I think many of us were raised with a particular idea of what it meant to be a „good woman“. Good women are agreeable. Good women do not make things difficult. Good women absorb the overflow of other people’s lives without complaint, because complaining is selfish, and selfish is the worst thing you can be. We were taught that our needs were negotiable and that others’ were not. We learned to make ourselves smaller, quieter, and more convenient, and we became so good at it that we stopped noticing we were doing it at all.

So we say yes to the request we do not have the energy for. We say yes to protect the other person from discomfort. We say yes because we know that if we do not, no one else will. And then we sit with the weight of it and wonder why we always end up here.

Here is what I have come to understand. That pattern is not generosity. Sometimes it is fear, the fear of conflict, of being seen as difficult or irresponsible, of what it would mean if we actually said: that is not mine to carry. But more often, if I am honest, it is guilt. The guilt of letting someone down who might genuinely need us. The guilt of saying no to someone we love. We are not saying yes because we are afraid for ourselves. We are saying yes because we cannot bear to disappoint someone else, and that feels different, more noble somehow, more justified.

What we do not see, until we are deep inside it, is what that pattern produces over time. When we are always available, people stop wondering whether we might not be. When we always absorb the overflow, it stops occurring to anyone that we might be full ourselves. Slowly, without anyone intending it, we become the one who is there anyway. The one whose wishes and dreams and limits are not quite real, because we have never openly expressed them before. And that, more than the tiredness, more than the frustration, is the thing that hollows you out. Not that people ask too much. But they have stopped seeing you as someone who might need anything at all. They started taking you for granted, and that’s the ultimate feeling of frustration, disrespect and humiliation.

But again: it is not their fault. We wrote the invitation without knowing we were writing it. But we are allowed to change what the invitation says.

And the people around us, the colleagues, the partners, the children, the bosses, are not villains for accepting what we offer. They are simply human.

The moment something shifted for me was not dramatic. It was a small thing. A request that landed on a day when I was already full, and for the first time, instead of quietly absorbing it, I heard myself say: I cannot take that on right now.

And guess what: The world did not end. The person did not crumble. What happened instead was quieter and more surprising. They found another way. The thing I had believed only I could carry turned out to be carryable by someone else entirely. And I sat with the strange, slightly guilty, slightly liberating feeling of having turned something down.

That is the thing about saying no for the first time. It is not really about the request. It is about realising that the ground holds without you carrying everything on your shoulders.

I want to say something carefully here, because I do not want to add another thing to the list of ways a woman can do her life wrong. If you have spent years saying yes when you meant no, that is not a character flaw. It is a perfectly understandable response to the life you were given. You did what you were taught. You kept things running. You held it together for people who needed holding.

But: you are allowed to update the curriculum.

Not by becoming someone who refuses help, withdraws and builds walls. But by caring about your limits, by getting curious about what you want, by asking, before you answer: do I actually want to do this, or am I afraid of what happens if I don’t? By recognising that a yes given from fear is not kindness. It is a debt you are quietly running up, and one day it comes due in ways that might overwhelm you.

The people who love you can handle your no. The ones who cannot are telling you something important.

You do not have to do it dramatically. You do not have to explain yourself, justify the change, or make sure everyone is comfortable before you begin. You just have to start, once, small, with something true.

Say no to the thing that is not yours. See what happens.

I suspect you will find the same thing I did. That the ground holds. That people adjust. And that somewhere in the quiet of having put one thing down, you will find something you have not heard in a long time. Yourself.

With love from the Bavarian Alps,
Kathrin

I have noticed something about myself, and about almost every woman I have ever sat with. When we look at our own accomplishments, we often suffer from a strange kind of amnesia. We remember the achievements of people we admire in detail, yet we forget our own, the contributions we made, the successes we quietly made possible, the lives we changed simply by showing up. And so, despite all of it, you have come to believe you do not have what it takes to change your own life for the better. Because the strength was always directed outward, spent on your boss, your partner, your children, your parents and the endless list of people who needed you, you never got to feel it as your own. You watched yourself be strong for everyone else and somehow concluded you were not strong enough for yourself. The evidence has been in front of you the whole time. You simply never counted it, because it never had your name on it.

I want to be honest with you, because pretending would be an insult. Building a life of your own is hard. Leaving the known for the unknown is genuinely, legitimately frightening, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a lie. It is easier to hold a role inside a structure someone else built than to build your own from nothing. Even people who look fearless fail at it. Your fear is not foolish. It is information about how much this matters to you.

But let me tell you this from my own experience. We rarely stand at the edge of the leap because it is too big. We stand there because we are waiting for permission, certain that someone or something will eventually tell us it is time, that we are ready, that it is safe to go. And that permission never comes. Not because we are unworthy of it, but because no one was ever going to hand it to us. We were the ones meant to give it to ourselves, and somewhere along the way, we forgot that was allowed.

Until one day, life forces the issue. The company lets you go. The marriage ends. The thing you were holding gets taken out of your hands. And in the rubble, you stand. You do the thing you swore you could not do.

Here is what I want you to see in that. It was never the catastrophe that made you strong. It only took away your excuses. The strength was already yours.

So here is the question I actually want to leave you with. Do you have to wait to be pushed?

Because you do not. You do not need to be fired to discover you can build something of your own. You do not need to be left to find out that you can stand on your own. The catastrophe is not the source of the strength. It only takes away your excuses. And you can set those down yourself, on purpose, while you still have your footing, if you are willing to believe what your whole life has already proven.

You are not waiting to become strong enough. You have been strong enough the entire time. The only thing missing has been your permission to use it for yourself.

So let me ask you, gently:

Where in your life have you already shown the exact strength you are now afraid you lack?

What have you been telling yourself you are not ready for, that some quiet part of you knows you could do?

And what would change if you decided, just once, to believe the evidence instead of the fear?

You do not have to answer today. But I would ask you to stop waiting for life to push you. You already carry everything you would have found in the fall. You can choose to do the first step instead.

With love from the Bavarian Alps,
Kathrin

• When was the last time you let someone carry something for you?

• What would you say if someone asked how you really are, and you decided to tell the truth?

• And who in your life might be waiting for permission to ask, because your strength has convinced them you do not need it?

You do not have to find the answers today. But I would gently ask you to stop assuming that you are the one who always has to be fine.

If something in these words found you, I would love to know. Just reply. I read everything. And I am asking you now, with room in the question: how are you, really?

With love from the Bavarian Alps,
Kathrin

The Rising is a weekly letter for women who have built the right life on paper and are quietly wondering if there is something truer waiting for them. Women who have spent decades being capable, responsible, and good at the lives they were handed, and who are beginning to sense that being capable was never quite the same as being free.

I do not think of this season as a crisis. I think of it as a remembering. You have not lost yourself. You were buried, not destroyed. Everything I write here returns, in one way or another, to that single idea.

There is no noise here, no hustle, no five-step plans. Just honest words, once a week, for women who are ready to stop gathering and start living.

If you are wondering where to begin, here are three letters that will tell you quickly whether my writing is for you:

→ This is for the woman who is done. Read this first, for the emptiness you have carried and never quite had words for.

→ You’re not having a crisis, you are having a remembering. Read this when everything stops making sense, and you wonder what it means.

→ You don’t need to find yourself. You need space to remember. Read this when you begin to suspect you were never lost, only buried.

If something here lands, the simplest next step is to subscribe. It is free, it takes half a minute, and a new letter will find you each week.

I wasn’t looking for them. I was sitting quietly, far away from the life that had been slowly hollowing me out — the long hours, the wrong direction, the growing sense that something essential in me had gone dark. I had gone to Bali to recover, not to create. And then, without warning, they arrived. Ideas. One after another. Painting. I wanted to learn to paint. I hadn’t held a brush since school — the same school that had quietly convinced me, over years of correction and comparison, that I had no talent for it whatsoever.

I believed that for thirty years.

It took one week of space — real space, space that belonged to nobody but me — to find out it wasn’t true.

My first painting after returning from Bali

You are not the only one

I don’t think you’re lost. I think you’re exhausted from living in a space that was never designed for you to think freely in.

And I don’t think you’re alone in this. Not even close.

The women I’m talking about — the ones who wake up one day feeling like a stranger in their own lives — are not a minority. They are most of us. We just don’t talk about it, because somewhere along the way we learned that not knowing who you are is something to be ashamed of. A personal failure. A sign that something went wrong with you specifically.

But here’s what I know to be true: nothing went wrong with you. Something was done to you — quietly, gradually, and with the best of intentions.

It starts before we’re old enough to resist it

Before we can form our own opinions about who we are or what we want, the world is already deciding for us. Parents, teachers, schools, societies — all of them shaping us according to what they believe is right, what is safe, what is practical, what a girl like us should become. Not out of malice, mostly. Out of their own conditioning, their own fears, their own limited vision of what’s possible.

The school system measures what you cannot do and calls it assessment. The loudest message most of us received wasn’t here is where you shine — it was here is where you fall short. We left school not knowing our strengths. We left knowing our deficits.

And from there, we built lives.

Careers chosen not from passion but from obligation, expectation, or the simple fact of not knowing what else to do. Relationships that made sense at the time. Roles that were handed to us — daughter, wife, mother, caregiver — each one real and meaningful and also, slowly, cumulative. Because it is almost always women who step back. Women who pause their own becoming to take care of children, then parents, then whoever needs them next. Women who postpone their dreams so reliably that one day they look up and can no longer remember what those dreams were.

This is not a weakness. This is what happens when you spend decades being externally piloted.

And then one day, midlife arrives

The life you worked so hard to build doesn’t feel like yours anymore. Or maybe it never quite did, and you are only now brave enough to admit it. Either way, something has shifted. The path that felt certain feels hollow. The achievements that were supposed to be enough aren’t. The question that used to be easy — what do I want? — has no answer you can reach.

That feeling is not a crisis. It is not a breakdown. It is not evidence that you left it too late.

It is a signal. Your truest self, tired of waiting, is finally making itself heard.

I want to say something honest about what comes next

Changing direction in midlife is hard. Not impossible — but genuinely, legitimately hard. If you are financially secure and have a partner who supports you, it is still hard. If you are not financially secure, if your partner doesn’t understand, if you grew up in a society where women don’t get to want things for themselves, it is harder. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise isn’t respect. It’s dismissal.

What I will say is this: the difficulty is real, and it is not the whole story.

Here is what I learned in Bali

The answers are already inside you. They have always been there. You haven’t lost your dreams — they were buried. Under the obligations, the roles, the years of being needed by everyone except yourself. Under a school system that told you that you had no talent for the thing you secretly loved. Under a life that never once asked: but what do you want?

You don’t need to find yourself. You need space to remember.

Not a programme. Not a five-step plan. Not someone telling you who to become.

Just space. Quiet. Room to think out loud without anyone needing anything from you for a little while.

That’s where the ideas come back. That’s where the paintbrush appears after thirty years. That’s where you remember that the life you actually want has been waiting patiently — not gone, not lost, just buried — and that you are not too late, not too old, not too far from it to begin.

You just need somewhere to breathe.

If something in these words landed — if you recognize yourself here — I’d love to hear from you. Just reply. I read everything.

With love from the Bavarian Alps, Kathrin

You might dismiss it at first, you’re busy running your life after all. Until it comes back, sitting there in the back of your mind like an uninvited guest refusing to leave. Nagging. Confusing. Irritating.

All of a sudden, you start to question things. The life you worked so hard to build doesn’t feel right anymore. You’re strangely engrossed, like you were dropped into someone else’s reality. Like a stranger looking in. People start noticing that something’s going on with you, but you can’t even explain what it is. Things just don’t make sense anymore. Your life doesn’t make sense anymore. Everything seems to be falling apart, and you start asking yourself: Is this really it?

The day I could not “see” anymore

I remember the day I went blind, not literally but mentally. Since I was a child, I have perceived my world in images, still and moving. I used to be the girl daydreaming, imagining being someone else, fully immersing myself in other worlds.

Even today, when I think of anything - and if it’s just how to get from A to B, I have to “see” it. This is how I make sense of the world. I never knew any other way.

There I was, sitting in my office, running a busy PR & Marketing department of a large hotel in Dubai. The department was terribly understaffed, and I was producing material like a factory. I knew it was the wrong thing to do. It didn’t bring more revenue or new customers, but it was the only way my superiors knew - and being guys with big egos, they had to be right. I had no problem working hard. I had a problem with working hard, doing the wrong thing, and not being able to change it. I cared for this place. I wanted it to work, and I knew we were running in the wrong direction. Frustration started creeping up, giving good company to the growing feeling of exhaustion. A toxic combination. My health started deteriorating. Being busy became feeling stressed, stressed in a very negative, all-consuming and infuriating way. And one day, two little words popped up in my mind that I couldn’t chase away anymore: “What for?”

That was my sign that I needed to change something. But my mind had shut down, the images had disappeared. I felt trapped in a big black hole, and I couldn’t “see” a way out. I was terrified.

What I found when I stopped running

So I escaped. I took some time off and jumped on a plane to Bali - a place that has always been dear to my heart. Not for the beaches, not for the fun - but to retreat, to recover and to find myself again.

In a little yoga place, I met people from all walks of life - the successful investment banker from London, who quit his stressful corporate job and decided to travel for several months in search of a more fulfilling life. The businesswoman, who was recovering from her divorce. The lady in her fifties, who saw her children leaving the nest, and was now sitting quietly with the question: what comes next?

All of them had one thing in common - they had outgrown the lives they had lived before, and they had granted themselves the space to think about a different future than what they had anticipated. So I realised, I wasn’t alone in this. Many others felt the same way and faced the same struggles. What had been right for me three years earlier had served its purpose. It was time to leave. Taking some time away from the place that caused my stress gave me the space and perspective I needed to “see” clearly again. It was time for me to leave the corporate world.

I was trained to believe – and everything I have lived has confirmed – that the answers are already inside you. Bali did not give me new answers. It gave me back the silence I needed to hear the ones that were already there.

You are not broken - you have outgrown your previous life

If you feel like your world is falling apart, rest assured that there is nothing wrong with you. Think of a snake shedding its skin. Not because it’s failing to fit in. Because it has outgrown its previous stage.

What feels like a crisis is actually a remembering - a return to being the person you were always meant to be. Your life until now has been preparing you for what is about to come - a new stage that requires exactly your combination of experience, wisdom and hard-won understanding that only a life fully lived can produce.

What causes confusion is that you are not yet seeing the path. It might not just present itself to you - it might require some effort. But it is there. It has always been there.

And if you have been here before – if this is not the first time this feeling has found you, if you have circled this truth for years and somehow always found a reason to keep waiting – then hear this: you already know. You have known for longer than you are ready to admit. The difference this time is that something in you has decided it is no longer willing to wait.

What this means for you

You do not need to have experienced significant turmoil to feel that disconnect. You do not need to quit a job or leave a relationship before you are allowed to think of what comes next. You are allowed to do that right here, right now.

So let me ask you three questions. Not rhetorical ones – real ones worth sitting with:

• What if the feeling you have been calling a crisis is actually a signal?

• What if the life you are meant to live has been waiting patiently for you to stop running from it?

• What if you are not falling apart – but finally, after all this time, falling into place?

You do not need to answer these today. You do not need to answer them to anyone but yourself. But I would invite you to stop calling what is happening to you a crisis. It is too important for that word. Too purposeful. Too alive.

It is a remembering. And it is just beginning.

If this landed for you – if something in these words brought something up – I would love to hear what it was. Just reply to this letter. I read every message.

With love from the Bavarian Alps, Kathrin

What looks great from the outside often feels very different on the inside. Titles look good on a business card, but no one understands the pressure of meeting unrealistic expectations, navigating your boss's erratic episodes and dealing with colleagues who envy your position because no one is walking in your shoes!

While others envy your salary, you’re grinding 12 hours a day to fulfil someone else’s vision. You’re supporting a business that has no meaning to you. You represent company values that are not aligned with your inner self. You’re functioning, but the void inside of you is taking over more and more space until you feel that there’s nothing left of you.

I woke up one morning at 5 am in my apartment in Dubai and couldn't move my head. My cervical spine had completely locked up. I could neither turn left nor right. I knew immediately what had happened. The day before, I had my annual performance review. I was running the marketing department of a large hotel with almost 600 rooms and 13 restaurants and bars – I had two people. The sales team had 15.

One of my team members was my assistant; she wasn’t great at her job, but as the hotel wasn’t willing to pay an adequate salary, she was the best I could find. I had been searching for six months before I hired her. Knowing I would be back at doing it all by myself if I let her go, I held on to her. During my review, the General Manager blamed me for not firing her, for accepting “mediocrity”, where a leader should never accept “mediocrity”. At the same time, he had been running the property for years and was responsible for the crusty structures that had quietly built up over time, jeopardising my efforts every single day. The difference? He was the boss. While he pointed out my shortcomings, I fought back tears of anger. No word that I had taken over a position that was vacant for more than six months before I joined. Not even a little sign of appreciation for having turned the department around in no time. No acknowledgement that I had established structures for internal communications that didn’t exist before. No respect for getting media visibility with close to no budget. This wasn’t a review; this was an intentional neglect of my achievements, with the simple goal of keeping me small.

Now I sat there in my bed, in severe pain. The emotional stress of the day before had hit me right in the neck. Yet, being the responsible employee I was, I still attended a meeting at the corporate office, which meant a risky car ride and three endless hours of sitting on an uncomfortable and weirdly shaped designer chair, with flashes of pain shooting down my spine.

What followed were several months of chiropractic treatment that cost me dearly – in pain, time and money. As my company's insurance considered the treatment “preventative”, they refused to pay, so I was left to bear the cost. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was done.

Looking back, I am thankful this incident happened. It showed me the insanity of wasting my life trying to fit into someone else’s box. I did a great job, I was giving all I had, I presented endless ways to increase revenue, I treated this hotel as if it were mine – except, it was not.

That’s when it struck me. If I could put my heart and soul into a corporate job that didn’t even appreciate me, why not in my own business?

That thought never left me since. But change is easier said than done. It took me years to find myself again. Throughout my life, I had worn so many masks that I didn’t even know who I really was anymore. I had to try, fail, lose everything and get up again. The problem was that I was doing it alone. Talking to friends and family is nice for emotional support, but it often doesn’t get you anywhere. Despite meaning well, they knowingly or unknowingly influence you because they think they know what is good for you. But the only person who knows what is good for you is you, and what you need is a friend without an agenda.

So I created the space I wished had existed for me – to help women find their purpose and step into the work they were always meant to do. Women who are done grinding and hustling for organizations that would replace them in a second if they handed their notice tomorrow. Women who have a wealth of experience and are done giving it away to bosses who do not even see them. Women who have so much to give but don’t know where to start. Women who are stuck, confused and unsure how to get out of the corporate rat race and start a life that fulfils them. Women like you!

I can’t offer you an easy handout or a roadmap that leads straight to success. What I can offer you is a safe space to think, to get back to yourself, to see your value and to find your path.

If any of this feels familiar – if you recognise yourself somewhere in these words – I would love to hear from you. Simply reply to this letter. No pitch. No agenda. Just a conversation.

With love from the Bavarian Alps, Kathrin

This is the first of my Letters from the Alps. I write twice a month – honestly, without an agenda, for women who are ready to rise. If you know a woman who needs to read this, please pass it on.