My Story
The excavation, not the performance
I pursued Aerospace Engineering, became an International Contact Member for a European student society, earned an Erasmus scholarship in the Netherlands, moved to the UK for my PhD, and built a research career in Bristol. On paper, it was a success story. And in many ways, it genuinely was.
But before every meeting, every presentation, every moment I was supposed to simply walk into a room and speak, something in me froze. I over-prepared. I over-explained. I monitored every word, every impression, every reaction. I looked at the women leading around me and couldn't quite see myself in them.
From the outside I was doing everything right. But inside, I was dragging. My thoughts were blurred. I was waiting, always waiting, for someone to tell me what to do, how to proceed, whether I was good enough, whether my work was good enough. I was running on external approval because I had lost access to anything internal.
"Everyone else here is more capable than you. Everyone else is smarter. Do you really deserve to be here? What can you actually offer?" I thought I was the only one who heard it. I wasn't.
In 2021, everything changed at once. I left my career as a research engineer to commit fully to yoga and coaching. My relationship ended. I left the home I had shared with my partner. Everything that had defined my external life was gone.
What I found in that space was not a crisis. It was an excavation.
Through yoga and meditation, I began to do something I had never done before. Not add to myself. Remove. The masks I had worn, the endless performance of being whoever the room seemed to need, slowly fell away.
But I had made a mistake — which I now understand was part of the journey. In believing that a spiritual life and an engineering life could not coexist, I had abandoned a part of myself. The scientist. The woman who loves rigour and precision and the particular satisfaction of solving a genuinely hard problem.
So I decided to go back. What I have been building since then is not balance — which implies two things competing. It is integration. One whole person showing up everywhere.
A year after leaving research, I applied to the European Space Agency. I walked out of that interview certain I hadn't got the job. They hired me. My interviewers told me why: there were multiple moments where I looked at the panel and said, plainly: I don't know. I have no experience with this. I will learn. Calmly. Without apology.
What they saw was not technical mastery. It was genuine, undefended security. The ability to be in a room without performing. That quality cannot be studied for. It can only be developed from the inside, by removing the layers that have been covering it. That is what I built The Self-Led Woman around.
