At the age of thirty – not without going through the corresponding crisis – he published a compilation of texts written over fifteen years and titled it End of adolescence This is how the journalist Sergio Diez has woven his first book, which unites melancholy, love, humor, fears and the passage of time. With words to his grandfather and his potato tortillas, reflections on his roots, romantic comedies, childhood, universal basic income and the dog Sota, to whom he dedicates one of his poems, entitled Incident“I read his story in a newspaper and I found it very sad. A policeman shot and killed the dog of a man who lived on the street,” he recalled to the newspaper.
“A good poem can also be born from the articles we read, and not only from our personal experience, because on these topics we can then project our point of view and our way of feeling and expressing, which, personally, I think, is the most important thing.” reflects this man from Madrid, who is part of the Table, Coverage and Networks team of elDiario.es.
“The texts, mainly poems, are born from ideas that concern me, seem interesting to me or that come to me in one way or another,” he acknowledges. The result is for its author “a circular journey that leads from the present to the past, and ends in the present.” Sota is not the only one to receive dedications in her volume, edited by Talón de Aquiles, she also alludes to Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman and George Brassens. “These are names that were very important to me when my love for poetry was born,” he explains.
In the prologue, titled Thoughts and Storiesshares: “It’s not a story and nothing happens.” A statement that has a lot to do with his way of writing. “It helps me give myself the freedom to create without excessive judgment towards myself, to let the water flow from the source. And then later, with a critical eye, you shape it, you decide whether you like it or not, you are more or less demanding. Removing expectations has helped me,” he reveals.
In another of his texts, paradise lostexplains that “it’s a shame to live your life in chronological order,” and he says that finding an alternative “is difficult.” “It’s about coming to terms with your memory, because it can bring you back to many moments and times that you’d forgotten about that were important to you,” he says, “often, depending on who you are, they can come flooding back to your head, and if you’re lucky enough to be generally at peace with your past, walking through it or being assailed by memories can even be enjoyable and help you understand things better.
Sergio Diez says that this does not mean that he tries to be a “not very nostalgic” person, since he considers that nostalgia “is interesting and pleasant; but also sad and very delicate.
The privilege of “walking without a goal”
“Walking without a goal does not mean getting lost” is a quote from the book The Fellowship of the Ring which forms the backbone of one of his stories, and which in JRR Tolkien’s volume referred to the character of Aragorn (who was played by Viggo Mortensen in its big screen adaptation, directed by Peter Jackson).
“In End of adolescence It has more to do with the fact that, even if you have several layers, if you know more or less what you want and what you don’t want, in general, you can walk on solid ground,” explains Sergio Diez, “others may think that you are without course because you change a lot of work, residence, lifestyle, or because you do not thrive in a certain area. “But maybe you value other things. Maybe you know yourself well and you follow your own compass decisively,” he says.
If you know more or less what you want, you can walk on solid ground. Others may think that you are aimless because you change jobs, residences, lifestyles a lot. But maybe you enjoy other things. Maybe you know yourself well and follow your own compass decisively.
Sergio Diez
— Journalist
He was also inspired by the phrase “in childhood one lives and then one survives”, in this case a quote from the poet Leopoldo María Panero and the documentary Disenchantment: “She’s very insightful about how we try to defend and protect for a good part of our adult lives some of the innocence and beauty that the child we once were had in his eyes.”
The “anxiety” of seeking happiness
The journalist values in another of his texts: “I will never be as happy as I am today.” A statement that, as he acknowledges, “has more anguish than happiness, paradoxically. It has to do with the fear of losing the people you care about, that things will go wrong or that the world will collapse, beyond the fact that it is true that we already live in a very complicated world. At the same time, he relates it to “anticipation and how it prevents us from living in the present.”
“When you stop being young, you lose the feeling that after a bad time, better things will always come,” he considers, “after a bad experience, you don’t usually change for the better, you change for something different.” In any case, he emphasizes that we must “never lose hope and accept that we are all vulnerable.” “Our lives can suddenly go wrong and, until then, we must try to focus on the pleasure of everything we experience,” he suggests.
Accept yourself, know yourself, endure
in the room garlic handsThe writer reveals that there are times when it is still “hard” for him to look people in the eye. But it is progress, since there was “a time when I practically never did it.” An experience from which he concluded that, although it is instilled that we must “love our neighbor as ourselves,” the reality is that “no one usually explains that for this, we must first learn to accept ourselves.” “He who cannot bear it will be able to offer little love to others,” he writes.
“We are not taught or we are taught badly; and it is important to know ourselves well and not to be at war with ourselves,” he says before clarifying that this does not mean that we can “do everything”: “Accepting ourselves has much more to do with our contradictions and knowing that, if we are wrong, in many cases we can fix it or do better later. Accepting contradictions and complexity, as a way of knowing ourselves better “without blaming ourselves too much”, is for Sergio Diez the key to “being with others in a calmer and more pleasant way”.
Self-acceptance has much more to do with our contradictions and knowing that if we make mistakes, we can often fix them or do better later.
Sergio Diez
— Journalist
One way to do this is to “waste time,” an “activity” that doesn’t get much of a good rap in the age of increased productivity. “It’s worth being alone with yourself, and it seems that being bored is increasingly a luxury,” he laments, “good ideas often come from moments of boredom, or simply from having fun and feeling better.”
“Many beautiful things are born from unplanned moments, in which one is calmer, without being obsessed, for example, with being productive in one’s leisure time,” he concludes, “it is worth setting aside time to do things that simply make you feel good, like In my case, writing, and if it goes somewhere later, very good. And if not, then perfect.
