The turning point
For most of my life, I got everything I wanted through force.
I climbed to the top of a company.
I worked three days and nights without food or sleep.
My children had a saying about me...
Our mom would be on her deathbed and still insist she was fine.
For years, I insisted the same.
“I was not fine.”
Years earlier, I had left a marriage I had to leave, with my children and nothing else, and I had rebuilt my life from the ground up.
Yet, what I never learned was... how to be still.
Then… life forced me to stop.
I could no longer walk, or hold a conversation.
And what frightened me was never the thought of dying.
It was the thought of living that way.
Dependent.
After a lifetime of needing no one.
Then life chose for me.
Everything I had built was taken from me.
The company, the money, the country I had lived in for more than twenty years.
An ordeal I never saw coming stripped away every proof I had that I was strong.
And for the first time, I had nothing left but my own thoughts.
In that silence, I felt what I had never believed in.
The touch of a higher power.
And I asked myself, “Blanka, how did you get here?”
I had spent my whole life taking what I wanted by force. For the first time, I saw there was another way. I only had to go within to find it.
So I went within. And in the quiet, I finally heard the story I had been telling myself my whole life.
“You have to be strong. You have to prove you don’t need anyone.”
I had been repeating it since I was a girl. It had carried me through the leaving, the rebuilding, the climb. It worked. And it nearly cost me everything.
“But I don’t want to live this way.”
Then who would you be, I asked myself, if you stopped proving?
I had no answer. For the first time, the silence did not frighten me. I sat inside the question the way I had once sat inside my own bed, unable to move.... except now nothing in me was fighting to get up.
And then I understood.
I did not have to prove I was strong. I never had.
I did not become someone new overnight.
But I stopped running. I began to do small things slowly.
To sit with a question instead of solving it, to let a day be quiet without calling it wasted.
I began understanding that, alignment is not something you seize. It is something you stop refusing.
Everything taken from me had emptied my hands enough to finally find what I was looking for all along.
I have work still.
I will always have work.
But I know now I cannot force my way to peace.
I only have to stop long enough to let it find me.
I left the only home I'd known with two dresses and nothing else. I no longer wanted to be strong. I wanted peace.
In Dubai I had nothing to chase for the first time in my life... no rank to climb, no one to prove wrong.
Only the quiet I'd spent a lifetime running from.
Then the war came...
Sirens in the night, an empty apartment, no one to make it stop.
And underneath the fear, something held...
That was how I knew it was real... not strength I had to summon, but peace I could stand on.
When the worst of the war ended, I picked up my phone one morning and recorded myself talking.
Just me, in the light, saying something I now believed in.
I could not edit it, so I did not try.
I only spoke, and I let it be honest.
In Dubai, alone, I finally began to speak.
Whoever is meant to hear it
I never set out to build anything. I only spoke, most mornings, and let it be honest. The ones who found me wrote back as though I'd been speaking to them alone. Whoever is meant to hear a thing finds their way to it.
So maybe it's not an accident that you're still here. I told you my story because you may have recognized your own inside it — the striving that never fills you, the quiet you keep running from. I'm not special. I simply reached the end of what force could do, and stopped. If I could, so can you.
Wherever you are, there's always a way through.
I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm sharing what I'm learning, as I learn it. Whoever's supposed to hear it will find it.
JOIN THE PRIVATE LISTA letter every few weeks on what I am learning, as I learn it.