When he stopped calling me Andrea

Until a few seconds earlier, I had been Andrea.

Then I became “Dr Tripodi”.

I did not take it as a sign of respect. I felt it as distance.

I was twenty-six and in Kyiv as an intern at the Italian Embassy, working as a press officer. I had graduated not long before and had chosen a postgraduate internship, certainly a high-level one, but still an internship.

I remember a cold February morning. I walked to the Embassy, breaking through the piles of snow along the way with each step. One of my duties was to prepare a daily report on national and international news for the diplomats.

That day, a local article about the spread of the Russian language in Ukraine made me stop longer than usual. I remember clearly the question it left me with.

Is a language simply something we use to understand one another, or does it also carry a culture, a history, a sense of belonging?

I printed the report and began my usual round of the offices.

When I went into the consul’s office that morning, he had time and was in the mood to talk. He gestured for me to sit down. He called me Andrea and joked that I was the “Embassy philosopher”.

I showed him the article and explained my doubt. I kept returning to the idea that behind a language there could also be a culture and a sense of belonging. He pointed to the complexity of Eastern European history and, at one point, dismissed the matter as something for philologists.

I kept asking questions.

His tone changed.

I remember his look, which I perceived as sidelong, dark, judgmental. I cannot know what he was thinking. I can say what happened to me: I had the feeling that the conversation was closing down.

Then the way he addressed me changed too.

Until that moment, I had been Andrea.

In my memory, the sentence still sounds like this:

Dr Tripodi, we’ve gone too far.

I wanted to reply: “Seriously?”

I did not. I was at work and our roles were clearly defined. I stayed silent.

I felt rejected. I read that shift from the familiar “Andrea” to the institutional “Dr Tripodi” as a way of re-establishing distance. It seemed to me that, in that moment, the role had become more important than the question.

I left the office.

I remember the corridor leading to the ambassador’s room. I looked up at the ceiling and shook my head.

I was not angry, and I had not doubted myself. What I felt was more like a kind of compassion for what, in my eyes, looked like a surrender of the freedom to express one’s own thoughts.

I kept telling myself that I would not silence my critical spirit for the sake of convenience.

A compromise is one thing, I thought; compromising oneself is another.

It seemed to me that, in some workplaces, an individual’s personality could be crushed by what we call the “apparatus”, whether an institution or a company. I thought that such a system did not help a person develop their abilities, but risked stunting them instead.

Years later, however, I understood that the scene also said something about the Andrea I was then.

It was essential to me that my contribution be recognised.

I had just graduated, I had sat an entrance competition for a PhD and not succeeded, and I found myself inside a structure where roles clearly carried weight. I was not looking for the consul’s judgment of me. I have never thought that winning a competition, holding a title or having a diplomatic passport made one person better than another.

But I wanted what I brought to the table not to be seen as merely “functional”. I wanted there to be room for my thinking too.

A few minutes later, I entered the ambassador’s office.

Same report. Same unease.

This time, however, we engaged with the substance of the article.

The ambassador and I exchanged ideas, not judgments. That is the whole difference.

I remember the way he looked at me: understanding, reassuring. We went into the substance of the article and, in effect, into the work I had gone to Kyiv to do. I was not there simply to gather news, but also to interpret it and try to make sense of it.

In that moment, my contribution no longer felt merely “functional”. It had a soul.

The ambassador did not turn my question into a truth, and he did not validate my interpretation. He let it exist long enough for us to think about it together.

For me, that was the difference: not the desire to be right, but discussing something together so that I could let go of my truth and the other person could let go of theirs and, through the encounter, perhaps find one together, born from different experiences and different kinds of expertise.

I don’t think the way you do, but I give my time to getting to know and understand your point of view. That, for me, makes the difference.

Those two encounters made me think that it is not the role we attain in life that determines a person’s importance, but the way the power attached to that role is exercised.

One paradox also stayed with me: in my eyes, the person in the highest-ranking role was the one who felt the least need to remind me of it.

What does the way we exercise the power entrusted to us by a role say about us?
And when does that power become distance rather than responsibility?

During those months I also wrote a story. A fox became lost inside a pyramid where all the animals were terrified of a presence at the top. After making its way through that structure, the fox set them free by teaching them not to be afraid.

Reading it again today, that story says a great deal about the way I saw power then.

Over the years, I have understood something else too: there is a point at which insisting stops being only a search for the other person and becomes a need to be recognised. It is what I have called “a movement of the soul”, a voice crying out to the world: “I exist!”

For me, writing became the place where that voice learned to recognise itself.

The blank page was my map, my compass rose: when north seemed lost, I was free to draw it again and, in finding it once more, to recognise myself.

Today I would not insist with the consul in the same way. I have learned that there are different people for different things, for different subjects, and that giving one’s inner self to anyone while expecting it to be received in the same way can be a mistake. We also have to know how to protect ourselves.

But the story does not end there.

On my last day of work, I went to say goodbye to him. He told me, more or less, that I could go back to Italy saying I had had a good experience.

Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, I replied: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

I remember that he fell silent.

Today I consider that reply a mistake, because I understand that it was charged with resentment. I was twenty-six and it came out spontaneously, but there was still something of that distance inside it.

If I could speak to the Andrea I was then, I would tell him to be calmer, to look at people for what they do, not for what they say, and not for the social role they occupy either.

To the consul, on the other hand, I would say nothing.

And if I had to work with him today, I would probably be the one asking to keep a certain distance.

I would tell him:

You can keep calling me Doctor.

Not because of the title. Because today I think we should not hand our inner selves over to just anyone.

Perhaps it is protection. Perhaps it is a necessary boundary. Perhaps some distances continue to work within us even when we think we have understood them.

One question remains:

What really changes when, after finding a door closed to us, we are the ones who have the chance to decide who may enter?

The remarks and expressions attributed to the people in this story have been reconstructed by the author from memory, years later, and do not constitute a verbatim transcript.