I was sitting on the beach yesterday absentmindedly scrolling, when out of nowhere a video appeared that flooded me with an acute recognition of something I hadn’t consciously seen before.

It felt like a blinding light piercing my awareness, illuminating dark corners of my psyche that had remained unexposed for decades.

The video told the story of Sicilians who migrated to America and were segregated under Jim Crow laws. They were considered neither white nor black and experienced their own form of racism known as Italophobia.

There was even a mass lynching of Sicilians in New Orleans in 1891 after a jury failed to convict several Italian immigrants following the death of a police chief.

I watched the video, cried, and then walked to my poignantly timed therapy session talking to my GPT about the possibility of my Sicilian father, who moved to London in 1969, having experienced racism himself.

My whole body sank with overwhelming grief.

Isn’t it strange how everything converges?

My Dad turning 90 in July 2026.

A sudden re-interest in Italy.

A recent trip to Milan.

Scanning through old family photographs only weeks earlier.

A video appearing out of nowhere moments before my therapy session.

It’s as though something deep within me had orchestrated the timing with cinematic precision.

As if some hidden part of my psyche had finally decided:

Now.

Now you’re ready to see this.

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you’ll probably know that I have a deep fascination with identity, autonomy, selfhood, belonging, and the invisible forces that shape who we become.

But until that moment sitting on the beach, I hadn’t fully understood why these themes had followed me throughout my entire life with such intensity.

In one moment, it all started making sense.

For years, I believed my obsession with autonomy was purely psychological.

A nervous system adaptation, a “trauma response,” an attachment dynamic perhaps.

And yes, of course it is partly those things.

But now I can see that it’s also lineage, culture, migration, and inherited emotional climates.

You see, when you’re born between two worlds, identity isn’t always obvious like it is for some people. It can manifest instead as tension, internal conflict, contradictory thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

My mother’s side carries strong Anglo, Scandinavian, and Nordic influences.

Stoic.
Emotionally restrained.
Practical.
Measured.
Quietly enduring.

My father’s side is Sicilian.

Passionate.
Expressive.
Emotional.
Intense.
Proud.
Fiery.

Fire and ice, you could say.

And so no wonder I found myself asking:

How am I ever supposed to reconcile those two emotional realities inside one body?

No wonder I’ve spent so much of my life soul-searching.

No wonder autonomy became such a defining force in my identity.

That emotional contradiction meant I had no choice but to find grounding through self-definition.

And I think for much of my life I’ve existed inside a kind of over-expressed autonomy in an attempt to truly know myself.

There’s been a deep need to define myself outside of inherited systems that felt overwhelmingly opposing and entangling.

And like many of these things, it was just an adaptation, not a pathology.

Perhaps the reason I’ve been so exhausted over the years is because I’ve been trying to use all my willpower to reconcile centuries of inherited emotional coding that had never before been consciously examined.

Oooffff… what a job.

Thank God I was born with copious amounts of life force.

Because this is not just “childhood trauma.”

This is decoding a lineage.

Something inherited containing survival needs, conflict, pressure, money, traditions, gender roles, pride, shame, silence.

And immigration itself leaves fingerprints on the nervous system.

Especially when assimilation becomes necessary for survival.

The more I’ve reflected on my father’s generation, the more I’ve started wondering what it must have felt like arriving in London as a Sicilian man in 1969.

Wanting to belong, succeed, and integrate whilst simultaneously carrying an identity the world may have subtly looked down upon.

I can see now how split identity forms.

How somebody can feel immense pride in where they come from whilst also unconsciously distancing themselves from it.

How somebody can love their culture deeply whilst learning to mute parts of it in order to survive socially.

And suddenly, so many tiny things about my father started rearranging themselves in my mind.

His resistance to flashy status symbols.

His complicated relationship with pride.

His deep work ethic.

His emotional contradictions.

His simultaneous Britishness and Sicilianity.

The psyche is rarely random.

There is usually meaning underneath someone’s patterning.

And in amongst all this, something else has been surfacing too.

I don’t have children.

Which means, biologically speaking, I am the end of the line.

There’s something quite meaningful about that and I didn’t fully understand it until now because it feels as though I am the place where these two worlds converge.

I am the place where the line becomes conscious.

And that thought has been a tectonic shift for me.

Because perhaps some family lines aren’t meant to continue unconsciously forever.

Perhaps some arrive at a point where somebody finally turns around and looks directly at the inheritance itself with interest, curiosity, and awareness.

And perhaps that awareness changes the lineage just as profoundly as reproduction does.

I don’t know… but it feels pretty special.

And one last thing…

For years, I rejected history.

I failed my History A-Level because it had absolutely no meaning to me.

I was always far more interested in the future than the past.

I loved Churchill’s definition of history as “one damn thing after another.”

But I think I’m changing my mind now because history is regaining its meaning.

History lives inside identity.

Without history, my identity was extra strong, yes, but also ungrounded.

History lives inside the stories our families tell.

But it also lives inside the muted stories.

The implied ones.

The ones that never got a chance to be fully spoken.

The stories we can only untangle when we’re finally blessed with enough space to explore the subtext.

Before menopause, I don’t think I could have done this work because I was inside my own chaotic storm.

But now, post-menopause, I can feel this deeper identity wanting to emerge because I’m finally spacious enough to hold far more complexity.

The fire and the ice.

The stoicism and the passion.

The Britishness and the Sicilianity.

The autonomy and the longing to belong.

Not necessarily swinging between identities…

but allowing all of it to coexist without an internal war.

For me, wholeness isn’t about becoming one thing.

It’s about holding the energy for conscious convergence.

And honestly?

It’s wild.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this blog, you might also enjoy…

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/autonomytrauma

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/paradigms-i-m-no-longer-subscribing-to

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/relationshipsindifferentparadigms

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/the-red-flag-in-the-happy-childhood

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/over-idealising-our-parents

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/how-to-manage-guilt-from-relationships-with-emotionally-immature-parents

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/absolute-thinking

• https://www.sallygarozzo.com/blog/why-do-i-feel-anxious-when-nothing-is-wrong