From burnout to Rome: my search for purpose as a Creative Technologist
Burnout doesn’t roar. It whispers.
For me, it started when everything looked fine.
I was working as a software engineer and a brand manager for a business pre-accelerator. Two jobs. Two lives.
From the outside, I looked like someone going somewhere.
Inside, I felt like a hamster on a wheel: running, sweating, repeating.
I used to love that work. The pre-accelerator gave me meaning – helping others, seeing innovation bloom. But the software job drained me.
Each day I built things that meant nothing to me.
Line by line, code by code, I started forgetting about myself.
I was a ghost, haunting my own life.
Somewhere along the way, my identity stopped being mine and became my work.
The bigger sin
They say the bigger sin isn’t being wicked, it’s being ignorant.
And that’s what I became: ignorant.
Not angry.
Not passionate.
Just… muted.
Then, one day, I looked at my best friend living in Rome: so obsessed, so alive.
He wasn’t working herself to death.
He was living.
And that contrast hit me like a mirror to the face.
The real monster
The real monster wasn’t the job. 9-to-5 wasn’t the problem.
It was the mindset.
The employee mindset: waiting for someone else to notice, to save me, to tell me I was doing great.
But no one comes.
You have to shine on your own.
You have to push yourself into finding your own journey.
That realization was both freeing and devastating.
4 years of engineering studies, sleepless nights, sacrifices… and I had to admit: it wasn’t for me.
The courage to walk away
When I told my family and friends that I was leaving, they thought I’d lost it.
Who gives up stability? A salary?
But my coaches, my mentors, they called it courage.
Courage to walk away from something safe, to chase something real.
To swap a path I knew for one that didn’t have a map.
The funeral of my old self
I had to bury a part of me, the version that sought validation, that craved permission to exist.
As an employee, I wanted someone to check my work, tell me I was good.
Now, I’ve learned that discipline doesn’t come from approval. It comes from purpose.
I had to kill the limited way of thinking, the voice that said, “The market is bad.” or “You can’t do this.”
There’s always a way.
You just have to focus long enough to see it. “Connecting the dots” as my best friend would say.
Learning to glow in discomfort
If I could whisper something to that old version of me, I’d say this:
Learn to glow in discomfort.
Nothing is permanent.
We are not trees. We can move.
Rome, the healer
Rome healed me in ways I didn’t expect.
Coming from a country where every conversation circled around work, performance, and apartment loans, landing in Rome was like stepping into another reality.
Here, people spoke about spirituality, values, beauty, culture.
No one asked, “So what do you do?”
They asked, “Who are you becoming?”
That shift was therapy in motion.
Still becoming
My life now is about admitting that life happens in cycles. Sometimes we are bulls. Sometimes we are bears.
Discipline is hard.
Scaling is harder.
I’ve proven to myself that I can find clients, that I can survive.
But now I’m learning how to grow.
Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe we never really “arrive.”
We just keep moving, chasing light through the fog, one honest step at a time.