When people ask me that, the truth is that I didn’t have a “quit my job number.” I just had money.

And suddenly that money had a completely different job. It had to buy me time.

I understand why people ask. I would ask too. Because when someone tells you they walked away from a six-figure salary at 40 without another job lined up, you assume there must have been a spreadsheet involved. A plan. A carefully calculated exit strategy. Especially when that person spent her entire career working in finance.

There was not.

I wish this story started with me sitting down six months before quitting, calculating my monthly expenses, building different scenarios and deciding exactly how much runway I needed before handing in my notice. That would have been very Director of Finance of me.

Instead, I had what can probably best be described as a mental breakdown. I reached my last drop when I was asked, once again, to work on my holiday ( this is more like a rule rather than exception in corporate finance ) I just didn’t have a single spreadsheet, analysis or teams call in me anymore. So I sent an email to my boss, and I never went back. I never saw my boss again. I never went back to the office. After 14 years at the company sent me a shipping label so I could mail back my laptop and badge. Fourteen years of service and the grand finale was basically a prepaid FedEx label. There was no farewell cake. No dramatic last walk through the office carrying a cardboard box with a sad little desk plant sticking out of it. Just: Please print the attached label.

And that was the end of my 17 year corporate finance career.

After 14 years at the company sent me a shipping label so I could mail back my laptop and badge. Fourteen years of service and the grand finale was basically a prepaid FedEx label.

The money I had

A little context for anyone who doesn’t know my whole life story yet: I’m originally from Finland, but before moving to Los Angeles, I lived in Copenhagen for 11 years. I moved to LA for what was, at the time, my absolute dream job, that ended up being my biggest nightmare. Apparently dreams should come with terms and conditions.

On paper I actually had quite a lot. I had around $100,000 in savings in Denmark, but I also had a mortgage of around $55,000 on my apartment. My mortgage is interest-free as long as I keep an equivalent amount of savings in the same bank, so I never really considered that entire $100,000 mine to spend. Technically it was but giving up an interest-free mortgage felt stupid even during my fuck it, I’m quitting my entire life era.

So in my head, $55,000 belonged to the apartment. That left around $45,000 that I actually considered accessible. Over the following months, another roughly $30,000 came in from my final paycheck, selling my car and getting my apartment deposit back in the U.S. Because I didn’t just quit my job. I basically burned my entire life to the ground. My job was tied to my U.S. visa, so quitting also meant I had to leave the country, sell my car, pack up my apartment, my two cats and move my entire life back across the Atlantic. So in my head I had $75,000

Which sounds like a lot of money. And it is a lot of money.

But there is a very big difference between looking at $75,000 while earning a six-figure salary every year and looking at $75,000 when you have absolutely no idea when your next paycheck is coming.

Suddenly it didn’t look like $75,000.

It looked like a clock.

And the clock had already started

I had budgeted around $6,000 for the move; flights, container, vets and passports for the cats. It cost $10,300. Excellent forecasting from the former Finance Director.

I also decided I wanted to renovate my apartment in Copenhagen. Was renovating an apartment immediately after quitting my job with no reliable income the most financially responsible decision I’ve ever made? Probably not. But after one of the hardest years of my life, I desperately needed something to look forward to. Something to dream and plan so I wouldn’t completely spiral into a bottomless bucket of shit mentally. So I gave myself a renovation budget of $5,000, which I now understand is adorable. Anyone who has ever renovated anything is currently laughing. I am laughing as I’m currently staring yet another wall I need to fix in my living room

And then I turned 40. I had already decided I was going to Mexico with my best friend and I was going to spend whatever I needed to spend to celebrate making it through my 30s, which I can say is the hardest decade of your life so just hang in there. That weekend cost me $2,800. Worth every fucking penny.

After the move, the renovation money and a buffer for all the things I hadn’t thought of which, based on my moving budget, was clearly necessary, I mentally landed at around $60,000.

That became my number. Not my net worth. Not everything I owned. Just the money I was willing to use while trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do when I grow up.

$60,000 stopped looking like $60,000

Because $60,000 could buy me several completely different lives.

If I went into full survival mode and somehow managed to live on $2,200 a month, I could theoretically survive for around 27 months. But let’s be serious. I did not go from being an anxious shopping addict with a six-figure salary to suddenly becoming a woman who meal preps noodles and doesn’t do a single impulse buy ever. I’m working on myself. I’m not a miracle worker.

At around $4,000 a month, which is what I consider comfortable enough, I had about 15 months.

That number hit differently.

Fifteen months to recover from burnout. Fifteen months to write. Fifteen months to figure out whether this creator thing could actually become a business. Fifteen months to try things that might make absolutely no money. Fifteen months before I had to seriously start thinking about another paycheck. My beautiful little freedom experiment would last approximately 15 months.

I started seeing money as time

A purchase wasn’t just $100 anymore. A subscription wasn’t just $15. Another random thing I convinced myself I needed wasn’t just money leaving my bank account. It was a tiny piece of the period I’d given myself to figure this out. And I started thinking about money in a way I somehow never had while literally working in finance.

Which is embarrassing.

I spent years looking at budgets, forecasts, investments and ROI for companies. I could tell you why a business was over budget. I could build a forecast. I could sit in meetings and talk about where millions of dollars should or shouldn’t be spent. Meanwhile, I had never really sat down and looked at my own finances

The audit I’ve done of my own finances since quitting has genuinely been one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve done. The embarrassment. The shame. The way I was spending my 6 figure salary still makes my stomach sick.

But I’m also trying very hard not to turn this into another reason to beat myself up. I can’t go back and invest the money I spent in my 30s. I can’t unbuy the things I didn’t need. All the Daddy issues and imaginary lives I had hang in my closet because I felt miserable in my life or needed an escape

I can only decide what I do with the money I have now.

So how much money do you need to quit?

I don’t know. This all happened 11 months ago

But I do know that my relationship with money looks completely different now than it did when I first quit and that peace of mind and freedom costs way less than anxiety and stress ever did

It took months for my nervous system to calm down enough for me to even understand what had happened. Now I track my spending every week. I look at purchases that made me cringe. I’ve cancelled things, changed habits, spent too much and tried again. I’m still learning but now I make the same effort weekly for myself that I did for the company for almost 2 decades

My life isn’t particularly peaceful on paper right now. I’m renovating an apartment. There is dust fucking everywhere. I’m trying to build a business without really knowing what I’m doing. I’m trying to write a book. I’m watching money leave my account while trying to figure out how to make enough of it come back in. There are days when I panic about whether any of this is actually going to work.

I make my coffee. I decide what I’m going to work on. Sometimes I write. Sometimes I film. Sometimes I spend six hours plastering a wall while questioning how far I need to take my attitude of “ how fucking hard can it be, men do it “ It’s chaotic and uncertain and financially uncomfortable, but somehow my life feels softer than it did when everything looked successful from the outside.

And I spend less.

Not because I’ve suddenly become some minimalist woman who owns three beige shirts and finds happiness in a capsule wardrobe. Absolutely not. I still like things. I still buy things I probably don’t need. I’m still figuring out my relationship with spending.

I just don’t need as much to make myself feel okay anymore and the less I spend on stupid shit the happier it actually makes me. I’m getting better and I’m proud of myself for that.

Maybe that’s the part I never understood when I was earning a six-figure salary. I thought a comfortable life was expensive because the life I was trying to recover from was expensive. The shopping, the dinners, the conveniences, the little treats, the trips, the constant need to have something to look forward to a.k.a an amazon delivery. I was spending so much money trying to make a stressful life feel better.

Now my life is objectively less secure. I don’t have a salary landing in my bank account every two weeks not even every month. I’m still going on minus. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to replace it. I’m still burning through the time I bought myself.

And yet, I feel richer in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with my bank balance.

I don’t know where this ends. Maybe this works. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there comes a point when the numbers tell me I need to do something else.

But even on the days when I’m scared about money, I’d rather struggle trying to make this life work than go back to struggling in a life that was making me sick.

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And it turns out the life I was so scared I couldn’t afford costs a lot less than the one I couldn’t afford to keep living.

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I’m pretty sure none of my former CFOs ever walked out of a restaurant thinking, “Well, that’s this week’s toilet paper sorted.” They probably didn’t spend an entire week forgetting to buy toilet paper, eventually running out, using every napkin and paper towel in the apartment to wipe their ass before finally accepting defeat and sneaking a roll into your bag from the bathroom of a restaurant.

And to make matters worse, I made an Instagram Story about it.

That, to me, felt like the most accurate representation of who I really was.

Not Director of Finance.

Not the woman presenting million-dollar forecasts.

Not the one sitting in boardrooms discussing strategy.

Just... the idiot who forgot to buy toilet paper for seven consecutive days.

That was always the version of myself that always felt most real. Maybe that’s why I spent most of my career convinced someone had made a mistake hiring me.

I never felt like an adult even I’ve been adulting since the age of 16. Paying rent, the bills, working, doing laundry…without adult supervision. Most of my meals were eaten standing in the kitchen because sitting down somehow felt, and still feels, like too much effort. Or I was In the middle of another pivot and didn’t even own chairs. I don’t cook. I keep myself alive by mixing eatable ingredients and calling it a meal. My home has always been a permanent collection of seven different hair tools, make-up all over, half-open drawers, yesterday’s jeans, tomorrow’s outfit. It all blended into one constant state of “I’ll deal with it later.” Unless I had an anxiety attack in the morning. Then my kitchen was spotless. There’s nothing quite like a clean stove when your life is spiraling into a bottomless bucket of shit.

And then when I’d walk into a meeting with my GM. Where everyone was looking... finished. Pressed shirts. Confident opinions. Leather notebooks. While my notebooks usually had rainbows and butterflies and inspirational quotes like “ You Fucking Got this Shit “ People using big words I’d had to Google after the meeting because I had absolutely no idea what they meant. Moving to USA made it even worse. Back in Europe I’d spent years working in an international company where almost everyone spoke English as their second language. We all simplified things. We all made grammar mistakes. Nobody cared. Then I landed in LA. Suddenly people weren’t just speaking English. They were speaking corporate. Every sentence sounded like it belonged in Harvard Business Review.

“We need to socialize this initiative.”

“Let’s pressure-test the assumptions.”

“We should circle back after we’ve aligned cross-functionally.”

I had never heard “circle back” in real life before America and I had been working in finance for 13 years in Europe. I still vividly remember translating “collectively” on my first week in my new job in LA. Like I knew what it meant, more or less in the sentence, but I still had to Google the exact meaning as I genuinely had never heard of it before. Half the meetings I was translating English into... slightly different English. I’d nod and smile like I understood. Then Google half the vocabulary, after I had transcribed the whole meeting, of course, because there was no way I was able to listen and take notes at the same time. “Hi, my name is Janina” - and I have ADHD and apparently my brain only accepts one task per subscription plan.

Surely at any moment someone would realize I had absolutely no business being there. Because in my head, I was still the woman “borrowing” toilet paper from restaurants.

Yet, Most of my 17 years on this career ladder I was doing the job. Not just surviving it. I was good at it. I climbed the ladder with no university degree to the director level. I hired teams. I led teams. I was a great people manager, in my admittedly biased opinion. The very first thing I said to anyone ever working in my team was “ I don’t care when you work, where you work, how you work. I only care about the deliverables. If there’s a slow day, fuck of at 1pm. I am not looking at your teams status - that was my opening line. I Built budgets. Complex finance trackers. Influenced decisions worth millions of dollars. People came to me for answers - before America at least. And somehow none of that ever overrode the voice in my head that kept whispering, ”Yes... but you are also the idiot who had to “borrow” toilet paper from a restaurant”

Looking back, I think my imposter syndrome had very little to do with intelligence.It had everything to do with adulthood. I thought adults had their lives together. Adults meal-prepped. Adults paid their bills immediately not on the last day ( or the day after - that’s still me! ) Adults folded laundry before it became another piece of furniture. Adults had all the furnitures! Adults definitely weren’t making Instagram Stories, broadcasting their entire life from their office toilet. Apparently some people built businesses in their garage. I built mine in the office toilet between budget meetings and my little menty B breaks

So every promotion felt like someone had accidentally invited the wrong person into the room. Sometimes I felt like the dummest person in the room and sometimes the smartest person in the room. One meeting I’d leave convinced I was completely out of my depth. The next I’d spend the entire meeting wondering why twelve highly paid adults were spending 2 hours talking about a strategy that concluded to absolutely nothing.

Why we were inventing new words for old problems. We’d create processes for processes when instead we could have all just gone home to do something we actually enjoyed in life. Why we needed to complicated things and invent extra work. We’d build seventeen-slide presentations to explain something that could’ve been said in two sentences and didn’t move the sales needle….not one bit.

I never quite found the middle ground. Either I assumed everyone else was smarter than me. Or I looked around thinking, “Are we seriously doing this?” While these said 12 people were debating about next steps that were never taken, I had seven new hobbies in mind, five business ideas, six books I wanted to write while texting thousands of women in my instagram stories about my last nights date. Work was almost never the thing occupying my brain. And I know, it should have been. I assumed people in positions like mine spent their days thinking about strategy, numbers and the next big decision—not wondering whether they'd remembered to buy toilet paper, what they'd make for dinner, or if their next pottery mug should be pink or yellow. I clearly didn’t deserve to be there and I was constantly trying to convince myself that I belonged in a room full of people who looked far more put together than I ever felt. Which was another reason I always felt like an imposter. Because the work itself was... easy. Not easy because I was smarter than everyone else. Easy because most of it seemed unnecessarily complicated.

Eventually the pretending became exhausting. The feeling of trying to squeeze a round object into a square hole is deeply painful to your soul. Not because I was pretending to understand finance. I was pretending to be the kind of person I thought someone in finance was supposed to be. And those are two completely different things. I had spent years trying to earn a seat at a table I didn’t even want to sit at anymore.

Now thinking, I don’t think my imposter syndrome was ever about intelligence to have the seat at the table. It was about trying to fit into someone else’s idea of what an intelligent person was supposed to look like. I thought smart women wore blazers, chased promotions, money, used words I had to Google afterwards, had immaculate beige homes, never forgot to buy toilet paper and definitely didn’t make Instagram Stories from their office toilet. I spent years trying to become more polished, more corporate, more “adult,” when really I was just trying to become someone else.

These days I’ve made peace with the fact that my intelligence doesn’t look the way I once thought it should. I’m smart. Street smart, at least. Don’t ask me to use fancy corporate words. I still think half of them exist just to make people sound important. And if you’ve followed my Instagram Stories, you’ve probably become fluent in typo. I still have forty-seven tabs open. I still have more ideas than I know what to do with. I still wear low waist jeans and flowery crop tops at age of 40. I flirt. I fuck. I swear too much. I forget things. None of those things have ever made me less intelligent. I was smart enough to build a finance career without a university degree. Smart enough to make good decisions with my money that when I hit my last drop on that teams chat 9 months ago, when my boss asked me to work on my holiday, I had the financial freedom to leave. That’s smart enough for me.

For years I thought I had to choose between being taken seriously and being myself. Between being intelligent and being feminine. Between wearing the blazer or a flower top. Between being analytical or being sexual. Turns out those choices only existed in my own head. I can understand balance sheets and wear pink. I can write essays with spelling mistakes. I can be deeply analytical and still be the woman who borrowed toilet paper from a restaurant. The cure for my imposter syndrome wasn’t becoming more impressive. It was finally realizing that I never had to earn the right to be myself.

So if you’ve ever felt like you’re pretending, maybe the answer isn’t trying harder to become the person you think successful people are supposed to be. Maybe the answer is giving yourself permission to look successful in your own way. Because success isn’t a personality. Intelligence isn’t a dress code. And confidence isn’t waking up one day feeling like you belong. It’s deciding that the person you’ve been all along was enough to belong in the first place. Just the way you are.

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We are thought to think love is a proof. A proof if you work hard, stay kind, kept showing up as the best versions of yourself, then someone will eventually see you, someone will chose you. Someone who will catch you when you are falling, claps for your wins and makes the losses easier to carry. Someone who sees you fully and doesn’t need you to file down the sharp edges

That’s romantic isn’t it. That’s what we are taught but in reality there is the risk of someone charming walking in soft, kind and kisses your forehead while places a trap in your feet that looks like home and feels like comfort and you walk in, not because you are weak, but because you are tired. You are tired of doing it all alone and always being the strong one. He lets you be soft and it feels like for a second you can stop being so god damn strong all the time.

When someone offers you a safetynet you allow yourself to fall.

You start rearranging things. You don’t call it change because you’d never change for a man. It’s small, almost un-noticeable. Less writing, less time, less creating, less dreaming. Less doing the small girly things that just simply make you happy. You change pieces of you to him. It’s the currency of love, right? The Compromise. You do more explaining. More shrinking. More time. More defending your own life. More apologizing for things you value. You call it balance, but really it’s erasure

“In sickness and in health - but for many women it’s the sickness. Not the love but what you give up to keep it”

They don’t tell you what is the cost of a happy ending. When the person you love isn’t made to carry all of you; the tenderness and the edge. The soft corners and the sharp edges. The woman who curls into his arms, and the woman who won’t stop reaching for more. Not more of him—he’s already enough. But more of herself. More of her own becoming.

And that’s the catch: some men only know how to love the version of you who stays quiet, stays lovely and sits still.

I think what broke me wasn’t the thought that he didn’t love me but that he loved me despite. And that word “despite” that’s what cut deeper than I wanted to admit. Because despite means he saw my ambition as a flaw. Something to tolerate, not celebrate. Something to forgive, not hold.

In spite of the fact that I want to share my story.

In spite of the fact that I want to build something bigger than this.

In spite of the fact that I refuse to keep my voice small.

In spite of the very things I value in myself the most. Those very things makes me love me more and value myself more in the world that constantly tells women to be less, stay small and just look pretty

Not that I know anything about love, but I do know this: love isn’t supposed to make you smaller. It’s not supposed to make you second-guess the fire in your chest or mute your own voice

“In spite” means I was never fully embraced. It means my ambition was treated like baggage. My past, my story, something to be ashamed for. It means my dreams were something he tolerated instead of cherished.

But I’m not here to be quiet. I’m not here to erase my story so someone else can feel big in theirs. I’m not here to dim down my light.
I have too much to create, too much to say, too much to become.

So I don’t think love is safe for women with ambition. Your partner will either protect your ambition or quietly erase it. So chose wisely because it will be the most important choice you’ll ever make. And the hardest truth is, you won’t notice the erasing until you’re the one missing from your own life. Real love for me doesn’t ask you to trade your voice for their comfort. It doesn’t kiss your forehead and pull the pen from your hand or treat your dreams like a threat or something to negotiate. Dreams of mine that are silly, ridiculous and even delusional at times, but they are my dreams. Mine.

I want the kind of love that sees me working towards them and celebrates it.
The kind of love that thrives because of what I’ve been through. Because I’m building something from it, not in spite of it.

So if choosing myself makes me difficult to hold, so be it.
If walking away is the price of keeping my fire, I’ll pay it.

I’ve lost myself before, and I learned what it costs. But survived that version of me and after discovering how powerful and peaceful it feels to be my true self, I refuse to ever abandon her again.

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“Hi love, I just need to vent a little… I feel comfortable sending this to you because I’ve read so many of the stories you share, and you always give the best advice.

I’m 31. I left my country when I was young, so I never studied back home. Then I met my ex and built my life around him for 8 years — until he cheated. Now I find myself single and almost always alone. I have one friend, but she has her own life, and most of the time it’s just me.

I even had a relationship with a boy from my home country. It was long distance, and at the beginning it felt so good. But with time it became heavy and draining. I’m so sad about it, because I know that if I lived there, it could have been a beautiful relationship.

That’s what hurts the most — when I visit back home, I feel alive, like I can connect with people and maybe build a future. But I can’t stay, because I’ve been gone for 10 years, I don’t have a diploma, and my only stability is the job I have now. I even started university, but I’m struggling to finish.

I feel stuck between two worlds. I’m also scared that in the country where I live now, I won’t meet anyone — it’s such a small town, with no opportunities to connect. The loneliness is killing me. I know I need to learn to enjoy my own company and not depend only on people to feel good, but right now it feels so hard.

I just wish someone could remind me that there is still light at the end of this tunnel.”

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The situation is never that bad or hopeless than I think it is. Feeling stuck is debilitating. It feels like every day is groundhogs day and you just go through the motions, get up, log in the work you don’t particularly enjoy or maybe its the kind of feeling “is this it?” you don’t love it, you hate that the stability shackles you to it. You try new things to make your life more meaningful; maybe a new hobby, new shoes, try something new that immediately makes you feel uncomfortable and ridiculous you even tried. You find out you are not a runner, you don’t like pottery and the friends date you tried was a catastrophe - but I would like to take a moment here and pause. You tried, you are trying and that’s the key. You are trying to finish university leave the “but I struggle out” , you are trying new things, you are trying to enjoy your own uncomfortable self. You are trying to figure it all out. And even on the hardest days; YOU ARE TRYING and most of the times succeeding in anything in life feels like a struggle. So first advice; Give yourself a medal of trying. Take your self out on a little staff meeting with your heart, mind and soul. I love doing a little shopping and have a glass of wine and a meal after and celebrate myself of simply TRYING. I would note I also feel uncomfortable in these staff meetings, but something I’ve learned is to sit at the bar, feels way less intimating than sitting on a table alone. Give yourself the credit you deserve from trying and celebrate it

Thinking if things were differently you would have the perfect relationship and things would just fall in place is a fallacy. Because you don’t know. You are just holding onto an imaginary future that never played out and that’s why it hurts so much because you are so sure you missed out on something perfect that never was that perfect and that was replaced with a life you are living that doesn’t feel like your own. Please let go of that idea, because comparing your life to a life that is not lived, is a death sentence to your happiness. Let go of the “what if” and work on the “what could be”.

The feeling where you live in a city, a job, a life that is draining you, does make me personally sad because I’m living it and trying so hard to find a solution or courage to do something different, but the only viable option would be to burn my current life down and once again, start all over. Literally pack my life and move again across continents to back home to start from scratch, at age 39. If that doesn’t sound like a failure I don’t know what does. BUT…

We so often think we are stuck and powerless over our own life where in reality everything we don’t change we choose. You are thinking about all the impossible and take them as fact; you couldn’t get a new job in your home country and you would be so much happier in your home country but…what has helped me with the feeling of powerless is to acknowledge that I actually do have power. I am working a job I hate but I could quit tomorrow and move back home, I just chose not to but I absolutely could. Tomorrow. If I wanted to. Would it be hard. Yes. Would it be the plan what I wanted. No. And I think most of us, could actually do the exact thing we wanted to, we just don’t because we are afraid and often our brain will start braining; what if I can’t find a job, what if I will never find another man again, what if I hate it, what if I regret if, what if its the wrong choice? It’s the soul crushing fear of “what ifs?”. I actually think you could find a job in your home country, if you wanted. Maybe it’s not the same job, maybe it requires to work in some cafes or “shitty” jobs before you could find it. Who knows maybe you’d even like to work in a cafe, if you’d let go of the idea what your life should look like - which often just comes from social pressure of what a success looks like. Maybe you could finish your school in your home country or even start a whole new education. The possibilities are endless and I can guarantee it is not impossible so what is that you are really afraid of?

This is the part of my own advice I am still working through. If you feel you are alive and happy at home, you should definitely pursue that, because life is too damn short and too damn beautiful to feel miserable. Often times I think we need to go find ourself just to realize that we need to return to the place where we initially thought we needed to leave and pursue life. Its not a mistake you left in the fist place, it is the necessary detour you need to do to uncover all the different layers of yourself that doesn’t just peel off itself in the comfort of familiarity. You needed to explore your curiosity and the world that seems so big for one lifetime to explore, but you at least got to try. So you left your home country and finding yearning back there isn’t a failure its the growth that happens in the messy in-between of not right or wrong choices, but just choices we do in life

When life feels stuck, don’t rush to force yourself out of it. Stuckness is a teacher, even though it’s one we never asked for. It teaches us to pause, to question, to strip away the noise until only what really matters remains. And what remains is you, the version of you who is learning to try, to fail, to begin again, to carry your loneliness without letting it define you, to hold your sadness without letting it consume you. The tunnel you’re walking through will not last forever. Some seasons of life are not meant to be climbed out of quickly, but walked through slowly, step by a painful step. And even in the slow walk, you are still moving. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are in the middle of your story, and the middle always feels the hardest. One day, you’ll look back and see that this version of you, the one who thought she was stuck, was actually building the kind of strength and depth you’ll carry for the rest of your life. The life that feels right. That’s the light at the end of the tunnel: not a man, not a perfect plan, but the quiet realization that even here, even now, even stuck, you are still becoming.

And lastly. I’m strongly against to put a man in the center of your life because I truly believe the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a man. Man is not the price. The price is you. You are the price. Like I wrote In one of my substack posts; “how would you life look like, if love wouldn’t be an option.” How differently we would dress, act, and mostly love ourselves, if we weren’t constantly thinking we need to act a life like if the love was watching. We measure so much through men’s validation, through the value system that puts us in a pedestal if we have a relationship. It really doesn’t matter what kind of relationship as long as we have one. We need connection and partnership for sure, those are key things in a good life, but they can come in so many different forms throughout your life.

I am absolutely sure you will find a partner in your life. But when you do, I hope it won’t feel like salvation. I hope it feels like an addition. A partner should never be the light at the end of the tunnel, they should be someone who walks beside you once you’ve already found your own light. Because if the tunnel only ends when someone else arrives, you will always be waiting, always negotiating your worth against their presence. And you deserve so much more than that. You deserve to know that even alone, you are already the whole damn price.

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Not just the kind where you get a “girls’ night in” or few hours alone. I mean real solitude. The type where you don’t have to answer to “how was your day,” where you can move from one room to another without carrying anyone else’s energy, where you can refill your lungs in the silence of your own apartment.

I rarely say this out loud, because people get scared when you admit you want space. They hear distance and think it means rejection. They hear silence and assume it means anger. When really, it’s just how I survive. sometimes it’s easier to keep quiet than to explain why silence is not rejection, why solitude is not a threat

People say “ you should have your own separate rooms” I’ve lived alone my whole life. In an apartment, sometimes small but still all mine and here’s what I know: room is not enough. I don’t want to “go to my room” like a teenager sent to sulk. I need space. I want to sit in the living room and watch TV, then wander into the bathroom for my thirteen-step skincare routine, pluck my eyebrows, walk through the kitchen to my bedroom all without breathing the same air with another human. All without the energy or another persons presence. So no, a single room would never be enough— it would feel like trying to breathe through a straw.

Space is not luxury to me; it is oxygen.

I have always felt guilt to admit that people drain me, even the ones I love. That in order to be good, kind, loving, I first have to retreat. I need to disappear into myself, so that I can come back as whole. And yet, when I confess this, it makes me feel broken. Like there is something wrong with me for needing distance, for not thriving in the constant closeness that relationships are supposed to be about. Society has written a very specific script for women in relationships. We are supposed to want togetherness. To always be emotionally available, caretaking, listening. We’re supposed to delight in checking in on our partner’s day, and if we don’t, if we need quiet more than conversation, it reads as cold, detached, unloving, avoidant. A failure of intimacy.

So when I say, “I just want to be alone tonight,” it feels like a betrayal. Not of him, but of the image of what a “good girlfriend” is meant to be. I’m learning this isn’t about being bad at love. Maybe it’s about refusing to perform a version of love that doesn’t fit me. Maybe solitude is not selfish, but sacred.

“The reason you ghost your friends, avoid responding, and disappear even when you care is because your nervous system sees connection as a demand, not a comfort. You’re not a bad friend, you’re overwhelmed.” - A wise person

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In a culture where women are told to give endlessly to partners, to children, to family, friendships, people - some women included, don’t understand it: I cannot give endlessly, because I am not an endless source. I recharge in stillness. I become myself again in silence.

Sometimes I wish I could show a broken arm to people to help them understand how serious of a situation it is. Maybe then they’d stop calling it “just needing me time” like it’s a spa day, instead of survival. How silence is not indulgence, but medicine. My solitude is the cast that allows me to heal.

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If I am ever going to be a good girlfriend, friend a human being, it won’t be because I gave up my need for solitude. It will be because I honored it. Because the truth is, nothing makes me kinder, softer, happier, more loving or more present than those hours of moving quietly through my own space, learning how to breathe again.

I used to think it made me a bad partner.

But I’m starting to realize it is the only way I’ll ever be a good one.

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Imagine your life if no one was coming.

I think about how much of my life I’ve lived in anticipation of someone else’s approval. The haircuts, the clothes that were subconscious auditions. The movies I pretended to love because he did. The dinners I learned to cook to impress. I hate cooking from the bottom of my heart, but still I’ve tried to domesticate myself into a good future investment, for a man. The music I endured, tracks I still can’t hear without tasting cheap beer and the afterburn of swallowing my opinions. The hobbies I adopted like costumes that never quite fit. I’ve been into biking, hiking and yoga and as much as I try, I do not like yoga. I wonder what parts of me are genuinely mine, and which were only borrowed for the sake of belonging. How much of myself was real, and how much was performed under the quiet pressure of being chosen?

So much of womanhood feels like a preparation for love. And it starts so early. From the question on the playground; “ are you gonna marry neighbor’s Steve?” We need to have everything figured out by the time we hit 25. Career, finances, silverware …while no-one judges a man in their 20s who lives with two roommates and has two plates and a plastic cup to his name. He is traveling with his buddies “exploring the world” while we are preparing to look good next to him when he is ready to settle. His Dad tells him to not to settle too early “there’s so many girls our there”, “you have time “ while the mom tells the girl "you should go and find a good man and settle down”

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Everything we do is an audition to be chosen. We soften our voices so we don’t sound threatening or too much. We toughen our skin so rejection from a man won’t sting as much. We starve our bodies, curl our hair, paint our faces until strangers call it effortless. We bend our time, our friendships, our goals, all for the possibility that love might be watching.

We chase promotions while thinking whether the title will make us harder to date. We move cities and countries after love. We stay home when his career requires it, rearranging the blueprint of our lives around someone else’s path. We make compromises in boardrooms and bedrooms, trimming ourselves into more manageable shapes, never too loud, never too demanding, never too much.

Every choice becomes with the silent question: Will this make me more lovable, or less?

There’s a violence in how much we bend ourselves for the promise of being chosen to the point it deeply hurts. How much time we waste filing down our sharp edges, trading authenticity for compatibility, hiding ambition and rage and desire because it doesn’t photograph well next to a man. Breaking into smaller pieces just to fit in someone else’s life

If love was never on the table, I think I would have been dangerous. Not to anyone else just to the rules that kept me small. I would have taken up space without apology. I would have worn what I liked, even if it resisted instead of invited. Maybe I would have chosen a career that made me feel alive, instead of the kind that made me look responsible. I would have never pulled out my wallet just to prove I wasn’t a burden. I would have let the price of my presence stand unchallenged. I would have demanded pleasure that matched mine, not just his. I would have demanded orgasms for me, not the ones faked into existence for his pride.

Who would I have been if the question was never, Would he like this? but always, Do I like this?

Maybe the ugliest truth is that without love as a possibility, I might have loved myself more. Fiercely. Entirely.

So I ask: Who would I be if I never needed to be chosen?

And maybe the darker question: Why did I ever think I had to be?

I woke up this morning feeling like I had a truck on my chest. Heavy. I can hear every heart beat echoing in my chest and it fills my whole chest. You are not supposed to feel your heart are you ? It’s just supposed to be in there, keeping you alive and nowadays it feels like the echo is trying to suffocate me.

This is the norm nowadays. Anxiety has changed from something I felt when I was nervous. Good nervous, kinda. When I had a really big meeting I wanted to do well, when I wanted to nail that interview or get that promotion. When I wanted to prove someone I had done a good job. That was good anxiety, it kept me going, kept me wanting to do a good job. But now? Now the anxiety shows up before anything even begins. Before I open my laptop. Before I’ve brushed my teeth. Before I’ve even remember which mask to slap on my face that day. Is it team building? Budget meeting? 1 to 1 with my boss? It’s no longer tied to something specific; a meeting, a deadline, a goal to crush. It’s just there. A constant hum in the background, like white noise laced with dread. And that’s the scariest part. Because it means I’m not chasing something anymore. I’m just trying to survive it. Trying to breathe through. I try to tell myself “just breathe” but I get pissed off because bitch, that’s the only thing I’ve been doing past decade. “Breathe” Breath through the panic, the anxiety the nervousness. I’m a master at breathing and look where it has got me? Surviving.

It wasn’t always like this. I was exited about my career. I was ambitious. I was also 20. How otherwise I would have got here. Little miss Finland all the way through Denmark to Los Angeles. I remember crying tears out off joy when I entered a job at my company 14 years ago

I used to act the role and I loved that role. I dressed up in pencil skirts and heels walking through the office hallways like it was the red carpet even I was just going to the toilet and I felt important. My default week was from Monday to Sunday and I “loved” working on Saturdays when no-one was bothering me. I thought it was fun. Like WTF?!?! I think nowadays. How empty my life had to be to think that was fun? That’s what I wasted my 20s on. I was Perfecting my excel sheets. I used to be the one who’s excel sheets had more color coding than the pride parade and I took pride out off it. I used to say “ I’m so busy” carry that as a badge of honor. I was always working ahead. Checking the emails on Sunday’s, prepping for the meeting a week before. I was three steps ahead of my endless to-do list. But the only thing I have realized from that is that you can keep working ahead your entire life but you willl never get ahead. It’s like walking up the escalators the wrong way. You’ll never see the top of it. Just another task, another deadline, another performance review

The more tired I’ve became along the years the more I’ve realized what a theatre the corporate world is. Elaborate, well-rehearsed theatre. We have meetings on having meetings - both meetings are unnecessary - the outcome would be the same and most of the time the outcome is …nothing. It is only for the decision makers to sit down and feel important and useful playing their role. I send emails my boss asks me to send and I know no-one reads them. Why? Because I never read them. Half of my emails I skim through the headline and think, if it’s important enough, They will follow up. Rarely they do. I make budgets for months knowing very well the numbers are obsolete the minute we press “publish” Like we are doing 2026 budget in October 2025. The changes that the world has yet again turned upside down by January are about 90%. Working in finance has taught me the art of story telling. You come up with numbers, shape them around a narrative “projected market growth,” “strategic acceleration,” whatever buzzword sells best and then when reality hits, you pivot to another story. “Market volatility,” “FX headwinds,” “favorable credit from prior years.” You fill the gap between fiction and actuals with better fiction.

There’s something deeply broken about needing a 14-slide deck to say something nobody reads. Something absurd about spending 12 hours a day sending emails and call it a career. Something soul-killing about logging in just to stay part of the theater. The act. I used to think burnout was about doing too much. Now I know it’s also about doing too much of what doesn’t matter. Now the act has become exhausting. I used to rehearse being impressive polished, prepared, always on. Now I rehearse staying neutral, just trying not to look visibly dead inside the teams call. I keep my tone measured, sprinkle in the occasional “super helpful” or “great call,” while ChatGTP takes notes. I smile, nod, pretend. But the belief is gone. The mask is slipping, and underneath it is someone who’s not just tired, but soul-level exhausted. Someone who doesn’t care. I log in to do my job and not an inch more… and log out.

I used to think I could fix it. That if I just adjusted the knobs; woke up earlier, meditated more, took magnesium, set better boundaries, bought the right planner, I could make it sustainable. I thought burnout was a personal failure. A signal that I needed to try harder, get stronger, be more resilient. That I needed to manage my anxiety and emotions better. So I optimized. I journaled. I went to therapy. I made gratitude lists. I lifted weights at 6AM. I tracked my cycle, my screen time, my mood. I took anxiety walks. I drank green powders. I read books. I bought candles.

And still - I woke up exhausted. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough. But because the very thing I was trying to survive was the thing draining me.

Now, even in this bone-deep exhaustion, I know I don’t want to bounce back. I don’t want to recover just so I can return to pretending. I’m done trying to become better at managing what was never meant to be sustainable. I don’t want to fake enthusiasm. I don’t want to optimize my coping mechanisms just to survive another calendar quarter. I don’t want to be more efficient at enduring something that is slowly sucking the living soul out of me

And yet—I still took a deep breathe and logged in today. Still answered emails. Still sat through meetings with a fake smile. But something in me is shifting. I can feel the break coming. The day I’ll snap. The day I’ll close the laptop and just… not come back. The day I burn the whole thing down and finally choose myself. It’s scary. That day isn’t today. Not because I don’t want it—God, I do—but because I’m too tired to plan the escape. Too worn out to map the exit. So I wait. Floating somewhere between burnout and rebellion. Knowing I can’t do this much longer. And knowing that when the moment comes, I won’t hesitate.

Not because I’m ready.
But because I’m done.

I'm getting sterilized today for no other reason than simply that I don't want to have children. “Oh, but you will never know how real love feels like unless you've experienced mother's love”. That's probably the most common sentence I've heard among; “just wait, you'll change your mind. “ Or “just wait, you'll regret it one day.” When someone who's a mother says this to me, it feels very degrading, rather than some kind of wisdom they obtained by pushing a human being out of their Vay-Jay. When someone tries to tell me I can't live a full and meaningful life without choosing what they chose, it feels a little that you're trying to convince yourself rather than me. I'll never know what I'm missing out, because I literally don't know what I will be missing. I will never experience that, because that is my choice. And there's no amount of convincing that you can do to make me miss it, because you simply can't miss what you don't know. You can’t regret something you never wanted in the first place.

The Love will show up differently in my life,. In deep friendships, in the family I choose rather than raise, in the freedom of fully get to know this version of myself and love only myself. I know it sounds selfish, but it really isn't. Isn't that the highest form of love? I could almost argue that's one of the hardest journeys we all have to take. Loving ourselves fully, I mean. Just as we are. And I'm a cat mom. As far as I'm concerned, I birthed those two, and I would do anything to keep them safe..

Maybe we are not all meant to mother in the same way. Some of us birthed books, art, ideas, companies, communities, versions of ourselves that never got to exist. And I don't think that means we are missing out on anything. It just means we are creating love differently. I think it's just different choices. Same depth of life. Not having children don't take the capacity away to love and feel loved. To struggle, to feel joy. Our path may look different, but I think it's still the same complexity of life.

Some of us maybe needed to mother ourselves first. To learn how to hold space for all the parts of ourselves. Not because we were broken, But because no one else could do this part for us. Because becoming who we are is a kind of motherhood too.
The kind that doesn’t always involve children, but still requires patience, protection, and love. And not to fix ourselves, but to meet every version of us with compassion.
And sometimes, that’s the longest, most important motherhood we’ll ever do.

If you are a mother, you have my highest respect. But motherhood doesn't make a life more meaningful, neither does avoiding it. So today, I woke up with that. A choice to protect the life I built from something that was never meant to be in it.

Every choice comes with a trade-off. No path gives you everything. But we don't need everything. The goal isn't to live a life everyone else understands. It's to live a life that feels right for you.

Because at the end, you're the only person who has to live it.

So you decide to do your own little Eat, Pray, Love trip.

Not the instagrammable one, the real one. Because you’re lost. Not in the dramatic, movie-trailer kind of way. Just in the way where you wake up one day and realize —is this it? There is something that no-one shows on their highlight reels about their solo travels. That it’s not always a cleanse or a breakthrough. That it feels like unpacking a suitcase you didn’t know you were carrying — full of expectations, doubts, and clothes that don’t quite fit anymore. That you don’t always come back transformed. Sometimes you just come back knowing the difference between being alone and being with yourself—and that is way harder than it sounds.

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the filler scenes of your own life, while everyone else is starring in their highlight reels? Like the universe handed you a script with no third act and said, "Figure it out." Some days you wake up determined to get it together. Maybe today will finally be the day you feel like a grown-up. And the next, you're standing in the shampoo aisle holding back tears, wondering if you're having a breakdown or just need more iron.

Everyone else seems to be doing it right. They’re thriving, glowing, renovating kitchens, and talking about mortgage rates over dinners. Meanwhile, you’re scrolling through the 300 open browser tabs of things you want to do in your life—but never actually have the guts to actually do. And there you are, waking up to the dreaded sound of your alarm every Monday morning. That is your life.

You’re in a job you hate. Not because you were reckless—the opposite. Because when you were 16, you were expected to know what you wanted to do with your life. At 16, when you weren’t allowed to do anything grown-upsy, but somehow were expected to know your entire future while learning how tampons work and simultaneously surviving high school bullying and underlying depression. So you pick something and pray you got it right because the weight of that decision feels like a life sentence. At 16. Talk about how early the pressure starts. So you pick something safe—not the childhood dream. Nothing creative, because gosh, being a writer is not a job, it’s not stable, let me correct, financially stable, and doesn't come with a 401k. And here you are, 20 years later, on a path that felt solid, respectable, and mildly soul-crushing. A life that looks good on paper but feels like cardboard.

So you buy the ticket. Isn't that what they always say? "Life is too short not to buy the ticket." So you buy one. You expect to find something there. Answers. Clarity. Yourself, maybe. Or at the very least, a really good story.

We love the fantasy of the solo trip. It’s marketed as this glamorous, soul-reviving experience. The idea that you’ll fly somewhere far away, somewhere Instagrammable, and by day three, you’ll be barefoot and journaling on a rooftop at sunset, drinking green smoothies and brimming with certainty about who you are and what your life purpose is. You’re supposed to have an awakening over herbal tea, cry once (tastefully) in a hammock, and leave with a tattoo in Sanskrit that means inner peace.

I don't know. Maybe I missed the memo to inner peace, because that’s never how it’s happened for me. And here’s the part no one puts in the travel guides: The truth about solo trips doesn’t fit into a cute caption.

It’s sitting at a table for one in a city where no one knows your name, pretending to be fascinated by the texture of your napkin because you don't know what else to do with your hands. It’s feeling brave and independent one minute—then wildly insecure and awkward the next. There are moments you’re sitting at a restaurant and the waiter asks, "Just one?"—and it somehow feels like an existential question. You watch couples taking sunset selfies. And there you are… eating grilled vegetables while trying to look mysterious, but really just Googling "how to change your life without burning it all down." Even the strongest sense of self can feel wobbly next to a wine glass and the sound of your own chewing.

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I’ve done a few of these solo trips before. The first one always feels like freedom. You bump into exotic strangers, make a few questionable decisions that empower you, buy clothes in prints you’d never wear at home and call it reinvention. It’s chaotic and exciting—filled with late-night conversations, exotic cocktails, and fleeting romances you swear are life-altering. You post it all to your highlights with #livingmybestlife… and honestly, you are. But then you come home. With a suitcase full of souvenirs you never use, clothes that don’t make sense in your real life, and this weird sadness in your chest when you scroll through the photos—because somehow, you miss the version of you that danced barefoot on a beach in Thailand. And you wonder what happened to her.

The second trip? That’s the one you book chasing that same feeling—freedom, wild stories, the kind of magic you swore you could recreate. The romance, too. Because nothing in your real life has felt as alive since that night you slow-danced with someone who didn’t speak your language but somehow still understood you better than your last situationship. You try to do it all again: the spontaneous plans, the late nights, the “new you” moments. But something’s off. The clothes don’t feel as bold. The conversations don’t hit the same. The flirting feels forced, like you’re trying to imitate someone who no longer fits. And then one afternoon, you find yourself standing in front of some grand monument in a beautiful city— alone. Couples pass you, laughing, documenting their joy with selfie sticks while you’re posing alone with yours.

And you just… stand there.

Lost. Not in translation, but in yourself.

And it’s uncomfortable. And you’re not good with uncomfortable. This feels like failure. And after that you decide solo traveling just isn't for you.

Then there are these trips you book because you are so lost and exhausted in your own life that you have to buy the ticket, take action, do something—because if you don't, you’re afraid you might just disappear inside the life you’ve built.

No one tells you that the first step to "finding yourself" might just be sitting through the discomfort of your own company—without a performance, without a plan, and without pretending it feels profound. And I can tell you—it is uncomfortable and it doesn't feel profound at all. There are moments you feel even more like a failure than before the trip, regretting the money you paid just to feel more lost. And the tasteful cry in a hammock before rediscovering yourself? That, in reality, is ugly crying alone in your dark hotel room through sunset, questioning all your life decisions that led you there. No big revelation. Just you, your puffy eyes trying to be brave and a very dramatic inner monologue about whether you made a huge mistake.

But here’s what I’ve learned. That feeling of mistake and failure, that is where the unraveling begins.

Where you are lost with yourself. Alone and uncomfortable. In the slow afternoons with no plans kind of bored with your own company but exhausted to try to make friends or flirt with strangers. In the walk you take because you have nothing else to do—no work, no emails, no urgency to fill the uncomfortable gaps. So you walk. A lot. With no destination. No other purpose than maybe finding new exotic snacks. And there are moments you realize you’ve been staring at a tiled wall for ten minutes, and somehow... it's not uncomfortable. It felt kind of nice. Even if no one else saw it. No one saw that you saw it.

The quiet holds up a mirror—not the flattering kind with good lighting. Not the one that cares about your skincare routine or how many unread self-help books you packed and promotions you have in your back pocket. But the kind that shows you what you’ve been avoiding. You.

Suddenly, you're faced with the fact that you don’t actually know how to just… be with you. Not productive. Not impressive. Not creating content pretending you are living your best life. You are not performing some subtle version of “I’m totally fine.” Just… you.

The kind of moments where you’re sitting alone in a café, and realize you haven’t checked your phone in 45 minutes—not because you made a conscious choice to be present, but because, for once, you forgot to escape yourself. The kind of walk where your shoulders finally drop, and you can take a breath. Not the kind of breath that needs an emotional support playlist. Just… breathe. Simple. Yours.

I didn't post anything. I took pictures no one saw. I wore gorgeous holiday outfits no one got to admire—just me, feeling really cute even if no one liked it or asked where it was from. I danced with strangers awkwardly, arms too loose, steps totally off-beat with zero intention to be sexy and mysterious. And it didn’t feel embarrassing. No one cared. And for the first time in a long time, neither did I. I ate food—so much food—that I didn't take a picture of. I spent an afternoon cooking in someone else’s home, learning recipes passed down through generations—not downloaded from YouTube, not part of some curated experience. Just stories from the time when people still passed them face to face, the old way, without screens.

These trips? You return home just as you. You didn't buy clothes that made you feel like a different person, or souvenirs to prove you traveled. It didn't feel profound or monumental. But you don't feel like you failed. This is how a successful solo trip is supposed to feel. Real.

So my advice: buy the ticket. Buy as many solo trips as you need—the questionable one, the quiet one, the trips you post to your highlight reels, and the ones that make you feel awkward and alone—even sad at moments. You didn't fail. This is exactly how it is supposed to feel to sit with yourself. And that is the good thing.

That’s what this chapter is about. Not the dramatic unraveling, the eat-pray-ugly-cry moment. But the quiet kind. The subtle undoing of everything you thought you had to be. The discomfort of being with yourself, without the buffer of busyness or someone else’s opinion of who you are. It’s the kind of clarity that sneaks in when you’ve finally sat still long enough to hear your own voice—without the noise, without the roles, without applause for how "well" you’re doing…or pretending

Unraveling isn’t pretty. But it’s necessary. Because before anything can come together, you have to let it fall apart a little—the plans, the pressure, the polished image—before you can even begin to see what’s underneath.

It isn’t glamorous. It’s not a montage. It’s you, realizing the version of yourself you’ve been performing is… exhausted but there haven’t yet been any awakenings yet over a green smoothie and a new morning routine.

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is sit with the version of you that isn’t polished or profound but just painfully, uncomfortably, awkwardly and beautifully you.

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Even at the age of 39, even when you're child-free by choice, you're still not trusted to make decisions about your own body. Apparently, certainty isn't a medical reason. Unless you're a man, of course.

I went off the pill recently, after 26 years of hormonal autopilot. I wanted to meet the real me, and weirdly, I kinda like her. She's intense, moody, absolutely not what you'd call low maintenance, but for the first time in a long time, I felt almost happy. Not the loud kind of happy. No fireworks. Just a steadiness I hadn't felt in years. Like my nervous system finally took its shoes off and laid back.

So we've been pretty good lately, apart from the minor detail of reuniting with my uterus, which now insists on making her presence known like a diva who's just discovered her stage lights. Which I'm not a big fan of. Not at all. My entire life, my hormones have kept my body stable. No bloating. No ups and downs. But my mood? That's been stably unstable my entire life. A familiar kind of chaos, like monthly storms, surprise heatwaves, and the occasional emotional tornado—crying in the kitchen because you forgot to buy milk and now your latte and your life are falling apart in slow motion in front of your eyes.

I also stopped taking my ADHD medication. I was on it for a year. It helped. Technically. I could focus, push forward, tick the boxes. But I missed the chaos. My happy chaos. And I do think they made me depressed—probably because I was able to work so much. But they also smoothed out the very edges that made me feel alive, and that made me feel me. I got functionally joyless, and I'd rather be a dysfunctional, joyful mess.

Lately, I've started to wonder—maybe we're not always supposed to be pushing forward. Maybe life isn't about optimizing every minute, squeezing meaning out of every hour, or turning healing into a checklist. Maybe it's about presence, even when it's messy. And I got tired of performing functionality. Tired of holding it all together just to prove I can. Some days, the bravest thing you can do is take off the mask and let it all fall apart. On purpose. Because maybe the real work isn't faking it till you make it. Maybe it's about feeling it till you heal it.

The thing is, neurodivergent minds aren't broken. We're just not built for cubicles and rigid schedules and pretending we don't feel everything all at once. We don't need fixing. We need a world that stops mistaking difference for dysfunction.

No one warned me that coming off birth control would feel like being born again—but with cramps and existential dread. Though I'm not mad about the increased sex drive. Now I just need to find someone to have sex with. But it feels like I'm hosting a different version of myself every few hours. One cries over a cat litter commercial. Another one gives flawless presentations like she just didn't bleed through her pants. I don't know which one is the real me. Maybe both of them.

So here I am, unmedicated, unfiltered, slightly unhinged, and really more at home in my own skin than ever. Except I really don't want to get pregnant. Ever again.

There's something about heading to a place where you have to argue for the rights to make decisions for your own body that just sets the tone for the week, don't you think? Today's agenda: discuss options. Though we both know that that word is a bit stretched in today's world. "Options" implies possibility. Autonomy. In reality, this is more like a menu where everything I want is out of stock unless I'm actively dying. And even then, they'll need to check with the committee.

As if managing a life and a body and a job while bleeding through both isn't hard enough.

It's wild, isn't it? How many times a woman has to say, "I don't want to have children," before it's heard as a full sentence—not a detour on the road to inevitable motherhood. I've known since I was a kid I didn't want kids. Other girls played house. I played the dad. And this was still when my dad was around, so don't come at me about my daddy issues. Though, I'm not denying.

I played the banker, obsessed with money, or a woman who lived alone in a New York apartment with excellent lighting and no one asking her to split the dessert or make room for someone else's dreams.

I've had an abortion three years ago, at the age of 36. I don't think about it often, but I do think about what it meant, that I knew myself. That's what no one talks about. The peace of a decision made with clarity, not regret. Not with shame. Not with an apology. Not with a performance of emotional collapse to make everyone else more comfortable.

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Because when a woman makes a choice, especially one that doesn't follow the script. She is expected to flinch, to cry, to say it was hard but necessary, to assure the world that she's agonized. God forbid you simply knew. God forbid it felt like a relief.

But I didn't flinch. I didn't doubt. I always knew what I wanted, and I still do. And that kind of certainty, when it lives in a woman, tends to make people nervous. We are taught not to trust women who don't second-guess themselves. We are taught to watch them, question them, wait for the regret to show up like a plot twist.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I want more than every woman who wants to be a mother to be one. But I also want every woman who doesn't to be trusted when she says no without having to offer her trauma as proof.

I don't want to spend the rest of my life second-guessing late periods, or quietly panicking over what one night might mean, or rushing into the pharmacy every time I sneeze and pee in my pants. Though, let's be honest, that chapter might be waiting for me sooner than I'd like, considering my mom went to menopause at the age of 45.

But I don't want to keep holding my breath every time something feels off. I want to be sure. I want to live without that question mark hanging over me. Because knowing I don't want children isn't new. What is new is finally wanting to protect the life I built from anything that was never meant to be part of it.

And maybe that's what this all comes down to. Not fear. Not drama. Just the desire to live without the weight of a decision I've already made being handed back to me, over and over again. Like someone's waiting for me to change my mind.

I built the life I chose. A messy, meaningful, hard-earned life. I chose no children. And I'll be damned if I ever wake up one day and find it hijacked by a pregnancy I never wanted. Not because I'm careless. Not because I'm naive. Not because I'm still willing to believe in men. And worse, love.

And that should never be the thing that puts my future at risk.

So I want to be sterilized. My choice would be hysterectomy. But as I mentioned, that's probably out of stock. So at least a tubal ligation.

My gyno is amazing. The only doctor I've ever liked. She's smart. Gentle. Actually listens. She's the one who performed my colposcopy last year, and I didn't feel a thing - opposite to the two million other women who saw me filming the procedure on my TikTok and had a wildly different experience. Which I am so thankful for, women sharing their different experiences. Especially about the hard stuff that no man could possibly understand.

For a moment, I thought I'd won the lottery in gynos. Until I found out that she works in a Catholic hospital. I'm not pissing on your religion. Don't come at me. I didn't even know at first. I'm atheist. So I don't usually check the religious affiliation of buildings. I just assume if they've got speculums and stirrups, they're here for science.

But no. She can't schedule my tubal ligation. Because the institution doesn't believe I should decide. Her hands are tied. Unlike my tubes.

So now I have to find another doctor. The kicker? No matter how informed, how grown, how resolute you are, there's still someone—usually in a lab coat—gently suggesting you might change your mind. As if your "no" is just a placeholder. As if you can't possibly know yourself that well.

Here's the thing. Your hormones aren't the problem. They are part of your rhythm. Your fire. Your feeling. What's exhausting is having to move through a world that doesn't acknowledge any of it. That treats your emotional landscape like a liability instead of a language.

A world that doesn't slow down for your bleeding, your becoming, your breaking, or the choices you made along the way. To have kids. Not to have them. Or through the painful choice that was made for you,

not being able to have them. Through the tears. The full-body waves of feeling everything all at once.

You juggle a job, a social life, a uterus, and some ancient grief passed down by the women who did all this before you, even with fewer choices. It just expects you to keep going.

If men had uteruses, there'd be legislation, not loopholes. Paid leave, not polite refusals. They'd get applause for vasectomies. We get paperwork, as if certainty needs a second opinion. We get protocols designed to make sure we don't trust ourselves too much.

Because this is what being a woman is: holding two truths at once. You're exhausted and unbreakable. You want peace, and still show up ready to fight for it. You're bleeding, breaking, unraveling—and somehow still expected to make dinner.

I didn't get what I came for. Not today. But I asked. I showed up. And I'll keep showing up. Because every time I speak, I leave the door cracked open, just a little, for the next woman behind me.

Because that's what we do.

And maybe, on the days the world forgets our worth, that's the most radical thing we can do.

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For years, I believed that working ahead was to the key to success. If I could just finish this project early, respond to emails faster, anticipate problems before they even existed, then maybe, I would finally be ahead. Maybe I would finally feel in control and be enough.

I became the person who always replied within seconds, who had an inbox at zero before logging off, who prided herself on never missing a deadline. I was efficient. I was reliable. I was drowning.

Because here’s what no one tells you; you will never actually get ahead. You will spend the rest of your life trying to get ahead. It’s like running up an escalator that’s going down. At first, you think if you just move fast enough, you’ll beat it. You’ll rise. You’ll finally reach the top. But no matter how fast you climb, the ground beneath you keeps moving. And the moment you slow down, to take a fucking breath, you feel like you're falling behind.

Then when I would actually finish early. Wrapped up my to-do list before sunset - a rare, almost mythical event. Most people would take that as a sign to relax. To exhale. Maybe even go outside and touch grass. Nope. Not me. I took it as a green light to start working ahead. That project kicking off in two months? I started building decks for it. That internal process no one asked me to touch? I thought, you know what this needs? A full redesign.
My Excel sheets. They were already clean, functional, and doing their job but I decided they could be... prettier. Color-coded. Maybe throw in some conditional formatting for a little extra magic, because why not.

I was Marie Kondo-ing my Excel sheets and alphabetizing folders like I was training for the Productivity Olympics. And the worst part. I genuinely thought this made me impressive. Exceptional. A team player.

In reality, I was just redecorating the hamster wheel.

And if I’m being honest, I think I believed that if I made myself just efficient enough, just indispensable enough, I’d earn my place at the table
A kind of sacred permission slip that said “ you belong” here. But that permission never came. Because when you're always ahead, ahead becomes your new baseline. Your reward for doing more is... more.

So there I was, burning out early for a party no one even RSVP’d to. Working three months ahead like I was being chased by a deadline that didn’t exist feeling I was constantly 3 months behind in my life. Just me, my immaticular Excel Sheets, and the sad glow of screen-induced selfworth. If you’re the person who always jumps first, you will be expected to keep jumping. And the faster you jump, the higher they will make you jump.

At some point, I had to ask myself: Am I actually moving forward, or am I just sprinting on a treadmill, exhausting myself just to stay in the same place?

You’re not getting ahead. You’re just keeping up with a system designed to keep you climbing. And the irony. There is no prize at the top. No parade. No glittering trophy for Most Exhausted Employee. Just another escalator. Another hill. Another to do list full of tasks waiting to replace the ones you just crushed yourself to complete with the expense of rest, free time, dinners with friends…that hobby you always promise to start..next Monday.

At some point, I realized I wasn’t climbing toward anything. I was just stuck in a loop; forever busy, forever trying, forever tired.

So I stopped running. And that’s when I started to rise.

The Anxiety over letting go of the control

The hardest part wasn’t the work itself. It was the control. The unread emails staring at me from my inbox felt like tiny bombs, ticking away, each one a silent accusation that I wasn’t doing enough. If I didn’t reply immediately, what would they think? Would they assume I wasn’t on top of things? Would my boss question my work ethic? I was conditioned to work hard because valuable, good girls work hard and never say “No”. That is how you gain wort in the world right?

I had conditioned myself to believe that being good at my job meant never letting anything sit unanswered, unsolved, undone. I would check my phone at dinner, on weekends, on vacations, because if an email came in and I didn’t respond, the anxiety would consume me. I couldn’t think anything else. I was drafting emails in my head while going to bed, composing responses while brushing my teeth. Gosh while having sex, because apparently my brain thought there was nothing more erotic than circling back on a Q1 deliverables mid sex. That is how important I thought I was when in reality, I was nobody. Not in the self-pitying, shrink-me-down kind of way.
I was a lot of things: a loyal friend, a loving daughter, a mediocre (but improving!) girlfriend.

But in the grand scheme of work.
I was just one name in someone’s inbox. As a manager now, I certainly don’t care if my team members or colleagues don’t reply to me immediately. And for sure I am not thinking about anything remotely even resembling to work in the bedroom.

So why did I spend so many years letting it occupy every corner of my brain like the clingy Ex who wouldn’t take a hint? The answer is simple: I confused urgency with importance. Responsiveness with worth.

The truth. No-one is losing their sleep over the email you didn’t answer so you shouldn’t either.

When I started letting emails sit, it felt unbearable at first. The discomfort of not instantly solving every little request felt like withdrawal from an addiction I hadn’t even realized I had. My brain was wired to crave control, to seek the relief of just getting it done now so I wouldn’t have to worry about it later. Or getting it done because I thought no-one could do it better or they would mess up my color coded excel sheets.

But here’s the thing about control: it’s a lie. No matter how many emails I answered, no matter how much I planned ahead, the work never stopped. Believe me, I have 17 years of experience, and it hasn’t stopped. The only thing I was controlling was my own exhaustion.

It didn’t happen overnight.
There was no grand epiphany, no dramatic “I’m done” moment where I slammed my laptop shut and walked off into a sunset of work-life balance It was slower than that. Quieter. Like the way seasons change; not all at once, but leaf by leaf, degree by degree, until one day you realize you're wearing a coat instead of a T-shirt and breathing a little easier in the colder air.

I was still doing what I’d always done; racing the invisible clock, replying to emails like my inbox was on fire, trying to prove, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that I was on top of everything. I was still the one who showed up early, stayed late, picked up the slack, preemptively solved problems before anyone else even noticed them.

But slowly, over time, I started to play with fire.
Maybe I was getting older.
Maybe wiser.
Or maybe I was just tired.
Tired of constantly chasing a finish line that kept moving.
Tired of trying to reach the top, only to realize there was no marching band waiting for me up there.

No confetti.
No banner that read, “You did it! You can relax now.”
Just more stairs.

So I tested the system.
I left an email until the morning.
I didn’t start that project two months in advance just one week. I arrived at the office 8.15, 8.45 …..9.30

And you know what happened? NOTHING! Absolutely nothing happened. No deadline was missed, no task was left un-done, no-one noticed. Except me. I noticed.

The Art of saying “NO”

This was also when I learned that saying “No” is a skill. No one teaches you how to say no. No one pulls you aside in your career and tells you that setting boundaries is just as important as meeting deadlines. No one tells you that every time you say “yes” to something, you are saying “no” to something else; your time, your energy, your peace of mind.

And at first, saying no felt foreign. Uncomfortable. Like I was breaking a rule I had silently agreed to years ago. But start small. Leave a few unread emails in the evening and answer them in the morning. Let the receive-reply extend little by little, pushing your own unattainable, perfectionist; Must-reply-in-0.2-seconds instinct. Chronic “I’ll just handle it” syndrome. Gold medalist in the “Being available at all times” Physically incapable of leaving a message on read without an existential crisis - standards.

Slowly rewiring your brain from: “I must be the most reliable person alive” To “I will respond when it fits my schedule, not my guilt’s. From “I need to respond in 5 minutes” To “It’s been 5 hours, and the world hasn’t ended” Eventually mastering “Not everything needs an immediate response - especially not at my expense” That is what I call character development

No more silent “Pick me, pick me, pick me.” energy
Instead, just... sit back. Let the silence stretch. Let someone else step in.

I wasn’t disappearing, I was just disentangling my worth from my willingness to overextend. I began to conserve my energy like it was something precious, because it is. I stopped treating every meeting like an audition. I stopped trying to prove I deserved to be in the room. Because at some point, I realized: I was already in the room! And I could take up space in it without performing or actually doing nothing more. Letting go didn’t make me less ambitious, but more like someone who knows the value of a full tank, and finally stopped driving on empty just to get somewhere faster.

I wasn’t doing less.
I was just no longer doing everything and immediately.

And in that shift, I found something that years of striving never gave me:
Not a promotion.
Not applause.
But peace.

And like any skill, the more I practiced it, the easier it became.

"No, I won’t be able to take that on this week."
"No, I can’t stay late tonight."
"No, I won’t be available over the weekend." “No I’m not going to take on a new responsibility without compensation”

And here’s what I realized: when you start saying no, people adjust. No one fought me on it. No one pushed back. In fact, most people didn’t even question it, because boundaries are normal. I was just the one who had spent years pretending they weren’t.

Because the reality is, if you don’t set boundaries, people will set them for you. And their version will always benefit them more than it benefits you.

Being Available Isn’t the Same as Being Valuable

I always took pride in how much I worked. It was the badge or honor I carried like a scar I’d earned in the battlefield of productivity. Late nights, skipped lunches, just quickly checking something during holidays... I wore it all like a flex. We’ve turned being overworked into a weird form of social currency. The culture where the busiest person wins, even if they’re losing their mind.

It’s our personality trait; Who’s sending emails the latest. Who’s online the earliest.
Who replies from the airport, the dinner table, the car while picking up your kids from school. We don’t just glorify burnout - we reward it.
We trade stories of exhaustion like war medals. "You think you’re tired? I haven’t taken a real lunch break in six years and I’m only my 6th coffee today."
"Wow, I was on back-to-back calls until 9 p.m. yesterday."
"That’s cute. I took my laptop to my honeymoon."

But here's the truth:
Being constantly busy doesn’t mean you're important.
It means your boundaries are M.I.A.

Now, I take pride in how much I log off. Because the moment I started closing my laptop at a reasonable hour, or even taking a half day off without asking anybody - because I know I have already worked 20 years a head of this company - my life started to open up. I had the time and, more importantly, the energy—to do more things for myself, not just for work.

Logging off meant I finally had time to go to the gym, to cook a meal that didn’t come out of a takeout bag, to sleep, to snooze, sit in silence and actually think about what I want from my life. To plan for my future, instead of just working for someone else’s.

And here’s the golden realization, the thing I wish I knew when I was younger; Taking time for myself , rest and joy for myself, makes me feel more confident and worthy than any late-night email or powerpoint presentation ever did.

Now, when I see someone sending work emails from their vacation, I don’t feel impressed, I feel sad for them. Because I know exactly what that feels like.
Not dedication, but fear.
Not passion, but pressure.
It’s the quiet panic of trying to prove your value by never being off.
And I’ve lived there. I just stopped renewing my lease.

For years, I thought my value came from being productive, from proving I was the hardest worker in the room. But the more I prioritized myself, the more I realized that worthiness isn’t something I need to earn. I am already enough, whether I answer an email in five minutes or five hours, or honestly, forget the damn thing completely. If it is important enough, they will write again.

Because the truth is: not everything needs an immediate response, especially at my expense.

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The Freedom in Letting Go

If you’re reading this and feeling the pull of the same cycle, the need to always be ahead, to always be doing more, ask yourself:

"What am I actually chasing?"

Because if you don’t stop and question it, you’ll be working ahead until you die and no-one will be tapping you on the shoulder “Good job” You’ll trade your energy, your peace, your life for an illusion of control that never actually arrives.

So… I choose something different now. I choose to work enough.
I choose to let go of the urgency that isn’t real.
I choose to believe that my value is not measured by how much I sacrifice.

And, most of all, I choose to step off the treadmill. To walk. Not to sprint.

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There’s a particular kind of identity crisis that sneaks up on you when you realize you’ve spent your entire life keeping people at arm’s length—not because you don’t care, but because you do. Because caring means expectations, and expectations mean disappointment. And if you never expect anything, you never have to feel that that quiet realization that people, despite their best efforts, will eventually let you down.

I have spent years being independent. Not the I don’t need a man to pay my rent kind (though, respect), but the kind where no one is ever close enough to disappoint me. The kind where I can shrug and say, Well, I never really expected much anyway, because the truth is, I didn’t. Friends, boyfriends, family—I kept a respectable emotional buffer between us. Close enough to be warm, but not close enough to require anything of me.

It is a system. A neat, tidy, well-oiled machine. A life where you never have to feel like someone’s emotional support animal, where you never have to pretend to be okay with something just because someone else needed you to be. Where you could ghost out of a room without anyone noticing, because you made sure you were never the main event to begin with - more like the background music at a coffee shop, pleasant enough to be there but never loud enough for anyone to really pay attention

And you were good at it. Not in an obvious way—no one called you cold. You could be fun, charming even. You know exactly how to give people just enough to keep things light. Casual. You are the queen of casual. Casual friendships, casual dating, casual responses to big, heartfelt confessions (Wow, that sounds tough). You mastered the art of being present without ever really being there. Because the thing is, you can’t be disappointed by people who were never given the chance to show up.

Hyper-independence isn’t something you are born with. You don’t wake up one day and decide, You know what? I’ll be a one-woman show. We are made this way. It’s built brick by brick, moment by moment, in all the ways you were shown that relying on people is dangerous. We are custom to be let down by people who are supposed to love us the most. Maybe your parents weren’t there—maybe they were addicts, maybe they were absent, maybe they were too consumed by their own problems to notice you were drowning in yours. Maybe they were there, but in the wrong way. Too sharp, too cruel, too conditional with their love. Maybe they were too far away. Or maybe they left for good, one way or another, and you learned early that people go, whether they mean to or not.

So you did what anyone would do. You adapted.

You figured out things alone, even when it would have been easier to ask for help. You became capable, because capable meant safe. Capable meant no one could pull the rug out from under you because you never stood on one in the first place.

It wasn’t just about survival—it became who you were. The friend who didn’t need anything. The girlfriend who never asked for too much. The woman who took pride in handling it all alone, and making it look effortless. You were the walking embodiment of don’t worry about me, I got it. You wore it like a badge of honor.

Because anything deeper meant danger. Deep meant expectations. Deep meant someone might actually see you. Deep meant stepping outside the version of myself that was easy - easy to admire, easy to be around, easy to leave. As long as I kept things surface-level, I could slip away just as effortlessly as I arrived, never tethered, never trapped. Deep meant letting someone get close enough to see the parts I didn’t have polished answers for - the contradictions, the quiet fears, the pieces of me I wasn’t sure anyone would choose if they really knew them. Damn, I’m not sure if I would even choose me. Deep meant being seen, really seen. And if someone saw me, they could decide I wasn’t enough. So I never stayed long enough to find out.

Because love, real love, requires a level of vulnerability that hyper-independent women are deeply allergic to. We don’t need you. We want you, sure, but need? Absolutely not. If you give us an excuse to leave, we will, because nothing is more comforting than knowing we don’t have to rely on anyone but ourselves. And the second you start making things complicated, we remove ourselves. We are not going to sit around waiting for you to get your shit together. Which, to be fair, has been an excellent screening system—no weak excuses, no half-ass efforts, no emotionally unavailable men popping back up like a bad sequel nobody asked for.

And asking for help? That’s like playing Russian Roulette with a loaded gun - risk too high, payout too low. Hyper-independent women don’t ask for help. Not with the light bulb, not with moving furniture, not even when our world is crashing down. We are fine. We got this. We will hold it together through grief, heartbreak, and breakdowns, convincing everyone - including ourselves - that we are fine. You know how some people ask for help when they start to struggle? We wait until we’re drowning - until the weight of everything - stress, exhaustion, loneliness - has pulled us under. And even then, we’ll convince ourselves we can hold our breath just a little longer rather than reaching for a hand. Yep, that’s us.

The truth? We’re exhausted. We’re tired of holding up the weight of our world, of everyone assuming we’re fine because we always look fine. But when you’ve grown up believing that people will inevitably let you down, self-reliance isn’t just a preference—it’s a survival tactic.

We require a special kind of love. One where help is given without being asked for. Because asking? That’s a language we do not know. That’s like skydiving without a parachute—we might survive, but the risk is simply too high. Don’t ask if we need the garbage taken out, just do it. Don’t ask if we need dinner, just bring it. Don’t ask if we need anything because we don’t, even when we are 2 minutes away from a level 10 breakdown. Because if you ask, we will say Don’t worry about. I got it. And we will mean it, even when we don’t. And then we will - got it.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped considering any other way of living. Not consciously. Not with defiance. Just… gradually. The way water carves a path through rock - not in a single, dramatic moment, but over time, through a thousand quiet choices, “ I’m fines” that shaped everything.

I built a life designed for one. Not out of bitterness, not because I don’t believe in love, quite the opposite, but because self-sufficiency became a default setting. The kind of self-sufficiency that isn’t just a personality trait—It’s woven into the bones of who I am. And I don’t truly think there is anything wrong with that—nothing wrong with who you are, no matter how you are. We are all the sum of the chapters before us, stitched together by the moments that shaped us, the lessons we had no choice but to learn. I guess it’s just that when you get older, you start to wonder not just how you became this way, but whether it’s still the way you want to be. Whether the armor that once protected you is now just keeping you apart. Whether survival mode is still necessary, or if it’s just become a habit that’s hard to break. I feel quitting smoking after 20 years felt easier than admitting that I, me and my significant self, would need anyone.

I don’t think I ever made the decision to do life alone. I just kept handling life, solving problems, managing the shit life throughs at us all, until the thought of letting someone else take a piece of the load felt more unnatural than the weight of carrying it all myself.

And so, here I am. Entirely capable. Completely independent. And totally honest - exhausted.

It’s not that I don’t have people. I have friendships, connections, a life that looks full on the surface. But when you’re the one who’s always fine, always put together, something happens beneath the surface. You realize that while you’ve spent years making sure you never needed anyone, you’ve also made it easy for no one to need you in the same way.

There are benefits. Oh so many comforting benefits. No one to compromise with. No one to mess up your space. No one to take up the blankets or leave dishes in the sink. But the other side of that coin is just as real—no one to lean against, no one to pick up the small pieces of your day, no one whose voice fills the quiet without requiring effort. And that’s the thing—being alone is effortless. It’s easy, predictable, soothing in a way that being around people rarely is. Mostly I feel people are annoying. I love my people but most people…I chose my cats over people 99% of the time. I love that part in my solitude. I thrive in that part. But sometimes, I wonder if I’ve made it so easy to be alone that I’ve forgotten how to be anything else

And It’s not just about romantic love, though sometimes that absence feels like the missing puzzle piece that was never included in the box to begin with. It’s about all the spaces in between—the dinners eaten in comfortable solitude, the decisions made without a second opinion, the small, everyday moments where another presence would feel both foreign and, maybe, quietly necessary when you are spiraling into bottomless bucket of shit. Like all the decorative pillows I own—technically unnecessary, never actually used, but somehow, once they’re there, the space just feels more like home.

I’ve been running a one-woman operation for so long that letting someone in now feels like hiring an intern for a job I’ve perfected. I already know the system. I don’t need a second opinion on my dinner choices, my furniture placement, or the best way to fold my towels (which is obviously the correct way). How would someone else fit into this life I’ve built so carefully, every inch of it molded around just me? My days move in rhythms I’ve perfected, routines crafted with precision—silent, predictable, entirely my own.

Maybe, after all this time, It’s not about proving you can do it alone. Maybe you just have to admit that you don’t always want to. But saying that out loud? That feels like walking straight into a free fall without a parachute. Absolutely terrifying.

The silence lingers for a moment before my therapist tilts her head slightly, the way she always does right before dropping a question I won’t have an answer for.

“And what happens if you let someone catch you?”

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A space for the moments that shape us — the dreams we chase, the lessons we learn the hard way, and the versions of ourselves we leave behind —where apparently, "winging it" is just another term for personal growth

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There comes a time in every woman’s life when she realizes she is the only one who can truly save herself. Not in the poetic, romanticized way that self-help books or social media posts make it seem, but in the weight of the moments no one else is there to witness. It’s not about independence as an aesthetic, or resilience as a badge of honor—it’s about the undeniable reality that no one else is coming to figure it out for You. No one is coming to save You.

We grow up with a thousand narratives about what it means to be a woman. That we should be kind but not too soft, ambitious but not intimidating, loving but never needy. That we should find love, but not lose ourselves in it. That we should chase dreams, but also be practical. That we should be everything, but never too much of anything.

And yet, when we strip all of that away, what is left. Who are we when we stop performing the version of womanhood we were taught the time we enter the world?  When we let go of the pressure to have a perfect five-year plan. When we stop measuring our worth by timelines, relationships, and the idea that we should have it all sorted by now and make it all look effortless.

We don’t wake up one day with all the answers. We find them in the pieces we pick up along the way—in the things that break us, in the things that heal us, in the quiet moments where we realize we are not the same woman we were before. Not lost, not behind, just becoming.

I don’t know much and I am on the same journey as we all are, but what I do know; A woman standing in her truth - even if it’s messy, even if it’s unfinished - just being A Woman is a powerful thing. And when we remind each other that we are allowed to take our time, that we are allowed to be both soft and strong, unsure and unstoppable—that’s when we rise.

At the end of the day, before anything else, you are a woman first. A person navigating desire, identity, and self-acceptance on your own terms. Maybe that means choosing a life that doesn’t revolve around marriage or motherhood. Maybe it does include all of that. Maybe it means saying yes to things that once felt off-limits. Maybe it means finally trusting yourself enough to live—fully, unapologetically, without the weight of anyone else’s expectations. Because the only thing a woman truly should ever be is who and what she ever the hell she wants.

Before we are taught to be women, we are taught to be everything else. We are taught to be Daughters —to be the good girl, obedient, well-mannered. We are taught to be caregivers, nurturers, always looking out for others. Good students, employees, teachers, mothers, wives. We are taught to be givers. We are taught to make room for everyone else before we are ever told to make space for ourselves.

And somewhere between all the roles society gave us, we are taught that our bodies belong to the world before they belong to us. That they are things to be protected, covered, disciplined. That our sexuality is something to manage, not something to explore. That desire is dangerous, that pleasure is secondary, that a good woman don’t ask for too much.

For men, sexuality is a given. It is expected, assumed, normalized. For women, it is something to be unlocked only under the right circumstances. In love, in commitment, in moderation. Not too much, not too loud, not too soon. Because a woman who knows her body, who seeks her pleasure, who owns her desire? She is disruptive. She is harder to control. We are taught to compromise before we are taught to come.

But the truth is, we deserve the same freedom. To explore. To make mistakes. To learn what we like, what we don’t, what makes us feel at home in our own skin. To learn what sets our soul on fire. To understand that pleasure is not a reward, not a thing to be earned through good behavior or the right relationship—it is ours by birthright. Our sexuality is not something to be controlled, tamed, or silenced—it is our power. Our divine director. Our inner GPS. It is not something shameful or dirty or something to “give away” when we find the right person. When we find the right man.

It is ours.

It belongs to us.

And yet, so many women go years—sometimes lifetimes—without ever fully claiming it. Without ever asking what they want, what they enjoy, what it even means to feel at home in their own bodies—because they were never taught that their pleasure, their desires, their needs were just as important as anyone else’s. Because they were told to be desirable, not desiring. Because the world made them believe that wanting, choosing, and owning themselves was something to be earned, not something they were born with.

Some of us learn that through love, through patience, through the right hands at the right time. —some find it through mistakes that sting, choices that haunt, moments that make us question everything we thought we knew. But what if there is no wrong? What if this, too, is just part of the unfolding the layers of becoming You.

A woman who trusts her body, who listens to it’s hunger, who does not shrink herself for the comfort of others—she is not dangerous. She is not reckless. She is not a problem to be solved.

She is simply free.

And when a woman is free—free to choose, free to want, free to exist on her own terms—she becomes something even more powerful than society ever prepared her to be.

She becomes herself.

And so should you.

Go out there and take up space—the kind you don’t need to earn, the kind that was always yours. Say Yes to what sets your soul on fire, and say No even louder to what dims it. Love yourself in the way you were told to love others - unconditionally, without hesitation. Let your desires be loud, your boundaries be firm, and your choices be entirely your own.

Happy Women’s Day to all the amazing, unique, beautiful, unstoppable, and completely unapologetic women out there. The world is better because you exist, exactly as You are.

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Thank you for being here - this space is yours as much as it is mine

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Share this with every Woman who needs to remember she was never meant to shrink.

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She walks in. A little late, she more than I was, full of dreams, wearing a little too much eyeliner and a heart too open. She’s hopeful, a little naive, but oh—she’s got fire in her.

She sits across from me, eyes wide, scanning for clues about the future. “So… did we make it?” she asks, fingers wrapped around her coffee cup.

I smile, because what do I even tell her?

That she will push herself to the limits, trying to fit into a world that drains her— to be the version of herself that is easiest to digest. That she will sit in endless rooms where she feels she doesn’t below, bite her tongue when she wants to scream, nod along when she wants to walk away. That she will pour every ounce of herself into a job that will never love her back.

Do I tell her that some nights, she will cry into her pillow so heartbreakingly ... exhausted, of doing it all alone. That she will wake up in a job she hates— wondering if the title, the paycheck, the endless meetings were ever meant to fill the emptiness she feels creeping in.

Do I tell her that she will reach every milestone she once thought would bring her happiness and make her feel enough. The miles stones she will work so hard that they almost break her — only to feel nothing?

Or do I tell her the real truth?

That she is stronger than she ever thinks she is. That she will outgrow places, people, and even parts of herself, and it will hurt but she will survive it.

I want to tell her she will break herself into pieces just to find herself whole. I want to give her a hug, because she will get through that too.

I could tell her all of that but I don't tell her any of it, because if I would, she would lose the fire in her eyes and I know that is the only thing that will get her through it

She stirs her coffee, waiting. “Do we ever stop over thinking everything?”

I smile, exhaling softly. “we are getting there.”

She grins. “Good. I always knew we would.” And just like that, she finishes her coffee, tucks her dreams back into her pocket, and walks away

I watch her go —steady, fearless, not yet aware of how much she will have to break to rebuild.. She doesn’t yet know that some of those dreams will take longer than she expects. That some will change. That some will break her heart before they ever come true.

She doesn’t know how many versions of herself she will have to let go of. She doesn’t know that life won’t always feel like it’s moving forward—sometimes, it will feel like standing still. Like watching her own train pull away, wondering if she was ever meant to be on it in the first place

She doesn’t know about the quiet victories—the moments she will look in the mirror and finally feel at home in herself. The way she will learn to protect her energy, to set boundaries without guilt, to trust her intuition even when it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. And one day, she will look back and realize that the shame she once carried was never a reflection of who she was, but of what the world taught her to believe

She doesn’t know that happiness won’t come from “having it all figured out,” but from learning to be at peace with the uncertainty.

And maybe I don’t have all the answers yet.

But I do know this:

She’s going to be okay.

And so am I.

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I’ve always been a deep thinker, an introvert to my core, equal parts dreamer and an over thinker. A little delusional in the best way—believing I can be anything and everything—while simultaneously spiraling into a bottomless bucket of self-doubt, just like every other woman trying to figure out her purpose. Figuring out life’s purpose isn’t exactly a one-and-done situation—if anything, it feels like an endless game of trial and error. And honestly, I’ve changed directions so many times, I might as well list “professional pivoter” on my résumé. My therapist might call this running from my own internal chaos, but I like to mask it as refusing to settle for a life that doesn’t fit. One day, I think I have it all mapped out, and the next, I’m questioning everything over a 4th Diet code ( Hi, my name is Janina and I am a diet coke addict). But maybe that’s the point—life isn’t about getting it ‘right’ on the first try, it’s about having the courage to keep rewriting the story until it finally feels like your own

The Search for “Home“

“Home”, a word that has always felt more like a question rather than an answer. I left home at 16 with nothing but a vague idea that life had to be bigger than what I grew around me. Small city that felt like it ate dreams for breakfast. I wasn’t even sure what mine were, but I knew I had to leave before “they”, the dreams that I was still dreaming on finding about one day, got swallowed whole. And since then my story has been one pivot after another. New cities, new countries, new jobs , new identities I tried on like outfits hoping one would finally fit. That if I just kept hustling harder, I’d arrive at a version of a life that felt right. Like my own.

Looking back , I wouldn’t change any of it. All those “wrong turns” and “failed plans” , pit stops and plot twists. Every city that never felt like home. I needed them. Each pivot wasn’t a failure, Even this, as I’m writing this in the midst of a meltdown in a high altitude shoebox, ( a.k.a an airplane toilet on my way visit home ) If you follow my socials, you know I do most of my discoveries and brilliant plot twists sitting on a toilet. Preferably my office toilet so at least I get paid for my existential crisis. ( Hence the pictures of my shoes me sitting in there. (Follow me, if for nothing else than seeing my shoe collection! ) I feel, all these “ moments”, have all been just another layer peeled back, revealing who you actually are beneath all the expectations you put on yourself. The layers of who you thought you had to be.

What I have slowly started to realize ; finding yourself isn’t about becoming more, it’s about becoming less.

Less of who you were told to be.

Less of who you pretended to be.

Less of the version of yourself you thought would finally be “enough”

It’s terrifying and exhausting work. It’s feels like giving birth; There is blood and tears, placenta everywhere and people are screaming and crying happy tears at the same time, But on the other side of it, there is something worth holding onto.

You.

Because that’s the reward right? Not the perfect life, not the clear path, but the quiet understanding that even in the moments when everything feels overwhelming and messy, it is the beautiful process of becoming. There is a blessing in the breaking. You are just moving towards the real version of yourself

I used to think that finding myself meant leaving; always looking forward, always chasing the next chapter. But maybe the real discovery isn’t in the leaving. Maybe it’s in the coming back. Not as the same person, but as someone who has seen more, learned more, become more after every breaking and after every layer peeled back. Maybe home isn’t about cities, countries or places. Maybe it’s about having the courage to stop running and finally sit with who you are.

And maybe, just maybe, that is enough

When you overslept your future

I skipped the traditional path of education , not intentionally, I think. Unintentionally. Or maybe it was my subconscious trying to sabotage me before I even got started. Or maybe it was the undiagnosed ADHD that made me feel like I never quite belonged in a structured group of people. So instead of showing up for the next chapter of my expected life - college - I bet my future on vodka and the dance floor the night before my entrance exams for uni. Solid financial decision making right from the start—a real commitment to my questionable life decisions —I overslept my entrance exams and woke up , not just a hangover, but with the kind of imposter syndrome, never getting that degree, that would follow me for decades. Not that school was ever the place I had felt I belonged. So I made my career, how would I say it? “Interesting.” I figured it out as I went. And I still do. I build my career on Google and Wikipedia. Yes, I’m that old where Youtube was only starting to take over our education and chat GTP most definitely didn’t exist. So I went with traditional trial and error, fueled by fake it till you make it smile, figuring things out as they came. And even though I was never the smartest in the room , you can bet I worked the hardest. But every time I step into a meeting room with people, still after 17 years of faking it and to my credit, making it occasionally, I feel like the one who snuck in through the side door, just waiting someone to notice I don’t belong.

Life so far? Some might call it chaos; I call it an adventure. I’ve always lived as if my life was the greatest movie I’ve ever written. The kind where the main character walks into every scene with the perfect song playing in the background. Overly dramatic. When life has been bad, it’s been the kind of soul-crushing drama that makes you invested in the suffering of the main character. And when it’s good. It’s a feel-good movie you play on repeat, the kind that makes you believe in magic again. The kind of Magic like in Eat, Pray, Love. After traveling through Italy, India, and Bali, Liz finds peace, self-love, and an unexpected romance

And there have been romances, quite many in all transparency. Some out of a Notebook-level romance, others straight out of a Sex and the City plot where you're screaming at the screen, “Girl, please, not him!” And then there have been the undeniably steamy chapters, that would make even Bridgerton’s Duke of Hastings raise an eyebrow. The kind of toe-curling, screaming-his-name kid of moments —some of which would make an excellent R-rated movie. You might have seen some of my Stride of Prides on TikTok or Instagram, because if there’s one thing I’ve mastered, it’s turning my questionable life choices into quality entertainment! There were the thrillers, the plot twists I didn’t see coming, the moments that made me wonder, if I was even in control of the storyline at all. But mostly, throughout the internal drama, chaos and questionable life choices, I’ve tried to treat life as a lighthearted comedy, because honestly, in between the meltdowns, that’s the only way to survive it.

What I have figured out so far on this journey of finding the truest version of myself? Life isn’t about having it all figured out. There is no manual on success or a guide on how to live perfectly. It’s about taking the pen back and writing your own damn story—even if you don’t know how it ends yet. It’s about choosing to believe that every misstep, every wrong turn, and every chaotic chapter has led you to exactly where you need to be, with everything you need in your next chapter. It’s about rewriting the script while still being mid-scene. It’s about realizing that just because the first few acts didn’t go as planned, it doesn’t mean the story can’t take a completely unexpected, brilliant turn.

These little chapters are my way of rewriting my story. It’s like revising my future while trying to understand my past—piecing together the lessons, the missteps, the moments of clarity, and everything in between my multiple office toilet meltdowns and the deep existential debates I have with myself while staring at a half-finished Excel spreadsheet. Between questioning my life choices over desk lunches and giving myself a pep talk in the parking lot just to walk back in. Between moments of I’ve got this confidence and Googling how to quit your job and start over in your 30s

So, here I am, one year away from 40, deciding that maybe the best part of my movie is just about to begin. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself—because otherwise, I’d have to admit that I’ve been winging it my way through the script with no clue what genre I’m in. A coming-of-age story? A slow-burn success tale? A comedy of errors? Who knows. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that I’m not rolling the credits just yet

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After nearly two decades of hustling, moving from city to city, country to country (and occasionally running from my own chaos) My latest midlife crisis? At age of 36, I left the life as I knew it and decided to move continents. Moving from Copenhagen Denmark under the palm trees to Los Angeles to live my hot girl summer 24/7 and chase my dreams. Spoiler, “the dream” you want so badly that it is the only thing that you think will bring you happiness, the feeling you’ve finally “got it”. It can, just saying, it might, become your worst nightmare, while making you discover parts of yourself you never allowed to exist. Which is the flipside of the story.

This journey so far ? Well, I have realized I’m exhausted—not just the I-need-a-nap kind of tired, but the I’ve-been-carrying-the-weight-of-trying-to-have-it-all-together-for-too-damn-long kind of tired. And maybe you are too.

So this is my space to get real about the messy middle—the moments between “I have no idea what I’m doing” and “Okay, maybe I’ve got this.” It’s about the pivots, the breakdowns, the unexpected detours, and the small wins that don’t always make it to Instagram but matter just as much. It’s about finding the courage to admit that sometimes life feels overwhelming, and that’s okay.

Because here’s the thing: no one’s coming to save us. But don’t worry, you were always the main characters anyway.

This isn’t a self-help guide with 10 easy steps to fix your life (trust me, I’ve read those, and if it were that simple, we wouldn’t be here). It’s about sharing the raw, unfiltered stories of figuring it out as we go—navigating careers, personal growth, dating, heartbreak, and those everyday meltdowns we laugh about later. It’s about putting on your big girl pants, not because you have everything figured out, but because you’re willing to show up for yourself every day anyway.

So if you have ever looked at your life and thought, “is this really it?” - you are not alone. It’s easy to feel stuck, hoping that someday between your morning coffee and laundry, thing will finally make sense, But life doesn’t start when you have all the answers. It starts when you decide to pick up the pen and start rewriting your own damn story.

So grab a coffee (or something stronger), pull up a seat, and let’s dive into this beautiful, terrifying, chaotic thing called life together.