Being an artist, in Italy especially, is already hard enough as it is.

"It doesn't pay the bills" -- "You don't have fixed hours" -- "You're a DJ, but are you registered with SIAE?" -- "Sure, but if you want to busk you need a permit, you know."

You can already feel the stress behind these statements or questions I've been asked over the past 16 years.

But let's take it one step at a time.

A creative person, by definition, feels a need to communicate something -- and doing that means putting themselves out there. Sharing your art with anyone who might ever experience it is inevitable -- otherwise, what would be the point?

There.

I promise you, for an emotionally sensitive person, it's not a given. At least it wasn't for me.

And now, starting from a bit further back, let me explain why.

How does a love this big come to be?

Imagine.

You're 4 years old, you wake up at 9 on a Sunday morning to the sound of a vacuum cleaner coming into your room, because your parents are cleaning the house, probably have been for a couple of hours already.

You get up, head to the kitchen for breakfast, and as you cross your bedroom door, the moment your mom decides to switch off that deafening mite-sucking contraption, a piano sound and a warm male voice wrap around you:

"♪ La settima luna.. era quella di un disgraziato ♪"

Your 4-year-old curiosity pushes you to figure out where that sound -- so warm, so overwhelming -- is coming from, and you discover, to your enormous surprise, this round black thing spinning, with a little metal arm resting on top.

"This thing is magic" -- that's the thought my tiny brain landed on, hearing Lucio Dalla's voice and putting it together with the fact that a black disc was spinning.

It was the only plausible explanation.

And fair enough: I was left bewitched by that inexplicable mechanism that was a record player. So bewitched. Maybe too bewitched. To the point of asking myself "what happens if I touch it?"

Well, you can imagine my reaction (but especially my parents') when I actually tried touching that round black thing. But that story we'll save for next time.

Music is space

Flash-forward a few years later, in no particular order.

Playing "Silent Night" in fifth grade in front of the whole school. (Sol-La-Sol-Miiiiiiii, Sol-La-Sol-Miiiiiii -- you know, that one, you get it)

Getting a mini DJ console as a gift for my 13th birthday -- which I still play live sets with today.

Studying singing for three years.

Ending up in bands or music projects, surrounding myself with incredibly creative people who became -- or already were -- some of the people I'm closest to in the world.

Taking Ableton courses, electronic music composition courses, and singing lessons again -- I wanted to make sure I could still do it -- and at this point you can probably guess where this article is headed.

Flying to Berlin alone for a week with the sole purpose of listening to (and yes, dancing to) all the techno music it had to offer.

I mean, I've always done other things too -- volleyball, university, work. I've always found music somewhere along my path, and whether by chance or by choice I gave it space, and it filled that space, every single time.

Tired, angry, happy, in the mood to dance, or just broken.

It was always there.

And I think that's what every artist would want to do, fill voids, needs, spaces, with their own music. Their own, or other people's, it doesn't really matter.

An artist has to communicate something to someone -- otherwise it doesn't work.

"But is that space finite or infinite?"

There's a line from Baricco's Novecento -- I'll use the official English version, from the film The Legend of 1900: "A piano: the keys begin, the keys end. You know there are 88 of them. Nobody can tell you any different."

Poor Alessandro (Baricco), I imagine, meant something entirely different -- and I hope he'll forgive me for stealing it. But it applies perfectly here too:

The piano, well: 88 keys.

Then again, knowing how to actually play it is a whole other matter, don't get me wrong. But you do have 88 keys and 10 fingers. Whatever you know how to play, whatever you want to express, lives somewhere in between.

On the other hand, anyone who approaches the world of music production runs into a gigantic, insurmountable, elephantine pile of stuff:

synths, how to use Ableton, that cool Ableton plugin, the COMPRESSOR, EQs, the mix, that even cooler Ableton plugin I saw some guy use on YouTube, microphones, panning -- and I think I'll stop here because I probably already lost you at "synths." --

Anyway, you get the idea. A lot of stuff.

And given how I'm wired (badly), in my head I had to learn ALL of it before I even let myself play.

Come on, we said I have to fill spaces, right?

I can't just fill it with the first sound I get by hitting the "G" key on my computer keyboard. I have to fill it with the most beautiful sound in the world, because the emotion I want to describe deserves that exact sound. The perfect one. First I'd better know how to make a sound that's "soft" or "acid", right?

Well, if you've made it this far and you feel like you relate to this line of thinking, the answer is NO.

No. Or rather, not right away.

An artist is whoever makes art

Let's cut to the chase.

I've talked about this imaginary space that needs filling.

The truth is it took me longer to figure out what I actually wanted to put into that space than it did to learn how to make a "soft" sound.

Then again, come on, you've seen Fred again.. do his tiny desk concert, right? And it stings a little, because in 15 seconds this madman, just by hitting his KNUCKLES on the table, builds a drum beat so good it locks right in with you. I'll never be as good as him.

On top of that, add the fact that I care so much about what I want to express that I'm scared to let it out, scared of other people's judgment.

Exactly --> the lethal combo for an artist: impostor syndrome + being overly sensitive to criticism -- that's me.

My solution?

Everything I've ever made, in my opinion, isn't finished. And if it's not finished, nobody can hear it.

BRILLIANT.

I shut every door, window, and vent I could find, just to keep my music from ever escaping my own harsh, threatening judgment.

So, to answer the earlier question: the space we have available is absolutely infinite. And the real risk is losing yourself in it if you don't have a sense of who you are and end up swimming blindly in that abyss.

And in the same way, boxing yourself into a finite space, from which you watch the infinite, does nothing but wear you down and grind you into the ground, because you'll always wonder what's out there beyond that shell.

Honestly, a bit of a disaster.

In the end, I answered

I'm not entirely sure what happened. I mean it.

Maybe over the years I unconsciously started caring less about a reverb not sounding perfect, or maybe I've just played so much that I built up some healthy self-confidence. I honestly couldn't tell you.

But there's one thing I did figure out.

Ever since I started looking inward instead of outward -- when I compose, when I put together a setlist for my next DJ set, when I sing -- everything else matters a whole lot less.

If someone has something to communicate, to share, they should do it.

Not because they claim to know how, but because they're aware they want to.

And the trick is doing it while trying to stay as light as possible -- whether the reverb is perfect or not.

It took a while -- even to get to the end of this article -- but in the end, I answered.