Hi. If this is your first time here, welcome, I’m glad you found this little corner of the internet.

I should probably tell you the real story behind this site, because it’s not just a personal brand project. It’s also my dissertation, and it took me two years to actually sit down and write it.

I re-enrolled for my master’s degree last autumn, and I kept putting the dissertation off. Not because I didn’t care, but because I couldn’t find a version of it that felt like mine. School projects have a way of feeling separate from real life, like something you do and then forget, and I didn’t want that. So every time I sat down to start, I just… didn’t.

At some point I realized the actual problem wasn’t the dissertation itself. It was that I’ve always been a little afraid of showing up in public with personal things, with projects that are still unfinished, with hobbies I haven’t mastered. And without even noticing, I’d built a perfect little loop out of that fear: I couldn’t start the personal project because I was scared to be seen, and I couldn’t finish the dissertation because it didn’t feel personal enough to care about. Two things stuck, feeding each other, going nowhere.

So I decided to collapse them into one. This website is both things at once, on purpose. It’s the dissertation I actually needed to write, and it’s the personal brand I’ve wanted for a long time anyway. Turning it into both meant I finally had a real reason to stop waiting for the right mood, or the right amount of readiness, or whatever it was I thought I was missing.

It hasn’t been calm. I found out the real deadline was a lot closer than I thought, which meant building this fast, under pressure, figuring things out as I went, sometimes with things breaking in ways I didn’t expect. If some pages feel more finished than others right now, that’s why. I’d rather launch something honest and still-in-progress than wait for a version of “ready” that, I’m starting to think, never actually arrives on its own.

A few other things, since we’re getting to know each other: I recently adopted a cat, Paletka, who has already taken over my desk more than once while I was trying to work on this exact site. I also have a notebook that’s been filling up for years with ideas that were only ever meant for me, and somewhere in the last few weeks I decided it was time to actually open it.

So that’s the real version of how this started: two years of avoiding a dissertation, a fear of being seen that I finally got tired of feeding, a very short deadline, and a cat who has strong opinions about my keyboard. If you’re working on something you’ve been putting off too, for whatever reason, I’d love to hear about it. You can always find me on the Contact page.

Thank you for being here at the very beginning of this.