Juliana Romano

I didn't plan it. There was no spreadsheet. No exit strategy. No new job lined up, no business ready to launch. There was just my daughter (three months old) and the absolute clarity that I could not go back. Not to that job. Not to that version of my life. Everyone had advice. Just hold on a little longer. Do the minimum. Collect the salary. Buy yourself time. You can't afford to be impulsive right now, you just had a baby. And they weren't wrong, exactly. The rational thing — the smart...

I was the woman who never failed. Not because nothing ever went wrong. But because I had built an identity around not letting it show. Strong. Reliable. Always delivering. The one people could count on. The one who didn't ask for help. The one who kept going. That was me. That was the story I told about myself. And for a long time, it worked. Burnout didn't arrive like a breakdown. It arrived quietly — in the things that slowly stopped mattering. The projects I used to care about. The...

When I moved to the Netherlands for work, I thought I was fine. Good job. New country. New chapter. I had done everything right. What I didn't see (what I couldn't see yet) is that I was living a life someone else had designed for me. Not a villain. Just the slow accumulation of what was expected. What was admired. What counted as success in every room I had ever been in. I had built a career around those things. I had made decisions around those things. I had measured my worth around those...