Public Speaking: The Embodiment of Belonging

I deliver impactful keynotes and public talks that spark dialogue, challenge assumptions, and center the complex lived experiences of international adoptees. Through my lived experience and broad professional competence, my listeners are invited to explore the intersection of race, belonging, and mental health in new ways.

In these inner intersections, our sexual identity is one of many layers, not always supported in our societies because of negative social norms and ideas of what is ‘normal’ and ‘accepted’.

Whether you're organizing a community gathering, professional panel, educational event, or conference, I offer grounded, insightful speaking that helps audiences explore adoption, identity, and the embodied journey toward belonging.

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‘Home is not one Location’: Reunion, Identity and the Cost of Assimilation

This speech is an invitation to everyone in the audience to join me on my deeply personal journey—growing up as a Black child adopted from Brazil, raised as an only child by white parents in Sweden.

In my search for roots, belonging, and ultimately myself, I returned to Brazil and reconnected with my biological family and relatives. Fifteen years later, I brought my little sister to Portugal to stay with us as an au pair.

Through the lens of love and longing, I reflect on what it means to grow up in a society that demands assimilation and renders difference invisible. I share what reunion taught me about family, trust, and the emotional cost of having to give up parts of myself in order to belong. And how my attempt to bring the family together—putting my mothers in the same video call during dinner—turned out to be both the right and the wrong way to move on.

This talk is a powerful invitation and reminder: relationships are complex, our identities are layered, and reunion might lead to something entirely different from what we were searching for.

Key themes - Transracial adoption, reunion and finding home, assimilation vs. authenticity, family and belonging, social identities as layers.

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‘The Adoptee Body: Overlooked intersections of reproductive justice, fetish, and adoption’

In this keynote, I move from the narrative that it was fate that brought me to my family and parents, to one rooted in reproductive injustice and the embodiment of intergenerational trauma. And, from another side of the world, a longing for family and future allowed me to live an amazing life—although everything around my existence is shaped by injustice and the raw structures of sexual health principles in the world.

Through a brave exploration of the impact of infertility, SEXistential shame, and a personal, embodied knowledge of what my destiny truly is about, I highlight how mental and sexual health are deeply intertwined—and how these dimensions are often neglected in adoption discourse.

I share how I found myself in the duality of myself; how I can walk in my power and, at the same time, have a body charged with sexual, stereotypical expectations—and how other people’s fetishization could be transformed into a source that’s only mine.

Good intentions are not enough, but radical acceptance brings us pretty close.

Key themes - Reproductive justice, sexual health, adoption and infertility, as a silent message, Shame and sexual development, embodiment and unspoken truths.

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My public speaking is more than storytelling, they are in themselves a call to action. My invitation to you; professionals, educators, community leaders and policymakers, is to challenge dominate narratives and stay in exploration on how our lived experience between worlds can be used for bringing hope and resilience for the coming generations.

Depth, nuance and connection - on every stage.

Book me for your next event