Every World Cup, it never fails to fascinate me how a game that is technically about who can kick more goals into a net has evolved into a symbolic match where historical and colonial grievances can be rectified, perpetuated, or — as in the case of this World Cup — muddled beyond belief.

I woke up this morning to hundreds of messages in my Instagram inbox from angry Argentinians denouncing me for hinting at my support for Spain in yesterday's finals. "How could YOU — an advocate of indigenous rights and so-called champion of justice for the Global South — support our ENEMIES the Spanish, the same people who stole our land and committed the largest genocide in human history?" Whoa. When will I learn not to open Instagram before my morning ashwagandha latte?

I hardly posted anything about this World Cup because I was enjoying a two-week work trip/holiday in the Mediterranean, and my favorite teams (Brazil, Australia, Ecuador, Cameroon, Morocco, Egypt) had been eliminated. So yesterday I found myself in the perplexing position of having to support one of two teams I have historically cheered against. As an Australian-raised, Peruvian-born daughter of a Quechua woman and an Argentinian father of Spanish/Italian descent, this decision held a lot of complexity for me. The conundrum may come as a surprise to those of you expecting me to automatically root for my father's country (for reasons that will become clear below). And when I hopped on Instagram after the match, I realized I wasn't the only one experiencing confusion about their allegiances. "Me connecting with my ancestors after supporting their colonizers in the World Cup" was one of the memes I cheekily shared with a Spanish flag.

The World Cup is more than a sporting match — for many of us it's an opportunity to rewrite the last 500 years of colonial history, which is why Brazil's team has captured so many hearts around the world. When we see people whose ancestors were almost wiped out, or brought over as slaves, take sporting revenge on the countries who acted out and profited from this bad behavior, it feels like a win for all of us who carry the open wounds of colonization in our hearts. It's more than a game. Where else but on the soccer field can we see countries of the so-called Global South rise up against their better-funded counterparts in the Global North? These are small but not insignificant wins in the collective psyche of those who identify with the "underdogs" of history — myself included.

I remember when Brazil won the 2002 World Cup. I was watching with a group of expat Brazilians (this was during my era as a Brazilian samba dancer, performing shows in a sequinned thong and feathered headdress all over Sydney). During that exhilarating match and subsequent win, I felt like I truly belonged to that group of mixed-race, hot-blooded, warm, sensual and passionate people. I truly believed that my ancestors (the brown ones, at least) were celebrating with us in their graves. Never have I met a Brazilian who cared that an imaginary border separated my country from theirs, and in all the months I lived there, they always treated me as family.

That was not always the case growing up in Lower North Shore Sydney, Australia, and it certainly was not the case when I visited Argentina for the first time as a wide-eyed, innocent 16-year-old excited to reconnect with the country of her (albeit absent) father. "You're not one of us" was the message I received from the citizens of Buenos Aires — implicitly, and at times explicitly to my face, as was the case with a rude blonde shop assistant in a fashion boutique in Recoleta. She refused to help me until she realized I spoke English, and when she asked where I was from, she insisted I could not be Argentine. My European blood had been tainted by indigenous Peruvian heritage, and I was therefore outside her circle of care or interest. (I don't know how valuable this is as a data point, but it's the only country in South America I've visited where I am not constantly hit on by the men.) That summer will always be marked by the heartbreak I felt at not being fully welcome, despite having romanticized Argentina for most of my life as the birthplace of my glamorous absent father, whose charming face — in the few photos I had of him — was too handsome to hate for abandoning us when I was a baby.

Yes, Spain sent millions of its citizens to my ancestral lands to conquer, plunder and irreversibly change our ways of life (for the worse, I would argue). But my experience in Argentina proved to me that Spain's colonial legacy of racism and indigenous erasure was being continued and celebrated there. I couldn't bring myself to root for Argentina while seeing in my head the image of that rude shopkeeper and the killers of Marcelina Meneses and Joshua Torres (a Bolivian mother and her baby son whose brutal murder shocked me to my core that summer, and whose murderers were never punished). I can also acknowledge that a subconscious part of me may have been partaking in a small act of revenge against my father, who never gave me the chance to meet him, or have even one conversation with him, before he died unexpectedly a decade ago.

So, reluctantly for me, Spain it was. I reconciled this extraordinary shift in allegiances with the fact that they did have some very cute young players of African descent (namely Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal) whose stories of overcoming adversity inspired that core part of my essence that loves to support an underdog. But Spain as the underdog? Who would have thought?

The more nuanced side of this story is that Argentina and Argentinians are more than a few bad eggs and should not be judged on the unfortunate behavior of a loud and rude minority. It's a country of millions of people who have survived imperialism, dictatorship, mass disappearances, repression and the ongoing plunder of their natural resources (a point first articulated by @thefuddhist on IG). On paper they would certainly qualify as the underdogs against Spain, but sadly the arrogance and bad sportsmanship of their team has turned many against them. Perhaps this moment will usher in a cultural reckoning among the kind and caring Argentinians, many of whom emphatically wrote to me about my original post with so much class and elegance that I issued an apology and took them up on their offer to travel outside of Buenos Aires and experience their true culture for myself.

The commentary around the geopolitics of this World Cup certainly feels more charged this year than usual — maybe it's the nature of our algorithms these days — but I have to admit that the simplified colonizer/colonized game is becoming exhausting to me and so many others. I should point out that my Quechua ancestors (incorrectly known as the Incas) once colonized the indigenous communities of modern-day Argentina. The reason the Spanish were able to conquer us is that they found so many communities willing to support them against Inca imperialism. Unfortunately for all of us, they didn't know they would be aiding a much crueler oppressor.

I have observed that these semantics are wearing thin and are not winning over any critics of "woke history revisionism" — an important argument we are ignoring at our peril. But just because the debate feels stale doesn't mean the dynamics of oppressor/oppressed are any less real today — although they have become as muddled as the World Cup finals themselves.

For instance: my Israeli boyfriend was stubbornly supporting Argentina in the finals. His algorithm had convinced him that the Argentinians were friendly to Israel and that Spain was its enemy. Not for the first time in our two-year relationship, I had to explain to him that protesting the actions of the Israeli state was not the same as hating Jews (although unfortunately both can be true). This is not the post where I get into my boyfriend's political views (I'll save that for the next one), but suffice to say I could never spend my life with someone who thought the killing of innocent people could ever be justified. But every now and then I see his cultural programming take the driver's seat, veering him towards self-preservation over mutual liberation — entirely befitting of someone whose ancestors were forced out of Iraq, Tunisia and Romania just for being Jews. Does the pain of Jewish historical oppression justify Israel's treatment of Palestinians? Neither of us believes that statement to be true, but he did not choose where he was born, or to be a scapegoat for the actions of his government, and I won't fault him for clinging to the perceived safety that the collective fantasy of Israel holds for him and many other Jewish people. I know his heart and how much he has softened and bravely shifted in the last two years of our relationship.

Before the game we had a conversation that went something like this (reader should note the tone was lighthearted and loving):

"I can't believe you are really going to support Spain after what they did to your grandmother. They stole her land and killed her people. How could you forgive that?"

"Isn't that what you did with the Palestinians?" I answered.

Because he knows my heart, he brushed my comment off with a chuckle, but I know it landed.

If you go back far enough in each of our ancestral histories you will find both conqueror and conquered. We are living proof that each generation has a moral choice to make: to take up the tools of the oppressor, or march with the oppressed. And with each generation, the lines of who is what are becoming even more blurred. I have a cousin in Peru who expresses hatred for the rural indigenous protestors despite being just one generation removed from that reality himself. His DNA is no different from theirs, but now he identifies as a modern, city-dwelling Peruvian, with no compassion for the backwards peasants who remind him of a past he wants to leave behind. And I have friends with pure European ancestry who dedicate their entire lives to righting the wrongs committed against entire peoples over 500 years ago. I despise binary thinking, but my belief is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who believe in self-preservation, and those who believe in mutual liberation. This is potent because it doesn't mean your position is fixed. It can indeed shift — something I have witnessed myself in my beloved, and even some of his friends. Spain is proof that you can switch sides.

If I were to write my thesis today, I would comment incredulously on the fact that Spain — a country I associated with so much violence and injustice against my indigenous brothers and sisters of Abya Yala — would today be associated with the Palestinian liberation movement. It is one of the only countries brave enough to stand up to the current status quo of sending billions of dollars in funding for killing innocent civilians under the cynical guise of keeping Jewish people safe. (You can ask my Israeli Jewish boyfriend if he feels safer since the war began — I can assure you that he doesn't.) Of course the "other side" are equally guilty of imperialism, brutal oppression and directing their wealth towards weapons of mass destruction. But this post is about fútbol — or is it?

Soccer has proven to be less about a game than an identity. Who are we when we drop these national identities? We become family, kin, and friends. How's this for a provocative question: without "national identities," would we have wars? How would we know who to fight for if we woke up one day and "forgot" whose side we were on? Think of the money we could redirect from war to education, or rewilding!

I yearn for the days of our past — and hopefully our future — when we drop the politics of identity and identify ourselves according to our watersheds instead. E.g.: Hi, I'm Nathalie, and I steward the Richmond River watershed, and my ancestors stewarded the Marañón River watershed and the Río de la Plata Basin.

But what about the fútbol? How would we know who to root for? We could devise a World Cup based on bioregions, uniting players and fans across racial and historical divides, defined by their stewardship of shared lands, waters and ecological systems. E.g.: Hi, I'm Nathalie and I play for the Big Scrub (the ancient subtropical rainforest bioregion of the Northern Rivers), with dual eligibility for the Marañón cloud forests. Team names could take inspiration from the animal or fungal totems of these bioregions — imagine the Big Scrub Ghost Fungi taking on the Marañón River Dolphins — showing our respect for our more-than-human family.

I have hope that we will arrive at a future as beautiful as the one I described above. Where the valid grievances of the past are acknowledged, healed and moved on from. Where we can drop prejudice, hatred and bias to unite in support of something that truly matters: sustaining life on Earth. Clean water, nourishing food that has not been poisoned, thriving biodiversity. I don't want to imagine a future without the most beautiful game in the world. Just one without the fracturing nature of its identity politics.

2005 Rio Carnival . My favorite identity; Samba Dancer

It was early in our courtship. I had been babbling to my beloved about something no doubt superficial - when these four words pierced through my monkey brain and filled me with crystalline clarity. After a moment of stunned silence, I bowled over laughing at his audacity.

When my delighted cackles subsided I looked my beloved seriously in the eyes and said “I want you to say those words to me over and over again, for the rest of my life.”

First some context. I had booked 3 blissful months in a stunning Japanese style cabin in the woods of Accord in upstate New York as a present to myself for my 40th birthday. My beloved had come up to spend time with me and catch the last warm days of what had been a glorious summer. I had just wrapped a series for my corporate overlords, Amazon, and so, flush with money and unlimited ideas about how to spend it, I spent a lot of time regaling him with my grand plans. I think he could tell I was craving his validation and admiration when he turned to me one day and said it.

I had spent my entire twenties in a long term relationship and my thirties doing what most people do in their twenties - learning about myself and what kind of partner I was looking for, mostly through a lot of painful trial and error. I had spent a 5 month period in celibacy and introspection before meeting my beloved just a few months before my 40th birthday. During that time I consciously worked to let go of my limiting beliefs around my biological clock and the expiration date that our society puts on women to have found their partner by 40.

I saw my reluctance to let go of my youthful beauty precisely because it formed the entire basis of my sense of importance. It gave me power, agency, attention, validation - and my experiences with the opposite sex only reinforced the neural pathways in my brain that had bought into these illusions. That entire belief system was shattered that day with those 4 words.

As our love blossomed I had to acknowledge that all my anxiety about timing was unfounded - the arrival of this relationship could not have been more perfect, precisely because I was no longer in the peak physical blossoming of my youth. He was meeting me at a time when silver hairs were making their first appearance, when hormonal shifts made me tired at sunset and all I wanted to do was cuddle in front of a fire in a big cozy sweater in big unsexy underwear. If I had met him even a year earlier there would have been more performance and less authenticity as I navigated the evolution of my identity from hot girl to future babushka.

Most women my age had children to remind them that they were no longer the centre of the universe, but in my case, that truth had arrived much later, from the mouth of my beloved.

Profoundly grateful, I asked him that summer if he would consider growing old with me. If he could see himself loving me with a head full of silver hair and a face wrinkled from years of laughter. If he would still want to make love through the ebbs and flow of hormonal shifts, if sexy dancing in big grandma underwear would still make him smile when I am literally weak in the knees. I laid out the entire vision for growing old with me with as much detail as my imagination could muster. The good, the bad, the cozy.

And to my heart’s utter delight, he said yes.

2 years later, there is still no one else I would rather grow old with. We have weathered more than a few storms and revealed our true characters without scaring the other away. I still have many questions and fears about the nature of monogamous long term relationships - but I never doubt him.

If this man continues to remind me of my unimportance for the rest of my life, I would be the luckiest woman in the world. Without any prior knowledge of Buddhism, he is a natural embodiment of anatta; the principle of non-self. His intuitive grasp of his own unimportance - and mine - is the most romantic thing I’ve ever encountered. I’ll weather any storm for it. Preferably from in front of a crackling fireplace. In very big unsexy underwear.

“If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.

If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.

If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.

If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.

If you want to be given everything, give everything up.

The Master, by residing in the Tao,

sets an example for all beings.

Because she doesn’t display herself

people can see her light.

Because she has nothing to prove,

people can trust her words.

Because she doesn’t know who she is,

people recognize themselves in her.

Because she has no goal in mind,

everything she does succeeds.”

— Tao Te Ching, Chapter 22 (trans. Stephen Mitchell)

That phrase has since stuck with me, as did the meaning behind it: a label designed to remind the bearer that they have achieved one of the highest tiers of status in Western society, and so they better shut up and be grateful.

One of the bizarre paradoxes of pretty privilege is that even though attaining it has become the ultimate goal for women and now young men alike, you are not really supposed to acknowledge or talk about it, unless you want to be judged as boastful or narcissistic. I think about how often I see women brush off and reject compliments that I know deep down they crave. I had to train myself to say “thank you” rather than “no I don’t” when someone said I looked beautiful. And now I’m training myself to mentally say “it’s not that important” when someone compliments or critiques my physical appearance.

It’s mortifying to imagine how many hours of my precious life I’ve spent mentally tallying up praise against criticism when it comes to my looks.

But my friend was wrong about one thing. I was not actually born with pretty privilege. In fact, the first 11 years of my life I lived on the other side of that seemingly gilded existence, in the domain of the “ugly ducklings.”

I remember the agony of being the only short, round, little brown girl in a sea of taller, blonde, skinny ballerinas in my lower north shore ballet academy. I hated those weekly reminders of all my perceived inferiorities: lack of talent, lack of beauty and grace, lack of friends. My mum Rosa, an undeniably beautiful and graceful woman, was so committed to seeing me fulfill all her unfulfilled ambitions as a ballerina that she didn’t realize her palpable disappointment in my performance was compounding my growing sense of failure and inadequacy.

There is so much more I can share about the psychological warfare I experienced from an early age about my body, sexuality and the ways in which I was programmed to relate to other girls, men and myself. But for today’s commentary on “pretty privilege” I will fast forward to the moment I realized I had it.

It was 1997, I was 11 years old, and it was my first day of high school. I was surrounded by around 100 girls who were also being welcomed to their new home for the next 6 years. I hadn’t had my first bleed yet, but I had already experienced what I would now call sexual abuse, though at the time I hadn’t shared those secrets with anyone. I have never publicly discussed those brief but painful parts of my childhood, the ones that would leave such an imprint on the rest of my life. At 41, it feels like the right time to excavate those experiences, because they shine a light on the collective sickness we are all living in. More on that in future posts.

On the first day of this new school I experienced my first and perhaps most profound metamorphosis of the many I would undergo in life. Perhaps it was the uninvited sexual awakening of that previous summer, combined with the noticeable changes of puberty occurring in me, but among these new faces I was a new Nathalie. Not the invisible, nerdy girl who loved reading alone and eating blocks of cheese while other girls had sleepovers in their big expensive houses. Seemingly overnight I had flowered into something others would call “pretty,” and the effect of this was seismic. Like a magnet, I suddenly attracted a lot of interest from girls wanting to be my friends. These other girls were also considered pretty, and now a gang was formed. It was a selective school for academically gifted girls, so everyone there was also extremely smart, but us “pretty” ones stuck together, sealed by an unspoken bond.

But any perceived privileges of belonging to this group also came with another, less desirable consequence: envy. The bullying started almost instantly. Mostly from older girls who didn’t like my newfound confidence and cockiness. They saw the attention I would get from the boys after school and made sure to let everyone know I was a “slut.” The girls in my grade turned on me too, thrilled to be able to take their revenge. To be fair, I probably hadn’t wielded my pretty privilege in the most benevolent of ways. I used my newfound popularity to get my own way and to gang up on my nemesis, S. But no child deserved to be beaten up and publicly humiliated in school-sanctioned “muck-up days,” where graduating girls got to torture the younger girls with the permission of the teachers. I had rotten eggs smashed in my hair, and was forced to walk through inflatable pools of gunk to get to my classroom. I didn’t dare stay home those days either, for fear of being labeled a wimp. I proudly faced all my bullies with defiant stoicism, even if I was breaking on the inside. Now, as an adult, I have compassion for the legacy of vicious competitiveness and violence that those girls inherited, one that they unintentionally tried to program onto me. But I’m proud to say that when it came to be my turn to graduate and participate in these barbaric and outdated rituals, ones that could only exist in a country founded on the abuse of convicts, I did not take part.

I wonder if my friend, the photographer who accused me of “pretty privilege,” could have imagined the violence (physical, sexual, emotional) that has since come with this title, starting even before my first bleed as a young girl. But he was right to point out the judgmental tone in which I bemoaned the epidemic of plastic surgery among young women, because I was placing judgement on the girls themselves and not on the society and culture creating the conditions for these insecurities, a culture that I, as an actress, am very much a part of.

There is much more to say about the workings of this dominant Western culture: its obsession with youth, small noses and high cheekbones, and how my winning genetic lottery ticket opened (and also closed) many doors for me in the industry. I want to tell you more about Rosa, my mother, and Rafaela, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother Mama Julia, and the ways they experienced their physical beauty not as a privilege but as a curse. And I want to reimagine the way we relate to one another as women: moving out of the ingrained patterns of competition, scarcity and fear to remember our shared history in ancient sisterhoods, where securing a man was not the most important goal in life. Not because we didn’t value children and family, but because we lived in matriarchal communities rather than nuclear families.

It feels thrilling and terrifying to share these intimate details with strangers, the way I would with my closest friends. But I’ve come to believe that stripping back the layers of illusion and perceived perfection is its own kind of freedom, and that the codes binding us to competition, to scarcity, to disconnection from one another and from Source, only hold their power while they stay hidden. So I will keep uncovering, poking, dismantling, no matter how uncomfortable -  in the hope that one day, these truths shall set us all free.

X Nat

Young Nat hating life in so called “nude” stockings that only served as a reminder of my unattractive brown skin.

The early part of this tapestry is luminous. Communities across the world, guided by a deep understanding of their place in the web of life, created abundance through devotion and tending. They built floating cities on lakes that cleansed their own waters. They developed governance models that protected the most vulnerable. They cultivated biodiversity, clean waterways, and reciprocal relationships with the living world that sustained them. Yes, even then we experimented with slavery, domination and state-sanctioned violence - but these were recognized, in time, as failures. Painful reminders of what happens when we forget our original instructions.

In recent centuries — some would say since the enclosures, the industrial revolution, the severing of people from land — the tapestry has become increasingly distorted as the guiding principles turned from reciprocity to greed. The original design of this tapestry is now barely visible beneath the layers of extraction, separation and forgetting.

But any good weaver knows that there are moments when the only honest thing to do is unravel. To find the place where the pattern went wrong and begin again from there.

We are living in that moment now.

This is not the first time. Every civilization that has walked to the edge of its own undoing has faced this same choice - reweave or collapse. Each time, enough people remembered the original instructions to pull the species back from the brink. The same must happen now. This great unravelling will not be without heartache, chaos and confusion. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

This substack is my commitment to never forgetting the original instructions. To love one another — and all beings, the water, the animals, the fungi, the forests, the generations yet to come — so fiercely and so specifically that love itself becomes the weft again. For love is the thread that holds everything together even as everything comes apart.

Closeup of a weaving from the ancient Paracas culture of what is known today as Peru.