design

I understand that many people choose graphic design and make a career out of it. They prepare themselves, specialize. They even train in other parts of the world. There is a desire there, an almost innate passion. Some do it because they had to “choose” a random career to please their family. Others arrive by pure chance. That’s my story. It’s not a great one, but it paid my bills all this time and… I won’t be humble: I’m good at what I do, and sometimes I even have a lot of fun.

Some already know this: design shows up in my life abruptly, when the truth is I barely finished high school close to my 30s, “to do something different,” and I think that’s more or less how things work in my personal life too.

Today, after many years in the profession and a fairly varied portfolio, I’m bored. I can’t imagine doing this my whole life, you know? Maybe it’s temporary and in a few months I’ll say something different, but what does it matter if there’s nothing beyond what I’m thinking right now.

death

The thing is, I was lying on the couch, playing Genshin Impact, when my character, after taking enemy damage, dies abruptly. She had just crossed the ocean on a magnificent ship and everything suggested that new horizons would bring new adventures, but no, she gets killed with a hammer. But it’s a video game, she revives and can fight again. Very easy, right?

That’s how I quickly put the iPad down, grabbed my laptop, and signed up to start studying thanatology in the coming weeks. Yes, I’m going to specialize in thanatology and then, maybe, if the direction is the right one, I’ll go a bit further, but it doesn’t make much sense to talk about that right now.

You know, since I was very young I’ve had a thing with death. I did psychoanalysis for years and all the conversations led to the same place: death. Dying, for me, was the perfect excuse to procrastinate in this life. Dying, in fact, invalidated my existence for a long time. Until one day my father dies, collapses hard onto the bed, and after a failed attempt at CPR, he’s gone forever. Then death, for me, became something else.

When my father’s body is taken out of his house, one image stays with me, and it’s not seeing his body lying down, being carried on a stretcher inside a bag, but seeing my siblings cry. A kind of crying I had never seen in another human being. The sound of pain at its rawest peak. Of course I was emotionally shaken too, but my attention settled, inevitably, on them. On all that desperation.

A few hours later, I took charge of everything related to his farewell and burial. Then I took care of my siblings, most of them younger than me.

From that moment on, death became an enigma for me, and today, the reason I decided to study it, in order to accompany those who are in the process of dying, or those who are grieving.

design and die

It’s 2026 and I feel like changing. I feel like living new experiences. You’ll say “how cliché” and you’ll see it’s not. At some point, you’ll feel like this too. You’ll feel that life is not a single thing but a proliferation of many others, and it’s inevitable to give in to that. Give in or wake up. For now, while I keep working in design, I’ll put my free time into studying death.

If you want to learn more, here is this link.

If you’re going through a difficult moment, you can count on me over the next few months.