The story begins like that of any child raised in Brazil in recent decades. I learned to read with Monica’s Gang comics. It gets a bit more unique with the fact that the stack of comics in the bathroom included some editions of Uncle Scrooge, Turma do Arrepio, and even a few from The Trapalhões. Around the age of six, I started playing with making little newspapers for my family on A4 sheets. From there, discovering the texts of Luis Fernando Verissimo and starting to enjoy writing classes was a natural step.
Because I loved reading so much, writing came along with it. Ironically, I only discovered fiction writing in journalism school.
Journalism school was where the texts I produced were mostly praised for their literary quality and rarely for the information and reporting of the articles, which made the path to literature and creative writing more obvious as the semesters went by. College was also a place to explore and work with different media and the basic tools of journalism. That’s where audio and design started finding their way into my ideas.
The classes I enjoyed the most were those involving design and different ways of communicating information. Having access to design course materials also fueled my interest in the field — to the point where I went so far as to create animated journalism projects and dabble in drawing logos.
On Monday, October 3, 2016, at the age of 23, I discovered I had an AVM (arteriovenous malformation). I could have had small signs throughout my life or never known about it at all. But it so happened that this AVM decided to announce itself in the most dramatic way possible. It ruptured and flooded part of my brain with blood.
What followed were 24 days in a coma, with looping nightmares, an unconscious birthday, and a total of 72 days in a hospital, not knowing how — or if — my life would continue.
My life did go on, and here on this site, there’s a bit of what followed and a bit of the life that came before as well. There’s journalism, there’s content, but there’s also art — because art was one of the guiding lights that allowed me to move forward after that weekend.