I am the woman of my life

As luck would have it, my life has been like a journey of many seasons. Sometimes I have been alone, many times accompanied, but there has always been one constant in it: I have always made the journey in freedom. And every time the struggle wears me down, when the headlines discourage me, when the angle of the slope becomes too steep to reach the top, I think of them.

For me, every day is Women's Day. No, really. How do I get to see it that way? Not only surrounded by a team of people for whom inequality is a thing of the past, but also by paying homage to those who are no longer here, to those giant women on whose shoulders we all stand today. Because that is what Lo de Manuela is all about ; recovering the past to make it shine in the present. To them I give thanks and from them I keep something to accompany me every day.

From Baroness Karen Blixen I take her sense of adventure. Her empathy and her ability to tell stories of foreign cultures as if they were her own are the foundation on which all our work is built.

From Anna Karenina I keep the courage. Because it was having everything and risking it all to find love. And although her bones are words and her skin a cover, she managed to teach me that sometimes the cell is built by oneself inside.

From Lota and Elizabeth I learned that there are times when mixtures simply work even if they don't fit in your head. Like metal with stone or ink on paper, you learn from fusions and the collective can become much more than the individual. You just have to dare.

Lange left me the denunciation, like a heartbreaking cry on my skin, because sometimes it is so necessary to live it to initiate change, just like the wind and the rain, whose chaos will always augur a new spring.

I have met these women on these trips, in these collections. And I couldn't be prouder to share the genre with them.

And it is that... je suis la femme de ma vie. I am the woman of my life. I am thanks to them. To those who made it. I am thanks to you, woman, sister, friend, companion, unknown but so close. And so will be all those who are yet to come.