The Things We Carry

01 — You’ve built a life in Romania, Italy and now Texas. Which parts of you belong to a place, and which seem to travel with you wherever you go?

In Romania, I built what I thought was the life I was supposed to want: a successful career, love, a beautiful home, friends, family, and a lifestyle that looked like success.

There wasn’t some extraordinary feeling waiting for me on the other side of achievement. And that made me curious about what might exist beyond a paper-perfect life.

So when the opportunity came to leave everything behind and move to Italy, I didn’t need much convincing.

But I wouldn’t say I built another life there. Italy was more about deconstructing the one I had already built and, with it, some of the identities and roles I had accumulated.

I arrived with my partner and our dog. No family, no friends, no professional title to precede me. I had even closed my business in Romania. Suddenly, many of the things I had previously used to define myself were gone.

I think I left behind the high-performing, restless version of me that needed to achieve in order to feel successful or enough, together with a very specific image of what life was supposed to look like.

Italy brought another part of me to the surface, the one willing to slow down, question the norm and explore what I actually wanted.

Now, in Texas, I feel like I’m in a building phase again, but this time much more consciously. I’m bringing with me everything I learned from those years of deconstruction and experimentation and trying to genuinely choose what matters to me, every day.

Looking back, Romania shaped the part of me that knows how to build and achieve. Italy gave more room to the part that questions, lets go and experiences life differently. And Texas is teaching me how to integrate those parts rather than choose between them.

What hasn’t changed?

My curiosity, probably more than anything. My courage, determination, kindness and faith too. What else will I discover? What else will I feel? What will this version of life show me?

I’m very much in love with the feeling of being alive.

02 — What did you understand about Romania only after living in Italy, and what did you understand about Europe only after moving to America?

I love this question! Especially because I think you have to leave a place before you can really see what it has taught you.

When you grow up inside a culture, so much of it simply feels like reality. You don’t necessarily recognize it as Romanian or European. It’s just how life is. It’s a little like being a fish in an aquarium you don’t know you’re looking at the world through glass until, somehow, you find yourself outside of it.

I remember my second day in Italy. We were waiting for someone to come install our internet and I was anxious because I barely spoke Italian. Then I heard this man coming up the stairs, singing.

It was a hot afternoon, he was in the middle of a workday, and he was just… cheerful. He was patient with my terrible Italian, genuinely excited about the few words I knew, and somehow we managed to connect.

It was such a small interaction, but then I started seeing versions of it everywhere.

People talking in supermarkets. Stopping for coffee. Spending time outside. Eating together. Enjoying nature. Paying attention to beauty. And it wasn’t something reserved for people with extraordinary amounts of money or free time.

That made me realize how much of the Romanian way of living I had absorbed without questioning it: the stress, the busyness, the idea that being exhausted somehow proves that you are working hard enough. We even connect with each other through complaining about how difficult or busy everything is.

Italy showed me that adulthood didn’t necessarily have to feel that way.

One of my favorite tiny examples is the balconies. In Romania, we often close balconies to gain a few extra square meters of useful space. In Italy, I kept seeing balconies filled with flowers, little tables and chairs, space deliberately left “unproductive” so someone could sit there and enjoy it.

It sounds insignificant, but to me it represented two completely different relationships with life.

I don’t think Italians taught me to be less ambitious. They taught me not to rush the important things. Connection, food, nature, beauty, time, these weren’t rewards waiting at the end of productivity. They were part of life itself.

Then I moved to America and had the opposite experience: I started seeing Europe from the outside.

There were things I had barely thought about before because I had always lived with them. The protections around healthcare, education, food, maternity leave, public spaces, walkability… I started realizing that Europe had been taking care of me in ways I hadn’t necessarily recognized as care.

America made individual freedom feel much more tangible to me, but it also made individual responsibility feel much more tangible.

And then there was another side of America I wasn’t expecting to connect with so deeply.

There is something about the mindset here that feels like there are fewer excuses between an idea and doing something about it. If you have an idea, build it. If you see a need, create something for it. If you want something different, there is a strong cultural permission to go after it.

As someone naturally ambitious and entrepreneurial, I feel incredibly energized by that.

There is competition, of course, but there is also creativity, movement and this very pragmatic relationship with possibility. People build, sell, improve, experiment. Ambition doesn’t necessarily need to be justified.

And strangely, moving here made me appreciate Europe more without making me admire America less.

I think Europe taught me how much a society can protect quality of life.

America is teaching me how much a culture can protect the belief in possibility.

I’m not sure I would want to choose between the two.

03 — When you’ve started over more than once, does reinvention eventually become less frightening, or do you simply become better at trusting yourself through it?

You would think that… after already leaving one country, starting over again would feel less frightening.

In some ways, it does. You know you can build relationships from a distance. You know you need far fewer things than you thought. You know you can solve problems you’ve never encountered before. You have evidence that you can adapt.

But the unknown is still the unknown.

Every time I start over, I become a little more flexible, a little more resourceful and creative. I adapt faster. I know I can find solutions. I know I can go through difficult things if I have to.

But knowing that doesn’t make me fear less.

Sometimes having a beautiful experience somewhere makes leaving even more frightening, because now you know exactly what you could lose. Italy was good to me. Texas has been good to me so far. If there is another move someday, I don’t know what that one will bring.

Perhaps what starting over has changed most was not my relationship with fear, but my relationship with certainty.

I still don’t know. I just know more about what I can do when I don’t know.

04 — You’ve experienced three very different relationships with work, time and ambition. What would you steal from each culture if you could design your own?

I think, without realizing it, I’ve already started stealing from all three.

From Romania, I would take the ability to work through adversity.

There is a kind of resourcefulness I deeply associate with growing up Romanian… this instinct to look at what you have and somehow make it work. To find another way. To solve the problem. To keep moving even when the conditions aren’t ideal.

I sometimes think of it as the power of the underdog. There is something powerful about being underestimated, about nobody really knowing what you have inside you, and still finding a way to build something from where you are.

Romania gave me a very strong relationship with work. I grew up understanding that if I want something to happen, at some point I have to do the work. I have to act. I have to participate in creating the result.

I wouldn’t want to lose that.

But then Italy challenged my understanding of what all that work was ultimately for.

Italy taught me to respect time differently. Not everything needs to be optimized, accelerated or made more productive. Some things actually become worse when you rush them.

A meal. A conversation. Art. Nature. Relationships. Sometimes even the work itself.

I loved seeing businesses that seemed completely comfortable saying: this is what we do, these are the hours we do it and we do it really well. There was something almost rebellious to me about not needing to be available all the time.

Italy taught me that quality deserves time and that life does too.

And then America brought ambition back into the picture, but in a completely different way.

Here, possibility feels practical.

There is a cultural energy around doing things that I find incredibly stimulating. You can have an idea and actually try it. You can build something, change direction, create an offer, sell it, improve it, fail, start again. There is a freedom in the idea that your life doesn’t necessarily have to follow one predetermined path.

I love that ambition can simply be ambition. You don’t have to apologize for wanting to build something big, but you also have the freedom to define what “big” means for you.

So if I could design my own culture, I think I would steal the strength to work through adversity from Romania, the wisdom not to rush what matters from Italy, and the belief in possibility from America.

05 — What did you have to leave behind that wasn’t packed in a suitcase?

Easy access to the people I love.

I have a younger sister and brother, a big family, and one of my biggest fears when I first left Romania was that one day I would look back and regret all the time I had missed with them.

And then something happened that I didn’t expect.

Some of those relationships actually became more profound.

We stopped taking each other for granted.

Time together became intentional. Visits became something we protected. Conversations became more meaningful. When I lived in Italy, the distance was manageable enough that we could still visit each other quite often, and I started noticing how much more present we were when we were actually together.

Moving to America stretched that lesson even further. Now there is an ocean, a much longer flight and significantly more time and resources between us.

Of course, I miss the ease of being physically close. And sometimes there is a strange loneliness in meeting new people who only know a version of you. It’s an internet saying summing up the feeling very well: I wish they knew how funny I am in my mother tongue.

06 — You work in marketing, a profession built around understanding what makes people pay attention. What have you learned about attention that has changed the way you live your own life?

One of the things that fascinated me most is realizing how different people can look on the surface, while what makes us pay attention remains surprisingly similar.

The culture changes. The language changes. The way people communicate changes. The channels definitely change.

But underneath all of that, we are still moved by very similar things.

We want to feel seen and understood. We want connection, belonging, safety, recognition, pleasure, possibility. We have fears, desires, insecurities, aspirations. We respond to stories and emotions. We pay attention to things that somehow touch something that already exists inside us.

The expression is cultural. The human underneath it is remarkably similar.

And then there is the way different cultures compete for that human attention.

In Italy, I loved how present traditional media still was in everyday life. I could walk through a town and discover a concert from a poster, an event from a flyer, a local business simply because I passed it on the street.

I didn’t have to actively search for it. More importantly, I didn’t have to enter a screen.

Then I came to America, which feels like marketing heaven.

I’m fascinated by how even small businesses use CRMs, email, text messages, personalization and follow-ups. If I show interest in something, there is often an entire system making sure I can easily find my way back to it.

And I appreciate that too.

I actually love living in a world with an abundance of choices. I love seeing businesses make an effort to understand what people need, create something valuable and then find a way to put it in front of the right person.

When it’s done well, marketing can shorten the distance between a need or a desire and fulfilling it. It can save me time. It can show me something relevant. It can make my life easier.

So I don’t mind businesses competing for my attention.

But working on the other side of that exchange for more than ten years has made me very aware of what my attention is worth.

I try not to consume media without knowing why I’m there. I’m much more conscious of when I open something because I actually want information, inspiration or entertainment, and when I’m simply being pulled from one thing into another.

I pay attention to the moment when consuming stops being a choice and starts becoming automatic.

Because I know how easily attention can influence emotion, desire and even the way you see your own life. If I spend enough time looking at something, it will eventually start shaping what feels important, what feels desirable, what feels missing.

So I try to be careful about what I repeatedly expose myself to.

07 — What is something marketers know about human beings that perhaps everyone should know?

We are not nearly as rational as we like to believe we are.

I find this fascinating, probably because my work in marketing eventually led me to study psychology, coaching and NLP as well. The more I learned, the more interested I became in how much of what we do is influenced by emotions, associations, previous experiences, automatic responses and processes we aren’t fully aware of in the moment.

And yet we love the idea that we are completely rational, independent decision-makers.

I know why I chose this. Advertising doesn’t work on me. Nobody can influence me.

I actually think that believing you cannot be influenced is one of the more dangerous positions to be in.

A marketer knows that how something is framed matters. What you see repeatedly matters. The emotion associated with a message matters. Context matters. The words we use matter. What other people appear to want matters.

And this goes far beyond buying something.

Companies are marketing. Politicians are marketing. The media is marketing. Creators are marketing. In some way, every time we communicate an idea and try to make someone else see its value, we are shaping how that idea is perceived.

That doesn’t mean we should become suspicious of everything around us or believe we have no agency. For me, it means almost the opposite.

It means we need to become more curious about our own responses.

Why do I want this? Why did that make me angry? Why does this person make me feel safe? Why does this idea suddenly feel true? Is this actually what I think, or have I simply heard it enough times that it now feels familiar?

The more of those automatic reactions we can bring into awareness, the more choice we have about what we do with them.

Not complete control. I don’t think any of us has that.

But more choice.

08 — What advice about building a personal brand do you think people would be better off ignoring?

Maybe the first piece of advice I would ignore is the idea that you need to build a personal brand in the first place.

I know that sounds strange coming from someone who works in branding.

But personal branding has become so trendy that I think we sometimes spend more time constructing who we are on paper or on social media, than actually being that person in real life.

What should I talk about? What should I be known for? What should my feed look like? What should I wear? What are my content pillars? How often should I post?

And slowly, without realizing it, you can start living according to the brand instead of allowing the brand to emerge from the way you live.

I’ve fallen into that trap myself more than once.

I’ve tried to create versions of my personal brand from my mind, from what I thought it should look like, what made strategic sense, what would position me correctly. And maybe you can sustain that for a while.

But in my experience, it doesn’t work in the medium or long term.

The personal brands I find most compelling have a backbone.

There is a real person underneath the positioning. There are experiences behind the opinions, competence behind the advice, choices behind the values. What they say, what they do and what they deliver somehow belong to the same world.

And you can feel it.

It has very little to do with having the perfect photos or posting every day.

Of course strategy matters. I’m a strategist, I would never argue otherwise. But strategy can amplify something that exists; it can’t give substance to something that doesn’t.

09 — You’re also a writer. What can you say on a page that you can’t say as a marketer?

As a marketer, I often have a responsibility to make meaning clear.

As a writer, I can sit inside the meaning while it is still being made.

On a page, I can stay with something before I’ve figured out what it means. I can contradict myself. I can be vulnerable, uncertain, afraid. I can explore the parts of human nature that don’t necessarily lead anywhere useful.

I don’t have to perform competence there. I don’t always need an answer, a lesson or a solution.

Sometimes I can simply say: I don’t know. This scares me. I’m still thinking about it.

And leave it unfinished.

I can be human. :)

10 — What part of starting over turned out to be completely different from the story you had told yourself beforehand?

The funny thing is that every time I started over, I thought I knew what I was doing.

And every time, I discovered I didn’t.

Before a big change, you inevitably create a version of it in your mind. You imagine how the place will feel, who you’ll be there, what your days will look like, what will be difficult and what will be exciting. You need some kind of story to make a decision that big.

Then you arrive and reality has very little obligation to follow your script.

So much of what I thought I knew beforehand, I eventually had to let go of.

11 — Has living in several cultures made you more certain about who you are, or less?

More certain, I think. But also less rigid.

Living in different cultures showed me something I hadn’t fully understood before. The same part of you can be appreciated in one environment, misunderstood in another and almost invisible somewhere else.

And that can really mess with your sense of self if you’re not aware of it.

There were parts of me that felt too much in one context and completely natural in another. Parts that were rewarded somewhere and barely noticed somewhere else. Traits I had judged in myself that suddenly made perfect sense once I was in a different environment.

At some point, I realized I had been using the reactions of the culture around me as evidence.

If this part of me is appreciated here, maybe it’s good. If it isn’t, maybe I should change it.

Living across cultures helped me stop doing that.

It made me more whole because I stopped needing every part of me to be validated by the place I was in.

I started understanding that different environments simply bring different parts of you forward.

Sometimes ambition is useful. Sometimes softness is. Sometimes adaptability. Sometimes directness. Sometimes patience. Sometimes the part of you that questions everything.

I can choose which part of me needs to lead in a certain moment without deciding that the others are wrong.

And I think that has given me a much calmer relationship with identity.

So yes, living in several cultures made me more certain about who I am. Just less certain that I need to fit that into one fixed definition.

12 — If you could keep one thing from the Romanian way of living, one from the Italian way and one from the American way, what would you choose?

I think each place gave me something I now want to protect.

From Romania, I would keep the instinct to make the best of what you have.

There is something very Romanian, to me, about not waiting for perfect conditions. You look at what is available, you improvise, you adapt, you find a way forward.

I value that a lot.

From Italy, I would keep the understanding that living itself deserves to be prioritized.

Not work-life balance in the corporate sense. Something deeper than that.

The idea that quality of life is not necessarily about having more, but about how you experience what is already there. Your rhythm. Your time. Nature. Food. Beauty. Connection. The ability to actually enjoy your own life while it is happening.

Italy taught me that those things are not extras.

They are the backbone.

And from America, I would keep the relationship with possibility.

The ambition, the creativity, the freedom to build, try, change direction, follow an idea, create something useful and believe that your work can have an impact.

There is something here that makes possibility feel actionable.

And I love that.

So if I could keep one thing from each, maybe it would be this:

From Romania, the ability to make something out of what you have.

From Italy, the wisdom to make room for life.

From America, the belief that you can create what doesn’t exist yet.

That feels pretty close to the way I want to live.

We have our roles, our accomplishments, our possessions, our history — this whole get to know me file we carry around with us. And I think some of it gives us a sense of security. It helps us feel more certain about who we are and how we want to be seen.

But when you arrive somewhere new and, for a while, none of it can speak for you, people can only experience the person standing in front of them.

How you treat them. How you respond when something goes wrong. Whether you’re kind. Whether you’re curious. How you carry yourself. The energy you bring into a room. The choices you make when nobody around you has any expectations of who you’re supposed to be.

For me, that experience helped me understand what being yourself actually means.

It’s not just the collection of stories you can tell about who you are. It’s what all those years and choices have shaped in you and, even more, who you choose to be moment by moment.

I find that incredibly vulnerable, but also incredibly freeing.

14 — What are you still trying to understand?

After living in three countries, I’ve realized that where you live absolutely matters. Our environments shape us in ways we don’t always see.

But I also don’t think there is a place somewhere out there that can give you the permanent feeling of being at home.

At some point, that home has to exist within you.

That’s what I’m trying to understand in this chapter of my life, how to fully inhabit and take care of the one place I will carry with me everywhere.

My own body.

I want to understand how to bring my body with me through all of the life adventures.

How to listen to it. How experiences live in it. How to work with it rather than simply expect it to keep up with everything my mind wants to do. How to create more safety, health and connection within myself.

That curiosity has become strong enough that I recently enrolled in the Somatic Experiencing International training program, with the intention of becoming a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner.

But before it becomes something I use professionally, this exploration is deeply personal.