"The Woman Behind Door #2": Zeva Bellel on Trusting the Life You Can't Fully Explain

Zeva Bellel has spent her adult life following the same pull more than once: toward a truer version of herself, even when the choice to leave wasn't entirely hers to make.

There are two ways to read Zeva Bellel's story. One is a woman who kept choosing the uncertain, truer path over the stable, comfortable one - a one-way flight to Paris at twenty-five, a decade in journalism walked away from to build something of her own. The other is what happened the third time: the choice was taken out of her hands entirely, in a single phone call, and what she did next is really the heart of it.

The Pull Toward France

Zeva grew up in Brooklyn, in a neighbourhood she describes as predominantly Russian and Italian - nobody around her spoke French. No one else really cared about France. It didn't matter. Something about the language, the culture - first encountered through a French-language TV programme called French in Action in her classroom - called to her anyway.

"I wanna live in Paris. I wanna be French. And that was my thing," she says of a pull she still can't fully explain, one that survived a disappointing first semester abroad at twenty and a grandfather who thought the whole idea was impractical.

The One-Way Flight

At twenty-five, two weeks after her birthday, Zeva got on a one-way flight to Paris with no job and no plan - leaving behind a relationship, an apartment, and a career. She'd spent the previous year in therapy trying to explain a longing that wouldn't go away, working with a therapist who, it turned out, had lived in France herself and never mentioned it until Zeva was ready to hear it.

The first year was jobless and disorienting, spent largely on a friend's couch. "How do I stay? How do I stay?" she remembers thinking, on repeat, through panic moments that came in waves. She never once considered going home.

The Worst Boss She Ever Had

Zeva fell into journalism by accident, landing a job at a fashion magazine through a friend's referral. It closed after 9/11, and what followed was a decade of freelance hustle, magazine writing, and trend research - including a stretch at a luxury online magazine where her manager trusted no one, empowered no one, and left her whole team - in her words - miserable. Zeva told her boss so, directly, and quit soon after.

"No way in hell would I do any of what she's doing. The opposite," she says now - a line that, looking back, sounds like the first draft of her coaching philosophy. She left and started her own blog, Paris by Appointment Only, covering the city's hidden, appointment-only artisans. She ran it for a year, on nothing but her own judgment of what was interesting.

Building a Team at Yelp

Yelp came knocking through a friend of a friend, looking to launch the company in France - Zeva's first hire round required convincing fifty people to work for a company she wasn't allowed to name. She got pregnant within weeks of accepting the role; her manager, Miriam Warren, handled the news with a warmth Zeva still credits. Over ten years, she built a marketing team from nothing into a operation spanning France, Italy, Belgium and the UK, eventually as Senior Marketing Director.

Toward the end, something started to feel off. "I started to feel a little like a round peg, square hole," she says - increasingly drawn to the people on her team and what made them tick, over the metrics she was meant to be serving. "But I never would have left on my own," she admits. "It was like a dream job, in so many ways."

"We're Not a Family"

She didn't have to decide. On a single day - a date Bethany remembers as the 2nd of November, and the two of them now call "November Rain" - 175 employees across the world, Zeva's entire team included, were made redundant on the same phone call. There had been no warning. The team had just been celebrated at headquarters for its growth.

"We're not a family. We're not a family. That's it," Zeva says of what she took from it - not bitterly, but plainly. Beth was one of the 175; the two of them worked together at Yelp and lived through the same call. Zeva credits one colleague, Colleen Curtis, with fighting hard in the aftermath to make sure the team could keep their laptops - a small, practical act of leadership Zeva still points to as proof of who someone really is under pressure.

What She Chose Next

The redundancy wasn't Zeva's decision. What came after was. "I don't think I would have taken the time to explore that because it would have felt too risky," she says of coaching - something she'd been circling for years but might never have pursued from inside a job that good. Instead of going back into marketing, she got certified and started her own practice, working exclusively with women.

"That transition was kind of seamless in a way. Once I gave myself permission," she says. Today she runs a coaching community called Z Hive, hosts the podcast On Becoming - built to counter what she calls the "lightning bolt" myth of transformation - and is writing her first book, a workbook of personal essays due out in October 2027.

What Zeva's Story Teaches Us

• Transformation isn't a lightning bolt. It's a long, doubt-filled process - and the myth that it should feel instant does real damage to people going through it.
• A company can be brilliant and still not be a family. You can love your colleagues completely and still recognise the difference.
• A door closing on you without your permission doesn't mean you have no say in what happens next. Zeva's agency was never in the redundancy - it was in what she chose afterward.
• Watching a bad manager up close can teach you as much as a good one. Zeva's entire coaching philosophy started as a reaction to someone who got it wrong.
• Trusting yourself takes practice, not certainty. "We finally feel like we are the person who knows best what we want," she says - and that's the whole premise of her work.

A Final Thought

If you've ever felt a pull toward a different life you couldn't fully explain. If you've ever had a door close on you that you didn't choose to close. If you've ever wondered what you'd choose next if the choice were finally, frighteningly yours - Zeva's episode is for you. "You can only really be where you are," she says. "That's it." Listen to the full conversation on Notes from the Not There Yet.

Listen to the Zeva's Full Episode

Find Zeva

Website: zevabellel.com · Instagram: @zevab · LinkedIn: Zeva Bellel · Substack: zevabellel.substack.com · Podcast: On Becoming

Not lost, not arrived, just not there yet.