For this Women's Day, Amélie Huynh, Founder of STATEMENT Paris, shares her journey, reveals her strengths and convictions, and looks back on her moments of doubt.
The biggest or most important fight you had in your life?
Giving life itself.
It’s not talked about much, as if modesty dictated that we don’t broach the subject, but there is this almost-convention, this agreement that makes us physiologically able to create life, naturally. When we don’t fulfill that, we get into a fight, beyond the rational, something that comes from deep within. I had to fight for several years, with a timeframe, treatments, and logistics that are hard to apprehend, without ever giving up even when there were setbacks because I was convinced that every one of them was a step towards victory. My victory came 4 years later, and others followed, to my greatest happiness.
Aren’t we all a mix of shadows and light? What are yours?
The shadows give birth to my doubts. We all experienced impostor syndrome, taken on board limiting beliefs, or on the contrary, some that generate excessive pride and cause our downfall. I am torn between that doubt and the search for that rightness. Because I fear the excess of power that lies in the darkness with doubt.
Intuition is more than ever on the light side, and so is my relatively new capacity to listen – to myself as well as others – and to accept improbable encounters with whatever role we give them. I now deliberately seek out others for the experiences that we can share. On that side, there’s also confidence, the one you give yourself as time goes by and it’s from that feeling of confidence and accomplishment, this celebration of our victories that I wanted to share through Statement – a reminder that we are parties in our own path.
The moment you reveal your strength most vividly?
Strength can only be exerted with equanimity. I am strong when I am certain, when I believe in a project, in a person, in a topic.
I try not to impose. I defend a belief and if those who will accompany me trust me, I then have the strength to lead this project to success, together.
I’m thinking about the Strength tarot card, which represents a serene woman holding the lion’s mouth open without brutality, with no other strength than her feeling that what is defending is just. Patience and humility are strengths. Being able to involve people in projects, building a common strength, that’s quite the tour de force. Engage people in a journey because they trust you, never because they fear you.
I live by this rule: Be careful of what you tolerate because you’re teaching people how to treat you
Express your deepest belief, the one that guides your existence.
I am an engaged actor of my own existence. I have the choice to become its central character and to build my own legend, at my scale and however humble that may be. Beyond the inevitability of illnesses or death, I can take control at any moment, write my own script, decide what place each person entering my story will have. Whether they bring lessons or laughter, I’ll learn from every one of them but I am always the one who builds her own luck day after day, while being grateful for it every day.
Mind Upload is the beginning of our heroine’s story. If you could augment yourself, what personal abilities would you expand?
Our imagination has no limits, so I’m choosing two. The first: the power of ubiquity without a doubt because the ability to live several lives at the same time, to master this time that escapes us. Not because I want to control everything but to be able to simultaneously spend time with my children, lead my company, enjoy my parents and friends, stay in touch with everyone. The second would be being able to be conscious of my past lives and be able to tap into that wealth of spirituality and knowledge that has accumulated over each one of them. The power of wisdom but not the memory of what it cost because it rarely comes cheap… but that may be the point?
Exhale... you are in a safe space: Alyh created a world between solar punk and brutalisme, but what do you see in yours?
I imagine a sunny quiet place with only birds singing in the background, a very floral universe without being multicoloured and with that familiar scent of flowers and plants that surrounds me in a soft serene cocoon. There’s water, perhaps a babbling brook rather than a placid lake.
Never give up… What would you say to your best friend or child?
Your freedom. The reasons that lead you to happiness. Be wary of mistaking freedom and solitude. What you are looking for is the freedom to act and to choose, from the heart.
The best of... What are you proudest of?
To have refused to let failure sink me. And to circle back to where we started, to not have given up on building a family. A personal family by having children, of course, but also a family of friends and at work, by seeing who would walk with me, and who I would walk alongside. I am proud to have very quickly been able to determine who would be part of my life.
