Just Julia

I have been thinking a lot about what I might build next.

Maybe it will be a company. Maybe it won’t. Maybe I will work for someone else again while building something alongside it. I genuinely don’t know yet, and I’m trying to become a little more comfortable with not knowing.

But because entrepreneurship has been on my mind, I’ve been reading more about what makes a company worth building beyond the obvious things like the product, the market, the numbers and whether anybody will actually pay for it.

And that is how I ended up thinking about values.

I was reading The Buddha and the Badass by Vishen Lakhiani when I reached his discussion of foundational values and the Origin Story exercise. The premise made me stop because, rather than asking us to choose a collection of admirable words, it asks us to look backwards at the experiences that shaped us and consider what they might have taught us to value.

One section is called “The Hidden Gifts of Your Pain.”

That title stayed with me.

So did two ideas discussed around this subject: Rumi’s image of the wound as the place where light enters us, and Viktor Frankl’s idea that suffering changes when we are able to find meaning in it.

I don’t believe everything painful happens for a reason, and I don’t think we need to turn every difficult experience into a beautiful lesson. Some things are simply painful. Some are unfair. Some I would happily have lived without.

But I became interested in a slightly different question:

What if the things that hurt us leave clues about what matters to us?

And instead of thinking about the values of a company I haven’t even created, I found myself asking a much more basic question.

What are mine?

At first, the question seemed almost too easy.

Family. Love. Honesty. Growth. Courage.

Most of us could probably sit down and produce a respectable list in five minutes.

But there is a difference between choosing words that sound like us and understanding the values that have actually been shaping the way we live.

So I started going backwards.

I looked at experiences from childhood and adolescence that still carried emotion when I remembered them. I looked at moments in my career when I felt overlooked or underestimated, relationships that ended without the closure I wanted, and times when I allowed somebody else’s decision about me to say something about my value.

As I did that, I began noticing something.

Different people, different countries, different stages of life, but underneath many of those experiences was a similar question:

Will you see my value?

That was uncomfortable to recognize because, rationally, I know that I have value. I know what I’ve done, what I’ve built and what I’m capable of, and yet I’ve also seen how quickly somebody else’s lack of recognition can sometimes make that knowledge tremble.

The first word I wrote down was self-worth, but the longer I sat with it, the less precise it felt. Eventually another expression came closer:

Intrinsic worth.

My value has to exist before somebody else recognizes it.

I’m still learning that one.

And perhaps that is part of this exercise too. You don’t necessarily find the perfect words immediately. Sometimes you start with one, sit with it, question it and eventually discover that there is another word underneath it that tells the truth more accurately.

Pain, however, wasn’t the only place where I found clues.

I also started thinking about the moments in my life when I had felt most alive, expansive, courageous, curious or completely myself.

New Zealand appeared almost immediately.

I first left Brazil for New Zealand when I was young, and later returned through a scholarship. Those experiences changed far more than my address or my English; they changed the size of the world I thought was available to me.

I had been a very shy girl, and suddenly I was somewhere where nobody knew the previous versions of me.

While doing this exercise, I found a sentence that helped me understand why international experiences have mattered so much throughout my life:

When I left the environment that already knew me, I discovered versions of myself I hadn’t known existed.

New Zealand was followed by Italy, New York, the United Nations, working across countries and cultures, and speaking languages that sometimes made me feel less intelligent than I knew I was until, slowly, they became other ways of expressing who I am.

From those experiences, different words began appearing.

Possibility. Growth. Courage. Belonging. Becoming.

Growth in particular made me stop because I realized that, for years, part of my relationship with personal development may have come from a quiet belief that there was always something about me that needed improving.

I need to become better because I’m not enough yet.

That isn’t the kind of growth I want to build my life around anymore.

I prefer this:

I want to grow because there is more of me to discover.

One comes from inadequacy.

The other comes from possibility.

And that difference matters to me.

Find your words

This is where I want to turn the exercise over to you.

Vishen’s Origin Story exercise inspired me to revisit the experiences that shaped me and look for the values hidden inside them. Rather than reproducing that exercise here, these are the questions that became useful while working through my own story.

You don’t need to be starting a company to do this. You might be changing careers, becoming a mother, leaving a relationship, approaching forty, starting again, or simply realizing that some of the things you spent years pursuing don’t feel quite as important anymore.

Or maybe nothing dramatic is happening at all.

Maybe you simply haven’t asked yourself this question for a very long time.

And when one appears, don’t stop at the word. Define it.

Two women can both write freedom and mean entirely different things. For one, freedom might mean financial independence. For another, it might mean living in another country. For another, having enough control over her time to pick her children up from school. For somebody else, freedom might mean finally being able to say what she thinks without constantly worrying about how everybody else will respond.

So when you find a word, try completing this:

MY WORD: __________

To me, it means: __________

I learned this because: __________

If I lived more faithfully to this value, I would: __________

That last question is where this stopped being simply an interesting exercise for me.

Because once we know what we value, we also have to look at whether the life we’re living reflects it.

And motherhood added another dimension to the question that I hadn’t expected.

We spend so much time thinking about the values we want to teach our children. Be kind. Be brave. Respect people. Believe in yourself. Work hard. Love your family.

But our children are also watching the way we live.

If I want my son to know that his worth doesn’t depend on somebody else’s approval, am I living as though mine does?

If I want him to be courageous, does he see me trying things before I know whether I’ll succeed?

If I tell him that family matters, can he see that value in the way I protect my time?

If I want him to remain curious about the world, does he see his mother continuing to learn, question, change her mind and begin again?

Suddenly, values become much more than words.

They become behavior.

And you don’t have to be a mother to ask yourself the same thing:

If somebody who knew me intimately had to guess my values only by watching how I live, what would they say?

Would their list match mine?

The words I found

I’m not sure my list is finished, and I’m becoming less concerned about whether it ever is.

Some of the words I started with have already become more precise as I’ve understood what sits underneath them, but after looking at the painful experiences as well as the beautiful ones, the moments when I felt diminished and the ones when I felt most alive, these are the values that keep returning to me.

Intrinsic worth — knowing that my value exists before somebody else re…

A few days before I lost my job, I was sitting by the window of an airplane somewhere above the clouds, flying home from Bucharest.

I was anxious. Work had been weighing on me for some time, and I remember looking out of that tiny window and repeating something I had started saying to myself more and more:

Show me. Guide me. Use me. I’m listening. I’m at your service.

I don’t remember exactly how many times I said it, but I remember meaning it.

A few days later, I lost my job.

Apparently, I should have been more specific.

I can laugh at that now. At the time, I certainly wasn’t laughing.

And just to be clear, I don’t believe an affirmation got me fired. I don’t think I sat on an airplane, placed an order with the universe and received unemployment a few days later. But I have thought about the timing a lot, because there is something slightly inconvenient about asking life to show you another way.

What if you don’t like the way it shows you?

I’ve been using affirmations for years. One of the first that really stayed with me was Marisa Peer’s I am enough. Three words, and I repeated them for years.

Over time, my Notes app became a strange little collection of sentences I wanted to remember. Some were about worth: I, Julia, am worthy of having all my needs met. Some were about abundance: Money comes to me abundantly and freely. Others were about possibility: Surprise me, universe, with possibilities beyond what I can imagine.

There is one I use when I’m afraid of an outcome, particularly lately during job interviews: It’s this or something better. And there is another I love when I’m making something unnecessarily complicated before I’ve even started: Show me how easy this gets to be.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed that the affirmations that affected me most had started changing. They weren’t really statements anymore. They were questions.

What can I do differently to live a happier, more fulfilling life?

What is this asking of me?

Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say, and to whom?

And then there was the one that kept coming back:

Show me. Guide me. Use me. I’m listening. I’m at your service.

Maybe that difference matters, because I am enough asks me to believe something about myself, while show me asks me to admit that perhaps I don’t already know.

I shared that mantra publicly for the first time recently in my piece about Kundalini. Then, within days, I listened to two recent conversations with Oprah Winfrey, one with Jay Shetty and another with Mel Robbins, and heard her talking about a prayer she has carried through her own life.

The language was remarkably close to what had been running through my own head: show me, use me, how can I serve?

I actually stopped listening for a second.

Wait. Oprah asks this too?

Not because hearing Oprah say something suddenly makes it true, and certainly not because I’m comparing my life to hers. It was what the question represented that stopped me.

Here is a woman who has achieved almost every conventional marker of success imaginable, and she is still asking what she is here to do, how she can serve and where she should be guided.

Suddenly, I understood my own mantra slightly differently.

Maybe I haven’t been asking life to give me what I want. Maybe I’ve been asking to understand what I’m here for.

Those are not the same request.

Six months ago, I don’t think I would have been sitting here thinking seriously about purpose, service, what I want to create or what kind of work I want the next chapter of my life to contain. I had a career, a title and a structure. I knew how to operate inside it.

And then that structure disappeared.

I would love to tell you that I immediately saw this as an invitation from life. I did not. I saw it as losing my job.

There was disappointment, anger, fear, ego and a lot of practical questions. There was also that uncomfortable feeling of no longer knowing exactly how to answer one of the simplest questions people ask:

So, what do you do?

But eventually another question started appearing:

What is this asking of me?

Not why did this happen? I could probably spend years answering that. But what is this asking of me now?

That question changes something for me, because it doesn’t require me to pretend I wanted what happened. It doesn’t ask me to call something painful a blessing or insist that everything happens for a reason. It only asks me what I’m going to do with what has already happened.

Since then, I have found myself brainstorming things I never really made space to brainstorm before. What kind of work actually gives me energy? What do I want to build? What do I want to write about? Who do I want to help? What do I have to say that perhaps only I can say in my particular way? What would I attempt if I stopped assuming everything meaningful had to fit neatly inside the career I had already built?

Just Julia itself has become part of that questioning.

I started writing because I needed somewhere to put the things I was thinking about, but writing has done something I didn’t expect: it has made me listen to myself.

Every time I sit down to write one of these pieces, I have to stop long enough to ask what I actually think about something, not what sounds impressive, not what belongs on LinkedIn, not what somebody else would advise me to think or do. Me.

I don’t know yet where all of that leads, and perhaps that’s precisely the point.

For a long time, I thought affirmations were mainly about changing what we believe. Say something enough times and perhaps eventually the mind begins to accept a different possibility. I still think there can be something valuable in that, but lately I’m interested in something else.

I don’t know whether affirmations change the universe.

I know they change what I pay attention to.

When I stop in the middle of a difficult day and ask, What is this asking of me?, I interrupt myself. When I’m preparing for an interview I really want and remind myself, It’s this or something better, I loosen my grip, just slightly, on the idea that there is only one acceptable outcome.

When I’m frightened to put something into the world and say, Show me how easy this gets to be, I challenge my own assumption that everything important has to feel difficult. And when I say, Surprise me with possibilities beyond what I can imagine, I’m admitting something my control-loving brain doesn’t particularly enjoy:

Maybe I can’t imagine every good version of my future yet.

But there is a catch.

If I’m going to say show me, I have to be willing to see. If I say guide me, I have to accept that the direction may not be the one I had planned. If I say surprise me, I probably can’t add but only with surprises I have pre-approved.

And if I say it’s this or something better, then perhaps I have to learn how to exist in that deeply uncomfortable space where this is gone and something better hasn’t arrived yet.

That’s the part nobody puts on the affirmation card.

I still don’t know exactly what I believe about manifestation. I don’t know whether the universe is listening when I talk to it. Sometimes I say God, sometimes I say universe, and sometimes I don’t know who I’m speaking to at all.

Strangely, I’ve become more comfortable with not knowing.

Because perhaps the value isn’t in proving who is listening.

Perhaps the value is that I am.

I’m listening to myself, to the questions I’ve avoided, to the things that no longer fit, and to possibilities I might once have dismissed because they didn’t belong to the version of my life I had already planned.

Perhaps that’s what these words have been doing for me all along. Not predicting my future or magically creating it, but making me conscious enough to participate in it.

I still say:

Show me. Guide me. Use me. I’m listening. I’m at your service.

But I understand the words differently now.

I used to think show me meant: show me the answer. Now I wonder whether it means: show me what I haven’t been willing to look at.

I thought guide me meant: take me somewhere …

What if the habit you call preparation is actually making you suffer before anything has happened?

In this episode of Just Julia, we explore the ideas behind Julia Kallas’s essay “I Was Always Prepared for the Worst”: why worst-case thinking feels protective, how the body responds to imagined danger, and the crucial difference between preparing for uncertainty and emotionally living through it in advance.

Drawing on Julia’s personal reflections and an insight from Jay Shetty about our attachment to worst-case scenarios, this conversation examines the hidden cost of always bracing for disappointment.

This is not an invitation to ignore reality or force yourself to think positively. It is a conversation about radical self-trust and learning to ask:

Is this happening, or am I making myself experience it before it happens?

And when fear asks, “What if the worst happens?”, perhaps the more powerful question is:

And then what?

Because confidence is not knowing that nothing bad will happen. It is knowing that you will not abandon yourself if it does.

If you overthink, prepare yourself for disappointment, or carry tomorrow’s pain into today, this episode is for you.

You do not need to trust the outcome. You need to trust the woman who will meet it.

I am afraid of the future right now.

There. I said it.

I don’t know what my professional life will look like six months from now.

Will I take another corporate job? Will I build something of my own? Will one of the ideas filling notebooks and Notes folders become something real? Will I end up doing something I haven’t even thought of yet?

I don’t know.

And I don’t particularly enjoy not knowing.

I have spent most of my adult life moving forward.

There was always another goal, another country, another opportunity, another version of myself I was becoming.

Now, for perhaps the first time in a long time, I can’t see very far ahead.

And when you can’t see what comes next, fear is very good at offering directions.

Take the safe option.

Hurry.

Don’t fall behind.

Be realistic.

Find another title.

Make sure everyone knows you’re still doing well.

Fear can sound remarkably sensible.

Which is why lately I have been asking myself a different question.

How do you hear your own voice when fear is the loudest voice in the room?

I grew up in a small town in Brazil.

When I was young, I had what felt like an enormous dream.

I wanted to live abroad.

That was it.

I couldn’t have described the life I have now because I didn’t know a life like this was available to me.

At seventeen, I went to New Zealand.

Later came Italy. Milan. New York. The United Nations. An international career. People, places and experiences that the girl who first dreamed of leaving Brazil didn’t even have references for.

Her dream came true.

But something else happened too.

Life became bigger than the dream.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Because here I am again, standing somewhere I cannot see beyond.

And perhaps I’m making the same mistake.

Perhaps I’m assuming that because I cannot imagine what comes next, there is nothing beyond what I can currently imagine.

We spend so much of our lives following directions.

Some come from our families.

Some from the culture we grew up in.

Some from LinkedIn.

Some from Instagram.

Some from the younger versions of ourselves who decided, years ago, what a successful life was supposed to look like.

Study.

Build a career.

Earn more.

Get the title.

Find the partner.

Create the family.

Buy the things.

Keep moving.

And none of those things is wrong.

I wanted many of them.

I still want many of them.

But what happens when you arrive at some of the destinations and something inside you quietly whispers:

There is more.

Not I need more.

That’s different.

Not a bigger house. A better body. A more impressive title. Another country stamped into a passport.

More within me.

Something I haven’t expressed yet.

Something I haven’t given yet.

Something I may not even have language for yet.

I’ve started thinking of it as an inner GPS.

The problem is that mine is competing with a lot of noise right now.

Fear wants certainty.

My CV wants continuity.

The world likes an easily explainable next step.

And I would quite like someone to hand me a map and say:

Here. This is why all of this happened. This is where you’re going. Everything will work out.

Nobody has handed me that map.

So I’m learning to listen differently.

And maybe that’s what an inner GPS actually requires.

Not knowing the entire route.

Just becoming quiet enough to recognise the next truthful turn.

Today I heard Mel Robbins say something that stayed with me:

“Purpose is not the thing that you do. Purpose is the thing that happens in others when you do the things that you do.”

I had been asking the first question.

What am I supposed to do?

Another corporate job?

Writing?

A business?

A project for children?

Something completely different?

But maybe I’ve been asking purpose to give me a job description.

What if the better question is:

What happens in other people because I was here?

That question made me look backwards.

Not at my CV.

At my life.

And I began noticing something.

There were years when I didn’t feel beautiful.

I remember being the girl who wasn’t chosen by the boys at school and quietly absorbing what I thought that said about me.

I know what it is to carry an old version of yourself long after everyone else has forgotten her.

And today, when I think about writing for women, I want that woman to know that being unseen once does not make her invisible forever.

I spent years building a professional identity.

Then suddenly I found myself without the title I had become accustomed to putting beneath my name.

It hurt.

It still hurts.

But now I find myself wanting to tell the woman going through the same thing:

Your title described what you did. It never contained everything you are.

And then I think about my son.

I discovered affirmations, breathing, self-talk and so much of this inner work as an adult.

And one of the questions I keep coming back to is:

Why should he have to wait that long?

Why should children spend decades undoing beliefs about themselves when perhaps we can help them build a kinder inner voice from the beginning?

And suddenly, things that once felt disconnected begin to look a little less disconnected.

Not because I believe every painful thing that happened to me was sent to teach me a lesson.

I don’t know that.

Some things just hurt.

But I am beginning to wonder whether what I didn’t receive can become something I give.

Maybe that’s one way pain stops being only pain.

I believe in God.

I also know that not everyone reading this uses that word.

Maybe for you it is God. The universe. Life. A life force. Something greater than yourself.

The name matters less to me than the feeling behind it.

There is a prayer I find myself returning to lately.

Not:

Give me the job.

Not:

Make this idea successful.

Not even:

Show me exactly what my purpose is.

Something simpler.

Show me where I can be useful.

Show me what I have that can serve.

Take what I’ve lived, the beautiful parts and the painful ones, and help me do something worthwhile with it.

Use me for something bigger than my fear.

I wish I could finish this essay by telling you that once I understood this, the fear disappeared.

It didn’t.

I am still afraid.

I still want security.

I still wonder what my work will look like six months from now.

I still have moments when I would much rather know the destination than practise trusting the next turn.

But then I remember that girl in Brazil.

Her biggest dream was to live abroad.

She had absolutely no idea.

She couldn’t see New Zealand.

She couldn’t see Milan.

She couldn’t see New York.

She couldn’t see the people she would love, the work she would do, the family she would build or the woman she would become.

She could only dream as far as she could see.

And life went further.

Maybe yours has too.

Maybe there was once something you desperately wanted that, looking backwards, was only the doorway to a life you couldn’t yet imagine.

And maybe you’re standing at another doorway now.

Between what you know and whatever comes next.

If you are, I don’t want to tell you not to be afraid.

I’m afraid too.

But perhaps we don’t need the entire map today.

Perhaps we need to become quiet enough to distinguish fear from direction.

To listen underneath everything we’ve been told we should want.

To ask not only What should I do next? but:

What is mine to give?

What happens in other people when I am most fully myself?

What if the dream I can see from here is not the biggest dream available to me?

I don’t know what my next chapter looks like yet.

That’s the truth.

But once before, a girl in a small town in Brazil dreamed as far as she could see.

And her life became bigger than her dream.

So maybe I don’t need to see the next dream yet.

Maybe I only need the courage to listen for it.

And maybe you do too.

There may be more waiting for us than either of us can see from here.

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.

This episode is a companion conversation to my essay, She Just Kept Becoming, a reflection on my mother and the many lives she allowed herself to live.

She was a civil engineer, farm manager, gym owner, union president, student again at 41 and, nearly 70, an online fitness instructor. Her path was never linear, yet the continuity was always there, not in her titles, but in the woman herself.

Through her story, this conversation explores identity beyond work, resilience after rejection, the humility required to become a beginner again and the freedom of building a career around a life rather than shrinking a life to fit a career.

Perhaps we do not need to find one thing that explains us forever. Perhaps we only need to trust what we feel called to build now.

Read the original essay, She Just Kept Becoming, on Just Julia. The Just Julia podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

There are endings that hurt because something failed.

And then there are endings that hurt because something finally worked, just after you were no longer there to see it.

I think I am grieving the second kind.

A chapter of my professional life ended recently. It was unexpected, and for a while, I thought losing it would be the hardest part.

It wasn’t.

The hardest part came afterwards.

Things I had spent months working towards started happening. Things I had fought for, waited for, worried about, believed in when they still felt impossibly far away.

They were finally becoming real.

And I wasn’t there anymore.

I wanted to be there when it worked.

Even writing that feels vulnerable.

Because there is a part of me that thinks I should be above wanting recognition. That I should simply be proud of what I did and move on. That my worth shouldn’t depend on somebody noticing.

And maybe one day I will feel that in my bones.

But today, if I’m telling the truth, I wanted that moment.

I wanted someone to turn around and say, Look what you did.

Not because I needed to be the most important person in the room. But because I knew what it had taken to get there.

The effort. The persistence. The times I gave more than was convenient. The moments when it would have been easier to stop caring quite so much.

There is something about working towards something for a long time that makes you imagine the ending.

You picture the result. The relief. The satisfaction. Maybe even the applause.

I never got that ending.

My story stopped somewhere between the work and the reward.

And perhaps that is what I am grieving.

Not a person.

Not even a place.

I’m grieving an ending I never got to experience.

There is a strange kind of loss in watching a world that once occupied so much of your life continue without you.

For years, there are people in your phone, conversations following you into evenings, problems occupying your thoughts, things you wake up thinking about and carry home with you.

And then one day, there is silence.

The messages stop.

The calls stop.

Everyone moves forward.

And you realise that something can have occupied an enormous amount of space in your life without you continuing to occupy the same space in its.

The story continues.

You just don’t get to see the next pages.

People have told me that perhaps one day I will look back and be grateful.

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe one day I will stand somewhere completely different and think, Thank God that happened when it did.

Maybe one day the timing that feels so cruel to me now will make perfect sense.

But I’m not there yet.

And I don’t think I need to rush myself there.

I don’t need to turn grief into gratitude simply because gratitude makes for a prettier ending.

Today, there is still a tightness in my throat when I think about what I didn’t get to witness.

There are still moments when I wish the phone would ring and someone from that old world would simply say:

You should see what happened.

It worked.

Maybe that call will never come.

And perhaps that is partly why I am writing this here.

Since I started Just Julia, writing has become a strange way of sitting beside things I don’t completely understand yet.

Some of the stories I’ve written here happened years ago. I could look back at them with distance, turn them around in my hands, and try to understand what they left behind.

This one is different.

I’m writing it from inside the feeling.

I don’t have the wisdom of hindsight yet. I don’t have the beautiful lesson that ties everything together.

I’m not healed from it.

But I’ve discovered something about writing: sometimes putting words around what hurts doesn’t make the hurt disappear. It simply gives it somewhere to go.

And maybe, for now, that is enough.

Because the recognition I wanted may never arrive from the people I expected to give it to me.

So I am trying to learn another kind.

The quieter kind.

The one where I can look back and say:

I know how hard I worked.

I know how much I cared.

I know what I gave.

If nobody witnessed the result, does the work still count?

I think I am slowly learning that it does.

Maybe some of us simply leave before the harvest.

We plant. We water. We wait.

And sometimes the season changes without us.

I may not have been there for the harvest.

But I was there for the planting.

That part of the story is mine.

And maybe I don’t need to hurry this into a lesson.

Maybe, for now, it is enough to tell the truth:

I wanted to be there when it worked.

And even if nobody turns around to say, I saw what you did

perhaps I can learn to say it to myself.

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.

What happens when an intelligent, rational woman experiences something she cannot fully explain?

Inspired by Julia Kallas’s article I’m Not Becoming Woo-Woo, I’m Becoming Curious, this conversation explores her Kundalini experience in Milan, not as proof of anything mystical, but as an invitation to become more conscious, more open, and less afraid of the unknown.

It is a thoughtful discussion about scepticism, intuition, the identities we have built around being “rational,” and the possibility that curiosity does not make us less intelligent. Perhaps it simply allows us to discover parts of ourselves that logic alone cannot always reach.

To hear more conversations inspired by Julia’s writing, listen to the Just Julia podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Read the original article here:[I’m Not Becoming Woo-Woo, I’m Becoming Curious]

How many memories have we removed ourselves from because we did not like how we looked?

We take the photographs. We capture the birthdays, the holidays, the ordinary afternoons and the people we love. But when it is time to step into the frame, we hesitate. We hide behind the camera, move to the back or promise ourselves that we will take more pictures when we feel thinner, younger or more confident.

This episode is an extension of my essay “I Was There Too.”

It is a conversation about the quiet ways women erase themselves from their own lives and about what those missing photographs may mean years from now.

Perhaps the photograph was never supposed to prove that we looked perfect. Perhaps it was simply supposed to prove that we were there.

If this reflection feels familiar, subscribe to Just Julia for personal essays and conversations about identity, womanhood, motherhood, reinvention and the parts of ourselves we are finally learning not to abandon.

You can also listen to the Just Julia Podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This week, someone reminded me who I was before I had a CV.

Before Milan. Before the UN. Before job titles. Before marriage and motherhood. Before I had all these adult ways of explaining who I am.

I was 17.

I had just landed at Auckland Airport with a suitcase and the absolute confidence that I spoke English.

I did not.

Or at least, I did not speak New Zealand English.

Peter picked me up at the airport that day.

He was part of the Rotary Club hosting me during my exchange year, but that doesn’t really explain who he became to me.

He was never officially one of my host parents, but he treated me like a daughter. He looked after me, took me places, showed me New Zealand. He became one of those people who somehow turns into family without ever needing an official title for it.

I still remember that first drive.

Auckland to Palmerston North. About six hours in a car with someone I had just met, while trying to understand an accent that made me seriously question all those years of English lessons in Brazil.

We stopped at Huka Falls along the way.

And we listened to James Blunt.

A lot of James Blunt.

I think the same CD played for most of the journey. Even today, when I hear You’re Beautiful, a part of me goes straight back to that car.

It’s strange what the brain decides to keep.

Almost twenty years later, Peter wrote something about me on Facebook.

And I cried.

It happened because the day before my mum’s birthday, she finally subscribed to my Substack.

I say finally because until then, my mother had been receiving Portuguese translations from me while remaining mostly uninterested in understanding what Substack actually was.

Then, on her birthday, she shared an article I had written about her.

She Just Kept Becoming.

I wrote it because lately I have started looking at my mother differently.

Not only as my mum, but as a woman.

A woman who changed direction many times. Who worked, stopped, started again. Who didn’t have one perfectly mapped-out career, but kept finding new versions of herself.

Her Facebook filled with comments.

Friends, family, people from our hometown in Brazil. So many of them recognized the woman I had written about. They told her she was brave. Strong. Capable. That they had seen those things in her too.

There was something beautiful about watching other people reflect my mother back to herself.

And then Peter left his comment.

He wrote about how similar he thinks my mother and I are. Our drive. Our love of challenges. Our enthusiasm for life.

And then:

“Julia, your determination has not changed since we first met you when you were a young lady of 17 years old, and we picked you up from Auckland Airport.”

That was the part that got me.

Because I have spent the past few months trying to work out what comes after a life I thought I understood.

And when you lose a job, it’s surprisingly easy to start questioning things that have nothing to do with the job.

Your abilities.

Your judgment.

Your confidence.

Whether your next idea is exciting or completely ridiculous.

Whether you’re moving forward or simply lost.

Some days I have ten ideas before lunch. Other days I wonder what on earth I’m doing.

And there was Peter, reminding me of the girl at Auckland Airport.

He knew me before the CV.

Before I had a professional identity to hide behind. Before I could explain myself through companies and positions and achievements.

He knew the girl who got on a plane in Brazil at 17 and travelled to the other side of the world.

A girl who arrived thinking she spoke English and quickly discovered otherwise.

A girl who didn’t really know what she was doing.

But went anyway.

And apparently, Peter still sees her.

Lately, something else has surprised me.

Some of the people who have encouraged me most during this period don’t live anywhere near me.

They are scattered everywhere.

New Zealand. Belgium. Germany. Brazil. The United States.

Some knew me when I was 17.

Some belong to my years in New York.

Some are former colleagues.

Some I met only recently.

And at the same time, some people who were physically part of my everyday life for years have become very quiet.

I’m trying not to make that mean more than it does.

People move on. Jobs end. Lives become busy. Not every relationship we build is meant to follow us into the next chapter.

But it has made me think differently about closeness.

Maybe proximity and closeness aren’t the same thing.

Someone can sit beside you every day for years and eventually disappear from your life.

Someone else can live on the other side of the world and remember exactly who you were at 17.

There is a cost to making your life bigger.

I know that too.

My sister has newborn twins in Brazil, and I am watching them grow through photographs and videos.

There are birthdays I miss.

Ordinary afternoons with my parents that I don’t get back.

Moments when I wonder what it would have been like to build a life closer to where I came from.

So I don’t want to romanticize leaving.

But I also can’t imagine who I would be if I hadn’t.

That flight to New Zealand didn’t just show me another country.

It made my world bigger.

And I think I am only now understanding what that really means.

When you go somewhere new, you aren’t only collecting places.

You are collecting people.

Not deliberately.

You don’t meet someone at 17 and think, Perhaps this person will remind me who I am when I’m 38.

You just live.

You get into the car.

You try to understand the accent.

You listen to James Blunt for six hours.

You stop at Huka Falls.

You keep going.

And somewhere along the way, people become witnesses to different versions of you.

Maybe that’s one of the unexpected privileges of having lived many lives in many places.

There are people scattered around the world holding memories of versions of you that you sometimes forget existed.

And every now and then, one of them gives that version back to you.

Peter didn’t give me confidence with his comment.

He reminded me that there was evidence of it long before I started questioning whether I still had it.

Maybe that’s why I cried.

Because sometimes, when you temporarily forget who you are, someone from another version of your life remembers for you.

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.

Four years ago today, on September 17th, 2022, Alessandro and I got married on Lake Como.

And a few days ago, someone said something about our wedding that stopped me.

“I’m sorry so many things went wrong that day,” he said.

I remember looking at Alessandro.

What went wrong?

We genuinely didn’t know what he meant.

When I think about that day, I remember one of the most beautiful days of my life.

I remember walking into the church and finally seeing Alessandro waiting for me.

After almost three years of waiting for that moment.

And I remember what was playing.

Hans Zimmer’s 503.

It probably makes absolutely no sense as music for a bride walking into a church. But it made perfect sense to us.

Alessandro and I had listened to Hanz Zimmer endlessly in the car. During those years when we didn’t know when our wedding would actually happen, I had closed my eyes and imagined that entrance to that exact piece.

The church.

The doors.

Him waiting.

For a long time, the music gave a soundtrack to a moment that didn’t exist yet.

And then, suddenly, it did.

I remember my parents sitting inside that church. Relatives who had travelled all the way from Brazil, some of whom I wasn’t even sure would make it. Friends crying during speeches.

I remember the perfect temperature and the little wind that kept everyone cool.

And I remember the music continuing to follow us through the day.

Maestro, another Hans Zimmer piece I love, as we entered the aperitivo. Max Richter’s Spring filling the dining room before dinner with this almost fairy-tale feeling.

And then Alessandro and I entered dinner to Mr. Brightside by The Killers.

Because apparently, after almost three years of waiting, subtlety was no longer required.

It was loud and unexpected and ridiculously fun.

We danced to A Thousand Years. I danced with my father to Jimmy Fontana’s Il Mondo. There was Barry White. And toward the end of dinner, Volare came on and suddenly the room was full of people waving white napkins in the air.

None of it belonged together on paper.

Somehow, it all belonged together for us.

I remember thinking that, after everything, we had made it.

And I remember Romeo.

Of course I remember Romeo.

Apparently, there were things that didn’t go perfectly that day.

There was traffic. Some people were nervous about being late. There was wind. Maybe there were other little things.

I honestly don’t remember them.

And that struck me.

For almost four years, I had carried one version of that day with me.

It was just perfect.

Not perfect as in every minute was flawless.

Perfect because it was ours.

We talk a lot about memory when it comes to pain.

Someone says something cruel to us when we are young and decades later we can still hear the sentence.

Someone doesn’t choose us.

Someone makes us feel rejected, unseen, not good enough.

Something doesn’t happen the way we thought it would and we decide we failed.

We carry these things because somewhere along the way, consciously or not, we gave them meaning.

I know I have done that.

I have allowed words, moments and other people’s perceptions of me to become part of my own way of seeing myself, sometimes for years.

But I had never really thought about the opposite.

If we can give so much power to the painful things, why can’t we also choose what stays from the beautiful ones?

Why can’t I decide the wind was perfect?

Why can’t the traffic be irrelevant?

Why can’t my parents sitting inside that church outweigh a hundred tiny imperfections that no one really remembers?

Maybe happiness deserves that kind of loyalty too.

Because if there was ever a wedding that didn’t go according to plan, it was ours.

We got engaged on Christmas Day 2019.

We were supposed to get married in 2021.

And then the world changed.

COVID arrived. Borders closed. Brazil and Italy felt impossibly far apart.

So we postponed.

And postponed.

And postponed again.

Meanwhile, we watched friends who had become engaged after us get married before us. We attended their weddings while still not knowing when ours would be.

That was hard.

There was another pressure too.

I was getting older, and people reminded me of that.

Maybe you should have a baby first, they said.

Maybe you shouldn’t wait for the wedding.

But I had such a clear picture in my head of how I wanted to live those moments.

I wanted my bachelorette party. I wanted to celebrate with my friends. I wanted to put on my wedding dress and dance and have our honeymoon.

And then I wanted to think about becoming a mother.

Perhaps life didn’t care very much about my timeline.

But I cared.

So we waited.

And through all that waiting, we kept listening to the music.

Even on the days when the wedding felt impossibly far away, those songs were still there.

Sometimes we would listen in the car and imagine the moments we had planned. Walking into the church. Arriving at the reception. Finally celebrating with everyone we loved.

In a strange way, the music let us visit a day that hadn’t happened yet.

We didn’t know when we would get there.

We just kept believing that eventually we would.

On September 25th, 2021, one of the dates when we should have been getting married, we did something else entirely.

We got a dog.

Romeo came home.

It didn’t feel profound at the time.

We were still disappointed. Alessandro was working remotely. We weren’t getting married. We weren’t starting our family the way we had imagined.

We just asked ourselves a small question.

What can we do now?

We had met this impossibly small Pomeranian a few weeks earlier and fallen completely in love.

Without realising it, while we were waiting to become a family in the way we had imagined, we had already started becoming one.

Had everything gone according to plan, Romeo might not be in our lives.

He wasn’t a consolation for us.

He was family.

A few days after that recent conversation, I found something I had completely forgotten.

A speech.

I had written it for Alessandro a few weeks before the wedding.

I never read it.

There were already so many speeches that day, and mine stayed tucked away.

I don’t think Alessandro has ever heard everything I wanted to tell him.

Until now.

In that speech, I had written about how, before him, I never really planned long-term.

And how he taught me to imagine the future I wanted.

How, little by little, I started to see some of those dreams becoming real.

There was a list of things we wanted for our future.

Getting married.

Having a dog.

And then I found a line I had written before I had even lived the wedding I’m writing about today.

After a while, you understand why sometimes things don’t go according to plan.

I was writing about Romeo.

Before the wedding had even happened, I already knew.

Something I had cried over, resisted and wished had been different had also made room for something I would never give back.

A year after we finally married, Edo was born.

And the years that once felt like standing still began to look different from the other side.

First Romeo.

Then that church.

Then Edo.

Our family didn’t arrive according to my original timeline.

It arrived according to its own.

And perhaps that’s why this story has found me again now.

Because once again, Alessandro and I find ourselves looking at plans we had made and realising that some of them will have to wait.

Life changed.

The timing changed.

And once again, there are things we thought would be happening now that aren’t.

And it’s hard.

There are days when I struggle with where I am.

Days when I want to know what comes next.

When this particular pause will end.

When life will start moving in the direction I imagined again.

But I keep thinking about the woman who wrote that speech in August 2022.

She didn’t know either.

When our first wedding plans fell apart, I couldn’t see what was coming.

I couldn’t see Romeo yet.

I couldn’t see myself walking down that aisle with Hans Zimmer playing and finding Alessandro at the other end.

I couldn’t see my parents sitting there.

I couldn’t see Edo.

I could only see the door that had closed.

And today, once again, I can only see as far as today.

Maybe that’s what I want to remember.

Not that everything…