Q and A with Juliana from Bogotá, Colombia
“Educate your mind to think good thoughts and to be focused on the important.”
Q: What are you passionate about?
A: I’m passionate about mental health, political psychology, arts, sports, SDG, and human rights. I’m passionate about all that is related to international development on the basis of a well-being economy.
I consider people an intrinsic element of international development.
Societies with poisoned leadership reflect an aversive practice that affects our capacity to cope as a community, our dialogue as a main source for change, our happiness as a process rather than an outcome, and, nevertheless, our dignity due to political differences.
Q: What were your younger years like?
A: I believed a life-changing element in my childhood was receiving a Montessori education. I went to a Montessori school for six years, from 6 years old until 12 years old.
It was a place where I was introduced to a cooperative style of dynamics.
The classrooms were small places with a rooted rule that nobody could be alone during break time.
We did homework at the end of each day with classical music, we had poetry classes each day for about 20 minutes in the middle of the morning, and classes where we stretched and practiced yoga poses.
All of this at the same time as a family dynamic with a roller coaster of emotions, instability, and the grief of a 1-year-old son with Down syndrome. Not forgetting to mention a cultural male dominance and a mother with narcissistic tendencies.
Q: What is something valuable you’d like others to know?
A: Each person has a history to live; each person has a pain to carry. Your pain is at the end of your best professor.
What you fear the most is what brings the most of you.
Each experience that you live brings an empowerment component within, not in the way that you want, but in the way that you need to be positively impacted.
The essence of personal power is to take care of your mind, rely on the positive judge that all of us have, and ignore the negative self-talk that comes to advise us once in a while.
Educate your mind to think good thoughts and to be focused on the important.
Let pain be an anchor for continuous self-improvement, but not a guide for your life. Remember, it’s not another day; it’s one less day in our lives.
Q: What does feminism mean to you?
A: Feminism means to me the freedom of men too. Fixed roles incapacitate all the individuals of a society at the same level.
It is about what you think about yourself, how you perform in life, where you think you belong, and where you can go. The history of your own path is, in an undeniable way, the construction of multiple direct and indirect experiences in a personal, familiar, and cultural way.
Misogynous discourses have been on the books of humanity from dated and undated times. However, history has been showing us that men also suffer from historical social injustices.
It is a reality that men commit more suicide than women, and their human suffering is silent; silence in this case is a non-consensual agreement.
Feminism means to me that women can own their “destiny” without the fear of misogynistic tactics as silence, intimidation, humiliation, underestimation, and the use of physical force for self-centered purposes.
It means to me a much more dignified society due to positive mental health. Has someone ever questioned the resentment caused by misogynistic discourses? Has someone ever questioned how historic resentment is at the root of armed conflict?
Being born in the only country in South America that had an armed conflict for 50 years was a blessing and a curse at the same time. I became interested in everything related to negotiation processes and invisible weapons of mass destruction at a very young age; that was the moment I started to understand the use of sex as a mechanism of human control and emotional espionage to defeat adversaries from the depths of their souls. While the world relegates women to caretaking roles, power-hungry dictators use us as both a weapon and a shield. The use of women as weapons of war and psychic destruction is a secret at loud voices.
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