Just Julia

We invest so much energy in developing our careers, managing our families and becoming more capable. Yet when that same curiosity turns inward, many of us become uncomfortable. We worry that questioning our patterns, or exploring something we cannot easily explain, might make us less rational, less ambitious or somehow “woo-woo.”

This episode is a deeper conversation inspired by my article, I’m Not Becoming Woo-Woo, I’m Becoming Curious.

It explores why high-achieving women often find it easier to give than to receive, why we try to correct our younger selves instead of simply sitting beside them, and how old fears can continue influencing us long after we have outgrown the circumstances that created them.

Perhaps personal growth is not about constantly fixing or reinventing ourselves. Perhaps it begins by becoming conscious of what has been quietly driving us, and realizing that our past can explain us without defining us.

If this conversation resonates, you can read the original article on Just Julia and find the podcast on Substack, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

A question to carry with you:

If you could sit beside your younger self today, without trying to fix her or make her braver, what would she need from you?

I was three, or four, maybe five.

I was standing in the corner of a children’s birthday party, watching everyone else play.

I knew that little girl immediately.

She was me.

Decades later, I sat down beside her.

I didn’t tell her to be braver. I didn’t give her a pep talk about the life she would one day have, about all the things she would build, all the corners she would no longer hide in.

I just sat beside her.

As if to say: I’m here. You’re safe. I’m not leaving.

And somehow, being a mother now made that moment feel different. I looked at that little girl almost as if she were my own child. I didn’t want to analyse her. I didn’t want to change her.

I just wanted her to feel safe.

My actual body, meanwhile, was lying on a mat in Milan with an eye mask on.

It was a Kundalini activation.

And yes, I know how that sounds.

Before going, I actually worried about what to wear. I looked at photos online: white linen, flowing clothes, bare feet. Everyone seemed considerably more spiritually enlightened than my wardrobe.

Then came a small rebellion.

No.

I was going as myself.

I didn’t need a costume or a new identity to be curious about myself.

I’ve spent years adding skills to my CV. Learning, performing, improving, becoming better at what I do professionally.

I’m beginning to wonder why I never approached understanding myself with the same seriousness.

For some reason, that kind of development still makes people uncomfortable.

Meditation? Fine.

Yoga? Fine.

Kundalini?

Suddenly, things get complicated.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard everything from “that’s a bit woo-woo” to someone asking whether Mindvalley was some kind of cult.

I understand the scepticism.

If your only exposure to Kundalini is a dramatic video online of someone shaking, moving their body or appearing to experience something almost orgasmic, I understand why your first reaction might be: What on earth is this?

But what became meaningful to me looked nothing like that.

At one point, I wasn’t moving at all.

I was simply lying there.

And at the beginning of the activation, I found myself repeating an affirmation, or perhaps a mantra, that I’ve been using for months:

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

I don’t even know exactly who I’m speaking to when I say it.

God. The universe. Something bigger than me.

Perhaps the name matters less to me than the intention behind the words.

What I’m really saying is:

I’m listening.

I’m willing to be shown something I can’t yet see.

And strangely enough, what came back wasn’t some grand revelation about my future.

It wasn’t an answer about what I should do next, where I should go, or who I’m supposed to become.

It was a little girl standing alone in the corner of a room.

This wasn’t my first Kundalini experience.

The first one was at Mindvalley University in Tallinn a few months ago. It was intense and difficult to describe.

But something happened after that experience that I still find interesting.

I started writing.

I started Just Julia.

I began putting words around stories I had kept somewhere inside myself for years.

I can’t tell you that Kundalini caused that. Maybe it didn’t. I have no interest in turning correlation into some mystical certainty just because it makes a better story.

But the timing made me curious.

Maybe something simply became more accessible.

I don’t know.

And perhaps I don’t need to know yet.

At another point during the session, I was lying completely still, arms open, palms facing upwards, consciously thinking:

I give myself permission to receive.

That sounds incredibly simple.

For me, it isn’t.

I’m a giver. A people pleaser. Someone who has always found receiving surprisingly difficult.

Even compliments used to bounce straight off me.

You look beautiful.

“No, no, I look awful today.”

I love your dress.

“Oh, this old thing?”

Lately, I’ve been practising something tiny and surprisingly hard:

Just saying, thank you.

Palms up on that mat felt like the same practice in another language.

Towards the end of the session, we were asked to remember a moment from childhood when we had been really happy.

I saw my parents’ living room in Brazil.

I used to build an entire little world in one corner of that room. Barbie’s kitchen, Barbie’s living room, clothes, everything arranged exactly as I wanted it.

I could spend hours there.

Then came an exercise in which we imagined that the child we remembered had written us a letter.

Mine had one word.

Love.

Not romantic love.

Something quieter.

Love between the woman I am now and the little girl I once was.

And maybe love for the woman I’m still becoming.

I don’t think Kundalini has answered all my questions.

I don’t think one Saturday can heal a lifetime.

And I’m certainly not suggesting everybody needs to try it.

For me, it is simply one practice among many that can hold up a mirror.

Books. Conversations. Therapy. Meditation. Motherhood itself. Writing. Experiences I haven’t even discovered yet.

Because I’m beginning to believe that working on myself deserves at least as much attention as working on my career.

Not because I’m trying to become some perfectly healed, permanently enlightened version of myself.

And certainly not because I’m chasing mystical experiences.

I’m doing it because I want to become more conscious.

Conscious of the thoughts I have when I feel insecure.

Conscious of the moments when fear starts speaking louder than I do.

Conscious of the old patterns I can so easily mistake for personality simply because I’ve carried them for so long.

Maybe that is what all this inner work is really about for me.

Not erasing what happened.

Not pretending that one meditation, one book, one Kundalini activation or one beautiful Saturday can heal everything that came before it.

But learning to recognize what is happening inside me while it is happening.

To be able to catch myself in a moment of insecurity and think: I know this feeling. But this feeling is not the whole of me.

To understand that something from my past may explain why I react a certain way today without allowing it to decide who I will be tomorrow.

Perhaps that is what reclaiming my power looks like right now.

Not controlling everything around me.

Becoming more conscious of what has been quietly controlling me.

And then choosing again.

I want to do that work because I want to show up a little more consciously, as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a friend, as a professional, as a woman.

Not a woman who has healed everything.

Not a woman who has all the answers.

A woman who is learning herself well enough to recognize when an old version of her is speaking and compassionate enough not to hate her for it.

Because when I saw that little girl standing in the corner, I didn’t tell her to toughen up.

I didn’t tell her to become more confident.

I didn’t tell her about all the things she would need to change in order to become me.

I just sat beside her.

Maybe that is where becoming more conscious begins.

Not by running away from the person we used to be.

But by finally understanding her well enough that she no longer has to quietly run the person we are becoming.

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.

Who shows up when you fall and who is still there when you start trying to stand back up?

In this episode of JUST JULIA, we explore something we don’t talk about enough: how vulnerable it feels to start again when other people can see you trying.

After losing a job, changing direction, or putting something new into the world, the smallest gestures can suddenly carry surprising weight. A like. A comment. A reference. An introduction. A message saying, I see what you’re doing.

Because sometimes we’re not liking the post.

We’re liking the courage it took to post it.

This conversation explores both sides: what happens when the people you expected to support you are strangely quiet and what we can do when we see someone else trying to rebuild.

How do you keep going when nobody seems to be watching? How do you stop measuring people’s belief in you by their attention? And are we as good at supporting someone’s comeback as we are at supporting their crisis?

A conversation about starting from zero, external validation, friendship, former colleagues, professional identity, and the tiny gestures that can mean much more than we realize.

Because what takes you two seconds may have taken someone else months to find the courage to do.

And if this episode changes one small behavior, I hope it’s this:

When you see someone trying, don’t scroll past too quickly.

When I started writing on Substack, I didn’t really tell people.

A few, yes.

I told my family in New Zealand. I told a handful of friends. My parents and my sister in Brazil knew.

But some of my closest friends still don’t know.

I think part of me wanted to protect it.

When something is very new, and you’re not entirely sure what it is going to become, telling people can feel strangely exposing. You are not just saying, I wrote something.

You are saying, This matters to me.

And somehow that feels much more vulnerable.

My parents don’t speak much English, so when I published my first articles, I would send them the Portuguese translation.

They read them. Sometimes it took a few days. We talked about them.

And then, little by little, it became normal.

Another article from Julia.

Another link.

Another thing I was doing somewhere on the other side of the world.

My parents have never subscribed to my Substack. They don’t go there to leave a like or a comment. They probably don’t understand that those tiny things can help something new find its way to more people.

And I know how ridiculous this can sound.

My parents love me.

I know that.

They would do almost anything for me.

This isn’t about whether they love me.

It’s about something much smaller.

And perhaps that’s exactly why it matters.

Starting something is embarrassing.

We don’t say that enough.

Before something has followers, customers, subscribers, readers or proof that it was a good idea, there is just you — standing beside something you made, hoping somebody will notice.

A first article.

A new company.

A podcast.

A website.

A LinkedIn post after years of never posting anything.

We like to talk about entrepreneurship as though the difficult part is strategy.

Find your niche. Build your audience. Be consistent. Create content. Keep going.

But before all of that, there is a much more uncomfortable step.

You have to let people watch you try.

I have spent most of my professional life working for companies. I could hide behind the company name, the title, the meetings, the emails, the job description.

Now I am in a strange moment where I don’t know exactly what comes next.

Maybe I will return to corporate. Maybe I will build something of my own. Perhaps both, in some form.

But I know that whatever comes next will require me to become more visible.

So, recently, I started posting on LinkedIn.

I had barely posted there before.

And let me tell you: posting something you have written and watching almost nobody react to it is a very efficient way of discovering exactly how confident you are.

You press publish.

Then you pretend you don’t care.

Then you check.

You tell yourself likes don’t matter.

Then you check again.

It’s ridiculous.

And also completely human.

Because perhaps you spent three hours writing that post.

Perhaps you deleted it twice.

Perhaps you nearly didn’t publish it because you thought, Who am I to talk about this?

And then somebody you know scrolls past it in two seconds.

They have no idea what happened before you pressed publish.

I have always tried to support people when I see them starting something.

And I mean always.

Long before I started writing publicly. Long before I found myself wondering what I might build next.

A friend of mine became involved in a startup and started posting about it.

I didn’t understand everything she was doing.

I wasn’t going to become a customer.

I didn’t need to.

I liked her posts.

I’ve done the same on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. A heart on a story. A like. An insightful reaction. A small signal that says, I see what you’re doing.

Recently, at Mindvalley University, I met a Brazilian woman who had left corporate and was beginning a business in personal development and manifestation.

Now when I see her posts, I like them.

Sometimes, if I’m being completely truthful, I don’t even listen to the whole thing.

I still press like.

There is another woman I knew years ago who has started creating something completely different online. I hadn’t seen her on social media for a long time. I came across her again recently and thought, Oh, she’s trying something new.

Like.

Like.

Like.

I’ve always done this.

What has changed is that now I understand the other side of it.

Now I’m the one starting from zero.

I’m the one writing something for three hours and wondering whether to publish it. I’m the one posting on LinkedIn after years of barely posting anything. I’m the one watching something reach hundreds of people and then seeing a tiny handful of reactions underneath it.

And suddenly I find myself thinking: Wow.

All those little hearts I gave away so casually over the years weren’t quite as meaningless as I thought.

Because when you’re the person on the other side of the screen, you notice them.

You also notice who’s missing.

That has been particularly strange on LinkedIn.

When I lost my job, I received beautiful messages.

I’m so sorry.

Anything you need.

You can count on me.

If you need a reference, just ask.

And I believe people meant them.

But then the difficult moment passes. Everyone goes back to their lives. And you begin the much less dramatic work of trying to rebuild.

You update something.

You apply for jobs.

You try to make yourself visible.

You write your first posts after years of saying almost nothing publicly.

And the room becomes surprisingly quiet.

A post can have hundreds of views and only a handful of reactions.

Of course, nobody owes me a like.

That’s not the point.

What interests me is the difference between how naturally we offer support when somebody falls and how easily we can miss the moment when they’re trying to stand back up.

Perhaps the second moment looks less urgent.

But I suspect that’s when encouragement can matter most.

Sometimes I’m not liking the post.

I’m liking the courage it took to post it.

We are told constantly that we shouldn’t need external validation.

And I understand the principle.

If you are going to build anything, you cannot depend on your parents, your friends, your former colleagues or strangers on the internet applauding every time you do something.

Eventually, you have to keep going when nobody is clapping.

I know that.

But I also think we use the language of self-confidence sometimes to pretend we don’t need each other.

We do.

Especially at the beginning.

Not an audience of thousands.

Not constant praise.

Just a few people who understand that you’re doing something that scares you a little.

A friend who shares it.

A former colleague who leaves a comment.

Your sister subscribing.

Your mother pressing a little heart even though she doesn’t completely understand what Substack is.

Tiny things.

Things that take seconds.

And perhaps that’s why their absence can hurt more than seems reasonable.

It’s not really about the like.

It’s about looking toward the people you assumed would be watching and, for a moment, finding an empty chair.

The other day I met a friend who has also been without a job for some time.

I told her I had started posting on LinkedIn.

Then I said something I would normally be embarrassed to say out loud.

Can you please go and like my posts?

I laughed.

Just so I don’t feel like a complete loser.

It was funny.

But it wasn’t entirely a joke.

I am learning to do things publicly that I used to do privately.

And I’m also learning something I didn’t expect.

The people who believe in you aren’t necessarily going to read everything you write.

They aren’t going to listen to every podcast.

They aren’t going to follow every new thing you’re trying to build.

I am trying not to confuse their attention to what I’m building with their belief in me.

Those aren’t the same thing.

They have their lives. Their worries. Their own worlds happening thousands of kilometres away.

And I have mine.

Still, this experience has changed something in me.

Or perhaps it has simply made me understand something I was already doing.

When I see someone beginning, I try not to scroll past too quickly.

I know that what takes me two seconds may have taken them three hours to create.

And considerably longer to find the courage to share.

So I press like.

It costs me nothing.

I know what …

How much of ourselves do we slowly edit, soften, or make smaller just to belong?

This conversation was inspired by my latest JUST JULIA essay, How Much of Yourself Have You Shrunk to Fit In? an exploration of identity, belonging, and the subtle ways we learn to adapt ourselves to fit the rooms we’re in.

If this conversation resonates with you and you’d like to read the original essay, you can find it here:

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

What happens when you’ve built a career, lived different lives, collected titles and accomplishments and suddenly none of them quite explain who you are anymore?

In this episode of Just Julia, we go deeper into my article The Empty Space After My Name and the question I’ve been struggling to answer:

Who am I when there is nothing after my name?

We talk about identity, career transitions, the strange comfort of having a title, and why starting again can feel harder when you already have a successful life behind you.

We explore the difference between being good at adapting and actually belonging to yourself, the contradiction of wanting to be visible while being terrified of being seen, and why understanding yourself is not necessarily the same as becoming yourself. Those tensions sit at the heart of the original article.

And we talk about ambition wanting meaning and depth without pretending that money, success, beautiful things and big dreams suddenly don’t matter.

Maybe the question isn’t:

What should I become next?

Maybe it’s:

Who am I before I put another word after my name?

I don’t have the answer yet.

Maybe that’s the point.

JUST JULIA is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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.

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.

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

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:

“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.

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.

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

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