How I Became a Local
A journal entry by Valerie Jana — Locals World
This year I turned 30.
Two years ago, I packed my bags and moved to South Florida.
This year, the universe brought me home.
The Block
The block is the endless ocean of options. Where will I be in six months? Where do I want to be now? Where do I want to travel next? Is it a one-way ticket and a forever stay?
With so much remote-friendly freedom — a skill you can bring anywhere, untethered from one specific place — how do we find the routine and rhythm of our own desires when there are so many options?
The block isn't the how. It's always been the what.
If you're anything like me, you get stuck in analysis paralysis. Sometimes there's so much going on. Sometimes there's nothing at all and you just need a beat for yourself.
But when you know what you want — your dream life is on the other side of that bold next step you've been waiting for permission to take.
This is the permission slip.
Saturn Return
This year I turned 30. For most of my twenties, I poured my energy into building myself. My spiritual practices, my career, and living and breathing Locals World.
So that's what I did. I made a choice. I packed my bags and moved to South Florida, and then the universe brought me back home two years later.
My relationships and career challenged me entirely. They helped me immerse into the ocean of a new city, and supported my creative projects and work, including the largest productions I produced, creative/ art directed, modeled, styled, and budgeted/ planned, while working full-time. That was just on the weekends.
I returned home as a version of myself I wasn't before. Before, I was scared. I lived in fear. I didn't think I could do it alone. I also battled severe chronic inflammation, something I still manage today in smaller waves. It forced me to slow down and learn nervous system regulation. It taught me that in a world constantly asking for more, our bodies eventually ask us to listen.
Miami, for me, was an ocean literally and figuratively. I survived every wave that came at me, over me, and under me. I left untouched, only tears streaming down my face that it was over. I felt, at the time, like I had failed because I couldn't stay.
Fast forward: it was the deepest blessing.
The most transformative chapter of my life, all while Saturn was in its return. And at the end, I too had returned.
Returned from over-giving. From extending myself beyond my capacity. From saying yes to things I wanted to say no to. From swallowing my voice when I wanted to curl up and give up.
My favorite days were visiting the weekend farmers market — saying hello to the vendors who had started to remember my name. They were my repetition, my familiarity. Somewhat of a family I had cultivated in an unfamiliar place. I photographed them, bought from them, and they became my anchors in the ocean of that city.
Coming Home to Yourself
When I returned home, I came back to myself.
I realized what I was, and what I wasn't. Who I am, and who I'll never be. I started showing up as myself — fully, for the first time — in my own hometown. Someone who wasn't afraid to put flyers around town, self-marketing her own event. Someone who had imagined doing this so many times and had been doing versions of it for years.
I've cried at the thought of people celebrating me on my birthday — just from the weight of them taking time out of their lives to gather. Gathering people is what I truly love most, especially when it gives them a sense of deeper connection and purpose.
Now when I walk through neighboring towns, people say hello. They recognize me. I stop to talk, I hold eye contact. Women overhear me in conversation and say, "Oh, you're Locals Closet," or my recent favorite: "Weren't you the one who sang in your elementary school play?"
The point is — I know I'm showing up as I was always meant to, right in my own backyard.
There's an analogy I love: would you rather be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big ocean?
I chose the ocean first. And I survived it. Now I'm choosing the pond — and I'm showing up as the whole damn fish.
What I Want to Teach You
When I returned home, I still visit retailers, markets, places of commerce and exchange — that's where I light up. And I want to teach you how to light up too.
How to refine your spark. How to show up as you, with the cards you were dealt, in the place where your feet already are. As my life coach put it when I visited her in Boulder: how to feel like the town mayor and own it.
I've visited friends in Colorado, Chicago, New York, and Florida. We all have a story. We all have our pockets and hives of favorite places and places yet to be discovered. Whether it's a Chicago Cubs game that makes you come alive, a local Japanese paper store, a shop dedicated entirely to buttons and ribbons that reveals an entire behind-the-scenes creative culture of designers and artisans you never knew existed, or the yoga teacher who truly sees you in class, gets you water, lets you get everything off your chest at the end. Our experiences are not just human. They are beyond divine.
What Locals Closet Is
If Locals World is about becoming a local wherever you are, Locals Closet is one way we practice it. Through fashion, storytelling, swaps, designers, and community gatherings, we explore how clothing can connect us to a place, a culture, and ourselves.
Locals Closet is a sister of Locals World that defines a place through fashion.
Think: major marketplace energy, but IRL — at clothing swaps and pop-ups where I bring in my favorite local designers and invite locals to gather. Whether you only bought a ticket, you can still walk away with new pieces to bring your wardrobe back to life this season, or a one-of-one designer piece you'll wear year-round and feel like yourself in. It's cosplay meets playing dress-up meets the most sustainable item in your closet is the one you already own, meets interactive fashion show.
We walk away with pieces we never could have imagined finding at full retail price.
It's supporting local artisans, makers, designers, and creative founders who are building brands from lived experience, travel, craftsmanship, and imagination.
It’s also a movement and an invitation to reflect on our personal wardrobes and style. To look at labels, how things are made, think about quality pieces, have fun with our style, and how our style is really defining the places we reside.
Are You In?
No matter where you are in the world, Locals World exists wherever you go. Each world will look different place to place — because you're the one who creates it. You and your most fully expressed self.
What you need to do differently is to become her. The higher self version of you who is not afraid to show up and exist — whether you're halfway around the world from home, or the person right in your own neighborhood.
Start where you are. Visit the market. Introduce yourself. Wear the dress. Host the gathering. Tell the story. Become a local.
Valérie Jana is the founder of Locals World and Locals Closet — a movement rooted in local culture, conscious style, and the belief that you belong no matter where you are.
