This Idea is Either Brilliant or a Disaster.

May 22

I have been watching presentations.

A lot of them. More than is probably healthy for someone who is also trying to write a book, run a one woman publishing house, parent a toddler who has decided her primary personality trait is tired, and somehow also prepare for an international congress in Valencia.

And I noticed something.

The ones that stayed with me were not the ones with the best slides. They were the ones where someone stood up, looked at the room, and just talked. Like a conversation. Like they trusted the audience enough to not need a visual aid for every sentence. Like the ideas were interesting enough to carry themselves without a designed background and a transition effect.

So I made a decision.

No PowerPoint.

I know. I know. SIETAR Valencia España Congress 2026. International researchers. Intercultural practitioners. People who have spent careers in this field. And I am going to walk in with a handful of pictures and my voice and whatever combination of preparation and adrenaline gets me through twenty minutes without completely dissolving.

This is either going to be brilliant or a disaster. I genuinely do not know which one yet. I am choosing to call that exciting.

The pictures I do have are doing real work. There is one of me looking extremely proud of my double chin that I plan to show approximately one second into the presentation. Because if you are going to walk into a room full of researchers and talk about identity, belonging, and what happens to the self when the life moves — you might as well start by not taking yourself too seriously.

Everyone else will have slides. Nicely formatted. Probably with the congress logo in the corner. Very professional. Very intercultural.

I will have my face. A few images. And a lot of preparation that is going to look, intentionally, like I am just talking to you.

That is the whole plan.

Parenting Unpacked launches June 24th. I present June 25th. If this goes well I will write about it. If it goes badly I will also write about it, probably with more detail and definitely with more self deprecation.

See you on the other side.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

P.S. I am not improvising. I want to be very clear about that. This is prepared. Rehearsed. Practised in my kitchen to an audience of one husband who has heard it four times and remains supportive and visibly tired. There is a difference between no slides and no preparation. One of those is brave. The other one is chaos.

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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