The Day Before the Pages Open
Winter arrived without asking, as it always does.
The yellow leaves of our little ginkgo tree have fallen, leaving only the bare branches shaking against the grey sky. I hate the cold. I hate the short days, the lack of light, the way everything slows down whether I want it to or not. Even the paint betrays me: the gesso refuses to dry, the oils take forever, and the hours stretch into a kind of forced silence. I want to paint, but winter insists that I wait and waiting is the one thing I have never known how to do.
Tomorrow something extraordinary happens. My work will appear in the biggest magazine in Portugal seven portraits of some of the boldest figures in the fashion world. A project that has consumed every breath of these last weeks; a project that drained me and fed me at the same time. It took so much from me, yet it gave me permission to dream bigger than I ever allowed myself to dream.
Vogue Portugal - Dare to be Bold Issue - December 2025
Last Friday, I held the magazine in my hands for the first time. I opened it with the strange hesitation of someone holding a fragile truth. Months of work compressed into a few thin pages. Paintings born at two in the morning now photographed in the calm brightness of a printed layout. Relief washed over me — relief and joy — but also an anxiety I didn’t expect. Everything I fought for, everything I sacrificed, suddenly reduced to the turning of a page. It’s beautiful and terrifying at the same time.
Tomorrow should feel like closure, like the end of a chapter. The issue will be in shops, people will see it, strangers will form opinions about something I made in the solitude of my tiny studio. But the truth is: it doesn’t feel like an ending at all. If anything, it feels like the beginning of a new weight — an almost unbearable urgency to push further, dream further, try harder.
I feel a bit like the main character in The Bear. Success arrives, tiny and shining, and instead of savouring it, I immediately look past it, thinking of the next thing, and the next, and the next. Maybe it’s fear. Fear of public reaction. Fear of being seen. Fear of disappointing those who believed in me. Or maybe it’s not fear at all — maybe it’s the endless desire to turn the impossible into something real.
I haven’t spoken openly about this project to anyone except Tarla, my parents, and my brother. They saw the exhaustion day by day: the long nights, the self-doubt, the moments when my hands were shaking from pushing too hard. When I showed them the magazine, they turned each page slowly, almost ceremonially. I watched their faces my mother’s brightness, my father’s quiet pride and something inside me softened.
These are the moments that make all of it worth it.
These few seconds of calmness, when the people who love me see what I tried to do and recognise a piece of me inside it.
Tomorrow the world will see it too.
And winter, for the first time, doesn’t feel quite so cold.
Vogue Portugal - Dare To Be Bold Issue - December 2025
