You've Mastered
the Art of Success.
Now Learn the Art
of Being Alive.

I didn't arrive at this work through ambition. I arrived through necessity. Through a body that broke, a self that fractured, and a long, slow, sometimes agonising process of learning what it actually means to be alive.

I grew up in Finland, sensitive in ways that didn't always feel like a gift. I learned, as many girls do, to make myself useful. Competent. Easy. To take up the right amount of space.

At fifteen, I was sexually assaulted. I didn't call it that for a long time. I just got quieter in some places and louder in others, and kept moving. I became extraordinary at achieving things. I won scholarships. I moved countries. I threw myself into understanding human beings.

My body had its own way of making me stop. Endometriosis at twenty. Pain that lived specifically in the parts of me I had learned to disown after the assault. Being forced to inhabit my body so completely cracked open something I had kept sealed for years.

Then came Brazil. I was twenty-one, standing inside a high-security youth prison, face to face with boys who had survived things most people cannot imagine. They taught me more about humanity than my psychology degree ever could.

At twenty-three, I nearly died. It cleared away everything that wasn't true. What remained was a question I could no longer avoid: what am I actually doing with this life?