I think you don't exist

A while back, I was being coached. The person coaching me was a woman from Pakistan.

At some point in our session, I had this sudden, almost embarrassing realisation: I couldn’t fully believe she was real.

Not her specifically — she was very much real, and very much present, asking me sharp questions. But this mental construct I’d been carrying since childhood had just shown up uninvited: the sense that people ‘from abroad’ are somehow not quite there. Not quite solid. Either fictional, or impossibly competent, or both.

I grew up in Moscow. At some point in English class, our teacher gave us an assignment: write a letter to a pen pal from England.

I wrote the letter — carefully, in my best handwriting, with my most earnest sentences. But even as I wrote it, something felt slightly unreal about the exercise. Were these people actually there? Did they have kitchens and arguments with their parents and favourite songs? Or were they more like a concept — people from England — existing in some abstract elsewhere?

I’ve watched the same thing show up with clients. Women who speak fluent English, fluent Italian, who have genuinely brilliant careers — and still say, almost apologetically, ‘I don’t think working internationally is really realistic for me.’ Women who undersell their services to people far less talented, because some part of them still believes the world beyond their immediate context is populated by impossibly qualified people who would never pay for what they offer.

Here’s what that session cracked open: there is no singular ‘abroad.’ No monolith of exceptional, unreachable people. Just people, in specific places, with specific contexts — and the gap between you and them is rarely what your brain tells you it is.

This newsletter exists partly because of that realisation.

My name is Karina — a late-diagnosed auDHD woman, an ICF-certified coach, and a business consultant. The women I work with have already made the leap — they’ve left employment, they have clients, and they’re working toward income that arrives consistently enough to build a life around. They don’t fit neatly into the ‘serious businesswoman in a blazer’ template, and they’re not trying to. Freedom matters to them. Genuinely interesting work matters to them. They’re figuring out how to build something that actually reflects who they are.

Most business advice wasn’t built for someone who simultaneously craves a meticulously organised Notion system and wants to launch forty-three projects at once — and who has masked so effectively, for so long, that she’s lost track of what she actually wants underneath all that adaptation.

What we’ll talk about here isn’t growth for its own sake. It’s about finding work that fits, clients you actually want, and building income around a life you’re designing — not somebody else’s template for what that should look like.

Welcome.

You exist.

Karina

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