— —

Surely I’m not the only one noticing the horrific implications of the current beauty trends. Skinny is back, and this time it feels almost scarier than it did in the early 2000s. Somehow, the women spotted on the red carpets today are even smaller than they were at the height of heroin chic, their waist slimmer than ever, their cheeks hollower and narrower. You can’t scroll through social media without noticing the hordes of young women talking openly about eating disorders tips and tricks, stuff that used to have the merit of staying hidden behind the #ana hashtag on Tumblr. In stores, low-calorie products have reappeared in full force, quickly replacing foods rich in healthy fats and vitamins.

It’s absolutely everywhere, and it’s pernicious.

The good news (to me) is that this time, I’m older than I was back then, and I can now look at it with more distance and (hopefully) some perspective.

My perspective being, if you’d like to know: stop wasting your time, and most importantly, your energy on any of it. Not because you cannot achieve the current look deemed beautiful; no, I’m sure that with enough effort and consistent under-eating, anyone can. Mainly, I’m saying don’t do it, because by the time you do, another trend will have already arrived that will immediately turn your efforts into dust.

This is what it’s like to be a woman. It’s like running a race; as soon as you reach what you believe to be the finish line, the goal post has somehow moved several kilometres away. So you start to run, again.

Haven’t you noticed this? The same recipe repeats again and again. A trend appears, mostly being carried and promoted by the upper class. For instance, when we saw the arrival of the curvy figures in the BBL era. For a while, you could only see these bodies in the magazines and on the red carpets. Then, over time, the trend spread among the lower classes. Plastic surgeon offices spread throughout the country, offer increased, so their rates declined. Reaching that figure became more accessible. It’s no surprise that between 2021 and 2024, we’ve seen an overall increase of 40% of plastic surgery procedures performed worldwide.

And as soon as it did, well, that was unacceptable, wasn’t it? The wealthy needed to find another unreachable standard to promote, otherwise they might, gasp, be mistaken for someone of lesser means. Which is unthinkable.

It’s a pattern well documented in sociology, one that has persisted for centuries. The rich have an imperative to distance themselves from others to strengthen their social standing. That’s why the painters of the Renaissance highlighted rounded bellies, full thighs, and generous proportions as the pinnacle of female beauty. At the time, having a fuller figure meant that you could afford to eat well, that you didn’t have to perform physical labor.

And let me tell you: it was as unreachable then for a peasant to acquire the plumper figure as it is now to be that thin.

Let’s get one thing straight: you need your energy to survive. As opposed to the wealthy, who have a chef cooking their meal, a nanny caring for their children, and a cleaner for their homes, you won’t be able to go through your day-to-day life with a 1200-calorie diet. When your hair starts to thin out, you won’t be able to afford the spa treatments, the special hair creams, and the extensions to cover the bald spots. When you start losing your period, you won’t be followed by an extensive team of doctors and specialists. What will happen, most certainly, is that you will suffer. You will lose your energy and everything that makes you who you are.

And finally, as soon as, in spite of it all, you have reached the frail and fragile physique they’re so desperately promoting, well, by then it will be something else, of course. A new goal post will be erected someplace else, with a new impossibly difficult ideal to start working towards.

I’m not talking about a conspiracy. No, these are all well-documented sociological constructs and trend cycles built into the world we live in. They’re connected to the economy, to the powers in place, to the current political climate. They’re also not only directed at women; men, too, have impossibly high standards to reach, standards that have been erected by the upper class. The main difference is that men are pressured to be strong, while women must be thin.

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

― Naomi Wolf

It’s time to start resisting these ideals.

And, for anyone reading this, that means you should be eating well and, most importantly, enough. That means you must refuse the idea that anything the wealthy class is selling is in any way desirable. That means you should take up space rather than make yourself small. That means you shouldn’t worry about your weight or waist size; instead, focus on what you spend your time on.

That’s what matters most, what you must always fixate on: your time. Your creativity. Your energy.

That’s all.

Can any of us even remember what it feels like, to be bored? To be a child again on that first day of summer break, with endless weeks ahead of us, so many hours filled with long naps in the sun, playing cards with our siblings under the shadow of a beautiful tree, slurping on homemade strawberry ice creams after dinners.

As a child, I had means of entertainment, but they were—gasp—limited. A few books on the nightstand that would have to last me all season long. One single magazine—a summer special with pages upon pages of personality tests I would answer with a pencil, again and again, in an attempt to learn more about who eight-year-old me truly was. What kind of friend was I? What did my crush really think of me? What did my choice of swimwear reveal about my deepest, darkest self?

On rainy days, there were the VHS we would rewatch five or ten times, sometimes in a row. The video games we’d finish, and immediately press start again.

And then, in the middle of all of these simple day-to-day pleasures, there was also… nothing.

Unlimited hours of boredom, spent mostly lying horizontally at the beach or on the lawn, my younger self watching the clouds, making up different worlds inside my mind. And then, unavoidably, an idea would pop up. Let’s exchange friendship bracelets. Or build a sandcastle. Make sun tea with the mint that grows in the garden. There’s so much we could do. There’s so much to discover.

I haven’t been eight in a very long time.

And yet, lately, I have found myself craving the child that I used to be—her capacity to be bored, which often led to endless creativity.

I’d like to find this feeling again.

This August, maybe you might join me? Here’s my non-structured, analog, weirdly specific to-do list for the month ahead…

— go to the supermarket and make an event out of it
it’s not about just doing your groceries. no, go on a random Tuesday afternoon, at a time when absolutely nobody else is around. browse the shelves without any rush and only purchase what you consider to be very special treats. for me, it’s a box of ripe cherries, some oysters, and, of course, a bottle of limoncello liquor.

— read only steamy romance books or fast-paced thrillers, and absolutely nothing else
put the heavy fantasy tomes in the trash (or, more accurately, on your to-read pile waiting for september). avoid the philosophical essays, the non-fiction, anything that forces your brain to be working in the heat. only read what’s fun, simple, fast, and exciting—for a change.

— play sudoku at the beach
there’s something about sudoku specifically that can make you forget all about whatever anxious thought might be popping up in your brain, and instead focus on the next box and what number it might contain. trust me, it’s the best mindless game to keep you entertained for hours while sunbathing.

— watch old slasher movies
make an event out of it. use a projector to play the movie at midnight, on the one blank wall in the middle of your living room, or on a large sheet erected in your garden. pick any movie you’d like, but the only requirement is that it must take place in hot summer times. think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, or Jaws. you have to see the sweat, blood, and tears of the actors. you want to be terrified, hide under the covers, laugh at the special effects, and feel your own blood pumping from adrenaline.

— browse the magazine shelves at the corner shop
you may only pick exactly three magazines for the entire month of August: one about fashion, to get inspiration on what to wear this summer, one about house and garden, to make you redecorate your living space for the fall, and, finally, one about international politics, to keep you educated and informed.

— turn off the phone for a few days
just to see what happens. because what is, indeed, the worst that could happen if you don’t answer anyone for 48 hours?

— listen to Vienna by Billy Joel on repeat
not as background noise. listen to it, clearly. read the lyrics and try to actually internalise them. slow down, you crazy child. why don’t you realise Vienna waits for you?

— go on a postcards hunt
there’s something special about participating in the tourist attractions of your hometown. often, these are places you’ve never gone to, wanting to avoid the crowd, to distinguish yourself from the tourists. go there anyway, and find the most beautiful postcard you can find, and spend the following afternoon writing poetry all over them. send them to the friends you haven’t seen in a while.

— try the strangest ice cream flavour you can find
bonus points if it’s the least picked flavour in the entire shop. some that I’d recommend: olive oil, basil, black sesame, tomato. yes. trust me.

— make a summer playlist, just for this year
it can contain any song you like, and it should not be too long (no more than one hour). create it on the first day of august and play it again and again over the upcoming weeks. eventually, your brain will start associating that particular music with this summer, and you will be able to come back to it, again and again, and relive the nostalgia of a summer spent differently.

I’m looking forward to the next month. Let’s enjoy this season for a little longer, before seeking refuge in the crisp autumnal days.

Anything to remove the uncanny-valley smiles spread across the faces of everyone else.

Anything to feel alive.

It was while browsing the subreddit on “weird girl literature” that I found this book. I’m a simple gal; I see a novel on corporate burnout, I order it immediately. But then it stood on my nightstand for a while. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read yet another book about work-related events that would lead to someone’s unavoidable descent into madness, sickness and unhappiness. Was it truly what I needed, in that moment, while I was myself recovering from it? Would it even be relatable, since most books on the topic often present a character who is deeply unsympathetic and unstable?

But then I read the first few pages, and my frown turned into delight.

Discontent, written by Beatriz Serrano, tells the story of a young woman whose carefully crafted office persona threatens to crack when she’s forced to attend her company’s annual retreat. It’s the sort of novel I’d like to share with all the people who have gone through a burnout, but most importantly, with anyone who has, at one point or another, felt alienated from their colleagues at work. It’s dark, deeply relatable, and surprisingly funny. While reading it, I often found myself laughing out loud. It’s bitter without being cynical, which is exactly what you need if you’re working through the process of burnout recovery. Something to take the edge off, and most importantly, to make you feel less alone.

I recently read a study that stated that 1 in 5 employees worldwide feel lonely. The percentage is higher amongst people younger than 35. The study questions whether this may be due to the rise in remote work, but I would like to challenge this assumption. It’s too easy to blame it on work flexibility, after all—and it seems like the perfect excuse to force people to return to the office, which seems to be the mandate most companies are following, lately.

What if your work space had nothing to do with your loneliness, but instead it was the mask you’ve forced on every single day during working hours that was wearing you down?

In a way, I think this is the question the book is asking, deep down: who are we at work? As a woman, especially, this question rings true, leaving me uneasy. I took part in it all, and yet it always felt strange to me, the corporate routines I used to follow; the postures I took on, always ready to go, always with a certain level of alertness and tension. The way I touched base and circled back. Over time, I adjusted my tone, my energy, my vocabulary, almost perniciously, without realising it. It was like putting on a second skin, a version of myself that I deemed more acceptable and definitely marketable.

It probably was; just like the main protagonist in the book, it made me successful, helped me climb the ladder. But eventually, the mask became harder to take off. When I stepped out of a meeting at the end of a long day, I felt untethered, on edge, uncertain of who I really was underneath. Most crucially, it isolated me.

Out of the people I worked with, I’m not sure who had a clue who I really was. In the middle of a work environment, being vulnerable felt out of the question. Sharing me, the true me, without the flourishes and the corporate-speak. After a while, I wasn’t sure if that person was even there anymore. At the peak of my burnout, I’d distanced myself from my colleagues. They all blurred into a scrambled heap of corporate jargon and simulated smiles.

I couldn’t share anything with them because I felt alone in my feelings about work. Surely, I kept repeating myself, they would not understand what I was going through—my discontent, my rage.

But now that I have read this book, I am not so sure about it anymore. Perhaps it would have been better to share. Perhaps, I would have found like-minded spirits in it all, and it would have helped me feel better.

Perhaps there’s someone else out there, feeling the exact same way, who needed to read this today.

“I think about all the times we feel lonely until someone shows up, when you least expect it, to make you feel like part of something.”

—Beatriz Serrano, Discontent

The author might as well have been standing outside my window, taking notes, because the book is that relatable. But again, I’m pretty sure she was not. I’m pretty sure she simply spoke from her heart and explored her own feelings, and if you look closely, drop the mask for a while and share who you truly are, you might find other people who feel it all the same.

And then, there’s me.

I don’t find the prospect of childbearing particularly attractive. I’ve recently realised I didn’t want a fast-paced career.

Where does that leave me?

This question has troubled me over the past few years, ever since I turned thirty. It felt symbolic, moving on from my twenties, like that moment was set in stone in some ways. I was now an adult, in all senses of the word.

And it was due time that I made a decision.

What would it be? A child? A career? Both?

I’m a millennial born in the 1990s. I grew up with a lot of naivety and a society that told me, in more ways than one, that I could have it all. Women these days—they can do everything! The children and the career. We were entering a new millennium. Everything was possible. The sky truly was the limit.

And of course, this may still be true. At least, I want to believe that it is. I don’t have many examples around myself to prove it, but I want to believe they exist, these miraculous women juggling careers and children. I imagine them pushing a stroller around, all the while negotiating important deals through their earpods. Picking up their children from the nanny, hugging them after a long day of meetings and emails. Pumping milk in the office closet, rushing it between two business calls.

In my mind, they’re happy, at least I hope they are.

But, if there’s one thing that I know, it’s that they are also tired.

The problem is that, after burning out from my corporate job, I’ve realised something simple: I don’t want to feel tired.

“Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At ease women? Women who don’t dissect their days into half hour slots of productivity? Women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play? Women who aren’t afraid to take up space in the world? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax? Without guilt? Without apology? Without feeling like they need to earn it? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that.

But I would like to become one.”

— Nicola Jane Hobbs

It’s not like I am never tired.

Obviously, I accept the occasional fatigue, the one I feel after wrapping up a project, or the day after a night out. When my body feels sore from spending too much time at the gym, or after a particularly difficult pilates class. When I’m on my luteal phase. As a matter of fact, I accept that life is sometimes tiresome. It’s what we have to go through, as part of the human existence. Sometimes, we get tired, and then we rest, and then we feel good again. That’s fine.

What I refuse, however, is the chronic exhaustion I have experienced in my career, the same one I imagine mothers feel. No judgment if that isn’t your experience; but my recent realisation is that, for me, choosing either of these two paths would lead to a similar result in my psyche.

I’d end up exhausted.

Which led me to wonder: then, what?

If I don’t focus on birthing a child or building a career, then, what will I do? Is there even anything else to do?

I’ve spent a lot of time considering the alternative. I was stubborn about it. If the world was telling me that there were only two choices at my disposal, then I would carve my own secret third path for myself. You know, just like in video games—oftentimes, if you wander, you may find special routes hidden away from the main path. Developers put them there to reward diligent players who want more from the game than what is right in front of them.

For many years, I’ve struggled to find that third path. I’ve wandered. I’ve meditated and gone on retreats and sat with myself for hours, listening to the sound of my own beating heart, hoping the answer would naturally come to me. Let me tell you: I never saw it coming that way, which left me frustrated and worried for a long while.

But over the past years, almost in a separate lane, away from all of these questions and considerations, I started to write.

It was small, at first.

Small diary entries, every couple of weeks. Eventually, I finished an entire notebook, which forced me to go out and buy a second one. My collection has grown since then—I’ve recently completed my seventh journal, all written over the last half-decade. And then, a year ago, I’ve started writing short stories. This year, just a few months ago, I outlined the first chapter of my first novel.

It’s strange, isn’t it? I never considered myself an artist. But it turns out that making art is what relaxes me. While writing, I feel at ease, alone in my own thoughts, placing words on paper or on a screen. The constant buzzing around my biological clock or the Slack notifications finally quieten down.

And lately, I’ve started to believe in it, this corner of my own internal world I have found for myself. Maybe this is the secret path I will follow, at least for now.

A path of truth, of creation, and ease.

Well, for instance, have you considered what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I know. This one’s tricky.

Depending on where you are in your current stage of life, you might have an answer already prepared and ready to go. Something like: I’m finishing my studies. I’m working on that promotion. I’m trying to grow my family. Or, you might be just like I was a few months back, totally exhausted from the pressure you’ve placed on yourself and at a loss with what you’ll do next. You might tense up at the simple mention of “goals” or “purpose”. You might avoid family dinners, fearing the questions that will unavoidably be raised. You might even be on leave right now, entirely burned out from it all.

If that’s you, please believe me when I say that I don’t envy your position. I know that finding yourself lost and purposeless can feel like being stuck in an overwhelming pit of despair. To be honest, that’s exactly where I was not too long ago, agonising over what I would do next. What’s my purpose?! Since turning 30, this question has haunted more nights that I’d like to admit.

But then I found this book.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built, written by Becky Chambers, is nothing like the sci-fi books I’ve ever read before. First of all, it’s super short—147 pages in the original edition. It’s the kind of book you can pick up and read in a few days, which will make you feel great about yourself. It doesn’t have complex world-building or a thousand different characters. You can read and actually finish it, even if you struggle with a lower attention span.

The book tells the story of a monk meeting a robot. In terms of plot summary, that’s about it. They travel together. They develop a friendship. They have discussions around nature and what it means to be human.

I’m not particularly spiritual, and after burning out in a tech career, didn’t feel specifically excited with the prospect of reading a book about a robot or a monk. Yet, the story gripped me. It begins with a protagonist, the monk, who is feeling restless, but isn’t sure why. This may sound familiar to you—the monk knows there’s something missing in their life, but they have no clue what to do about it. They struggle for a while, switching professions, escaping into nature, finding themselves lost and alone. And then, finally, they meet a robot.

The robot tells them it’s okay not to know. That actually, you don’t have to know.

It turns out purpose is not something you need to find.
You can simply live.

Or, as better said in the book:

“You’re an animal. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites for the remainder of my days, that would also be fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.”
—Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

???!!!

Perhaps it’s my upbringing, or perhaps it’s the hell-scape capitalistic society we’ve all found ourselves stuck in, which pushes us to constantly be productive and effective and useful, but I sobbed while reading this. Could it really be true? Could I allow myself to live, just live, without justifications?

If that feels relatable, you are not alone. A lot of conversations I have with friends lately, whether they’re millennials or gen Z, usually end up with the same existential questions we ponder over for hours, before gulping down our glasses of wine and chuckling at our own silliness. Even though we know there is nothing silly about any of that.

I grew up with parents who, more often than not, taught me about dreaming and having ambitious goals. It is essential, they said, to ask the universe what you want, because you might just get it. Especially for me as a woman, the message was clear: you can have it all! Dare to dream big! The world truly felt like an oyster I could devour in peace. As a French citizen born in the 90s, this felt particularly true, the sense of wide optimism floating in the air after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the early beginnings of the European Union.

After all, things would only get better from there, wouldn’t they?

We all know what happened next. Even if it hasn’t all been doom and gloom, there is definitely a pull of negativity in the air right now, with real unmistakable fears looming in the distance—the rise of fascism in many countries, what consequences AI will have on the workforce, hustle culture becoming louder than ever. All of that, with the help of endless scrolls on social media, constantly reinforcing that question whispered sneakily into our ears: what is our purpose? The subtext being: figure it out, because you better find it sooner rather than later, and ideally start making money out of it, because it is not acceptable to just live.

But what if “just living” was all there was?

This may be an unpopular opinion in this current world, a controversial lesson that’s hard to swallow and learn. Over the past few months, I have learned, just like the monk in this book, that I could simply live. To me, that meant: walking barefoot in the garden. Reading the books that were gathering dust on my to-read pile. Going to the cinema on a random Tuesday afternoon, on my own. Writing poetry, just to see what would happen. Lying in the sun, gathering strength and warmth. My days were not filled with meetings and to-do lists anymore, but they weren’t empty either.

I just… lived.

Somebody once said that letting go is the hardest part, but let me tell you it can also feel like a release. If you read this book, I hope it can give you the same sigh of relief it gave me, the feeling that you are okay, and that you can take your time.

And perhaps, with this time, you may start listening to the animal part of yourself that’s begging for rest and fun, and finally stop agonising over purpose.

It isn’t always easy, but it’s a good life. Over the past few months, my nervous system has finally slowed down. I’ve acquired some lines on my face from spending too much time in the sun, from living and smiling more. I’m not in a constant rush anymore. I’ve built muscles I didn’t know I had from the necessary yard work, while keeping a little weight around the hips, from the baked goods I simply cannot stop baking.

But it was there, a few days ago, as I was literally barefoot in the kitchen, baking bread while wearing a long linen dress to save me from the summer’s heat, that a thought came to me. Was I in the process of becoming a trad wife?

Gasp.

I was raised a feminist. From my French mother’s bookshelves, I learned about the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Olympe de Gouges. She taught me how to work hard, how to be independent, how to earn my own money. She grew up towards the end of the second wave of feminism, where she learned from her own mother the importance of getting your own bank account, separating yourself from your husband, and rising in the ranks at work. Taking on the world.

Turning my back on a high-paid career may feel like a personal affront to her and everything she fought for. My life, at its core, could be mistaken for the life of a trad wife. After all, I follow the same aesthetics—the garden, the linen, the bread…

Trad wives may feel like a recent phenomenon, yet they are nothing new. They’re born from deeply rooted misogynist ideals that have been present for millennia. The term stands for “traditional wives”, designating these women who make a lot of money on social media through their aesthetic of linen and countryside living, whilst promoting traditional gender roles. In their videos, they look blissfully happy, yet always a bit tired, drink raw milk, and have many children, endlessly pushing the ideology that women should stay at home instead of wasting their time working hard on all these corporate jobs.

There are many reasons why I moved back to the countryside. At the core, I mainly wanted to become more environmentally conscious. I’ve stopped eating meat a long time ago and reduced my travels by plane. Now, I’m growing my own vegetables, eating seasonally, taking care of nature, refusing hustle culture… These ideals may seem close to the trad wives aesthetic, but to me, they couldn’t be further apart.

Why should living a quiet life closer to nature be framed as inherently conservative? Actually, I may go so far as to say it isn’t even traditional—unfortunately, in recent history, humans have never lived that close to nature. My grandfather, who grew his own vegetables out of necessity more than for aesthetics, destroyed the soil in his own fields through relentless use of pesticides. Is that really the traditional life we’re aspiring to get back to? My great-grandmother, who did not have access to the pill, painfully birthed eight children all by herself, at home on her farm. Is that truly what anyone is dreaming about?

Perhaps we could think of another system that does not take our archaic—and mostly imaginary—visions of the past, but instead looks towards the future.

Living a quiet life isn’t conservative. To me, it’s inherently anti-capitalistic. It’s deciding to turn our back on the constant drive to be productive. It’s moving the needle towards a future where we can live a life in communion with nature, not in opposition to it. It’s not easy, and it’s not always as aesthetically pleasing as the trad wives want you to believe. The life they’re trying to sell is a lie, forcing men and women to take on roles they don’t need to pursue, pretending to be traditional when it’s all just play-acting.

I believe we can choose to do better. Progressive values are easily integrated into a quiet life. Let us reclaim what has always been ours: the connection to nature, the environmental consciousness, the desire to be better humans.

After finishing that bread a few days ago, I stepped out into the garden and spent several hours digging my nails into the soil to remove some of the weeds. In that moment, I forgot all about the silliness of internet discourse. I forgot all about trad wives desperately trying to tell women what they can and cannot do.

Instead, I dug, listened to the birds singing all around me, and felt more at peace than I ever had before.

Where can I start? Maybe, with the moment it happened.

We’d just finished a long meeting that had left me tense, my neck hurting, and my legs fidgeting for a good walk. As part of the management team, it was expected that discussions wouldn’t always be about sunshine and rainbows, but that day had been particularly heavy. Perhaps because I hadn’t slept well the night before. I never did in hotel rooms. But that was my life: a corporate thirty-two-year-old who had already climbed to the top of the ladder and was now facing a life made of meeting rooms, hard conversations and cold hotel bathroom floors.

It was a particularly freezing day in February, I had a scarf wrapped around myself for support, and we were walking into a restaurant to grab some dinner after that long day of meetings. As always in these types of places, music was blaring out on the speakers. And that’s when I heard it. The first notes of the music that would become the soundtrack to the rest of my life.

“Stop, you’re losing me
Stop, you’re losing me
I can’t find a pulse
My heart won’t start anymore
For you”

Was Taylor Swift thinking of a corporate career when she wrote that song? Surely not, but in that moment the lyrics stuck to me, maybe because I had loved the song so much when it came out a few years before, but hadn’t really listened to it since. It felt strange, to have this song loud on the speakers of that random restaurant, exactly at the moment I’d entered it, because it wasn’t a song that was typically on the radio or in the cultural zeitgeist. No, in that moment, it felt like the song had been turned on specifically for me.

“My face was grey, but you wouldn’t admit that we were sick”

And indeed, by then, my face had been grey for quite a long time.

I’ve always been a high achiever. By the time I finished my studies, I was graduating among the top students and couldn’t wait to start working. I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to have responsibilities. And, most importantly, I wanted to earn money. Not too much because of the travels or the clothes or the lifestyle. Mostly because I had a dream: one day, when I’d made it, I would own a cozy cottage in the French countryside and live a quiet life out there, in the middle of nature. For six years, I worked in some of the largest cities of Europe—Hamburg, Amsterdam—all the while fantasising about gardening and slow living and waking up with the song of birds. Each day, the reality of my commute would hit me right in the face, shattering that dream with the simple noise of the traffic, the bodies crammed in a metro, the small apartments I rented, where neighbour’s parties would outweigh any sound of nature.

But then I found this job, the one that landed me in that restaurant on that cold February night. And at first, it was perfect. I had a great team. I was learning and growing in my role, receiving rapid raises and promotions. Crucially, it was fully remote. For the first time since I’d started working, I didn’t have to live in a city anymore. I could go wherever I wanted.

I was twenty-nine when I moved back to France and bought an old farmhouse in the countryside. One year short of turning thirty, I had to face the fact that my lifelong dream had been fulfilled, much earlier than I ever thought possible.

Which raised the big question: now, what?

For four more years, I continued working in that job. I’d justify it because there was a mortgage to pay, and living in a house came with much steeper expenses than what I’d been used to in small studio apartments. But that wasn’t the full picture, wasn’t it? I lived in the middle of nowhere. My cost of living had significantly decreased. I could have picked literally any other job, and I would still have been fine. I didn’t have to stay. But I did.

Stress became a part of my life. It was slow at first, a few crises here and there, requests to travel doubling, and then tripling, some personnel issues. Nothing out of the ordinary for any manager in any corporate job. To me, though, it slowly started to feel like being a frog in boiling water. The temperature had been so nice and warm at first, but it was now starting to burn me alive. I began waking up every night at 3 am. I’d check my work emails compulsively before bed. I’d vent to my partner for hours each night, obsessively analysing scenarios of what had happened during the day or what might happen next. I’d take everything personally, every mindless comment or snarky remark from colleagues, every mistake made by myself or others, every project running past my own self-imposed deadlines.

I never thought I was burning out. No, you see, because I’d done my research on it. Articles online stated that burning out meant that you’d stop caring. This wasn’t the case for me at all. No; I was caring too much.

Little by little, my life got smaller. I stopped going out into the garden that I had bought and dreamed so much about. I stopped reaching out to friends and family. Each weekend or holiday activity became a negotiation between myself and my terribly low energy levels.

On that day in February, after the restaurant, I came back to my hotel room and cried.

“Do I throw out everything we built or keep it?
I’m getting tired even for a phoenix
Always risin’ from the ashes
Mendin’ all her gashes”

The decision came much later. It’s important that I make this clear: yes, this February day, these hard meetings, that song in that restaurant, they were the sparks for what came next. But it took me several months to reflect on it, let go of my ego and everything I had achieved in my career, and finally make a decision.

One week ago, I quit that job with no backup plan.

And instead of immediately starting again with something new, I’ve decided to give myself one year to figure out what comes next. There are plans, of course, projects that have been quietly growing over the last few months—a novel I’ve started writing, for instance. Things that genuinely excite me and make me feel whole again.

This Substack will document my thoughts on this journey. I don’t have the full picture just yet, but there are many articles I have in mind, around what it means to take a different path than the one you expected for yourself, practical advice on slow living even from the heart of bustling cities, and some more fun ones around books, romanticising your life, and anything in between.

If that sounds like your kind of conversation, I’m glad you’re here.

“Do something, babe, say something
Lose something, babe, risk something
Choose something, babe, I got nothing
To believe
Unless you’re choosing me”

Let’s risk it today and start choosing ourselves.