He Told Me to Stay and Keep Making Coffee. I Am Glad I Did Not Listen.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk
coffee mug with a flat white

I had to dig deep to find this picture on my phone.

I have written before about bad advice. I have received enough of it to fill a book that nobody would want to read.

But there is one that keeps coming back. Not because it hurt the most, but because it became the image I return to every time I think I might fail.

I had just finished university. I was working as a barista while I looked for work in marketing. I was good at the coffee. I genuinely loved it. The rhythm of it, the regulars, the particular satisfaction of a well-made flat white at seven in the morning when the world is still waking up.

A manager from a different department sat me down and told me something he clearly thought was helpful.

He said I should stay and keep making coffee, that I should not go after the marketing job I had studied for because people in Australia did not like immigrants and I would not be able to get a job in marketing anyway. Save myself the hustle.

I want to be fair to him. He probably believed he was being kind. He probably thought he was protecting me from disappointment. He was looking at me, a Brazilian woman with an accent, and doing his own maths about what the market would do with that.

His maths were wrong. And I could not have felt more welcomed.

I went after the job, got work in marketing, built a career, moved countries again, and wrote books. I am still writing them.

And every single time I think I might fail — every time a launch feels uncertain, every time the blog numbers are smaller than I hoped, every time I wonder if this is the moment the whole thing stops working — I go back to that conversation and I smile.

I have done it once, I have done it multiple times, and I know I can do it again. And every time someone told me the door was not for me I walked through it anyway and found out it was.

The barista job was never the problem. The coffee was excellent and I would make it again tomorrow. The problem was someone else's ceiling being offered to me as my floor.

I am glad I did not stay.

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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