The Art Of Becoming
A psychologist’s story of movement, identity, and finding calm in the unknown
I’m Ana — psychologist, writer, mother, and lifelong seeker of meaning (and good questions).
I write for people in transition: those between places, identities, or versions of themselves. If you’re navigating change, or simply searching for more meaning in the life you already live, I hope this space offers something for you.
Here on Substack, I explore the inner landscapes of transformation, from identity loss and cultural shifts to burnout, belonging, and becoming. You can expect essays that weave together personal stories, therapeutic insight, and poetic reflection, always with the hope of opening something within you.
This isn’t a résumé. It’s a thread.
A thread of movement, loss, wonder, and becoming, shaped by depression, migration, silent retreats, long love stories, and the quiet strength that comes from listening, to others, and to life itself.
I’ve lived many lives:
– As a child dancer, once told I was too fat to perform
– As a seeker, sitting through ten-day silent retreats
– As an expat learning to breathe through depression
– As a mother
– And as a psychologist, walking with others through their own seasons of change
I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety, but I lived it.
I was diagnosed with depression, and I learned to live through it.
What I carry is a life of paradox: grief and gratitude, loss and discovery, stillness and movement.
If any of this speaks to your own becoming, I’d be honoured to walk a few steps beside you.
Here’s where it begins.
The Art of Becoming
A life in motion: fragments from a psychologist’s path
Not all transformations arrive with fireworks.
Some slip in quietly, dressed as road trips, language barriers, long-distance heartbreak, or quiet migration.
Others come suddenly, with the sharp edges of grief.
Over the years, I’ve lived in many places: apartments, cabins, countries, even boats.
And I’ve moved through many roles: psychologist, teacher, traveler, partner, mother.
But my becoming didn’t begin in a therapy room.
It began much earlier, in the tension between movement and meaning, between being shaped and breaking free.
Origins
I was born to a young married couple, in Lisbon, Portugal. My childhood was shaped by warmth, movement, and the thrill of creation.
At six, I began to dance, and with it, I discovered something wordless: a kind of freedom that lived in my body. I still remember the joy of galloping steps, the wind on my face, the rhythm humming through my bones. There was a lightness in those early years, a sense that life could lift you.
At ten, I was accepted into the most prestigious dance school in the country: the Conservatório in Lisbon. The building was over a hundred years old, shared with musicians and actors. It felt like a temple, sacred, echoing, alive. Every day, we trained to the sound of a live piano drifting through long corridors. I was just a girl, sweating through arabesques, but something about it felt profound. A symbiosis. A ceremony. Each drop of effort felt like a seed planted in the ballerina I dreamt of becoming.
But reverence doesn’t shield you from cruelty.
By twelve, my body had begun to change. I was developing normally, but in the eyes of my teachers, it was a problem. I was told, again and again, that I was gaining too much weight. At thirteen, the message was clear: I was too fat to ever become a classical dancer.
One day, in front of the entire class, a teacher said I would soon arrive at school by rolling down the street.
At fourteen, I wasn’t approved to continue. I was dismissed, quietly, officially, completely. I left the Conservatório with a backpack full of shattered dreams, and something within me split.
Walking away from that temple and into “the real world” was not a graceful transition. It was a rupture.
I continued dancing, but the magic had gone quiet. A few years later, I put down my ballet shoes… and picked up a bass guitar.
Music and Another Kind of Stage
At seventeen, I joined a girl band.
A year earlier, I had started playing small shows in bars with some friends, the kind of setups where you carry your own amp and count the audience on one hand. But with the girls, everything grew. Suddenly we were playing iconic concert halls, giving interviews on national radio, appearing in magazines and on TV, touring cities, staying in hotels. It felt surreal, like stepping into someone else’s dream, only it was ours.
We didn’t do it for fame. We did it for the sheer joy of making something together.
This was a different kind of art. A different kind of symbiosis, one where the “we” carried the music, and the “I” found room to grow quietly inside it.
Four years later, I joined a second band, this time with boys. The energy shifted. It was more intense, more ambitious. We played renowned venues, won national and European awards. It was still exhilarating, but less innocent. At twenty-one, I was juggling rehearsals, stage lights, and psychology exams.
But even amidst the noise, something quiet was moving in me.
At twenty-two, I left Portugal for a semester abroad in Sweden. I didn’t hesitate. The choice felt easy, clear. Even if I risked losing everything, the band and the rhythm of familiarity, I sensed I had everything to gain.
Some call that instinct. I call it listening.
First Departure
I was seduced by the snow. I had never seen so much of it, soft, heavy, and endlessly quiet. It was January 2007, in Uppsala, Sweden. I had arrived for my Erasmus semester in the dead of winter, wrapped in layers, walking alone through white, hushed streets. I chose to begin in January so I could witness the seasons shift, to watch the darkness give way to light.
Arriving in the peak of winter was an intentional contrast, and exactly what I was looking for. There was something sacred in the silence, in the way Sweden didn’t try to impress. It simply welcomed. And I listened.
At the time, I was in my final year of a psychology degree, but what I learned that winter couldn’t be found in textbooks. I learned how silence can hold you. How a country can reflect back a part of you that hadn’t yet been fully seen.
I began to sense the personality of a place, how each one carries its own tempo, its own emotional climate. And I discovered that your own identity can feel more or less itself depending on where you stand. In Sweden, something expanded. A quiet kind of self-acceptance took root. I felt more like me, not because I was different, but because I was seen differently.
But when I returned to Portugal, something inside me had shifted, and the world around me hadn’t.
Trapped in the confrontation with my past, I fell into one of the hardest seasons of my life: heartbreak, disillusionment, and a profound sense of not belonging. I struggled to adapt to the Portuguese work mentality after experiencing the spaciousness and structure of Sweden. Everything felt tight, rushed, dissonant.
Depression was the only thing that made sense, and I was formally diagnosed. I could finally live, in the most personal way, what I had studied in theory. The page had become the body.
A Return and a Rebirth
After a long season of loss and disorientation, I began slowly rediscovering joy, mostly through photography, travel, and the healing presence of good friends. Photography became a kind of self-therapy: a way of seeing myself differently, of composing my story frame by frame. Light returned, gently.
Five years after that first winter, I went back to Sweden, this time, to stay. It was 2012.
By then, I had been reading everything I could about psychedelics and altered states. My first psychedelic experience, in 2008, had cracked something open. Since then, I’d become deeply curious about consciousness, healing, and the silences that surround these subjects in traditional psychology. I was also drawn to understanding how the brain, as both a physical organ and a landscape of meaning, shapes our experience of well-being and illness.
That curiosity led me to a master’s program in Sweden called Brain, Mind and Well-being. The title alone felt like a promise.
But the Sweden I returned to was not the Sweden I had left. The start was not easy. The sparkle of novelty had been replaced by the slow work of making a life. I didn’t yet feel at home.
That began to shift when I returned to my body.
I started teaching what I knew: Pilates and yoga, forms of moving meditation that had carried me through my own healing. Slowly, studio by studio, I created spaces where presence could grow, where breath and movement became anchors, and where I could lead not through perfection, but through presence.
In teaching others, I found myself again.
Softening
I moved. I studied. I began teaching yoga and Pilates every day.
My body, once sculpted by classical dance, by perfectionism, by pain, began to soften. The old drive to perform gave way to something quieter. I learned to lead with presence, not performance. To hold a room not through control, but through attention.
Each class became a small sanctuary. A space of connection, of mutual presence, of breath meeting breath. And somewhere in the midst of all that movement, I met something I had long forgotten:
Stillness.
Acceptance.
Peace.
India: Silence, Sweat, and the Space Between
In 2014, I traveled to Jaipur, India, for a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat. I had done others before, but this one was different, I was alone, in a vast country I had never visited, thousands of kilometers from anything familiar. That was the stretch.
Sitting in silence in India felt like a ceremony of trust, in my body, in life, and in the unknown.
Alongside silence, I also met my body again, this time with an intensity I hadn’t known since dance school. I practiced yoga three hours a day, six days a week. My body and mind began to reshape, not toward an aesthetic, but toward presence. It was humbling. And empowering.
Around that time, I also entered a long, quiet relationship with a Swedish former model — now photographer and film director, 23 years my senior. It was never quite defined, but it shaped me nonetheless. It taught me about the beauty and ache of ambiguity, the kind of love that lives in margins, in friendship, in companionship, in connection beyond category.
It reminded me that not all important relationships come with labels. Some simply arrive. And change you.
From Grief to Grace
Meanwhile, back in Sweden, something unexpected began to heal: dance.
Luiza Lopes, prima ballerina of the Royal Swedish Ballet, began attending my yoga classes. For me, it was a quiet honour, to guide someone who lived inside the world I had once left behind. That Christmas, I went to see her perform The Nutcracker. I expected grief. That’s why I hadn’t watched classical dance in years.
But what met me instead was joy.
The art I had left in sorrow returned to me, softer, freer, forgiven.
Something in me opened. It was as if the little girl who once galloped across the studio floor, the one who’d been told she was too much, too heavy, finally sat down and simply watched, in awe. No shame. No sorrow. Just the music, the movement, and the miracle of it all.
A Cottage and a Quiet Life
Eventually, life offered me what felt like a miracle. Not the first miracle I’d known, but one that came quietly, without striving. I was offered a chance to live in a lakeside cottage with its own sauna, jacuzzi, and a tiny private beach. My income at the time was modest, and I had never imagined such a place would hold my name.
The gratitude was immense.
It wasn’t a large house, but it taught me everything about scale. About how beauty thrives in “enough,” and how “enoughness” holds its own kind of abundance. The days felt like a reward I hadn’t known I was earning, as if the home itself mirrored the stillness and grace I had been slowly growing into.
The Airport Years
Just as I had begun to root, I felt the call to stretch again.
I joined a global consultancy and soon found myself in near-constant motion. One week: New York and Montreal. The next: Bangkok and Jakarta. Sweden became less of a home and more of a layover. My suitcase held both boots and sandals.
It was thrilling. Disorienting. Liberating.
I learned to sleep in transit. To pack light. To anchor inward. I learned to belong not to a place, but to movement itself.
(Video: A moment in transit, with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue playing overhead and Chicago’s airport in the background.)
This was a new version of me I hadn’t met before, the corporate consultant, the keynote speaker, the globe-trotter. I was creating and delivering programs on organizational psychology at a global scale, designing interventions for multinational teams across industries. A side of psychology I had only known in theory was now coming alive in boardrooms and breakouts.
As I stretched into this new identity, the world itself felt smaller, not diminished, but somehow more familiar. My village had grown, and it spanned continents.
Pandemic and the Pirate
Then came 2020. And with it, the stillness.
The week began in New York, business as usual, despite whispers of a strange new virus. By the end of that same week, layoffs were looming. Within three days, I had packed up my apartment in Stockholm, found a renter, and flown to Portugal. I had a feeling borders might close, and if they did, I wanted to be near those who might need me most. As much as I needed them.
At the end of that year, during lockdown in the Algarve, I met a tall ship captain. Ronny, a Swiss man anchored nearby with a 110-year-old vessel. He was a seeker and a pirate. He showed me a glimpse of a life guided by wind and instinct. A different kind of movement. A different kind of bravery.
A few months later, he sailed off to Senegal and we drifted apart. But something had already shifted in me.
Road Trip and Boat Life
Before I ever met the captain, I had already felt the pull of the sea.
Early in 2020, I earned my yachtmaster license, not knowing yet how significant that would become. That summer, I went on my first long sailing trip: from Lisbon to Vilamoura, about 120 nautical miles. The first of many, I hoped.
A year later, after saying goodbye to the Swiss captain, whose wind-led life had stayed with me, I followed a new current. I took my first great road trip: 4000 kilometers from Portugal to Sweden, in my first car, a 30-year-old Mercedes. My mother rode beside me, and our dog came along too.
When we arrived in Sweden, she flew back to Portugal. But I didn’t move into a flat.
I moved onto a sailboat. Just me and Valentina, my dog.
It stretched me again. Living with the wind, the water, the solitude. The sky became my ceiling. The lake, my mirror. There were moments of fear, but more of wonder. I learned to tie knots, to sleep with the rocking, to be alone without feeling lonely.
Since then, road trips have become a rhythm. Thousands of kilometers shared between countries, between lives. A way to re-center. A reminder that life can shift beneath us, and we don’t need to resist.
But that first summer on the boat taught me something I had never learned on land:
You don’t always need to know the destination. But you must trust the current.
Grief and Groundlessness
In 2022, something shifted again, this time without a map.
I lost my best friend to a work-related accident in Portugal. She left behind her 13-year-old daughter, my goddaughter. Her absence rearranged the world. Some losses don’t feel real. Only the silence they leave becomes unbearably loud.
Just a few months later, I had to say goodbye to my four-legged soulmate, a loyal German Shepherd, my physical and spiritual companion for many years. Helping her into her forever sleep is a memory too painful to describe.
Grief has no measure, no language. But it has weight. And wisdom. It strips you down to what truly matters. It teaches you to notice what remains, and to hold it with reverence. It shows you that absence doesn’t erase love, it transforms it into something you carry, quietly, every day.
Family, Forward
Eventually, Ronny returned. He had never been forgotten. We reunited. And in a heartbeat, we chose each other again. This time, with even more intention. We wanted to become a family.
I became a mother. And once again, my whole world shifted.
Today, we are. We still travel. We still chase coastlines. And we continue living close to the edge of things, guided by wonder, not fear. For now, we are humbled by the dream we’re living: a family of our own, rooted in love, respect, desire, growth, and curiosity. We see life as art, and we’re in constant creation.
It feels exciting to look forward to what life has yet to unfold.
What I've Learned
This isn’t just a story of the past years. It’s a mosaic of a life. Woven through migrations, music, movement, motherhood, and meaning. Fragments that, together, shape an identity rooted in resilience, peace in the unknown, and quiet strength of spirit.
I’ve been a student, a dancer, a musician, a consultant, a psychologist, a partner, a mother.
I’ve lived in silence and in airports, in borrowed homes and on boats.
What I’ve learned is this:
Moving countries doesn’t just change your view, it changes your name, your posture, your sense of what home even means.
You don’t just adapt. You unmake and remake yourself. Over and over again.
It’s an ongoing process of discovery and becoming.
Life isn’t about choosing the perfect path.
It’s about learning to walk the one you’re on, with grace, even when the ground disappears.
And creating a new one, when the heart calls for it.
I don’t strive for stability.
I strive for richness.
For depth.
Comfort in change.
For the kind of life that feels lived, marked by beauty, emotion, and stories worth remembering.
Because to live fully is not to avoid the storm, but to learn to navigate it.
To bloom, not despite the rain, but because of it.
To sometimes create the storm, and to lower the sails when the wind gets rough.
(After all, how else does a sailor earn their skill?)
To trust creation, in all its chaos and beauty.
And to know: all is perfect, exactly as it is.
Thank you for reading.
If something in this story touched a part of you — a memory, a dream, a quiet truth — I’d love to stay connected.
You can subscribe for more reflections on change, identity, and the art of becoming.
And if you're curious about how I work as a psychologist and psychotherapist, you’re welcome to visit anabatista.com.
This story is a beginning. Maybe ours is too.
This is truly inspiring!!! I can’t tell you how happy I feel right now after reading this!! Thanks for sharing! And may we all find the richness we deserve!
Such a beautiful words, such a beautiful soul you are❤️ I’m so glad I found your substack.