Does Peace Come After Success, or Does It Have to Come First?

For a surprisingly large part of my life, peace was scheduled for later.

Not consciously. I never wrote *become peaceful* on a five-year plan. But somewhere underneath almost everything I did was a quiet agreement I had made with myself:

*After this.*

At 23, while working at the Bucharest Chamber of Commerce, I led my first international delegation on my own, to India and Nepal.

It was the kind of responsibility that should probably have frightened me more than it did. I remember looking toward it as a threshold. If I could do this, perhaps something inside me would finally unclench.

I did it.

Then came my first event involving heads of state.

*After this.*

My first speech as a spokesperson in front of a room of officials.

*After this.*

My first profitable month as an entrepreneur.

*After this.*

The milestones changed. The promise didn't.

I kept arriving at places I had once imagined would feel like arrival, only to discover another corridor behind them.

And because I was very good at moving, I moved.

Eventually, I developed another theory.

Perhaps peace wasn't attached to achievement.

Perhaps it was attached to money.

This was an extremely convenient theory for an ambitious person because it did not require me to stop running. It required me to run faster.

So I did.

At one point, I received the largest monthly income I had ever made at the time: €13,000.

I still remember going to the ATM. The number was no longer a target or an abstraction on a screen. It existed. I had done the thing.

And then I went home.

That same day, in the middle of an enormous argument, I remember having an almost absurdly clear thought:

*I thought the money would fix this.*

It hadn't.

The significance of that moment wasn't the argument. I am still married to the man I argued with that day. We are good.

But we are good, in large part, because I am good.

What collapsed that day was not my marriage.

It was a theory.

I had spent years assuming that enough competence, enough achievement, enough money, enough control would eventually manufacture an internal state called peace.

Apparently, they couldn't.

So I started digging

When your preferred theory of life stops working, you can either find a more sophisticated way to defend it or become curious about what is underneath it.

I became very curious.

Therapy came first, but certainly not last.

I explored hypnosis. RTT. NLP. Reiki. Affirmations. The Silva Method. The Monroe work. Prayer. Family constellations. Akashic practices. Numerology.

You name it, there is a reasonable chance I have tried it.

I don't consider all of these practices equivalent, nor do I need them all to be scientifically explainable for them to belong to the story. Some helped enormously. Some gave me language. Some gave me questions. Some gave me an experience. Some probably gave me nothing at all.

That wasn't really the point.

I was digging.

Under the achievement. Under the fear. Under the identities I had accumulated because they had once kept me safe. Under beliefs I had mistaken for facts.

Under the strange conviction that there was a version of me somewhere in the future who would finally have earned the right to relax.

I dug until I found myself.

And I realised I had always been enough.

Not that I had finally *become* enough.

That I had been enough before India and Nepal. Before the rooms with important people. Before the profitable company. Before the €13,000.

The evidence had arrived years after the fact.

The weight of peace

Somewhere in this process, I wrote a novella called *The Weight of Peace*.

It began, strangely enough, with politics.

Years earlier I had read Yanis Varoufakis's *Adults in the Room*, his account of negotiations during the Greek financial crisis. I had studied at the Romanian Diplomatic Institute and had spent enough time around official language to recognise its peculiar ability to make enormous human consequences sound procedural.

Varoufakis's account disturbed me because it allowed the humanity back into the room.

And it left me with a question I couldn't get rid of:

How can you live in peace in a world where so many people don't have it?

Over time, that question became more personal.

How do you allow yourself peace without feeling that you are abandoning someone?

And what if some of us were never taught peace at all?

What if we were taught compliance and given it the same name?

Children who learn not to raise their voices, not to ask for too much, not to upset anyone, not to be difficult, can become adults remarkably skilled at keeping the peace.

That does not mean they are peaceful.

That distinction became Stella, the protagonist of *The Weight of Peace*: a diplomat who has made a profession out of maintaining externally what she has been required to maintain internally since childhood.

Writing her made me confront something uncomfortable in myself.

For years, I had confused peace with the absence of conflict.

Sometimes with obedience.

Sometimes with control.

Sometimes with being so competent that nothing around me could fall apart.

The question underneath the book eventually became:

*When does peace stop being a virtue and become self-abandonment?*

And that changed the question I had been asking about my own life.

Maybe peace wasn't something waiting for me once I had successfully controlled enough variables.

Maybe the architecture was backwards.

Peace did not make me less ambitious

There is a version of this story in which I discover inner peace, abandon ambition and develop an irresistible desire to sit quietly under an olive tree.

That is not what happened.

I still move fast.

I still get excited.

I still change things.

I still build ridiculous things.

I still occasionally create enough activity around one idea to make reasonable people wonder whether somebody should take my laptop away.

What changed was not necessarily the amount of movement.

It was the reason for it.

There is movement that comes from curiosity, inspiration, delight, even obsession.

And there is movement that comes from the belief that if you stop, something terrible about you might finally be revealed.

From the outside, they can look almost identical.

Inside, they are different worlds.

I wish I could tell you I now recognise the difference immediately.

I don't.

Sometimes an idea still becomes too important. Sometimes I get caught inside a result. Sometimes the old machinery starts humming and I find myself asking a project to tell me something about my worth.

But sometimes I remember:

*The success or failure of this project means nothing about me.*

Not that the outcome means nothing.

I care enormously about outcomes. If something fails, I want to know why. If something succeeds, I want to understand that too.

An outcome can tell me something about timing, execution, assumptions, markets, decisions, people, luck.

It is useful information.

It is a terrible identity.

There is enormous freedom in being able to say:

*I really, really want this to work.*

And at the same time:

*If it doesn't, I will still be me.*

Anyway

On 8 June, I had an idea.

Not a business plan. Not an eighteen-month roadmap.

An idea.

I wanted to create a curatorial series about the decisions we make before guarantees exist.

I was fascinated by that peculiar space between certainty and action. What makes someone move before there is enough evidence that moving is sensible? What happens in their mind? What are they afraid of? What makes them go anyway?

Mostly, I was curious.

And excited.

The idea became **ORICUM™ / ANYWAY™**.

Seventy-four days later, we launched three volumes.

Now the project is going international through franchises.

And every once in a while, I look at what happened and think:

*What the fuck happened?*

Of course there was strategy. There was work. There were decisions, deadlines, problems, people and a frankly unreasonable amount of execution.

But I know what it feels like to build from anxiety.

I know what it feels like to make a project carry the unbearable responsibility of proving that I am clever enough, capable enough, valuable enough, safe enough.

This didn't feel like that.

I had an idea.

I loved it.

I followed it.

And perhaps because the project didn't need to save me, there was more room for the idea itself.

For years, I thought peace lived on the other side of success.

At 23, it was waiting beyond India and Nepal. Later, beyond the important room, the speech, the profitable month, the number in the bank account.

Every time I arrived, peace had apparently moved somewhere else.

Now I suspect it was never moving.

I was.

Peace was never waiting at the finish line.

It was the place I needed to start from.

And, as it turns out, starting from there hasn't made me want to build less.

It has made me much more curious about what I might build next.