MY JOURNEY

FROM CROATIA TO USA TO CANADA TO DENMARK

I always knew I would move abroad. My mom’s uncle used to visit us in Croatia every summer from New York, and I remember watching him as a kid thinking: one day, that will be me.

At 21 I got my first taste of it in the USA, two suitcases, no idea what I was doing. A few years later I did it for real: moved to Canada with no job lined up, after 200 applications from Croatia and zero replies. I got hired within days of landing, at a makeup counter, because I walked in to buy mascara and asked if they were hiring. I needed a job, any job, before I could think about finding one in my field.

Turns out, half of getting what you want is just asking for it.

What I didn’t expect was that standing behind that counter, talking to strangers all day, would show me the thing I’d been missing in engineering the whole time: people. It’s part of why I ended up training to become a psychotherapist years later, long before I had a name for what I was chasing. An engineering job still came two months later, but that shift had already started.

After a year in Canada, I needed to leave, faster than I’d planned. And eventually I landed in Denmark, a country I never planned to live in, in a language I still don’t speak.

Every one of those moves taught me the same thing: you don’t need the full plan before you start, you need to trust you’ll figure it out once you’re there. That’s what I actually help people with now.