An Atlas is a book of maps and charts to make our way. It is also the name of the topmost vertebra of the backbone, articulating with the occipital bone of the skull. We know Atlas as the Greek Titan god who carries the world on his shoulders.
As we explore and build the backbone of what it means to find a place to call home while we are in transit, the Atlas newsletter is a global community part of the Design of Return podcast, an Italian and English bilingual podcast about personal stories of transit as told by the in-betweeners: people who live in between different cultures, countries, languages and identities.
The idea of mapping personal geographies for those who don’t have one — or have more than one at the same time — started when I told my story of how I returned home to Italy from the United States after ten years abroad.
It was January 31, 2020, the last day I remember of a virus-free world before the first threat became known.
I was getting ready to give my first talk at Creative Mornings in Milan for their monthly theme “ROOTS”, the same week this Italian Mudra was entering the emoticon library.
An untranslatable gesture from my own culture making its way into a global language, while I was standing there with a dry mouth trying to find the words for re-entry in a culture that I had half-lost.
I was a year into the end of the sabbatical I took to come back home to redesign life and work, after leaving a twelve-year executive career in Communications with Luxottica and Oakley and my expat mission in California.
The reason why I intentionally designed a year off is that a “return” to the motherland felt inevitable. As much as a return to myself.
And what I needed was time to face all that came with it.
As I wrote my story down though, I felt like a little bit of an imposter.
How could I stand there and tell a story about a return, if I never really felt I have ever “arrived” back home?
I helped myself out by asking friends and a global community to send me questions to pave the road.
“Why did you come back? How do you keep your global mindset alive now that you are home? What is the difference between leaving a job and leaving a place? Returning home can be viewed as a step back, how did you design it to be a step forward? Did you ever feel American? Why did you look for home? And would you do it again?”
Like little white crumbles, they guided the talk and me to an insight.
That the going is just a little part of it all, everything else is a return.
In the room with me there were Italians who lived abroad and came back, foreigners who chose Italy as their home, but also people who returned to life after a deep change.
I felt lonely as I went through this journey of re-entry and belonging to a place in-between, with little to no support.
In that room, I realized I wasn’t alone after all.
And that there is no talking about return, without talking about transit.
After connecting with the community, we started building something exciting.
A place for all these stories to act as a home for the never-at-home enough.
And so “The Design of Return” that was born as a talk is now a podcast.
As I dig into my personal story of return, in the first season I interview a neurolinguist studying the bilingual brain, a writer born in Rwanda who grew up in the north of Italy and did not return to her motherland, an environmental engineer and visual artist working on our return to nature, and a former fashion journalist who ordained as a Buddhist monk.
Our newsletter will connect the community in a private space of conversation, share additional content, resources, and insights about our episodes, feature the option to download translated transcripts, and create curated experiences to explore our sense of belonging, placemaking, and cultural geography.
We publish monthly along with our first episode, starting June 22, 2021.
Welcome back.
In the meantime, tell your friends!