while the internet already handed everyone the answers. so the only thing left that's truly yours is knowing what to ask. what to want. who to be.
most people will feel that as a threat. i think it's the door. for the first time, the most powerful technology ever built can be pointed not at replacing you, but at handing you back to yourself. magic and technology were never opposites — they're the same impulse: to reach past what's "possible" and touch what's real. ai is just the newest name for it.
that's the convergence i've walked toward my whole life — technology, sensitivity, craft, and the stubborn belief that nobody's light actually goes out. it just waits to be remembered.
the magic didn't stay in childhood. years later it came back, on a train, to tell me what i was for.
i was directing a live event — i'd done dozens, mostly for speakers who turn wonder into a sales pitch. then there was igor sibaldi: a writer and thinker i found genuinely electric, the one whose reading of that lamp had reshaped how i think. all through the day in bologna, one thought kept circling — he lives in milan too; i'd give anything for a single real conversation with him. but i'd never have dared to ask.
we finished early. i managed to move my ticket to an earlier train, packed up, said my goodbyes, took a taxi to the station, and boarded. and there — in a block of four seats, the two beside me empty — sat sibaldi.
i don't impose on people. but i said one sentence: of all the speakers i watch at these events, you're the one who genuinely fascinated me. he talked for the next forty minutes — about me. a stranger, reading me with unsettling precision. and then he said it plainly: you're an evangelist.
he was right. it's a tension i'd carried my whole life, in a dozen shapes, never quite acted on — the need to remind people that their light is still there. and an evangelist needs many ways to reach people. that's thesmallmediacompany: one message, many forms. and it's why, now, i'm finally doing it.
so why one person? because i won't let this become soulless. every book, every voice, every word — shaped by a human who gives a damn, amplified by ai but never abandoned to it. i call it digital artisanship. it's slower. that's the point.
and here's what's different now: i don't want to defuse myself anymore. i'm done whispering the old formula. the energy that scared a small boy is the same energy this whole company runs on — and this time, technology is here to help me hold it, not hide it.
for most of my life i kept a formula to make myself smaller. now i keep a different one — four lines to reach every version of me that ever was, that is, and that is still on its way:
for all i was. for all i am.
for all i might be. for all i will be.
that's what realignment really is. not becoming someone new — gathering back everyone you've already been, and everyone you still might become.
it's small on purpose. close to the story. close to you.
this is my realignment. it became a company so it could be yours too.