Learning to stay unfinished
Transition as a space I inhabit.
Words & Visuals: Anna Serio
Photography: Laura Depaoli & Anna Serio
I used to believe that growing up meant eventually settling somewhere: choosing a city, a job, a person, a home, and slowly becoming a more definite version of myself.
This year, I did almost all of those things. I moved to New York City, changed jobs three times—which, indeed, was perhaps a little too much—got married, went back to university, made new friends, and bought and renovated my first home, where I grew up, on the shores of a lake in Italy. Each decision felt like a promise of resolution: a new chapter, a more stable life. And, for a moment, each one was. But almost as soon as I arrived somewhere, something started shifting. The place changed, what I wanted changed, and eventually I changed with it.
For a long time, I thought this restlessness was something I would ultimately have to overcome. I imagined that one day things would settle. Now I am beginning to think that, for me, transition is not just a phase on the way to something else, but my condition of being alive.
I finish things. I just don’t stay finished for very long.
When I moved to New York City last year, it was the first place where I didn’t feel particularly strange for being this way.
I arrived with the usual practical questions: where to live, where to work, how to get from one place to another. Some were answered quickly. Others are still being answered. In the meantime, I found a job much closer to what I wanted to do, shared this new life with someone I deeply love, made friends I also sincerely love, collected familiar streets, and developed opinions about which subway entrance to use.
From the outside, much of my life probably looks assembled. Inside, it is still being rearranged. And I am starting to enjoy that.
In New York, I find this whole matter less troubling. Perhaps it is simply that I meet more people whose lives are also in the middle of something: people who have recently arrived, who are considering leaving, who have changed their minds about what they came here to do. I don’t know whether this says anything particularly profound about the city. I only know that, for the first time, I don’t feel an immediate need to explain why my life is still taking shape.
Left: Casa 105 © Laura Depaoli, Right: Sketch © Anna Serio
I can feel good about where I live without knowing how long I will live here. I can take my work seriously without assuming it must be the work I do forever. I can build a life here without declaring that this is where it will end up.
And then there is the house.
Just before moving to New York, Lorenzo—the one guy who is now officially the love of my life—and I bought a house where we grew up in Italy.
There was no particular urgency. We didn’t need a place to live. I think we simply wanted something that was only ours. There was something slightly awkward and very adult about wanting a house. We wanted a place where we could leave our stuff, a place we could return to, still there if everything else around us changed.
When we bought it, the house still contained someone else’s furniture and the traces of decisions made by people we had never met. We wanted a place for the big table we bought in Brussels on Facebook Marketplace, the drawings we bought in China, the books we read while travelling.
It is also where I leave the things I’m not ready to give away: books, clothes for another season, objects I’ve collected and moved from place to place. Things that aren’t particularly useful in New York, but that I would never dream of getting rid of. A place where all these things could finally stop moving with us.
We spent months making our own decisions. This wall would stay. That floor would be restored. This room would become something else. We chose materials and colours, worked through drawings, changed our minds about some things, and eventually stopped changing them about others.
We wanted the house to be finished very badly. There was no deadline. We didn’t need to move into it. But we wanted to know that it was there. We wanted to arrive, open the door, and find our home. To paint a square on the wall. To put a nail in it. To leave something somewhere and know it would still be there when we came back.
I like knowing where things are. I like knowing they have a place and aren’t sitting in boxes, waiting for me to come back.
Casa 105 © Laura Depaoli
Perhaps this is why I like the house so much. I like knowing that I could cook there for friends, have people stay, or return one day and find the rooms more or less as I left them.
The house gives me something I didn’t realise I was looking for. Not necessarily another home, and not a reason to go back. Just a place that does not require me to make another decision. A permanent nest where I can leave my stuff, return, change, and create my own centre of gravity. A place where I can see my friends, design my dream bathroom, and know that it is for the people we love.
For a while, I thought these two places represented opposite desires. New York was where I was changing; Italy was where I was making something stay. But I don’t think they need to explain each other.
The house does not ask me to stay. It gives me somewhere to return to. And I can take the privilege of leaving some questions unanswered in New York because I have answered others somewhere else. I have an address to return to, rooms whose arrangement I know, and things I don’t have to carry with me every time I move.
The house does not resolve the uncertainty of living in New York and not knowing what will be next. It makes it easier to live with.
Maybe this is how I have actually been making decisions this year: not by deciding everything, but by deciding what needs to be decided. Other things, I have deliberately left open.
This year’s transition was total. It was messy, layered, sometimes overwhelming, and, more often than I expected, sweet.
I can want a home that stays and a life that changes. I can commit to a place without needing to be there all the time. I can make lasting decisions without expecting them to answer every question about who I am. Some have changed the structure of my life. Others have changed my daily routine. Some are still showing me what they mean.
I can’t always tell which decisions will become anchors and which will lead me somewhere new. Maybe I don’t need to know yet.
Casa 105 © Anna Serio
What has changed is how I think about permanence. I used to imagine permanence as the opposite of movement. If something was permanent, I thought, it meant I had finally stopped moving. Now I am less sure.
I think it took me a while to understand this because, as an architect, I was trained to understand space through plans, sections, distances, and relationships. I know a plan fixes things in place. It tells us where a wall ends, where a door begins, how one room relates to another. There is something reassuring about that. Once it is drawn, you know where everything is.
I know how to draw a place so that someone else can understand it. I am less sure this is how I remember one, or how I actually experience space. The places I have lived do not stay in their original arrangement. New York is mixed up with Italy now. The house I bought is mixed up with the house I grew up in. Some apartments I haven’t seen in years still appear when I think about where I have lived.
The same thing happens with cities. A place becomes familiar through repetition, but also through everything that happens there. It is difficult to separate the street from the people you walked it with, or the city from the version of yourself that first arrived there.
This is probably why distance between places has become less important to me. They can be very far apart and still belong to the same life.
I used to imagine that becoming an adult meant gradually arriving at a final arrangement: the right city, the right work, the right home, the right version of myself.
I still want some of those things to last. I have just stopped expecting them all to become definitive at once.
For now, I am learning to stay unfinished. Not because nothing has been decided, but because some things have. I have somewhere to stand while the rest can keep changing.
Words & Visuals: Anna Serio
Photography: Laura Depaoli & Anna Serio