JOANA FREITAS, Portugal: I strongly recommend that you get to know yourself and embrace who you are! Be brave!

1. Dear Joana, I know you are an amazing young girl, but I would kindly ask you to introduce yourself to the Bellspiration readers?

Hi everyone! I am 24 years old; I live in Portugal; I am curious by nature, I enjoy music, traveling, food, bad jokes, and spending time with my young siblings. I often present myself as a “hybrid” as I am both a young person and a youth worker, and I am also simultaneously a student and a teacher. In the high school I work in, I teach English, manage Erasmus+, and other international projects. I am in the final year of a master’s degree in Social Intervention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, working on thesis research about social inclusion of young people in EU initiatives.

2. You are coming from a small city in Portugal, but you have been to 23 countries. That’s fascinating! Tell us more about it. How you achieve that amazing journey as a young girl from a rural and isolated part of Portugal?

Well, it was a mix of working for it and being lucky, I guess!

For one, my parents raised me to be bigger than where I was and what surrounded me and always told me to be brave and allow myself to dream and that made me who I am. So even if my small city was 5h away from an opportunity to do something cool or enriching, they would drop me off and I would sit by myself in a bus and head for it (as long as it was safe, of course, there was always someone waiting there for me!).

Through local groups and signing myself up in national projects with regional representatives, by the time I was 14, I was frequently traveling through the country to be part of youth participation initiatives or volunteering projects. When I went to university, I became “too old” for those… so I took the next step and ventured into Erasmus+ projects and started going abroad for small periods of time. Which I could do because my amazing mom, who is Portuguese but has a gift for languages, had me grow up with English. We would spend our car journeys listening to Shania Twain, Céline Dion, or my 8-year-old-self idol, Anastacia and she not only taught me the words but their meaning too, which made me fell in love with languages and opened doors I didn’t know existed.

3. Youth empowerment! You have done over 10 Erasmus projects in different countries, did an exchange semester in Czechia, and 1 year of European Voluntary Service in Belgium. What do you think about how big influence international experience has in youth empowerment? How important it is?

Oh, wow, this is a big one! But I’ll try to make it simple. It really comes from my personal experience. Growing up, I was the odd one out. I suffered two losses at 11 and 12 years old that made me “adult” way earlier than I should. And then, because as I was so different and hurt, my social skills were not the best but my grades were which gave someone enough reason to psychologically and twice physically bully me for the next 2 years, until I found the courage – or desperation – to report it. Though things slightly improved in the friendship department over the years and the university presented me with a new city, people, and opportunities, it was not until my first youth exchange, and then again, to a whole different level, in my Erasmus for studies, and to my surprise, once again during EVS, that I got to meet myself and set free from all the expectations, layers, and labels that others had me covered in but also from the hurt, fears, doubt, and self-depreciation I carried around unknowingly. Being surrounded by diversity while exploring new things in another language makes everything feel brand new, and the fact that you can handle all those new “firsts” and help others to do so is deeply empowering as it makes you realize your abilities go away beyond what you were taught or told yourself you could do. Is not so much about where you are in the world but on your state of mind and what you open yourself to, and how that can improve your own self-image… I have been fortunate to have entered this world 6 years ago and witnessed this “magic of mobility” many times and I think it really can (be a step for) positively change a young person’s life.

4. What motivates you in life, Joana? What inspires you the most? What is “success” for you?

Well, I named my blog after a brilliant song called ‘Uncharted’ that talks about not staying around “waiting for the road to be laid” and instead “taking flame over burning out” and I guess that is success to me – that I am willing to keep exploring and accepting that I don’t have all the answers yet and that’s okay as long as I keep following my “kaleidoscope heart”, that “might not make sense but sure as hell made me”. So, as you can see, music is one of my main sources of inspiration.

But what really gets me moving is being surrounded by, as I affectionally name them ‘people who do stuff’. Not just talking just about awesome activists and public personalities, but also about the old man who reads poetry out loud in the street, fellow teachers who work go above and behind strategies to motivate their students, social workers that keep going in spite all of the hardships, all the parents who do what they can to give their kids the best chance, the kids who push through all the difficulties in their life to make the families proud… all those unsung heroes of every day. I hope wherever I move in life I keep finding ways to make them feel seen and valued and build bridges between them.

5. Do you have an inspiring message for all young people all around the world?

I would like to say: it is that it is okay if you are still figuring it all out. Don’t push yourself to be whatever you think you must be and don’t diminish yourself for what you haven’t done. If you look closely, most people’s success is not determined by how well they did at University or how many projects they joined… but by how and what they learned from it.

The truth is the more I traveled, the more different and isolated from my local reality I felt, and once I was back home and my energy and enthusiasm fade and were replaced by loneliness, self-pity, and a feeling of incapacity for not being confident enough to transport those amazing experiences to my “real life”. And that did not change until I decided I was worth being included and getting to know and let others get to know me. So, I strongly recommend that you get to know yourself and embrace who you are, even if you don’t know what that is yet – go try stuff out, collect clues – or if you think you need improvement. But in the process, don’t forget that no man is an island. Look for the people who make you feel heard and seen, even if they seem to not exist. As some quote says, friends are just strangers you haven’t talked to yet. Be brave!