When I was around ten years old, I was the tallest girl in my class.

Actually, for a while, I think I was taller than almost everyone. Girls and boys.

At school, whenever we had to walk somewhere together, the teachers would put us in a line according to height. Shortest at the front, tallest at the back.

I knew exactly where I belonged.

At the very end.

I hated it.

I was growing quickly, and most of my friends were much shorter than me. So when I walked beside them, I would bend down to talk to them. My shoulders would curve forward. My head would come down.

I don’t remember consciously thinking, I need to make myself smaller.

I thought I was simply getting closer to everyone else.

My mother noticed.

She could see that I was growing fast, becoming curvier, and developing terrible posture. So she enrolled me in classical ballet.

Me during my ballet years in Brazil.

At the time, I thought she was trying to fix my back.

Now I’m not so sure that was all ballet gave me.

For those years, my posture completely changed.

My shoulders went back. My spine became straight. My neck became long. I stopped looking at the floor. I could sit on a chair with a beautifully straight back and walk into a room without folding myself forward.

Ballet required my body to practice, over and over again, something I had been trying very hard not to do:

take my full height.

I would walk from my grandmother’s house to ballet several times a week, take my class, and walk back again. I didn’t know it then, but my mother was making an investment in me that I would understand only decades later.

Because I still shrink.

I’m 1.77m now. I’m not extraordinarily tall, but I’m taller than many of the women around me.

Then I moved to Italy and discovered an expression I’d never heard before:

Altezza è mezza bellezza.

Height is half of beauty.

I remember thinking: Are you serious?

I had spent years trying to disguise something that, in another culture, people were casually describing as half the job done.

There was something almost funny about it. The body hadn’t changed. Only the story around it had.

And sometimes, when I’m walking beside a shorter friend, I catch myself doing exactly what I did as a little girl.

I bend.

I lower myself.

I make myself closer to her height.

The strange thing is that I’ve started noticing that I don’t only do this with my body.

Sometimes I do it with my life.

Have you ever had that friend who, for a period of time, seems to be going through one difficult thing after another?

Her relationship isn’t working. Work is awful. She had a terrible weekend. Nothing seems to be going right.

And then there’s you.

Maybe, at that particular moment, you’re actually happy.

Your relationship is good. You had a beautiful weekend with your family. Something exciting is happening at work. Life isn’t perfect, of course, but right now, things are good.

You sit down with her and listen.

And then, almost without realizing it, you start searching your own life for something that isn’t going well.

Well, I’m exhausted.

Actually, something annoying happened this week.

Things aren’t perfect for me either.

Not because you’re lying. There is always something we can find.

But because saying I’m actually really happy right now can suddenly feel almost impolite.

You don’t want your happiness to make her sadness feel heavier. You don’t want to seem insensitive. So instead of simply being present for what she’s going through, you adjust yourself to meet her emotional level.

You shrink the good things in your life a little, so you can fit more comfortably into the conversation.

I know there is kindness in that. I don’t want to celebrate while someone I love is hurting.

But I’ve started wondering where empathy ends and shrinking begins.

Years later, I took a MasterClass with behavioral researcher Vanessa Van Edwards. She talks about the physical distance between our ears and our shoulders. When we’re uncomfortable or insecure, our shoulders can creep upward and our neck retracts. We physically contract.

I immediately thought of ballet.

Shoulders down. Neck long. Head up.

Create space.

It made me wonder how often our bodies reveal something we’re doing everywhere else.

How often do we shrink an opinion because we don’t want to sound difficult?

An ambition because it might sound ridiculous?

Good news because somebody else is struggling?

Our intelligence because we’re speaking in a language that doesn’t completely belong to us?

Our height because everyone else is standing a little lower?

Perhaps this is why, approaching forty, I’ve found myself thinking that every woman should take a ballet class.

Not because every woman needs to dance.

Because I think every woman should experience what it feels like to spend an hour being asked to take her full height.

To open instead of contract.

To lift her eyes from the floor.

To stop apologizing, physically or otherwise, for the space she occupies.

When my mother enrolled me in ballet, I thought she was fixing my posture.

Nearly thirty years later, I wonder if she was teaching me something much bigger.

Stand up.

Shoulders back.

Lengthen your neck.

Lift your eyes.

Take the height you were given.

At ten, I needed a ballet teacher to remind my body how to do it.

At almost forty, perhaps I need to remind myself.

Because I don’t want to spend the next forty years making myself smaller just so I fit more comfortably into somebody else’s line.

Just Julia

If something in this story felt familiar, you’re welcome to stay. Every week, I write for women figuring out who they’re becoming next.

Prefer to listen? Just Julia is also a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

Some stories stay with us much longer than the people who gave them to us.

In this episode of JUST JULIA, we go deeper into The Girl Who Never Made the List — a story that began with a childhood beauty ranking and became a much bigger question about confidence, external validation, and the beliefs we carry into adulthood.

Years later, I would find myself looking at my own face in pharmacy windows across Milan as part of a skincare campaign. But this isn’t a story about finally becoming “pretty enough.” It’s about something much more interesting: why did somebody else’s opinion ever get to become evidence of my worth in the first place?

This conversation explores the stories we inherit about ourselves, the authority we unknowingly give to other people’s judgments, and what happens when we begin to question them.

Read the original essay, The Girl Who Never Made the List, here.

A few days ago, I published an essay about something I’ve carried with me for years: what happens to your confidence when so much of your life is lived in languages that aren’t your own.

I wanted to hear that story differently. Some stories change when you hear them out loud.

This is the first audio conversation from JUST JULIA.

If you’d rather read the original essay, you can find “Do You Know How Smart I Am in My Own Language?” here.

There is a scene from Modern Family that has stayed with me.

Gloria, frustrated by not being able to express herself properly in English, says:

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“Do you know how frustrating it is to have to translate everything in my head before I say it? Do you even know how smart I am in Spanish?”

I laughed when I heard it.

And then I thought: God, I know that feeling.

I left Brazil in 2006.

Since then, I have studied, worked, fallen in love, built a career, married and become a mother in languages that weren’t originally mine.

Today, I speak Portuguese, English and Italian fluently.

That sentence should make me feel powerful.

And yet, sometimes it doesn’t.

Sometimes I’m in a meeting and I know exactly what I want to say. I know the idea. I know the argument.

But I can’t find the word.

Or, more precisely, the word arrives in the wrong language.

Portuguese comes when I need Italian. English appears instead. I reject one word, search for another, rearrange the sentence, check the grammar — all while trying not to lose the thought I was trying to communicate in the first place.

There is this strange linguistic mathematics happening constantly in my head.

And sometimes, somewhere in all that calculation, I lose the story I was trying to tell.

From the outside, perhaps what you see is a woman hesitating.

Searching.

Restarting a sentence.

But inside her head, three languages are moving at once.

The pause doesn’t necessarily mean there is less going on.

Sometimes it means there is more.

And yet, when this happens often enough, you can start confusing your ability to express your intelligence with your intelligence itself.

I have felt this at work.

I have been in meetings where I knew my subject deeply but couldn’t argue my point in Italian with the precision I wanted.

Someone would correct a word.

Someone would imitate my pronunciation.

Someone would laugh at the way I said something.

And while I usually laughed too, there were times when I could feel myself getting smaller.

Less articulate.

Less authoritative.

Less certain of something I had been completely certain about five minutes earlier.

I’ve caught myself focusing on my grammar instead of my idea.

I’ve listened to the sound of my own accent when I was supposed to be listening to myself.

And when you do that often enough, something subtle happens.

You start editing yourself before anyone else has the chance.

You make the sentence simpler.

You tell the shorter version.

Sometimes, you don’t say it at all.

That’s the strange thing about confidence.

Sometimes it isn’t taken from us in one dramatic moment.

Sometimes we give it away in tiny pieces.

And yet, some of the places where I have felt most comfortable speaking imperfectly have been the most international rooms of my life.

My university in New Zealand was extraordinarily multicultural. People came from all over the world, and for many of us, English wasn’t our first language.

Nobody needed to explain what it felt like to search for a word.

We were all searching.

Years later, I interned at the United Nations in New York.

I remember rooms filled with accents.

French. Spanish. Portuguese. Italian. Arabic. Languages I couldn’t even identify.

People paused.

People searched for words.

People pronounced things differently.

And somehow none of that made anyone seem less intelligent.

If anything, it reminded you how much existed behind the language being spoken.

You weren’t listening to someone’s English and wondering why it wasn’t perfect.

You were listening to their ideas.

This summer, at Mindvalley University in Tallinn, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time.

That same sensation.

Different nationalities. Different accents. Different stories.

People meeting each other somewhere in the middle.

It reminded me of the United Nations.

And perhaps that’s one of the reasons I feel so alive in multicultural environments.

Nobody owns the room linguistically.

We all have to cross a small bridge to reach one another.

And there is something incredibly equalizing about that.

Lately, I’ve also started wondering whether I’ve been thinking about accents in the wrong way.

Because perhaps it’s not just an accent.

It’s an identity.

Language carries culture, and culture carries identity.

Ask someone who speaks several languages whether exactly the same personality emerges in each one, and I suspect many will tell you no.

I’m funnier in Portuguese.

There is a rhythm to my humor there that doesn’t always travel with me.

There are parts of me that became independent in English.

And there are parts of my adult life, my career, my marriage, becoming a mother, that were built in Italian.

They’re not different women.

They’re all me.

The funny thing is that after almost twenty years abroad, I’m not even completely safe in Portuguese anymore.

Sometimes I speak to my family in Brazil and an Italian word slips into a Portuguese sentence.

My accent has changed.

They laugh.

And I laugh too.

But occasionally I think:

Where exactly is the language in which I sound completely like myself now?

Maybe there isn’t one anymore.

Maybe parts of me live in all three.

Maybe that’s not linguistic confusion.

Maybe that’s what twenty years of living between cultures sounds like.

I’m writing a lot about confidence lately because I’m trying to understand where some of mine went.

I’m looking backward at the little moments when I learned to question things about myself that I once didn’t question so much.

And language might be one of them.

Because somewhere along the way, I allowed the missing word, the accent, the grammatical mistake, the extra second I needed to respond, to become evidence against myself.

Something that should have made me feel more capable somehow started making me feel less.

And I’m starting to think I had it backwards.

I’m not less because I speak with an accent.

I am more because I speak three languages.

Because I have lived through them.

They carry different countries, different people, different versions of my life.

My accent isn’t evidence that I don’t belong in the conversation.

It’s evidence that I learned how to enter it in another language.

Actually, several.

Perhaps the goal was never to erase the accent.

Perhaps the goal is simply to stop hearing it as evidence of something missing.

Because an accent isn’t evidence that you know less.

Sometimes it’s evidence that you know more than one way to name the world.

I know there will still be moments when I forget the word.

Moments when Portuguese comes first and refuses to leave.

Moments when I begin a story and lose myself somewhere between three different languages.

But perhaps I can stop turning those moments into judgments about who I am.

Because the woman behind the pause isn’t less intelligent.

She simply has a lot of languages to search through.

And maybe that’s something I should stop apologizing for.

Just Julia

If something in this story felt familiar, you’re welcome to stay. Every week, I write for women figuring out who they’re becoming next.

Prefer to listen? Just Julia is also a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

When I was twelve, the boys in my class had a tradition.

Every so often, they would write a list.

The ten prettiest girls.

The paper would travel from desk to desk.

Someone would add a name.

Someone would cross another out.

People debated who deserved to be there.

Mine never was.

It’s strange how something so ordinary can quietly become part of the way you see yourself.

I don’t remember all the names that made those lists.

I don’t even remember what most of those boys look like today.

But I remember what I started believing.

I’m just not one of the beautiful girls.

Children don’t know the difference between an opinion and a fact.

So I carried that opinion with me as if it were the truth.

Without realizing it, I started collecting evidence.

I compared myself to other women.

To friends who became models.

To women who always seemed effortlessly beautiful.

To the girls who entered a room and somehow everyone noticed.

I admired them.

Sometimes, if I’m honest, I envied them.

And somewhere inside me, that twelve-year-old girl kept whispering,

“See? They’re the beautiful ones.”

Years passed.

Life happened.

I became a woman.

A wife.

A mother.

I stopped thinking about those classroom lists.

Or at least I thought I had.

Then, earlier this year, a friend called me.

She owns a skincare brand.

She asked if I would model for the launch of a new product.

I actually laughed.

Surely she had the wrong person.

There were so many women more photogenic.

More glamorous.

More… model-like.

But I showed up.

We spent a few hours taking photographs.

It felt simple.

Beautiful.

And then I went back to my life.

Months later, walking through Milan, I looked up.

And there she was.

Me.

My face was covering pharmacy windows.

Printed on product boxes.

Looking back at me from places I had walked past hundreds of times before.

I stood there for a while.

Not because I suddenly thought I had become beautiful.

But because, for a brief moment, I remembered that little girl sitting in a classroom in Brazil.

The one who believed she wasn’t enough to be chosen.

The one who quietly accepted someone else’s definition of beauty as her own.

And I wanted to hug her.

Because the thing that moved me wasn’t seeing my face in a pharmacy window.

It was realizing how long I’d allowed a twelve-year-old story to shape the way I saw myself.

The campaign didn’t make me beautiful.

It simply made me question the story.

And maybe that’s what healing really is.

Not becoming someone different.

Not waiting for the world to finally approve of us.

But finding enough distance to ask:

“Who told me this about myself?”

“And why did I believe them for so long?”

I wish I could tell you that from that day on, I never questioned my beauty again.

That wouldn’t be true.

Some stories don’t disappear overnight.

They soften.

They lose their certainty.

They stop sounding like facts and start sounding like old echoes.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe healing isn’t the moment we stop doubting ourselves.

Maybe it’s the moment we stop treating those doubts as the final word.

What I needed was to stop asking twelve-year-old memories to introduce me to the woman I’ve become.

If I could go back to that classroom today, I wouldn’t tell that little girl,

“One day your face will be displayed in shop windows across Milan.”

Because that isn’t the point.

I’d kneel beside her and tell her something I wish someone had told me sooner.

“Sweet girl… the people who made that list never imagined you’d carry their words for so many years.

It’s time to put them down.

They were never yours to carry.”

They don’t get to decide how you’ll spend the next thirty years looking at yourself.

And maybe…

Neither do the adults who came after them.

What story about yourself have you been carrying for years… simply because someone else wrote it first?

Just Julia

If something in this story felt familiar, you’re welcome to stay. Every week, I write for women figuring out who they’re becoming next.

Prefer to listen? Just Julia is also a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.