Transcriber: Maria Pereyra Reviewer: David DeRuwe
"No one will ask you about Harry Potter."
Tough words for someone who is deeply in love with books.
I was fourteen, and because I was fourteen,
I thought it was possible to read all the books in the world.
But it dawned on me.
The fact that -
most certainly there are people who can turn their passion into a career,
but books?
Seriously?
Who even reads anymore?
Chances were I wasn't one of those people.
Because success stories are only a few.
And actually,
it's quite weird how I'm growing older,
but the kind of books I read stay more or less the same.
This isn't how life works,
and the faster I accept the truth, the easier it will be.
So what was the truth?
The truth was that I wasn't enough.
My love for fiction wasn't enough.
Bottom-shelf quality type of literature,
something that I had to move on from to more serious books
and subjects like law, philosophy -
and leave the child behind.
So I decided to stop reading the kind of books I loved
with dragons and magic, and instead focus on serious ones.
"It should be easy," I thought.
"I love to read.
I only need to train my mind to like what it doesn't like."
And I will admit, sometimes that works.
I'm a big advocate of "fake it till you make it."
But what do you do when who you are and who you try to be are polar opposites?
And, in fact, you don't even want to be that person,
but it's the person you've convinced yourself you have to be
in order to be a functioning member of society.
If you ever tried to love someone you didn't love,
or not love someone you did love,
you know how difficult it is not to walk in the light of your truth.
But it wasn't that bad in the beginning.
I focused on my high school exams,
on being admitted to law school, and -
I lied to myself that I was OK,
that I enjoyed killing what made me, me.
But I became depressed, and -
for the first time since I could even remember,
there wasn't a story inside my mind
that I could think of when I put my head on the pillow and went to sleep.
And it might not sound like a big thing,
but it was something that I was doing every single night
since I fell in love with reading, and now it was gone.
In the second year of college, I started reading again.
I felt guilty and ashamed
because I wasn't reading the kind of books
deemed useful for a future lawyer or judge.
But, then again, it wasn't like I was reading anything else.
My experiment completely failed.
I almost managed to kill who I was,
but I didn't replace that person with a better one.
I came back to my old self - to reading and writing.
But after three years of a reading slump,
I had no idea what was being published anymore,
and so, I needed a platform to keep in touch with the publishing world.
And so I discovered "Bookstagram."
That is the Instagram niche dedicated to books.
And this is the first picture that I posted in 2016
that had a book in it.
One year later, in 2017.
Later down the line, mid-2017, and the breakthrough.
As my pictures became more and more complex,
art pages and international publications started to share them,
and so my account grew exponentially.
By accident, I managed to walk the fine line
between an art account and a bookstagram,
and so it clicked with more people than a simple bookstagram might have.
I was a law school graduate when that happened,
and I knew I wanted nothing to do with law but everything to do with books.
I realized that the community is much bigger than expected,
and it reached throughout the whole world,
connecting readers to writers to publishing houses,
in a way I hadn't even thought possible in my early years of bookworming.
I also realized that there's a way to turn this passion into a business.
And I became aware of the word "influencer,"
that I'm not fond of because we all know the articles
that are bashing the influencers,
mostly young women making a living for themselves,
and the comments in which people are kindly declaring
how much they are looking forward to seeing the bubble burst.
They say that influencers promote products they don't use,
and they will do everything for money,
but as far as I'm concerned, I turned down deals that didn't align with my values
or that I didn't believe in.
And I'm doing my best to label my collaborations correctly
so that my followers know
what kind of relation there is between me and the company I'm working with.
And for the most part, I'm promoting books.
So I don't think anyone can suspect me of not loving them.
They say that it's not a real job,
but it's 2019,
and if you're earning and paying your taxes,
it is a real job.
At the same time, contradicting themselves,
they say that it's so much easier than a nine-to-five job.
They themselves could do that.
Just as writing a book. It's so easy.
They could do that as well,
and the business idea that went so well, they would have thought about that.
They say that we promote mindless consumerism
and without focus on serious issues.
And yet, this was after eighth of March, 2018,
when I talked about my personal message
to the girls all around the world who are trying to figure it out.
I talked about what I figured out
having dealt with body image issues, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders.
I figured that change must come from a place of self-love.
At the beginning of my story,
when I told you I tried to change who I was,
I did it from a place of self-hate.
Because I thought that only by hating myself,
I could change the things that I hate about myself -
and how incredibly sad is that?
I figured that happiness doesn't depend on weight.
That my body brought me where I am, and that I should love and cherish it
because it will do its best to turn around my bad choices.
I figured that life heals and forgives.
That the circumstances of my life don't define me.
That I can use them as stepping stones and rise above them.
And I figured that after a certain age, you can't blame anyone else but yourself.
So whether it all works or not,
it will be your face you'll be looking at in the mirror,
and it will be yourself you'll have to live with.
So in the light of the end that makes all of us equal,
why are we so afraid of going for what we truly want?
I figured also that no one really cares.
A few do,
but no one really cares how expensive your clothes are
because no one really looks at you, just as you don't really look at anyone,
because we are, all of us,
stuck in this world with our own little problems.
And so, a few mistakes aren't that big of a deal.
Because out of all the mistakes that I made,
I can think of very few that really mattered.
And the first on that list
is not wearing sunscreen in summer of 2013.
I figured that people hate,
but that is on them, not on you,
because a truly happy person, content with themselves,
doesn't have place for hate in their hearts.
I'm saying all this
stressing again the fact that I can't stand the word "influencer".
For all intents and purposes, I suppose I am one.
But, if you'd ask me what I'm doing,
I'd say that I don't really know,
but it works.
This is my best friend,
who I'm working with, and with whom I started this journey.
We are writing together,
we are working together,
we are taking pictures together,
and we are helping each other.
And here we are after being invited to the Frankfurt book fair,
the biggest book fair in the world.
Well, it turned out
that actually, people are asking me about Harry Potter.
Thank you.
(Applause)