DEC 03, 2025
We were about to run the scene for the first time on the first day when I smelled it. A warm, unmistakable wave of alcohol came off her breath as she leaned in. I froze for half a second, confused. It was 10 a.m. on a Thursday. Was she drunk?
I pulled myself back into character because that’s what we were supposed to be doing: acting. I’d come to this six-week course specifically to shake loose my own edges a bit, to remember what it felt like to inhabit someone else’s skin on purpose. A small, secret hope tucked inside this decision, too: maybe this would reopen something creatively, or at least remind me that I am not just one self, stuck on one track.
She was the kind of person you’d assume had everything under control. A known actor with a recent Netflix role, returning to her craft after time away. She carried what looked like a berry smoothie — dark purple, very wholesome — and sipped it throughout class. Except the smell told a different story.
After class, a friend picked me up to go to the beach. I tried to explain what had happened in that confused way you do when you’re still half convinced you imagined the whole thing. I didn’t say who she was. I just kept circling around the fact of it: “And it was ten in the morning!”
Later that night, still unsettled, I drafted a short email to the head acting school teacher. Careful, almost apologetic. I wasn’t accusing her of anything; I just… didn’t know what to do with the information. I hit send, regretted being that earnest student who “brings things up,” and went to bed. By morning, I had a reply. It said I was making “very serious allegations,” which is the kind of phrase that makes you feel both scolded and slightly gaslit. I closed my laptop and told myself to drop it. Fine. Whatever. Maybe I was overreacting.
Over the next six weeks, there was a pattern. She’d slip out “for a coffee” or “to use the bathroom” right before her turn to perform, and come back looser, warmer, more emotionally elastic. She could give these huge, convincing performances — crying, shouting, collapsing — but something about them felt off. And I kept thinking, in that uncomfortable way you think the thing you don’t want to think: Is she showing up to actual paid work like this? Is this just… normal?
The part that really stayed with me was the recognition of the dynamic underneath it. The quiet splitting from oneself. The subtle, daily ways people disconnect just enough to get through whatever their life requires of them.
Not always with alcohol. Sometimes, with edibles. More often, it’s things like keeping yourself too busy to notice you’re unhappy, or telling yourself a story that makes a relationship seem “fine,” or eating in that way that feels like both comfort and punishment.
The constant hum of distraction, or getting very invested in “being productive,” or deciding that honesty is optional if it keeps things smooth. All the tiny, acceptable ways we avoid being fully present with our own lives.
Most people live like this. It’s not a moral failing. It’s a lack of awareness. A kind of spiritual autopilot. Some people live inside the roles they inherited, and others rewrite the script. Some people pretend a life, and others create one.
And the latter — the creators — are the ones I think of as practical dreamers.
A practical dreamer is someone who understands that dreaming without doing is self-indulgent and doing without dreaming is pointless. They are people who keep their heads in the clouds, yes, but with their feet solidly planted on the ground. They refuse to separate beauty from utility, vision from labour, desire from action. They inhabit both their aspirations and their realities with equal care, even when one terrifies them, and the other bores them.
Now, in this cultural moment, the stakes are higher. So many people spend their days worried that AI will steal something essential from them: their jobs, their livelihoods, the delicate illusion that they are in control of anything at all.
It is possible, but only if you are passive.
If you are operating on autopilot, if you are waiting for someone — a boss, a system, a timeline — to tell you what your life should look like. Because the only way to remain alive, relevant, and whole is to choose your life. To choose it in all its contradiction and uncertainty, in all its mess and joy. To embrace your interiority, your curiosity, your irrational impulses, your instincts, and your mistakes, and to act anyway. The only way to outperform a machine is to be aggressively human.
What is more human than to be the creator of your life? No machine can do that for you.
Entrepreneurship is one way to be a creator. It is about asserting yourself in the world in alignment with what you know, with what you are capable of, with what only you can offer. Freelancers, mentors, portfolio careerists, boutique founders, artists who monetise their craft, consultants who build their own frameworks, all of these are entrepreneurs. All of these are people who refuse to wait for permission, who choose to generate value from their own skills, curiosities, and insights.
Entrepreneurship is spiritual because it forces you to confront yourself. It forces you to notice where you hide, where you lie, where you numb, and it asks you to act anyway. It forces you to take responsibility for the way you show up as a human, as someone whose labour is not just transactional but creative, generative, alive. It illuminates your weaknesses and strengths and asks you to work with them, to outsource, to collaborate, to ask for help, to become stronger in the ways that matter most.
I am, by most definitions, the most unlikely entrepreneur. I do not follow trends. I do not invest in long-term content plans or rigid business strategies. I believe in changing my mind, repeatedly, until I find the approach that feels right for me. I believe in knowing myself deeply — Jungian style — so that when I claim my value in the world, it is not borrowed, copied, or acted, but entirely mine.
I believe in noticing what excites me, what makes my pulse quicken, what pulls me forward, and letting that guide me. I believe in trusting the process, even when certainty is impossible, because certainty is an illusion and clarity is built through iteration, through showing up, through experimentation.
I believe that the person you should always invest in most is yourself.
My own life — the way I structure it, inhabit it, show up in it — is my most powerful client magnet. It demonstrates that a life built on curiosity, attention, intention and deliberate action works. That it is possible. That it is magnetic. It proves that what I teach is not theory; it is practice.
Perhaps why Practical Dreamer sold out so, so quickly. So quickly, I opened up new spaces starting next year. And why many clients move on to rolling monthly mentoring programs, working together for six months to a year to build lives that are aligned, generative, and resonant.
— For anyone new to my work, I am offering a December special: $100 off a Single 90-minute Mentoring session, scheduled this month.
— For those ready to leap, I am accepting new clients next year for the 1-Month Intensive, a space to clarify, align, and build a framework that matches your unique gifts and rhythms.
Spaces are limited, and the first step is simply to reach out and start the conversation.
Vienda Maria 