I Do Not Remember the Dream. I Remember Her Face.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I grew up daydreaming constantly. I also lied a bit, if I am being honest, the way kids do when the truth feels too small for what they are actually trying to say. Somewhere in that overlap between daydreaming and lying I found something that felt like mine.

I remember being maybe ten, maybe younger. I had a dream one night, the vivid kind that stays with you all morning. I told a friend about it at school. She said she wanted to hear it properly, so we sat down and I told her the whole thing.

She loved it.

I do not remember the dream anymore. I remember her face while I was telling it.

I have been chasing that feeling for most of my life without really noticing. The marketing career, the business degree, the years learning how things work, all of that got me somewhere. But the moment that actually mattered was always the same shape as that morning at school. Tell a story. Watch it land.

When I started reaching out to people for the cast in Parenting Unpacked, I did not think about this memory once. I was just doing the work, sending messages to people I had never met, asking if they would trust me with their story.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

I’m not great at telling age. I don’t think I was 10 here but young enough.

But looking back now, every one of those conversations was the same moment, repeated. Cristiane sending an emotional message at seven in the morning, a father telling me something was beautiful before it was even finished, or Daniele sitting with me, talking about Eduardo missing his grandmother. Each time, someone sat with something I had written, or something we had built together, and it landed.

I think that is what I have actually been doing this whole time. Not building a brand, not running a demarketing experiment with thirteen Instagram followers, although both of those things are also true. Telling someone a story and watching their face while I do it.

The dream does not matter anymore. It never did. What mattered was that she wanted to hear it.

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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