About Me

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People who know me often describe me as someone who reflects a lot, who is balanced, at peace, always seeking to grow. It's flattering, and I let people believe it — it's their perception, after all. But I rarely talk about what's underneath it. My balance, my inner peace, my constant self-reflection — none of it comes naturally.

 

It's daily work, a daily choice. I've never met a person who does this kind of searching just for fun; there's usually something underneath it. For me, that something goes back to where I started.

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Where It Started

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My childhood ended abruptly when I was about five. We lived in Tbilisi, Georgia, when the Soviet Union fell apart and civil war started. People shot each other in the streets. My parents — Russian-Ukrainian by background — were suddenly treated as foreigners, robbed and threatened.

 

My mother fell into a deep depression after her own parents died in quick succession; my father left to help his family rebuild elsewhere. I had to become an adult overnight.

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I have vivid memories from that time: fleeing the war, three nights on a cold marble airport floor hoping for a flight out; watching a brown suitcase of cash become nearly worthless overnight to inflation.

 

Eventually my parents came back together and settled on the Russian Black Sea coast. I was often cold, hungry, and very quiet — feelings weren't something we had room for. Survival meant shutting them down.

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My mother built a vision that one day I'd leave for Western Europe, for real opportunities. Given where we stood — essentially homeless, no savings, no plan beyond the goal itself — it was a vision shot at the moon.

 

Everything narrowed to my education: best grades, best school, no exceptions. I remember bringing home the highest mark possible and being asked why it didn't have a star next to it. I was trying to earn love through performance, and it rarely landed.

 

What I didn't know then was how hard my mother worked to hide how poor we actually were — we lived in a sea container with no water or electricity, and I did my homework by candlelight, while she told others a different story.

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Even so, I found happiness where I could — in nature, with animals, in books. I read War and Peace and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by fourteen. I was about as far from any kind of wellbeing path as it's possible to be. I was just surviving. But I was collecting a lifetime of experience I'd eventually need to unpack.

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Where It Led

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That pattern didn't stay in childhood. It followed me into adulthood, into a career built the same way I built everything else: relentlessly, without exceptions, until it worked.

 

I moved to Germany, built a life and a career there from nothing, and spent over a decade in sales and media — eventually leading major client relationships, managing teams, being recognized for exactly the traits that had once been survival skills: composure, structure, the ability to hold complexity together without cracking.

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From the outside, it looked like success. And it was. But it was also the same facade, just wearing a nicer suit.

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Why I'm Sharing This

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What I carried out of my childhood is what eventually became my drive to search for balance and peace — and to make that search part of my daily life, rather than something I arrive at once and keep.

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It's also what drives me to make the facade fall. I spent years building a convincing one, and I know exactly how much effort that takes, and how little it actually holds up underneath.

So now, it matters to me to speak honestly about what's difficult — past or present — instead of managing how it looks from the outside.

To stop being ashamed of what happened, and what still happens.

To speak freely about the things that tend to get hidden or hushed, health issues especially, instead of quietly working around them the way I was taught to.

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This page is the "why" behind everything else you'll find here.

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My balance isn't a gift; it's a daily choice.