A reality far away from “Hollywood”

Hi gals.

First of all, let me congratulate you for all your achievements to date…both the ones seen via the TV show and the ones I am sure you would have to have reached for being the position you are today (and maybe were not exposed via the TV show).

Now, I am not sure that I can tell you my story in few words, but I will attempt to give you a summary and hopefully that will be a good start. 🙂

My name is Carolina (nick name Caru) I am originally from Brazil but I have been living away from my country for 17 years now. I am currently 34 years old. I first left Brazil to live in a tennis academy in Florida, where I finished my last year of high school. I went on to play colleague tennis with a full scholarship at Ohio State and graduated in Engineering. After that, I worked at General Electric in the US, Brazil and Singapore for another 3.5 years. In total, I was in the US for 10 years before I decided to sell my car, house and almost every in it to move to Europe. I could not think of any other reason than material why I was still living in the US. I then decided that I would never want material things to lead my life and my decisions, so I took a big step and moved to Spain (Barcelona), where I lived for the next 4 years (2 yrs still working for GE and then went on to do an MBA full-time at one of the top 3 schools outside US – IESE). I found out I was gay during my 1st year in Spain. It never really crossed my mind before, but now that I look back at my life, a lot of things make sense, such as the fact that I never been in love before, only had superficial relationships with guys and, to go a bit more on the personal level, never really enjoyed sex before being with a girl. When I first opened my heart and mind to the thought of being with a girl, I met my girl. She is from Argentina and we met in Barcelona in January 2005 and we are still together. We are planning to get married in Spain next year and start a family. We have been through a lot together, including a move to Australia for 2.5 years due to my work, many trips together, another move that saw us living apart for 11 months now (I am living in Switzerland now and she just moved back from Sydney to Barcelona). I have to say, she is a champion. She has gone through a major development since we met. I am not sure if development is the right word, or realization of her true self would be more appropriate. She has always had all this potential inside of her, but never had someone in her life that helped her realize it. She is a super smart and talented person with a beautiful heart and soul. I love her for that and for a lot more.

One important thing I need to tell you about myself is that I have been involved with sports all my life. I started to play tennis with 5 years old and always had a dream to play professional tennis, but sadly I wasn’t good enough to make a living at that level. But the passion for sports took me in the direction of experiencing many other sports once I graduated from colleague. I started doing triathlons, adventure sports such as rock climbing, cannyoning, extreme hiking, endurance sports such as marathon, and most recently I completed a crazy 2-day race in the Swiss mountains which included 5 sports (running, swimming, in-line skates, mountain bike and road bike) for a total of 452 km and almost 8,000 m elevation. It was an amazing achievement for me as I completed the distance in 32.5 hours with 4-hour sleep in between. I wrote a whole synopsis of my experience preparing and doing this race. In summary, I can tell you that what kept me going at all times was my desire to inspire others. And, considering the responses I got, I think I did it. 🙂

Why am I writing to you? Partly to connect with great people like you by sharing my story, but partly to ask you for some help. I have this immense unfulfilled desire to reach out to many lives with a positive impact. I am particularly passionate about using sports in education, to help increase self-esteem (especially for young girls) and as a mean to include minorities in society. I have done a few projects, such as teaching tennis to young kids for a limited time in the US and Brazil, and most recently (June 2007), organized a spinning festival in front of the beach in Barcelona to promote healthy lifestyle and raise funds for the Special Olympics Spanish team to go to Shanghai. It was an amazing experience and I don’t want to stop there. I want to do much more. So how does this relate to you? Well, I see you also doing beautiful things, giving a support structure to many lesbians around the world via your website and the TV program (and I am sure many other things). You certainly have a much better structure than I do to create such initiatives. I was wondering if I could combine efforts with you in any way with what I have to offer (sports expertise, business/marketing expertise, and international/cultural experience – having lived in 6 countries in the last 17 years). I have always been part of minority groups as a woman, Latin American, and gay. I feel there is so much I can do to help and so many ideas that I have to do so, but I lack the structure to do it. I am sure you must get requests from many people and I understand if you can’t or don’t want to discuss this further. In that case, I would love if you give me some pointers of other structures I could reach out to. My mindset is always to create Win-Win-Win situations, so I am positive that I can offer ideas (and help execute them, of course) that would be a win to all parties involved.

Lastly, I wanted to say that I have watched the Live Lounge Finale with Ilene Chaiken and heard her say that she wanted to take the show to other cities. I am not sure if she would consider other cities outside the US, but I am sure that this would be a beautiful thing for the show and for many viewers around the world. If that’s a possibility, I can contribute many stories of gay women I know in Europe. It would be a very different reality to the Californian life style and it would provide a connection to millions of gay women in Europe and the rest of the world I am sure. If Brazil is an attractive option, I can also provide a huge network there of many different realities and walks of life. It would be great if you could pass this idea on to Ilene. Again, I am sure she has a lot of ideas submitted and her own ideas for the show, but I would really appreciate if you could mention this to her.
Well, I better stop here, this has been longer than I planned to write, sorry! 🙂

All the best and I hope we can be in touch.

Cheers,

Caru

PS: the picture attached was taken in Cologne-Germany in August 2010, where I took part in the World Gay Games and won 3 medals in tennis for mixed doubles (gold), singles and women’s doubles (bronze).