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The Empty Space After My Name · Just Julia

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Empty Space After My Name When I was in high school, my father used to make me an offer.
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  SPEAKER_00: If I got into medical school,
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  SPEAKER_00: one of the good public universities in Brazil,
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  SPEAKER_00: he would buy me a car, any car I wanted.
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  SPEAKER_00: He made the same offer to my sister.
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  SPEAKER_00: Neither of us became doctors.
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  SPEAKER_00: For years, this was simply one of those family stories, something you remember and laugh about.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Lately, I haven't been laughing about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because at 38 years old,
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  SPEAKER_00: I have found myself thinking something I am almost embarrassed to admit.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I should have become a doctor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because I suddenly want to practice medicine.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't.
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  SPEAKER_00: But because somewhere in my imagination lives this other Julia.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Julia.
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  SPEAKER_00: She knows what she is.
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  SPEAKER_00: She wakes up in the morning and doesn't need to explain herself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone asks what she does and she has an answer.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm a doctor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Three words, an identity.
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  SPEAKER_00: And lately, I envy her.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've had a career.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've worked internationally.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've built partnerships.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've negotiated.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've sold.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've managed markets.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've sat in meetings and made presentations and carried targets and built relationships.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've been good at many of those things.
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  SPEAKER_00: But if you ask me whether they are me, something inside me says no.
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  SPEAKER_00: No.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't want my next chapter to be another version of the last one.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to choose another title simply because I'm qualified for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to keep becoming whatever fits most neatly onto my CV and
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  SPEAKER_00: that leaves me with a surprisingly difficult question.
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  SPEAKER_00: If I don't want to be what I've been, who am I?
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  SPEAKER_00: I genuinely don't know.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe this is the strange consequence of living many lifetimes in one life.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've been so many julias.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was the Brazilian girl from a small town,
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  SPEAKER_00: the exchange student in New Zealand,
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  SPEAKER_00: the university girl who worked part-time and partied with her friends
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  SPEAKER_00: and felt completely free,
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  SPEAKER_00: the international student,
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  SPEAKER_00: the girl who moved to Milan,
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  SPEAKER_00: the intern in New York, the career woman, the wife, the mother...
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  SPEAKER_00: And somewhere between countries,
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  SPEAKER_00: languages,
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  SPEAKER_00: relationships,
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  SPEAKER_00: motherhood, ambition, and becoming an adult, I became extremely good at adapting.
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  SPEAKER_00: Brazilian Julia tried hard to belong in the small world she grew up in.
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  SPEAKER_00: New Zealand Julia discovered what it felt like to belong somewhere completely new.
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  SPEAKER_00: Italian Julia spent years learning how to belong in a world that didn't always feel like hers.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Professional Julia became very good at belonging wherever she was needed.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: But lately, I've started wondering, which one of them learned how to belong to herself?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that I ever did.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I talk about authenticity a lot lately.
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  SPEAKER_00: Authenticity, authenticity, authenticity.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think perhaps I repeat the word because I'm desperately trying
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  SPEAKER_00: to understand what it feels like.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because there's a contradiction inside me that I don't quite know how to reconcile.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to be visible, and I'm terrified of being seen.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to build something of my own,
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  SPEAKER_00: and immediately I imagine what everyone will think if it fails.
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  SPEAKER_00: My parents,
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  SPEAKER_00: my friends,
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  SPEAKER_00: my husband,
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  SPEAKER_00: people who knew previous versions of me,
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  SPEAKER_00: people who might look at whatever I create and think, who does she think she is?
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  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps the more frightening question is the one I ask myself, who do I think I am?
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  SPEAKER_00: What authority do I have to build something different?
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  SPEAKER_00: What expertise do I have outside the world I've already worked in?
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  SPEAKER_00: Why would anybody listen to me?
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  SPEAKER_00: There she is again, the girl who didn't make the list.
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  SPEAKER_00: Older now,
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  SPEAKER_00: better dressed,
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  SPEAKER_00: more traveled,
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  SPEAKER_00: with a CV and a family and almost four decades of evidence
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  SPEAKER_00: that she can figure difficult things out.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And still, somewhere inside, asking, am I enough to do this?
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  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you where some of it probably began.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then tomorrow morning I wake up,
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's the part of transformation we don't talk about enough.
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  SPEAKER_00: Understanding yourself and becoming yourself are not the same thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is an uncomfortable distance between the two.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm standing somewhere inside it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps that's also why my relationship with work feels so complicated right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: I could choose something familiar, something respectable, something I know how to do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Put another title after my name.
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  SPEAKER_00: Build another version of Professional Julia.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe I would be very good at it.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I am frightened that I would wake up a few years from now asking exactly the same question.
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  SPEAKER_00: Is this really me?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't just want a job anymore.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to build.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to create.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want business and ambition and financial independence.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want beautiful hotels and great clothes and planes to places I've never seen.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to feel powerful in a room.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I also want depth.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want conversations that change something inside people.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to understand why we become who we become and whether we're allowed
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  SPEAKER_00: to become somebody else.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a long time, I thought those desires contradicted one another.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a meaningful woman had to reject material things.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a spiritual woman couldn't also be ambitious.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe someone who wanted to help people had to become softer,
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  SPEAKER_00: quieter, less interested in success.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't me either.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to choose between depth and ambition.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want both.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe authenticity isn't choosing which version is acceptable.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's finally having the courage to admit that all of them belong.
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  SPEAKER_00: Problem is, I still don't know what to do with that information.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what company I will build.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether I'll build one at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know whether my next chapter will be something I haven't discovered yet,
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  SPEAKER_00: or some strange intersection of all of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for someone who desperately wants clarity, this is incredibly uncomfortable.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want the roadmap.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want someone to say, Julia, this is what you're supposed to do.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's why Dr. Julia has been visiting my thoughts lately.
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  SPEAKER_00: She represents the road not taken.
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  SPEAKER_00: But more than that, she represents certainty.
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  SPEAKER_00: Study this.
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  SPEAKER_00: Become this.
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  SPEAKER_00: Call yourself this.
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  SPEAKER_00: Live this life.
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  SPEAKER_00: There is something seductive about a life with a name.
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  SPEAKER_00: But when I really think about it,
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  SPEAKER_00: the most extraordinary parts of my life never came from following the obvious road.
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  SPEAKER_00: They came when there wasn't one.
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  SPEAKER_00: So maybe this time I don't need another identity handed to me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I need to build one.
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  SPEAKER_00: And maybe, for the first time, I don't want to build it around a profession.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to know the woman underneath it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Who is Julia when there is nothing after her name?
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  SPEAKER_00: I don't know yet.
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  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps this Substack is becoming the place where I find out.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not as someone teaching from the other side, but as a woman standing right in the middle of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: So this time, I don't have a beautiful conclusion.
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  SPEAKER_00: I have a question.
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  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I have many.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if you're somewhere in this strange space too,
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  SPEAKER_00: accomplished enough to have built a life,
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  SPEAKER_00: but honest enough to admit that some of it no longer feels like yours,
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  SPEAKER_00: I would genuinely like to hear from you.
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  SPEAKER_00: How did you find yourself again?
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  SPEAKER_00: Not your next job,
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  SPEAKER_00: not your next title,
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  SPEAKER_00: not the version of you that looked good when you introduced yourself at
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  SPEAKER_00: a dinner table.
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  SPEAKER_00: You.
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  SPEAKER_00: How did you know when you had found her?
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I have lived many lifetimes already, and I have a feeling another one is beginning.
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  SPEAKER_00: This time, though, I don't want to simply become whoever the next chapter requires me to be.
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  SPEAKER_00: I want to meet the woman who has been underneath all of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: There has almost always been another word after my name.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe what frightens me about this moment is the empty space after my name.
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  SPEAKER_00: Julia.
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  SPEAKER_00: I keep thinking I need to fill it with a profession,
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  SPEAKER_00: a company, a purpose, something that explains me.
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  SPEAKER_00: But maybe before I rush to put another word there,
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  SPEAKER_00: I need to finally understand the name that comes before it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Julia.
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  SPEAKER_00: Who is she?
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  SPEAKER_00: Just Julia.