There are things you’ve been carrying for years without knowing why you keep them.
Today I’ll tell you about two: a sign in Mexico, and a seal in a drawer.
Today I want to tell you about two things that happened years apart, and turned out to be the same thing.
The first was in Mexico.
A little over a year ago I went to Zamora, a city in Michoacán, sitting in a valley. I went to be there for a friend who was teaching her first international workshop, along with another friend of ours. I didn’t go for myself.
We were driving in, on a tour, when I saw the sign.
ZAMORA
Take off the first letter and the last one, and what’s left is amor — the Spanish word for love.
Like Roma, which spelled backward says the same thing.
I kept looking at it. I don’t know if anyone else on that bus saw it.
And even so, those days moved things in me I hadn’t gone there to move.
The first few days I wasn’t comfortable.
And it’s not that this happens to me often. It happens when I walk into something that isn’t only mine — by which I mean a place where other people are already carrying their own weight: what they expect, what they’re nervous about, what they came to sort out.
When I’m in a room like that, I start picking up things that didn’t come with me. Meaning: I wake up uneasy about something I didn’t bring from home, and it takes me a while to work out that it isn’t mine.
Where we were staying wasn’t what we’d expected. The friend I shared a room with felt it too, at almost the same moment, and we looked at each other knowing exactly the same thing without having to say it.
We could have gone somewhere else. There were more comfortable options, and they were right there.
But years ago the three of us made each other a promise: to be there for each other through what’s hard. And when I say that, I don’t mean the pretty trips. I mean the days when something big lands on one of us and the other two stay close, even when staying close is uncomfortable.
You don’t keep a promise like that from the nice room across town.
So we stayed where she was.
We found, out of what there was, the room that looked the most like us. It wasn’t the perfect one. It was the best of them, and it was ours.
That’s where we sat with it. And by that I mean we didn’t fix it fast or talk ourselves into believing nothing was wrong. We let it last as long as it lasted, without looking for a way out.
A few days in, we were fine.
And it was right then, with all of that behind us, that I went out walking and actually saw the place.
Really saw it. The beauty I’d had in front of me for days.
The place had been the same since day one.
I hadn’t.
The second thing had happened years earlier, and I didn’t know it yet.
On a trip to Europe I bought a wax seal with the initials SF.
I saw it, I liked it, and then I thought: ah, Saskia and Frank. Nothing more than that. A nice coincidence that made me buy it.
I put it away and there it stayed.
Years later, getting some cards ready, I took it out of the drawer and looked at it properly.
And I saw what it actually said.
It wasn’t Saskia and Frank.
It was my name. The one that was going to be mine.
That seal is my brand’s seal today.
In psychology, this is called perceptual priming,
something researchers like Endel Tulving helped describe: once something registers in us, even without conscious attention, it changes what we’re able to see later. No new information arrives.
What was already there becomes available.
Which is why some things sit in front of us for years and then one day, with no explanation, read differently.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that.
The book you bought three years ago and opened just now, when it finally had something to say to you.
Your grandmother’s line that you repeated without understanding it, until the day you understood it.
The conversation you had a while back that you suddenly know what it was about.
None of that arrived today. It was already there.
What changed was you.
And this is what took me a long time to understand: a lot of things are already in place before you see them.
They don’t show up when you decide. They become visible when you’re ready to see them.
The seal spent years in a drawer. Zamora had been in front of me since the first day.
Neither one arrived. Both waited for me to be able to read them.
And there’s something else I only saw afterward: in Zamora, the gift wasn’t at the beginning. It was at the end.
If I’d left before we’d sat with all of it, I’d have walked away with the discomfort of those first days and nothing else.
That’s why I stop when someone tells me they’re starting from zero.
It’s almost never zero.
There’s almost always plenty already in place, unnamed. Notebooks, ideas that keep coming back, conversations that repeat, things you bought without knowing why.
And once you start reading that properly, life stops feeling like a fight to get things.
It feels more like seeing what was already there.
People ask me sometimes where they should go in Mexico.
Most of them expect me to say Cancún, Tulum or Mexico City. And they’re beautiful, and I’ll happily say so when that’s what you’re after.
But I ask something else first: what are you going for?
Because going to rest and going to find yourself aren’t the same trip. And by that I mean there are trips you come back from with photos, and trips you come back from with something of your own that wasn’t in your suitcase.
If it’s the second one, I’ll tell you Zamora.
It isn’t on the lists. It isn’t the obvious one. And I think that’s exactly why it lets you see yourself.
I want to go back. And this time I want to take Frank.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so you stop looking outside for what you’ve been carrying all along, and start reading it properly.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you’d like somewhere to write down what you’re seeing, I wrote My Woman’s Journal for that. It’s on Amazon if you’d like to have it close.
And if reading this brought something of yours to mind that you’d like to sort out with someone alongside you, the consulting application is open. I’ll leave it right here for you.
For today, just one question:
What have you been carrying for years, without knowing yet why you keep it?