Trained to recognise it. Lived through it. Building for it.

I grew up moving between five countries, always at international schools — the kind of childhood that teaches you to adapt quickly, read a room fast, and rarely stay anywhere long enough to feel fully rooted. It’s also, I’ve come to understand, the kind of childhood that can make it hard to notice what you’re feeling until it’s been building for years — something I now recognise in a lot of the students I work with.

For a long time, I struggled with my mental health, and with addiction. I’m sober now, and in a genuinely different place than I was — but that period taught me something no textbook could: what it actually feels like to suffer, and just as importantly, what actually helps someone move through it.

Alongside that, I built a career in B2B client management and project management, working with corporate clients across French-speaking Switzerland and on large-scale international events. That professional world gave me a second, different education: I watched capable, high-performing colleagues carry enormous pressure silently, in workplaces with almost no real space to talk about it. I saw the same quiet suffering there that I recognised from my own experiences — just wearing adult clothes.