From Żebbuġ to TikTok: How one Maltese baker’s viral wake-up call is ending the island’s obsession with endless endurance

**”I used to think endurance was healing. Then life taught me otherwise” – The Maltese wake-up call that’s gone viral from Valletta to Gozo**

By *Hot Malta* Staff Writer

The sentence started as a whisper on a Tuesday morning Facebook post by 34-year-old Żebbuġ baker Ramona Pace: *“I used to think endurance was healing. Then life taught me otherwise.”* Within 48 hours it had been screenshotted, stitched into Instagram carousels, pinned on parish noticeboards and quoted on *TVM’s* evening news. By Friday, the phrase had become the unofficial motto of a national conversation Maltese therapists are calling “the great unburdening”.

Pace’s original post described collapsing behind the counter of her family’s 70-year-old bakery after her blood pressure spiked to 190/110. For years she had been waking at 3 a.m. to knefti, deliver ħobż biż-żejt to tourists, and still make it to her evening MBA class. “We wear exhaustion like a badge,” she told *Hot Malta*. “My nanna used to say, ‘Qalb tajba tħaddem il-ġisem’ – a good heart runs the body. But no one told me the heart can also file for bankruptcy.”

Her words struck a chord because they collide head-on with two pillars of Maltese identity: Catholic stoicism and the turbo-capitalism of a country that went from donkey carts to blockchain in one generation. “We literally built a nation on limestone and stubbornness,” says sociologist Dr. Maria Camilleri at the University of Malta. “But the same resilience that repelled sieges and rebuilt churches after WWII has mutated into a toxic ‘grin-and-bear-it’ culture.”

The numbers back her up. A 2023 National Statistics Office survey shows 62 % of Maltese workers skip at least five days of annual leave, while Eurofound ranks Malta third in the EU for unpaid overtime. Add 300 days of relentless sunshine – ironically a depressant for seasonal-affective-disorder sufferers elsewhere – and you get a population that feels guilty for feeling bad.

Cue Ramona’s sentence, which arrived like a cracked church bell at noon. Within minutes, #IUsedToThinkEnduranceWasHealing began trending, spawning Maltese-language spin-offs: #SħiħaMhixSopport, #QalbMaTistaxTħaddemBilBastiment. Gozitan farmer Joe Borg, 58, uploaded a TikTok from his tomato fields confessing he’d delayed prostate surgery for four harvests. “I thought the land would heal me,” he says, hoe in hand. “Instead I watered it with blood in my urine.” The clip has 1.2 million views – astronomical for an island of 520,000.

The Church, long the custodian of redemptive suffering, responded faster than many expected. Archbishop Charles Scicluna devoted his Sunday homily at St. John’s Co-Cathedral to the parable of the Good Samaritan, retitled “The Good Therapist”. “Even Jesus took naps in boats,” Scicluna told congregants. “Holiness is not sleep-deprivation.” A pastoral letter due next month will, for the first time, include guidelines for mental-health days.

Businesses are scrambling to keep up. iGaming giant Betsson Malta has introduced “Ramona Days” – two extra paid leave days that can be taken with two hours’ notice, no questions asked. Start-up hub TAKEOFF at the University of Malta reports a 40 % spike in counselling bookings since the phrase went viral. “We’re seeing coders admit they can’t code through panic attacks,” says manager Andrei Petrov. “That’s revolutionary here.”

Not everyone is applauding. Some older commentators dismiss the movement as “imported American snowflake-ism”. One *Times of Malta* letter writer blamed “selfie-generation weakness” for ruining the work ethic that attracted foreign investment. Yet even the critics prove the point: 72-year-old lawyer Frans Xerri, who penned the letter, later confessed on *Net TV* that he’s been self-medicating with whisky for insomnia since 1987. “Maybe endurance broke me too,” he conceded live on air.

Back in Żebbuġ, Ramona has turned the bakery’s upper floor into a free weekly support space run by Richmond Foundation volunteers. The smell of aniseed and fresh bread drifts through conversations about burnout, grief and anxiety. “Healing doesn’t mean grinding your bones into flour,” she says, sliding a tray of ftira into the oven. “Sometimes it means closing the shutters at 1 p.m., walking to the village square, and letting the bells ring without you.”

The bells still ring, but fewer Maltese feel compelled to answer every single toll. And that, on a limestone slab of land where endurance was once the highest virtue, may be the bravest thing they’ve ever done.