Shy Ganglani, Oprah and the Croisette.
Shy Ganglani, Associate creative director, Leo Australia
The air inside the Palais is stale with nerves and recycled oxygen.
Somewhere in the darkness, a row of us (the 2026 Cannes See it Be it Cannes cohort) are waiting for our exclusive session with Oprah Winfrey, the Queen herself.
The heat has become physical, amplifying our erratically beating hearts. Sweat is tracing a determined little path down our backs, and the Mediterranean is glittering nearby with no concern for our escalating dehydration. Oprah is sitting directly in front of us looking composed in tailored white and gold, because of course Oprah does not appear to sweat.
A mere hour earlier, she had been on stage inside the Palais speaking to thousands of people about intention, service, influence and the danger of building a life around external validation.
Now, she is close enough to make eye contact as she talks to the 20 of us in the See it Be it cohort, with the same focus she once projected through television screens into millions of lounge rooms.
There are famous people who become fixtures of popular culture, and then there are people who become part of the architecture of other people’s lives, whose voices lived in the background while mothers folded laundry and aunties drank chai.
Oprah belongs to the second category, because she made people millions of miles away also feel seen.
She tells us that the real work of our lives is “making ourselves whole”.
“But HOWWW?” I mouth to myself.
She looks directly at me and laughs. Did you just say “How”?
Suddenly I become aware of everything at once: My silly Peter Rabbit crochet vest, my racing heart, and the terrifying possibility that she can hear my thoughts.
Then she tells me about hiking. She says she has new knees and a new favourite hobby, and what she loves about it is the almost offensively simple act of “putting one foot in front of the other”, because that is how you get anywhere.
I feel something inside me shift. Not long before this, I had written and performed a poem called Unstuck about the misconception that everybody else has access to some secret formula for becoming unstuck while you remain trapped inside your own head. Trying to think your way out of a feeling that probably does not require a breakthrough at all.
The poem ends with the line “What they will never tell you is that unstuck is just putting one foot in front of the other.”
Movement is often deeply unspectacular, that sometimes progress is shooting your shot, leaving the room, surviving the cringe of having done it, and waking up the next day to keep going.
And at some point you pause, turn around and look at how far you have come.
That is the view.
She asks whether I can do that now, whether I can stop thinking about the peak for one moment and see how far I have already travelled.
The countries I have lived in, the rooms I thought I would never enter, the rooms I entered and then spent years worrying I had been admitted to because of an administrative error.
The jobs I fought for, the jobs I lost, the jobs I left, the risks, the moves, the humiliations, the miraculous little pivots and every tiny act of courage. Each move made without knowing exactly where I was heading, each version of me carrying me as far as she could before another version took over.
I have spent so much time staring at the path ahead that I have mistaken not being finished for not having moved.
You tell yourself the summit will be the proof. The promotion, the brilliant campaign, the award, the moment somebody you respect finally looks at you and confirms you have not hallucinated your own potential. Until then, every achievement can feel like a layover.
Cannes is probably the worst possible place to experience this particular delusion because the Croisette is lined with people who appear to have conclusively arrived somewhere.
Everywhere you turn, somebody is wearing linen effortlessly, somebody is striding towards a lunch you were not invited to, and somebody has won seven Lions.
I had assumed becoming whole would involve some grand revelation, preferably with clear manual instructions, a branded worksheet and maybe a mantra. Instead, Oprah gives me something far less glamorous and far more useful.
“The distance travelled from where you came from to where you are now was once unimaginable to you,” she says. “The fact that you have come that far means you can go that much further.”
The only thing greater than the realisation of how far you’ve come, is the realisation that I am no longer lonely on the way to wherever the top is.
Around me in the See it Be it cohort is a group of women and non-binary people who are accomplished and vulnerable, kind and hungry, generous with what they know and still hustling, stretching and clawing their way through worlds that have not always made the climb easy for people like us.
Carrying whole histories, countries, communities, disappointments and dreams with them, while somehow still finding a free hand to reach for someone else.
At one point, one of them grabs another and says, “You’re not alone. You have us now.”
And perhaps that is the part nobody tells you when they teach you how to climb. The nightmare was never just that we might not reach the top. It was that we might get there and be alone.