01. The Parts You Don’t See

The person behind withstefa, and a little bit about why I’m here.

There are parts of a person that never make it into a 60-second video. You’ll see my kitchen. You’ll see what I’m making for dinner. You’ll probably know what coffee I’m drinking before 9 AM. You’ll hear Sebastian somewhere in the background. You’ll see pieces of my home, my family, my routines.

But those are still only pieces.

For most of my adult life, I worked in Human Resources. More than ten years of working with people, listening, solving problems, having conversations that mattered to someone even if they looked ordinary from the outside.

I think that’s probably why I still care so much about connection now. The setting just changed.

Instead of sitting across from someone at a desk, I’m standing in my kitchen making dinner while thousands of people somehow end up standing there with me. It’s funny when I think about it.

I started sharing things that felt completely normal to me. Food I grew up with. Coffee. The way my mother does something in the kitchen. Something I watched Nonna do a hundred times without ever thinking of it as a “recipe.”

And then people started asking questions. How did you make that? Why do you do it that way? Can you show us again? Things that felt ordinary to me suddenly meant something to someone else. I think that changed the way I looked at my own life a little. There is so much we inherit without realizing it. A way of cooking. A phrase. A habit. The instinct to feed someone when they walk through the door. The way your hands somehow know what to do because you’ve watched someone else’s hands do it your entire life. Those things are easy to overlook when they belong to you. Until someone else notices them.

withstefa became a place for those little things.

Cook with me. Have coffee with me. Come into the garden with me. Learn something with me. Just come with me. And somewhere along the way, I realized I wanted another place too. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere a thought doesn’t have to fit into a caption or compete with a trending sound. Somewhere I can stay with something for a little longer.

That’s what I want this Journal to be. Not my entire life. Some things should remain completely mine. But the thoughts between everything else. The things I notice. The things I’m learning from my mother now that I’m old enough to realize I should have been paying closer attention all along. The things I remember about Nonna, and the little traditions I never realized I was carrying with me. The strange experience of becoming a mother and suddenly seeing your own childhood differently. Traditions you don’t realize are traditions until you imagine them disappearing. The ordinary things that turn out not to be ordinary at all.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll write about here yet. I actually like it better that way.

And I don’t want this to feel like a space that belongs only to me. If you find yourself here after a long day, I hope it feels a little like pulling up a chair. Somewhere you can stay for a few minutes, read something, think about something, maybe recognize a little piece of your own life in mine. Because once you’re here, you’re part of it too.

My videos will still show you a piece of me.

Maybe here, you’ll get to know the parts in between.

There’s more to tell.

— Stefania