The repeated public debates about who is Catalan, or what it means to be Catalan, have little to do with wanting to understand Catalan society. These are discussions that arise from political confrontations, in which each participant uses their definition to define themselves and distance themselves from the adversary. Therefore, nothing can be known about Catalans and their nation, and all the interest lies in how we are used to further the respective political projects. These are debates that occur intermittently in all nations, but here they are endemic.

There was a concentration of therians at the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona. A month ago we didn't know what this word meant, and now we all do. People who "feel" like animals, whether dogs, horses, or cats (the most common). That is, they usually feel like mammals or reptiles. Rarely insects. There are no therians fly or louse. The word is a neologism that, like all things to be legitimized and perpetuated, comes from Greek.Therianthropia comes from therion (animal) and anthropos (human).

Before becoming a mother, I had very firm convictions about who I was and what my path would be. I didn't imagine the extent to which motherhood transforms you completely, the extent to which I myself would become a different person. I thought it would be harder for me to stop prioritizing myself, and that I would sometimes experience it with unease or as a loss.

At the heart of the independence movement was the desire to relegate identity-based and victim-blaming nationalism—in other words, the worst face of Pujolism, the Ferrussola face—to the background. The key contribution in this regard, from the intellectual sphere, came from the philosopher Xavier Rubert de Ventós, with his work From identity to independence, from 1999, a decade before the start of the Process. That book had a foreword by his friend Pasqual Maragall, who still declared himself a federalist. Over the years, Rubert de Ventós's essay would end up leading Maragallism and part of the PSC to pro-sovereignty positions.

When I appealed last week to a new intelligence—I could also have said a new imaginary—to refer to the migration processes our country is experiencing, what I meant was that we must know how to speak about social reality appropriately. That there are old concepts that don't fit the new realities. That concepts should be adapted to reality, not the other way around. That we must think in a way that brings us as close as possible to the facts—and, if possible, to the truth—especially those that are most conflicting and disturbing to us. That we must avoid masking or mystifying reality, whether it's done intentionally to make it more obvious or in bad faith to alarm us and take advantage of it.