The First Shameless Humiliation

He said he felt disgusted

São Paulo, October 24, 2025.

My love for Brazil multiplied after I moved to the United States in 2016. The absence of family, friends, and our culture hurt me deeply during the first year. I had no interest in being a flight attendant anymore after three years flying for a Brazilian airline, and I tried other professional paths when I first moved. It didn’t last long — I needed the rhythm of the job and the flexibility to fly home any day, any time. I spent years flying almost exclusively to Brazil, working every day to catch last-minute flights that weren’t even on my original schedule.

Taking Dorama to Brazil meant a great deal to me. Beyond introducing him to our culture, food, my family, and the friends I love so much, showing him where I came from felt like an important step after months of highs and lows. I kept believing in his insecurity, in the way he feared getting close and couldn’t handle his own feelings.

We barely slept the first night. We woke up and immediately went to explore the Jardins neighborhood — coffee at Casaria SP, lunch at Mamma Osteria on Oscar Freire, a walk along Avenida Paulista, and a workout at the local gym. Dorama was impressed by how seriously people in São Paulo took their fitness. And of course he appreciated the men there too, constantly “craning his neck,” as I started joking in my Brazil videos.

I had suggested many times over the past months that he create a social media profile, given how much my audience had warmed to the person I showed and wanted to know more about. He used to say it was “pointless” — his word — because he wouldn’t land any partnerships with Chinese brands through Brazilian followers. It was in São Paulo that he finally took my suggestion and created his second profile, this one open and aimed at Brazilian followers. I gave him advice on his first video, and combining that with his own creativity and humor, he found a new way to entertain himself daily. His joy and satisfaction reading comments of admiration were obvious. He translated them one by one, excitedly sharing everything he read.

The constant need to create content that I believed was hurting our relationship now seemed to have a side he had never been able to see. I believed social media would give Dorama more security — a way to see that we were committed to each other. I believed the fights, explosions, and threats of abandonment would stop. Somehow, his Instagram became one more tie and tool that made him feel confident enough to do exactly what I feared most.