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Constance Gallay

@constance.gallay

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I run and invest in companies internationally, and help women grow theirs.
The life in-between, from Paris.
Writing L'entre ↓ on Substack
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the second I’m in the water the brain goes quiet. not calm. quiet.< immediately. there’s a name for it. //transient hypofrontality. >> the prefrontal cortex, the part that plans and narrates, goes briefly ••offline. the body takes over. I live for that state. nb. well, the brain goes quiet until someone steals your wave lolilol [and yes, i´ve officially become that surfer who gets bothered when the etiquette isn’t honoured hh video credits @timeless_surf_studio by @constance.gallay
11
21 days ago
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//READING 00: ENTRE. Paris; le 15.10.2026. 3ème arrondissement. fifteen years of writing long. research, academic papers, notes and memos that are part of the work. words matter to me, and long form has always been where I think most organically. so I am starting a @substack >> L’entre, notes from the in-between; on women, business and the world. one word per reading, followed across disciplines, because a word rarely means one thing. every word is read twice: ‘le mot’ through the mind, ‘le geste’ through the body. the intro, N°00, is out now: go read it, link in bio <3 
tomorrow, the first word: THRESHOLD, in both readings. by @constance.gallay
14
3 days ago
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september was a lot of movement and stop and go. I left for the water and came back braced. >> nothing resolved //per se (what is?), and yet so much. I stopped needing it to. stopped the chasing. //the \\in-between/; l’entre again: the middle is not the wait before the thing, it is THE thing. you learn to read it like a set of waves coming in. 🌊🌊🌊🌊 by @constance.gallay
12
14 days ago
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my work days all look different >> but this is what yesterday’s looked like, while spending time in Morocco surfing with family and friends by @constance.gallay
8
23 days ago
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a few weeks ago I wrote about a kitchen, three people talking about my face while I stood there, and how long it took me to type that sentence. rooms not built for me. >>> second in the series. here’s the part I left out. I’ve had men in my corner my whole career. Arnaud at Keolis, who told me to apply for a job two levels above me when I was 25, and I thought that was insane. Patrick after that. James now. They backed me before I could back myself. I had no confidence and none of the codes, and they saw something anyway. so I worked, and I listened, and we built things I’m still proud of. I also became the right arm of several of them. and that was <protection> and it was also a •role. that’s the thing nobody says about rooms that weren’t built for you. it’s not that you’re kept out. >>it’s that you get let in by someone, on terms you didn’t set, and you’re •grateful• and you’re •useful• and you can’t fully separate the two<< I’d take it again. these are people I love and who changed what was available to me. but \\gratitude is a strange thing to build a career on, and I’m still working out what I owe to it and what I earned. by @constance.gallay
23
a month ago
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a bubbaloo outside a shop in imsouane. two dirhams. l’esprit de sérieux< Beauvoir’s word for adults who mistake the rules for facts. kids never do. they know someone made them up. >>I’ve always played. it’s the most serious thing about me. by @constance.gallay
55
12 days ago
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a muscle, yes.
made of curiosity.
you only go further if you want to see what’s on the //other side. >>of a backbend /of a conversation /of a plan that just changed /of a paradigm. so yeah i keep switching things up. new practices and new shapes; new floors (omg did I really start boxing today lol?) 
and i want more. it does feel like the beginning of a whole thing. >>the more you read the less you know. you see what i mean? same. exact. muscle. 
the body is asking for so many answers, and so am i. so let’s get them by @constance.gallay
7
6 days ago
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Wednesday 23rd. 2.05AM. The Equinox. 

The Equinox is the only day the light is split exactly in /half. end of summer; the hinge.

L’Entre. “L’entre n’est pas un manque mais un espace habitable. » The between is not a lack. It is a <habitable space>.

Adonis makes it a noun in French, which French doesn’t normally allow. between is a relation, a hyphen, >a gap. but he turns it into a /place. 
« Je ne voyage qu’entre. »
I only travel between.

// I’ve been living in that geometry for months (years?) without a word for it. founder and operator. mother and woman. french and english. strategy and tenderness. investor and friend. the western frame keeps demanding I choose, and I kept reading my refusal as a failure to commit.
it isn’t. 
>>the between is where the work actually gets done.
 this is what I loved in La Horde. two basins, a chasm torn open between them, and the living dancing at the edge of the hole. the whole piece is staged on a threshold. it doesn’t resolve. it <<crosses>>. End of summer. The light splits in half and then goes the other way.///
 Long form on this coming. by @constance.gallay
6
25 days ago
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last november someone i work with was on a call at my place with two partners. all men. like 90% of the time. i’d dropped off and gone to change to pick up my son, so they thought i’d left. i came back out to the fridge. they were talking about me. he was saying i work hard, that i do the heavy lifting. one of them said: well, it helps that she’s beautiful. i stood there and said nothing. that’s the part that stayed. not what they said. that i said nothing. the rooms i work in weren’t built for me, and it shows all day in small ways. i get asked who does the modelling. i get asked who else is on the team when i am the team. i give the answer, and the person who asked turns to a man in the room to confirm it. none of it is dramatic. all of it is constant. and it’s hard to describe without sounding like i’m complaining, which is most of why i never describe it. i wrote in my journal this spring that <<the fear of being read poorly is what kept me silent for fifteen years>>. that night i had the vocabulary, the time, and nobody withholding permission. i still said -nothing-. the fear was one half of it. the other half is that silence was the cheapest form of competence i had. you say nothing, you look composed, nobody can quote you. it works until it starts costing us the room. so let me say what i do, since it apparently needs saying. i sit with founders and investors. i read a model and tell you where it breaks. i read a room and tell you what nobody said out loud. i help founders i believe in find money and then survive having it. climate and education, not growth at any cost. venture rooms, conferences, site visits in kenya, rwanda, uganda, the uk. i’m 35 and i’m almost always the only woman there. and the first thing two men could reach for to explain me was my face. i’m saying it out loud nine months late. that’s the un-silent woman, apparently. she takes a while. by @constance.gallay
22
2 months ago
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i love clothes. that’s the whole starting point and I’m not going to be coy about it. colour first. then matière, the weight of a thing. the shape, the way it falls, the way it holds something and gives it a form. > i dress to match my energy, my mood, my essence on the moment. in a way, i dress the way I write; whatever is nearest to the thing >> different versions, all of them actually me. *it’s fun and it matters*, and I’ve stopped separating those two. by @constance.gallay
12
a month ago
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the books that made me, between 10 and 20ish. my reading life splits in two, and this is the first half. some school made me read, some i chose, some i learned english with, while in the US, and after. //i’ve been rebuilding my library over the past few years, finding these again <<one by /one. part 2, the last decade, comes next. l’attrape-cœurs, j.d. salinger 
the book of growing up >> that sentiment de vertige when you step into adulthood has stayed with me ever since. chopin, camille bourniquel 
i’m not a biography person. but i’ve played chopin since i was little, we’re two peas in a pod.
/this one lives by my bed. annie ernaux 
la place, in 5e, at eleven >> it’s inside this quarto. a woman’s life written with sociology and that simplicity. i could do a whole series on her. 
//she is something. GOAT. les fleurs du mal, baudelaire 
read at lycée. where i learned to read poetry, its movements, its big themes. forever marked. 
>another one of my GOATS. la sixième, susie morgenstern 
margot entering sixième. school mattered so much to me, and i felt very close to her. 
//stumbled across this book over the summer >> all the memories of reading it when i was little came rushing back. the sonnets, shakespeare 
hamlet at 16, in the US, was how i tried to understand english as literature, and one of my first real essays >> human nature bb. the sonnets came later. same language, super hard, so beautiful. 
so worth it. pride and prejudice, jane austen 
read in french, then in english. her sensitivity, where she stands, who she chooses to write about. oscar wilde read after the US, once i could finally read him in english. dorian gray, his only novel, the portrait that ages in his place. earnest, the comedy where everyone leads a double life.
the same question //twice, once dark, once laughing >> the masks we wear. grandiose. stefan zweig (GOAAAAT!) 
le monde d’hier >> a world about to tip, yesterday holding tomorrow. i own several copies. 
//and vingt-quatre heures, because it’s just so good. dying. les cerfs-volants, romain gary 
 his last novel. a book about staying faithful, to a person, to a country, to hope. to hope. 
/a man of many lives, read in m by @constance.gallay
3
13 days ago
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I was in the sea with Elsa in Marseille when she told me to go. they leave tickets at the door. two hours later I was in the queue, and I got them. FRONT ROW, (LA)HORDE >in their own city<. OMG. July 7th, and Elsa and I brought Laura with us. what a herd. @la.horde are touring Paris now. so, I wondered, what has crystallized?

>Après moi, le déluge< it opens in water. a basin, bodies washing and holding one another. care at the smallest scale, the scale where a system first holds or fails. then the tenderness curdles. hands that soothe become hands that harm, pin and hustle. no words, no warning. you feel the exact instant /care: becomes //hold: then they break the ground and <drop> the world into the hole. l’abysse. >après moi, le déluge< is a motto every generation gives itself. but it isn’t a cry. it’s a shrug. and the piece >refuses< it. simply. it doesn’t end in the flood, it ends in *trance*, elevation, the other, l’autre. the collective moves as one body and a collapsed world is ***>reborn, from below. 
un rituel de passage//>. this is not optimism; it is the *older* idea. the crossing is survived >together< or, not at all, and //hope is something you do with your /////BODY rather than something you /argue. >a civilisation doesn’t decide on the bridge. it metabolises, or it doesn’t. it holds, or it performs. it crosses together, or it says, after me, ///the flood/. scénographie Julien Peissel musique originale @pierreaviat lumières Éric Wurtz regard extérieur Alain Damasio by @constance.gallay
2
a month ago
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