What's Better Than One? Two.

Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Two. The number of times my book and my work have now been mentioned in a magazine. Which, for someone who still sometimes wonders if anyone is actually reading any of this, is a sentence I need to type out slowly and let it exist for a moment.

Two. As in one, and then another one.

FIRST TIME

Already happened. Already processed. Still not fully over it.

THIS TIME

Online. In a magazine. Written by a wonderful journalist. I am living it.

Screenshot of the article

📰 THE FEATURE

Capa Brazil

Written by journalist Dani Amorim

The wonderful Dani Amorim wrote about my upcoming book Parenting Unpacked for Capa Brazil — an online magazine. She wrote about it. In a magazine. About my book. That I wrote. With my hands. I keep rereading that sentence because it still feels slightly unreal and I have decided that is completely fine.

And here is the thing about all of this happening at once — the mentions, the features, the readers, the DMs — I keep waiting for it to stop. I genuinely do. There is a voice in the back of my head that says "enjoy it now, this is obviously about to end."

And to that voice I say: please be quiet, I am trying to enjoy this.

So many good things happening all at once that it gives me the very strong impression that it's all about to stop at any minute. And honestly? I refuse. I am absolutely loving having my work go around.

🤯 A BRIEF MATHEMATICAL CRISIS

Here is something I think about more than I probably should. I probably know, at most, 50 people in my life. Maybe. If I'm being generous with the definition of "know." And yet I have way more than 50 people buying my books daily, reading posts like this one, following me, and sliding into my DMs. Strangers. People I have never met. People I will likely never meet. People who found me somehow and decided to stay. How? How?

📊 THE NUMBERS THAT KEEP SURPRISING ME

  • People I personally know — ~50. Generous estimate.

  • People reading my work daily — More than 50. Much more.

  • DMs from people I've never met— Real. Happening. Wild.

  • Times I've thought "how is this my life"— Countless. Still counting.

Conclusion: words travel further than people do. And somehow, mine found you.

That is the part that gets me the most. Not the magazine features — though I will not pretend those don't make me want to call someone at 11pm. It's the reaching. The fact that this work is finding people I don't know, in places I've never been, at moments I wasn't there for. And it's helping. That part I will never get tired of.

To Dani Amorim — thank you for writing about Parenting Unpacked with such care. Go read the piece at Capa Brazil. It's worth your time.

And to everyone who has found their way here — through a magazine, through a DM, through an algorithm I don't fully understand — thank you for staying. You are the reason this doesn't feel like shouting into a void. You make it feel like a conversation.

Two magazine mentions. More to come. The voice in the back of my head is going to have to deal with it.

Absolutely living it,

Jessica Gabrielzyk

✦ PARENTING UNPACKED · COMING SOON · JESSICA GABRIELZYK ✦

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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