My birthday is coming up – December 11 – and, as always, I’m starting to do a little existential cleaning and take stock of the past year.
2025 was a very special year. The launch of my book “Memoirs of a Badly Raised Anthropologist” – on May 21 in Rio de Janeiro and June 5 in São Paulo – was the moment to “come out of my hole”.
I wrote the book after almost dying in a fire in November 2023. I followed the advice of my best friend who left three weeks before his 99th birthday: “You have to have courage, Mirian, courage, yes you will!”. And I went there. After more than 5 years of deep sadness, despair and depression, it was the first time I hugged so many loved ones. It was magnificent!
2025 was also the year I had every imaginable problem of an “old car that needs a mechanic and maintenance three times a year,” as a cardiologist told me: pneumonia, sinusitis, bronchitis, pharyngitis, asthma, pancreatitis, gastritis, bulbitis, pre-diabetes and other bad things. I’m happy because I’m finishing the year and my “old car” just needs medication for high cholesterol.
On May 1st, I met stylist Ale Valois via Instagram. In our conversations, I confessed that I was a kind of Steve Jobs: I only wear jeans, black leggings, a black t-shirt and black sneakers. Ale came to my house twice, we took everything out of my closets and I discovered beautiful clothes that I didn’t even know I had. Almost every day, I texted Ale: “I found out. » I created a slogan for my talented friend: “Discover yourself with Ale – A for joy; L for freedom and E for energy”.
On October 1, after four years of research, I completed the latest version of my postdoctoral report in social psychology on aging, autonomy and happiness. And, to my greatest pleasure, I was invited to write four boxes containing 100 questions on menopause, anthropology, envy and fear. The one about menopause has already been released and is a huge success.
Finally, in 2025, I celebrated my 15th anniversary as a columnist for Leaf with an exciting new feature: in February, I was invited to create 90-second videos for the company’s social networks Leaf on my columns. I was scared, because my thing has always been writing columns, not making videos. But it was an incredible exchange with my readers.
On November 4, in Rio de Janeiro, Yuval Noah Harari said his next book could be his last, because artificial intelligence is evolving at such a rapid pace that it will soon be able to produce books that surpass those he is capable of writing. I said exactly the same thing on August 14, during a debate at Rio Innovation Week on “Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Art, Sensitivity and Existence in the Automated World.” At the event, I said a colleague called me an “endangered dinosaur” because I didn’t use AI to transcribe my interviews or write my books and columns.
Even if my texts are overtaken by AI, I will never stop writing. My closets, filled with journals that I have written compulsively since the age of 16, are concrete proof that writing has always been and always will be what gives me the most excitement in my soul, as Rita Lee said at 73 years old. I don’t write to be read or published, I write to save my life.
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