What if the “authorities” you’ve been trained to obey—medicine, education, business, parenting, mental health—are actually keeping you trapped in a system that’s easier to govern, predict, and profit from?
What if everything you’ve been told about how to think, live, be healthy and interact with others is a carefully constructed narrative to serve that same purpose?
Awakened by a brutal childhood, I’ve spent my life saying “NO” to those systems. I refused their diagnoses, their forecasts, their limits. I found my way when they said there wasn’t one.
And I made it. Every. Single. Time.
From surviving trauma, reshaping my education, challenging business rules, to helping my daughter move past a psychiatric label considered irreversible—without relying on long-term medication—Everytime I’ve shattered the illusion that their limited way is the only way.
Now I want to show you how I did it, so you can rise too.
Are you ready to stop letting others close your life in a box and define your destiny? Are you ready to walk your life on your own terms—no leash, no script, no apologies?
But first I’ll give you a little glimpse of my story and then how I saved my daughter. It will take you only a few minutes to read, but it’s extremely important that you read it, as it will help you understand why I’m writing all this in the first place and with what purpose.
It’s never been easy to tell my story. I was born because of my mother’s last minute decision to drop the idea of aborting me. That’s the beginning, the rest is worse.
My home was dominated by a paranoiac violent mother that would get out of her head in bright anger and beat up my brothers and sister with no end for any little thing – or suspected little thing, while she was protecting me from their presumed villainy – in her head they wanted to kill me.
I was to be her demonstration that she was a good mother and that really it was my siblings that were the evil ones. I was her property and she made sure I knew that.
Well, I had the fortune to have a wonderful kind father, but he was working so hard and abroad I would rarely see him, and he was as much the target of my mother’s paranoiac behavior as we were: in her head, he was going in bed with every female coworker she would see in the company’s meeting photos.
So, in anger and desperation for the presumed cheating of my father, she would scream at him, destroy furniture and things he cared about and go to bed with another man as soon as he was not home – abroad or even in hospital with terminal cancer in his last years…
Dad kept staying with her because he loved us. How much he must have suffered in silence. At that time, in Italy where we were living, no law would have given the children to a father for any reason in case of divorce. Whatever the conditions they would have gone with the mother.
But it gets worse: As I get 11yo, my father dies. Right after having lost with him my last beacon of hope, I’m lured by a neighbor, acting as a father, and was sexually abused by him for almost 2 months. Inside myself I felt a switch turning off.
I was trying to stay away from those home nightmares and found refuge in my aunt’s home after school and on weekends and summer time, so I made it even worse.
My aunt was amazing, nothing to say about that, but she was a busy high school teacher and working for her catholic diocese on many things, so there was a catholic monk coming and staying weeks in her home very often.
You already understood how the story goes at this point I guess… He put his eyes on me… and then his hands. I was unfortunately a very cute boy, the perfect prey for these kinds of people. So it starts a second round of sexual abuse that would last almost 2 years, until I was 13 years old.
While going through all this, I forgot to say, I was constantly severely bullied in school since I was 8 years old.
I remember when my mother quickly dismissed my desperate request for help against the bullying with the excuse that I was afraid of nothing—surely because I was a boy. In that moment I had clearly understood I was alone and had only myself in life to count on. I was 9.
There is infinitely more to the story, but this is not the right place. A book is in the making.
How did I survive? There is no short answer, so I’ll just say for now that suicide had been an appealing solution to me since I was 12, but I was terrorized of death. So I never had the courage to hang myself, though I was tempted to, so many times.
After a while, my subconscious mind understood suicide was not a feasible solution, so it gave up on that. At 14yo, and after having being bullied and abused even by a female teacher in grade 9, that same subconscious mind decided to get me through the only other possible solution: rebellion.
From that moment on, I was to be the only authority over myself. Until I discovered a much higher authority up there… but that happens much later, and it’s for another story.
This is where Escape2Freedom really begins, long, long time ago. But I had to live through it before I could write and talk and help others. Finally that moment has come and so much is overflowing out of my heart and through this keyboard.
From that day, at 14yo, and with that decision, my life suddenly turned around. The last bullies built respect for me and turned into my protectors – I had bodyguards now. Then girls… but that’s for other stories too.
And then teachers started to respect me and admire me, and welcomed life lessons from me when I started saying NO to them, firm on how I wanted education to be for myself.
Now I want to help others do the same. Especially those stuck in systems—whether psychiatric, bureaucratic, or social—that say “this is the only way.”
I wasn’t a disrespectful villain, I simply owned and directed my life, knowing where I was going, but with full respect for everyone involved in it. I graduated high school with top marks and hugged all of my teachers. It was the same for my university degree – except the hugging of course…
…And the same for every job I’ve been taking afterward. …And the same for everything I faced and passed through in my life.
But that wasn’t the end of the story—because life eventually handed me the greatest challenge of all: watching my own daughter fall into a storm darker than anything I had ever lived through. And it was in that moment, when the system came for her like it once came for me, that everything I had ever learned—through pain, defiance, and rebellion—was put to the ultimate test.
All the strength I had built since I was 14, all the victories against false “authorities,” were suddenly not about me anymore. They had prepared me for this. And this time, I wasn’t fighting for myself—I was fighting for my daughter’s life.
Nevertheless I won… We won.