I grew up in Brazil in the 1980s, in what people often call a “third-world” country, within a bicultural, lower-class family, during the final years of a dictatorship and the height of the so-called lost decade of inflation. My first real understanding of what limitation felt like came in 1988, inside an Estrela toy store, when I was seven years old.

It was Children’s Day. My parents had taken my two siblings and me out, and my mother cheerfully asked me to choose a gift for myself. I remember standing there, surrounded by toys, and feeling something heavy settle in my chest. I worried that whatever I decided might mean less for my brothers.

This reflection continues in fiction.

Creative Process — Emma is one of the characters in my new book, The Mask We Wear at Work, who lives inside these questions.

She is not heroic, or broken, or exceptional in the ways institutions like to recognise. She is observant. Adaptive. Careful. The kind of person who learns early that power has a sound, a rhythm, a posture, and that safety often looks like knowing when to borrow them, without ever being told who designed them, or why.

Her journey sits at the centre of The Mask We Wear at Work, a contemporary tragic-comedy from the Veiled Identity series, which uncovers the cultural, political, and capitalist forces shaping contemporary identity through lived experience and intersectionality.

This essay is not separate from that world. It is part of the same investigation.

(The Mask We Wear at Work, coming up.)