I was a world champion at functioning.

8:30 a.m. And I was already done.

Not “done” as in ready. Done as in empty. Two kids chased through the house, wrestled into clothes they didn’t want to wear. Somehow teeth, somehow shoes, somehow out the door. And just as I thought “made it,” the teacher stood in the doorway. The rain trousers. Forgotten again. Then into the car. Then into the day. Like a hunted fox who’s also meant to give a presentation on the side.

The mask on the outside. Someone who wanted to scream on the inside.

I had a good job. Over ten years at Avira, nearly ten at ZF Group, I could do corporate: words, deadlines, pace. And juggle kids and career on the side, every single day anew.

Rushing out of meetings, guilty. Late to the school gate, guilty. At night, the mind that wouldn’t switch off. And always that one feeling: no matter how much I give, it’s never enough. I couldn’t say it to anyone. You’re the one who has it all under control, after all. The reliable one. The strong one.

I thought everyone else could do it. Just not me.

For a long time I was convinced that everyone around me was somehow managing, and I was the only one secretly stumbling. Until, for the first time, I found the courage to talk openly about the overwhelm. And suddenly I realised: I wasn’t alone at all.

Almost all of us carry the same feeling, that you have to do it all on your own, without complaining, without wavering. We hold on until the body says no. And then there’s no choice left but to finally listen.

My body said it anyway.

First the exhaustion no sleep could heal. Then the racing heart. The tightness. The feeling of watching my own life from behind glass. My nervous system was in permanent alarm, and I’d forgotten what calm even feels like.

And the absurd part: I understood myself perfectly.

I’d read the books. Heard the podcasts. Been to the seminars. I could explain my behaviour, analyse it, put it into beautiful words, putting things into words was literally my job. And I still felt miles away from myself.

Until I understood why: the way back doesn’t run through the head. It runs through the body. Not more understanding. Finally feeling again. Through breath. Voice. Movement. The language my nervous system understands. I wish I’d known that back then. It would have spared me a few very long years.

What I know today and pass on.

I don’t know the overwhelmed everyday from books. I know it from the inside, and that’s exactly why I now guide the people who stand where I once stood.

People who achieve a great deal and still never feel it’s enough. Who look composed on the outside while everything inside runs at full tilt. Successful, responsible, and secretly at their limit, without being allowed to say it.

Back then I could barely change anything on the outside. The kids, the job, the responsibility, that stayed. What I could change was on the inside. That’s exactly what a Reset is: you don’t turn your life upside down. You change how your body stands within it.

As a facilitator for breathwork & nervous-system regulation, I create spaces where, for once, you don’t have to perform. Where your nervous system gets the one signal it’s been waiting for: it’s over. You’re safe.

And privately?

I come from Transylvania, yes, land of the vampires. The only biting I remember from my childhood was into warm, fresh-baked bread; the scariest thing was a family party that wouldn’t end. I was the kid who stood on the table and sang until the grown-ups cried, in a house where someone was always around and the living room smelled of music.

At nineteen I got on a bus, twenty Deutschmarks in my pocket, a clear plan in my head: one year in Germany, then back. But you know how it goes: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. One year became a whole life.

Then I fought for German word by word: two pages of rules, six pages of exceptions. A language in which a girl is a neuter “it,” but a turnip is female, and where you say “the woman,” yet “the bag of THE woman.” The day I first wrestled the genitive and won, I knew: if I can learn this, I can do anything. Today I speak four languages fluently. The sentence still holds.

There was a time I lost almost everything at once, my marriage, my familiar circle of friends, the ground under my feet. I thought I’d been buried. Only much later did I understand that I’d been planted.

What has grown from that dark soil since, I couldn’t have imagined back then. Two children I’m close to, even now, as they grow their wings and go their own ways. A friendship with my ex-husband that some people dream of inside their marriages: on holidays we sit at the same table, with our new partners, and nobody has to hold their breath. A great, unexpected love in the second half of my life, that arrived just as I’d learned to be whole on my own, too. And friendships where I don’t have to be strong in order to be allowed to stay.

And if I’m honest, and I am now, mostly, this is a life I’d never have dared to plan. Too loud, too full, too alive for the careful little plan I boarded that bus with. Lake Constance has become my home, and in it I’ve become again the woman I already was as a child, before anyone taught me to be quieter: one who sings because she can, who cries when she needs to, and who won’t waste another second of her precious, chaotic life making herself smaller than she is. If we ever meet, bring all your exhaustion, and all your too-much. Here, you don’t have to hide any of it.