Autenticidade a coragem de ser quem voc
Translator: Leticia Rezende
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
When I got my first job,
an internship at Globo TV,
I remember telling my parents,
and of course, they were very happy.
“Congratulations! What a thing!”
I remember one of the first
things my mom told me:
“Daughter, OK, you got your first job,
so now we need to go out
and buy work clothes.”
I’d never worked in my life,
I thought, “What are work clothes?
Is there something wrong with my clothes?”
Then we went to the mall, and I said,
“Okay mom, let’s go buy work clothes.”
And I remember that when
we got to the mall,
my mom started looking for a formal shirt,
formal pants, and heels.
I was just looking, right?
Okay, she knows what she’s doing,
and I need to work, so let’s do this.
We went to the fitting room,
and I was putting on clothes
I’d never worn before.
I remember it all causing
a commotion in the fitting room
with the other women that were there.
My mom, of course, was super proud,
and telling everyone,
“My daughter got into Globo.
She’s going to work.”
People were looking at me
with those work clothes, saying:
“You look beautiful!”
and because they said this,
I knew it would work out fine:
I was going to be a big professional.
As if, by putting on those clothes,
by dressing like that,
I was for sure going to be competent,
that I would be a big professional
and have a wonderful career.
In a certain way,
I also believed it to be true.
For a long time.
So I believed I needed to dress like that
because perhaps the way
I dressed before wasn’t good enough
if I wanted to grow professionally.
I remember that I started my career
trying to be the person
others thought I should be,
not who I really was.
And then I remember going to work.
My first day …
super uncomfortable with those clothes.
In a way, it was like I didn’t fit in.
There I was on the bus in heels,
and I was sweating
in that shirt and the heat …
I was so uncomfortable,
and I didn’t know how
I could keep wearing those clothes.
But I went.
In those clothes, I went.
Time passed - years and years,
and I was dressing like I thought
I should be in order to get somewhere,
not like the real Mari.
And it’s very curious
because for a long time
I went to work in heels,
and that was how my friends knew me.
But it wasn’t the way I normally dressed.
I wanted to be there
dressed like a competent professional,
even if it was the opposite
of who I really was.
Working at Globo,
I was invited to take part on a project
that would become “G1 em 1 Minuto.”
They invited me to make
a pilot for this project:
“Mari, we need you
to come tomorrow to make a pilot.”
I didn’t know what it was,
but they continued on:
“We need you to come.
It’s a video pilot for you to host
a project on national television.”
I said, “Wow! What have I done?”
I ran to what we could call
the “credibility section” of my closet,
and I got out all the clothes
I thought made me look serious -
have credibility and such.
I arrived there rocking it,
and I remember one of my bosses
looking at me and saying,
″No Mari, we don’t want you like that.
We want the real you.”
So, you know, I looked at my clothes
and said: ″Really?”
He said, ″Really, on this project,
we want you to be the real you.
We want you with your own clothes,
speaking the way you speak.”
I said: ″Wow, really?”
So, I went back home,
got out my band
and TV-show t-shirts and such,
and dressed myself in my clothes,
without the costume.
Then I began that challenge, that project,
with mixed feelings inside me.
At the same time that I was very happy
because, in a certain way,
I’d freed myself from that box
that I’d thought I needed to be in
for so many years,
at the same time,
I was afraid of rejection.
We spend our whole life
trying to be accepted;
we spend our whole life
trying to belong to some group.
Inside my professional costume,
in a certain way, I belonged
to a particular group:
I was a competent professional.
One could say that
without that protection,
there were no walls
between me and the public.
That scared me;
I was very afraid of rejection.
I was afraid to confirm
that for a long time I believed
that I wasn’t enough.
“If a girl with piercing,
with a tattoo on her arm,
and TV show and band T-shirts
can get onto TV talking about
politics and economics,
I’m not going to believe what she says.
Oh, look how odd … ”
I myself fell into that trap.
At the beginning of the project,
I, too, believed that I didn’t deserve
to speak about more complex, dense topics
because of the way I dressed.
So I started this project
totally not believing in myself.
But I went. Again.
Closed my eyes and went.
And this was the beginning of a journey
that made me understand
the power of this word
that we hear today a lot:
authenticity.
I remember that at the beginning
of “G1 em 1 Minuto,”
a lady called the newsroom
in the middle of the day,
and she told my boss:
“Tell that girl to take
that wire from her nose
because it has nothing to do with her.”
And I remember my boss hung up laughing,
and I looked at him and asked,
“What is it, boss?”
He said, “Oh, a lady called here telling
you to take the wire from your nose.”
So I turned to him and asked, “Should I?”
and he said, “No, you shouldn’t.”
I stopped and said, “Wow, OK.”
Here I think it’s very important
to say the following:
It wasn’t just overnight
that I simply woke up and said,
”You know what?
I’ll challenge the system.
I’ll go against all codes,
all existing obstacles,
and I’ll get through it all.
I’ll wear my band T-shirt on TV
and people will fight.”
No!
I had the opportunity,
and I’m fully aware of the good luck
I had finding people along my way
who saw something in me
that I myself couldn’t see,
who saw that Mari could be enough -
the real Mari.
It wasn’t only the people
I work with who saw that,
but the viewers also began to see
the power of this authenticity
because the fear of rejection
I had before was left behind.
People began relating
to me in a certain way.
So I put photos of my family,
my dog, and such
onto my social media accounts.
I had, I don’t know, 300 or 400 followers,
and this number started to rise.
Rise, rise, rise, and rise some more,
and then people started
following me and sending me messages.
I thought: “Wow, it’s a movement!
There’s something happening here,
and I don’t get what it is”
Most of messages
said that they identified with me,
that they saw themselves in me.
Moms and grandparents said that they saw
their daugthers and granddaughters,
their sons and grandsons.
Journalism students said:
“Mari, I want be a journalist,
and I told my dad
that I wanted to get a tattoo,
but he told me that if I did,
I’d never be a journalist
Today I took your picture,
and I showed it to him
and said, ‘Look, she did it; I can too.’”
Once at a event, I met a girl
who told me that she came
to the event just to talk to me.
When she saw me, she took my hand,
and she started to tremble and cry.
I said, “What happened? Is everything OK?”
She told me, “I just wanted to thank you.”
“Why?” I asked.
She said, “I’m studying engineering,
and I dress in a way that people question.
People tell me about how I dress,
and how you do the same.
You do what you do,
with a sparkle in your eye,
something that you love,
and that gives me the strength
to resist and move forward.
This was the feedback
that began appearing,
and it gave me an absurd
strength to move on.
It made me understand
that, yes, I could be enough.
It made me understand that there
was value in Mari, the real Mari.
And how odd it is:
Many times we need
for another person to validate us
so that we can believe in who we are.
Usually it comes from someone else, right?
A person who looks at you and says:
“I like you like this. Nice, continue.”
If somebody tells you the opposite,
you’re going to question yourself,
and you’re going to doubt who you are.
So I continue to resist
because of all the support
I initially had.
It was this support that made me
understand the power of authenticity.
So I realized that I didn’t need
to go to my closet’s credibility section
because the credibility that was in me,
not the way that I dressed myself.
Yes, I could be competent;
I could talk about politics, economics.
And I could do all of this
while wearing piercings tattoes,
T-shirts, and sneakers.
This didn’t make me less competent.
Realizing this was transforming,
not only for my career,
but for my life too.
I started to realize
that many times we limit ourselves
and limit others too.
So someone who has
the courage to be real,
someone who has courage
to take ownership
of the way they dress
or the way they speak -
many times, we have a cruel view
about this person, right?
And this also means we have
a cruel view about ourselves.
So I realized the power this authenticity
movement could have for everything -
for our relationships, for our careers,
and not only for us, but for everybody.
And I understand that a lot of times,
we can be the barrier
that keeps the other from being real,
so we don’t want to be that barrier,
and we don’t want to be another obstacle
because there are so many obstacles
already holding us back
and telling us that we’re not enough.
No longer do we want
to be an obstacle for someone else.
Today we talk a lot about authenticity.
We talk so much about this courage,
this process that at the same time
is so hard and is so good …
Why is it so hard to do this?
Because it means breaking down a wall,
and when you break down this wall,
the feedback can be positive,
but it can be very negative as well.
I’m not saying here
that I only received praise,
that people loved me 100%, no.
I had a lot of negative reactions:
People told me that I didn’t deserve
to be in that place
speaking about politics and economics.
People called me an intern
because of the way I dressed,
knowing I’d had already spent
almost 10 years in my career
and that I worked a lot.
Despite only appearing
one minute on television,
I swear the job is much bigger than that.
The opposite also happened.
People said: “She’s only here
because of her T-shirt.”
I put on a T-shirt and sneakers,
I went in front of the camera,
and I talked - it was the same.
All of it made me doubt
for a long time and still sometimes.
Doubting who I am
and not believing in this self-worth
that I’ve been finding over time.
But after a lot of therapy -
I do therapy -
I realize that this negative criticism,
says more about the other person
than it does about me,
and I realize something else
that was very important to me:
I’d prefer getting a bad comment
about who I really am
and respecting my identity,
than getting praise
about a character that I created
because the person
is praising another person, not me.
This other person doesn’t exist,
and it’s very difficult
to sustain this person.
We burn a lot energy
playing the character,
knowing that we could be using
this energy another way.
It’s tiring being another person.
I can’t.
We can’t do it for long.
So thinking this way,
it’s a lot easier to be real because we
want more authentic connections.
We want to look
into someone’s eyes and see -
see the fragility, see the vulnerability.
See humanity.
We don’t want to relate with a robot.
We don’t want to relate
with everyone the same.
Since I started this movement
almost 10 years ago now,
I’ve been on the team
that embraces difference,
that welcomes the challenge
for everyone to be authentic.
I think that if I welcome others,
they will welcome me too.
Of course there are a lot of codes,
walls, and obstacles.
I’m not saying here
that if you work for a law firm
you should simply get out
your Foo Fighters T-shirt,
and the next day show up to work and say,
“You know what? Mari said this was okay.”
It’s not that.
I think it’s important that we find
all the possibilities along our path,
and to put our identity into what we do.
Inside the reality we live in,
we know that, unfortunately, in Brazil,
realities are completely different.
So I wanted to make a reflection:
How many of you already feel left out
by fear of being judged
and by fear of not being accepted.
And more, how many of you
ever had a cruel view
about someone who was there
trying to be herself.
I think that stopping to think about it
is the first step for us
in discussing authenticity.
It would be hypocritical for me
to say that it’s a simple process,
that it’s easy.
It’s not.
Like I said, I’ve been in this
for more than 10 years,
and I still get negative criticism.
I still question who I am.
I still have doubts about my ability
because of the way I dress.
But, I’ve been getting stronger
and I think this is a process
that will continue for my entire life.
And I think that even
with these difficulties,
even with this path,
which is not always easy,
it’s not always full of flowers,
one hour the sky opens.
So I can ensure you that it’s worth it.
Thank you.