Jamilia Grier
International lawyer. Serial expat. Mom of 4. Dubai-based, writing about what it actually takes to build a life across borders — the career moves, the hard calls, and the travel that changes you.
Sometimes dreams show up late - and right on time
In 2018, I walked into a showroom in Shanghai and told myself I was going to buy a NIO. I didn't. Here is how that actually went. I put down a deposit. Then I found out I couldn't get a Chinese driver's license as a foreigner. So they returned my deposit. Not long after, I got pregnant again. And then, before I could sort the license out, COVID arrived and closed the door on all of it. Curveball, curveball, curveball. The plan I had been so sure of quietly came apart, one piece at a time. I...
It looks like I changed careers. I didn't.
If you laid my resumé on a table, you might count the changes and assume I jumped around. BigLaw in Connecticut. Then China. Aerospace and defense. Hospitality. Banking. Singapore. And now my own consulting practice in Dubai. But look closer and you'll see it was never jumping. It was building. Every move deliberately stacked on the one before it — the same core expertise carried into a new industry, a new market, a new problem to solve. I wasn't starting over each time. I was compounding....
I came to interview her. She coached me instead.
I sat down to interview Petra thinking I was the host. Twenty minutes in, she was the one coaching me. She'd come on What Black Women Know — the podcast I host inside She Leads Here, where Black women experts teach what they've actually lived — to talk about leadership. Then, mid-sentence, she turned a question back on me: if you'd grown up without the rules you were handed, who would you be? I answered before I could stop myself. A dancer. An artist. Something freer. I've had a thousand...
Nobody told me it was this easy
Hi Friend, Building teaches you things you didn't go looking for. You try something. It works, or it doesn't. You adjust. You try something else. And sometimes — more often than you'd expect — the thing you finally try turns out to be easier than the thing you were grinding at before. That's what happened to me recently. · · · I had been running live conversations every Thursday — bringing together coaches, leaders, and members of the She Leads Here community for an hour of the kind of...
The person you keep meaning to become
Hi friend, I had a conversation with a friend earlier this week that keeps crossing my mind. It was about this idea that there is a version of each of us that we really want to become. You know the one. It's been there for years — sometimes in the background, sometimes very loud. It usually shows up in the quiet moments: a flight, a walk, a Sunday afternoon that goes still. The person who built the thing, made the move, started the practice, said the yes they've been sitting on. Most of us...
Luxury, kids, and the lie I stopped believing
Hi friend, There is a story women like us are handed early, usually by people who mean well: that children are the end of the "luxurious life." That once they arrive, the passport gets quieter, the horizon comes closer, and the woman who moved across the world folds herself into smaller rooms. I have not found that to be true. Last weekend my husband and I took the girls into the desert outside Abu Dhabi — Al Wathba, where the dunes turn gold an hour before sunset and the quiet is a kind of...
You can build alone, BUT you shouldn't have to.
Hi friend, Yesterday I sat down for brunch at Dubai Hills Mall and didn't get up for over two hours. Lattes, matcha, eggs going cold while I laughed and talked with fellow members of the She Leads Here community. A table full of amazing Black women just filling each other's cups — literally and otherwise — and nobody in any rush to leave. I drove home thinking: That right there is the thing no one tells you to pack. Because when I moved to Dubai, I didn't come alone. I came with my husband...
Five years building in Dubai — what nobody tells you
Hi friend, I'm back in Dubai tonight, after a few days in Abu Dhabi last week. On my last evening there I walked down to the Corniche to film a video, and I almost didn't. The beach was right there, the light was golden, and the UAE was doing that thing it does — making you forget you had a plan. That tension is actually what the video is about. Because the hardest thing about building a business here isn't the paperwork or the freezones. It's that you're building something that requires...
International lawyer. Serial expat. Mom of 4. Dubai-based, writing about what it actually takes to build a life across borders — the career moves, the hard calls, and the travel that changes you.