A few months ago, after hearing from a reader of Ombre e Luci, I reached out to several organizations, including the Paidea Foundation's Siblings program in Turin.
I ended up attending three online gatherings. Each brought roughly fifty siblings of people with disabilities — young adults mostly, but also people my age, from all over. The meetings had one simple purpose: to address what we were living through, to share it, to talk about it.
We covered three topics:
- The adult sibling's role: independence versus caregiving
- Family communication: expectations and freedom
- The emotional life of the adult sibling
Before each session, two or three siblings were asked to share their testimony. What they offered was raw and intimate. They spoke with real courage about their private, fragile experience. It couldn't have been easy to step into the light like that — but they did. And it changed us. Each of us felt less alone.
I remember the first meeting. A woman named Anna, close to my own age, from a town in Piedmont, shared her story. As she spoke, I realized I was listening to myself. Her account mirrored mine so exactly — though our families were different, the emotional and relational truth was identical. In that moment I felt her life become mine. I felt companionship. I understood that my experience was shared by countless other siblings: the dark and the light, the gains and the losses, the joy and the pain, the hope and the setback, the silence and the conversation, the weight and the satisfaction.
But I also saw something confirmed in all of us: we grew up fast. We became responsible for our disabled brother or sister before we were ready. We became responsible for life itself. We carried their fragility, and it shaped us. Life, for us, has never been trivial — never been a game or a joke at someone else's expense. We have carried within ourselves, despite the strain and sometimes despite our anger, a deep respect and love for our fragile brother or sister.
Family dialogue with our parents matters, of course. But not everyone has experienced this conversation with openness and peace. Still, our sensitivity — which hurt us in some ways — taught us to hear the words our parents never quite spoke aloud.
These gatherings have given me something I needed: a breath of air. The feeling of being in company. The sense of being connected to others who have already walked this road, who walk alongside me now, or who are making their way behind me because they are younger. A confirmation of how much it matters to be in network with people who understand.
These were the first online meetings the Paidea Foundation organized; they ended with a shared resolve to stay in touch, to keep talking, to face our concerns together. I was also struck by the delicacy and genuine respect the organizers showed toward those who shared their stories — and how that respect rippled through all of us listening. It held us together.