I have never been particularly frightened of change. I’ve moved house a few times, but I don’t remember particular discomforts, regrets, long periods of maladjustment. A lot of people hate moving; some people think it can shorten your life. But first of all, I love the word – in Italian, trasloco, or “across a place” – which makes me think of the momentum needed for a leap forward, a gathering of energy that propels you towards another place, where there is everything to discover and learn.

I am convinced, in other words, that change has a definite positive side. It helps us realize, for example, that we’ve accumulated a lot of useless things: very little is truly of use. We get attached to objects and spaces, and sometimes people; and find that without them, not only is our life not impoverished, it unexpectedly opens up to new possibilities.

When such changes are radical, my tendency, after a little hesitation, is towards euphoria. I feel the way I did when, as a child, I invented all kinds of reasons to be outside when a storm was approaching and the air was charged with electricity, and I could smell the rain arriving, feel the first drops, and wanted to get completely soaked before my mother grabbed me and pulled me inside.

That propensity, however, meant that it took me a culpably long time to feel the other side of change: suffering. I don’t mean so much the discomfort of small changes, but the devastating force of big changes when they destroy old models of life and invent and impose new ones. There is, to start with, the suffering of people who are overwhelmed, who suddenly see their existence in a shambles: they rage, resist from within the shell of old habits, give up hope and, finally, collapse when they discover that the world of yesterday will not be here tomorrow. It’s the suffering that accompanies a way of life in decline.

And yet I’ve never been drawn in – not even through literature – by regret for how wonderful life used to be. I’ve always felt the joy of upheaval, and maybe that’s why my relatively recent discovery of the suffering inherent in change has made a deep impression. If we look beyond the joy that has greeted the many revolutions in the lives of women, we find just as much real suffering. And yet, as far as I know, the pain of those changes has hardly been described at all.

Even as a liberating act, taking off a dress that we’ve always worn, sometimes from the first years of life, to put on one that is more fitting, more festive, more audacious, more authoritative, can hurt somewhere. We can’t tear off what once seemed to be our skin without pain; something endures and resists. Certainly the joyful sense of liberation prevails; but to be silent about the anguish, the suffering is a mistake. The anaesthetic doesn’t cancel out the wound.

• Translated by Ann Goldstein