I am a recovering workaholic. And, just like any other „-aholics” out there, my battle is a daily one.

You never STOP being a workaholic, just like other addicts don’t ever stop being addicts. They merely link together as many “clean” and „sober” days, months and years as possible. But that painstaking chain can be broken any time, so you simply can’t let your guard down.

Being a workaholic is like walking for the rest of your life on the brink of a precipice, where every moment holds the danger of you falling off down the slope. And what a slippery slope that is.

Workaholics get their kicks out of working. It fuels their engines, it lubes their rusty inner workings, it pushes the right buttons and turns them into someone worth being. It gives them purpose and value.

Workaholism goes way beyond the mere passion for something, although it always starts with that. Underneath there’s a need of being needed, of being irreplaceable not in a poetic kind of way, but in a strategic straightforward one.

It’s about being the hero.

If you work more, faster and better, you will eventually feel worthy. Needed. Appreciated. And possibly even loved. Like any hero out there.

My 20s were all about work. Sleepless nights, endless pages, always taking up more than it was expected of me, putting in extra hours, going the extra mile. Or the marathon.

Workaholism robbed me of more than my health, which I only recently managed to put back together.

It twisted my sense of fairness in regards to my work.

You see, my generation had ingrained in its collective mindset this crooked idea that “money is not important” when you are young. That youth is all about acquiring skills, learning the ropes, doing anything and everything that is asked of you.

That the more tasks you do, the more tasks you get and that’s a blessing in itself.

It’s not.

And there’s no statue, nor shrine built in your honor either. In some cases there’s not even a „Good job, thank you” thrown in, let alone any glory.

Acquiring experience and building oneself a professional persona is an intrinsinc part of youth, but being overworked and underpaid shouldn’t be the accepted collateral damage.

This is what this new generation finally got right: they know where to draw the line. They find this whole „tax on youth” to be preposterous.

I don’t regret writing hundreds of pages and making magazines from scratch. I loved every second, but what I do regret is not having drawn that line. Between “enough” and “too much”.

Between saving the day and sacrificing one’s health, wellbeing and much more.

Workaholism gave me a sense of purpose, of being the best and honing my craft at the speed of light. However…

I lost my connection with real life

I don’t remember my 20s in terms of dates, parties, escapes with friends. I only see an endless array of pages, articles, events, shootings and interviews.

And although I enjoyed each and every one of them, I could have saved some time, space and energy for me as well. For what the rest of my being, not merely my intellect, wanted and needed.

I should have exercised more, eaten more sensibly, gone to more parties, laughed more, talked to my friends more, done more work-unrelated stuff, just because they felt good and they made me happy, not just as a means to an end.

I worked so much that it didn’t leave much time for living.

I felt falsely invincible

Apart from making you feel extra-worthy and hero-like, workaholism gives you the illusion of invincibility.

Like there are no consequences to doing away with the boundaries of your own body and mind.

Sleepless nights, hours spent in front of the computer and daily meals sourced from vending machines seem the normal thing to do. The required rite of passage into „the big league”.

As weariness builds, coping mechanisms kick in and you suddenly start having a twisted competition with yourself. It’s called „How Much Can I Take?”.

And the answer is always „More, more, more”.

Basically, your sense of worth becomes a sum of sacrifices. The bigger the load, the greater the worth.

Working hours, pages per day, articles, tasks, they all get caught in the mathematics of inner worth. I once translated 100 pages from Romanian to English in one sleepless night and felt exhilarated. Could barely keep my eyes open, but I had done it. Go, me!

There is a time for everything and for nothing

I postponed life.

When you are very young, you see life as this infinite resource that never dwindles nor fades. So you feel you always have the time.

No matter how many weekends you sacrifice working, how many meetings, dates and parties you postpone or how many calls from friends and family you fail to pick up, there is always time for all that. Later…

Until there isn’t.

Workaholism enshrines work as the main priority in life and all the rest as kick-knacks that can wait. Only life doesn’t wait.

It may sound all poetic and deep, but it’s actually the simplest truth there is to know about life: it never waits.

If you allocate a huge amount of time to one part of your life, there will inevitably be chunks that you rip out from other places. Places that „can wait„, but never do.

I absolutely love my work and my current life, but if I could turn back time and be 23 again, with the mind of a 36, I would do many things so differently. I am certain that hypothetical new path would bring me here anyway, but with a lower toll on my health, life, wellbeing and happiness.

Those exact things that „can wait” until we’re done with the important, essential tasks of our professional path.

They never wait, they’re lost forever and we just have to come to terms with it, like responsible grown-up former workaholics that we are.

A few years ago, I went to see a coach. A life coach, that is.

I needed a fresh pair of eyes to look at my life and tell me if I was right about not liking it.

I had a life that felt seamless from the outside, but cumbersome from the inside.

The coach I went to gave me a sort of “exercise” to conduct at home: I was supposed to revisit the moments in which my life had been less than happy and conduct a “pep talk” to the Diana I used to be.

At first, it felt downright ridiculous. I was never one for new-agey practices and I felt embarassed to even do such things in my head, let alone aloud.

However, I did it. I closed my eyes and imagined myself at one of the most vulnerable moments of my life.

I pictured myself as an eleven year old. A little nerd, with thick prescription glasses and a wandering soul.

A poetic heart in a mathematics special class. A curly-haired girl, a bit chubbier than the rest, but most of all… more sensitive than all the rest. And shieldless. 

I was bullied by my professors, whose teaching techniques stemmed from the Russian methods of the communist era. I was the laughing stock of my colleagues because of my shyness.

I felt profoundly and heartbreakingly misunderstood, but not in any poetic kind of way, but in a realistic and painful way.

I felt the odd one out. The one that didn’t fit anywhere.

From all the tougher moments of my life, that was the first one that came to mind when I closed my eyes and channeled “the little me”.

And, for the first time in my life, I suppressed all my “This is ridiculous!” red flags and went with the flow.

And I listened. Little Me told Grown-Up Me all the things I would have loved to be able to tell someone, so many years ago.

She cried and I hugged her. And after Little Me talked and the Grown-Up Me listened, time came for the roles to reverse.

So I told that little girl what I would have desperately wanted someone to tell me back then.

That it’s going to be okay.

Dear Diana, I started.

And she cried, and I talked.

Dear Diana, I know you are just this tiny frightened girl, that doesn’t feel like she’s worth much right now.

You are the laughing stock of everyone and you feel that nobody is on your side. Not even you are on your side, because you don’t know how to handle everything that’s coming your way.

You do your best, although now that doesn’t seem like much. It is.

I know this period that everybody refers to as a special time of your life is nothing but a dark hole. It doesn’t feel like the childhood heaven that it’s supposed to be, but merely a grim tunnel with no end in sight.

But there is an end. Or better said, a beginning. You have a lot of beginnings ahead of you.

I know you’ll find it hard to believe, but a few years from now you will be so incredibly happy. Not just happier than you are now, but happier than your little mind can even conceive.

Sometimes, for some people, the timeline of life is not linear and smooth: the bad comes first and the good comes second. 

You are one of those people.

You are a late bloomer, but you don’t know it just yet.

You may look at yourself in the mirror and see only things you don’t like and that nobody seems to like. And you think that it’s going to be like that forever.

It isn’t. Your life is going to be so much better.

Someday, you will wear braces, you’ll grow to tame and love this messy curly hair, you’ll have long legs and rosy cheeks. And they’ll be yours. No magic there, just you growing into your own self.

Only this won’t happen right away, it will take a while. I told you life is unfair sometimes, but in the end it’s worth it.

You feel so lonely and voiceless now. You tell grown-ups about what you are going through and nobody gets it.

They all look at you like you’re supposed to be this carefree child with not a worry in the world. And it feels like you’re yelling your soul out in a soundproof room.

You’ll be doing that for some time, but someday, that voice, hoarse from all that inner screaming, will be a voice that people will care about.

YOUR people will care about that voice.

You know how you only feel happy when you’re writing? You’ll always have that, but someday it will not only be soothing to you, but for so many other people.

They will take your writing and patch their hearts with it. And you’ll feel worthwhile, because your voice does things for others.

It will not go in vain, not in a soundproof room anymore. It’ll be for the world to hear.

You now feel that nothing good can ever happen to you, but it will. There’s so much good waiting for you, piles of good will sink all the bad that surrounds you into the ground.

The good lifts the soul, but it weighs heavier than the bad. It tips the scale.

And there will also come a time when you’ll be able to get your revenge on all these people who are now insensitive and mean to you. You’ll look down on them and have your chance to yell into their ears everything that you gathered inside for so long.

All the hurt and the anger will have the chance to flow out like a rainstorm. Only… you won’t let it flow. You’ll choose not to.

Although you find it impossible to imagine right now, all that you are currently living will someday be an infinitesimally small dot on the map of your existence. Telling these people off will feel meaningless and a waste of energy and purpose.

They will not be worth it. 

And that will be one of the most exhilarating sensations you’ll ever experience: having the power to avenge yourself, but also the inner freedom not to care anymore.

It will have been too far gone to even matter. And that, my dear, will be the real power.

Not the kind of power that these people exert on you nowadays when they act mean and cruel. Their power comes from belittling and humiliating, not from themselves.

Your power will come from inside yourself and you won’t need to humiliate them to get even. You will be so much more than even.

I know you don’t feel like a winner of any life lottery right now, but trust me, someday you’ll feel like a million bucks.

And you will only have yourself to thank for that.

So hang on.

Hang on.

Youth is the most precious thing in life. It is too bad it has to be wasted on the young.

The irony of these words  – belonging to George Bernard Shaw – is not wasted on me, as I first heard them when I was a lot younger myself. And, just like Shaw intuited, much less wiser than I am now.

The idea of “wasted youth” rang true and beautiful for me, but I only grasped it recently. When I came to terms with the sad waste of my own youth.

With more time on my hands than ever before, I started thinking about the past. What could I have done differently? How would my life have played out in that parallel scenario, where I was smarter, savvier and more strategic with my own happiness? 

How much heartache could have been avoided? How much meaningless turmoil spared? How much energy, time and soul saved? 

Do you ever feel like you’ve wasted years of your life and, if given the chance, you would live them all so differently? For me, this lingering and nagging thought was the catalyst for turning my life around, two years ago.

I realised that something with my life was completely off when I would catch myself daydreaming more and more about “What could have been?”.

Ever so often, my mind would slowly and subtly drift away into a land of what ifs and could have beens. So much that it soon became my favorite escape and the one thing that soothed me when I closed my eyes at night. 

You know those movies in which the leading character wakes up and suddenly it’s 30 years ago and she/he has a fresh new start at life? That was my utmost fantasy. UNDO-ing my life.

And that was also the moment I had to fully confront myself. The darkest parts included.

What wasn’t working in the current reality that made me so unhappy? What malfunctioned so badly that it made me dream of hitting the “Reset” button and not looking back? And the answer was inconveniently and painfully simple: everything. Or, better said… nothing.

Nothing was working in my life at that time, so I did the only thing that felt right: I started to offload and to simplify. To deconstruct, to dismiss and to rebuild.

After almost two years of doing that, wholeheartedly and somewhat painfully, I realised that I have one more essential and difficult thing left to do: to forgive myself.

I look around and see that my current life is much more than I could have dreamt of. Two years, a radical change and a new life.

However, I subconsciously still blame myself for wasting so many good years and for bringing my life on such a brink of unhappiness that it had to be completely rebuilt.

It’s like being caught in an endless legal battle with an architect that built you a crooked house, one that you had to knock down and reconstruct from scratch. Only it’s a battle where you are both defendant and plaintiff. You built it, you tore it down, you put it back up.

It took me quite some time to get out of this circle of inner blaming because, truth be told, I had a lot to forgive myself for.

I had to forgive myself for suppressing my own desires in favor of what was acceptable or considerate. For having a dreadful sense of self and listening more to what other people had to say than to my own intuition.

For ignoring my inner hunches about people I shouldn’t have let around me.

For hoarding stuff instead of confronting pains.

For not running away when I had the urge. For conforming. For not taking better care of myself. For not having my own back. And for so much more.

There’s a whole trend nowadays about blaming the parents for our life’s mishaps. Somehow, we made it all about them: the way they raised us, the hugs they failed to give, the support they lacked to offer, the “I love You”s they didn’t provide. 

We blame our parents and, after a certain point in life, we start blaming ourselves even more for all we failed to do with our own lives.

I never really blamed my folks for not showing me „the ideal way” to navigate this rapidly-changing world, that honestly they knew little about themselves. But I did blame myself for not being smarter sooner. For needing years to wise up about the important things.

At this point in my life, I came to terms with the fact that both my parents and I had one major thing in common. Them, me and any other human being that breathed and lived.

In every single moment in time, we all acted based on the knowledge we had and the experience we owned.

Choose any random moment of your personal history and you will realise that you did… the best you could do, with what you knew. Even your personal disasters were once your finest work of strategic planning.

That was your best shot. You took it, now own it.

You didn’t know then what you know now, but instead of dwelling on the past, we should maybe take all our regrets and „should have beens” and use them to fuel our present and future. Maybe we didn’t know so many things back then… but we do now.

Blaming the past keeps our eyes on the past, but I found my own way of healing the past while focusing on the future: I think about all the things I SHOULD have done differently… and do them now.

I use that retrospective wisdom in order to bolster my present, which is the only thing I am able to change and mould as I desire.

Yes, I wasted good years and opportunities on bad decisions. Dwelling on them would only lead to even more useless waste.

Instead, I choose to draw a line and start over. Smarter, wiser, more strategic, but also kinder to oneself. Humbler.

This is probably the most precious lesson I got from my mistakes and it’s one I plan on honoring every day, for the rest of my life.

A few months ago, I found on Instagram a picture with a curious phrase written on it: „Fasting From People Is Also Important”.

It stayed with me, glued to my mind, because it rang so true. Strange, but so true.

We always talk about decluttering our homes, about honoring our bodies by fasting at certain intervals, about letting our cells heal. About simplifying and curating our lives.

So we downsize possesions, we lower our food intake, we cross out unessential activities… but what about people?

We are all different in most options, choices and preferences and it’s perfectly fine. We wouldn’t ruin a friendship because we have a different sense of style or clashing musical tastes. But our core values and principles are fundamentally unnegotiable.

That is the essential 1% of what we are as people: the beliefs that we stand for and that we are willing to defend and uphold no matter what.

Not merely as a moral obligation, but as a intrinsic part of who we are in this world.

We cannot simply smile and move on when something feels totally wrong and unfair, because keeping quiet about it makes us feel like we’re choking on the inside.

These past few weeks I unfriended, unliked and unfollowed lots of people. Not as a statement, but as a consequence of the phrase above.

I don’t think we all have to be on the same page about the important things, but we don’t have to all be friends to one another either. It’s not a prerequisite of life.

Ever since kindergarten, we liked who we liked. We weren’t all best buddies, but rather we deliberately chose who was part of our inner circle and who wasn’t. The rules were unspoken, but obvious: we befriended the people with whom we had the most things in common.

Even though we were radically different about most things, we made similar choices on the important 1%. That 1% brought us all together.

So… how come we are all friends on social media? We all Like, Share and LOVE like it’s all one big happy family. It isn’t. This pandemic made it clear for the whole world how fundamentally different our belief systems are. And it’s okay.

For the past few weeks, I’ve had more time than ever to ponder over the relationship I have with my body.

A body which has endured a lot and fought a lot and which I unfairly considered for a longtime to be a „broken”  gift I got from life.

My body cannot handle foods that are elementary for most people, it isn’t as strong and resilient in circumstances that most people find to be absolutely normal and has always hindered me whenever I wanted to prove myself „Limitless”. You cannot be Limitless when you are always searching for the hidden cause of some pain and discomfort.

It was only yesterday, when I was rewatching the superficial yet entertaining „Eat, Pray, Love” movie, with Julia Roberts as the troubled wanderer Liz, that a line shook me up. There’s a scene when the medicine man Ketut from Bali tells Liz that the purpose of this whole process of reconnecting with herself is to get to „smile with your face, smile with your body, smile even with your liver”.

I have to admit this made me smile. With my face, not my liver, though. And I suddenly realized that I have been pushing my body to mend itself as soon as possible and to „make me happy”, without taking into consideration the fact that it had had a tough fight of its own.

Was my body happy? No. Had I given a damn? No.

For the past 30 years, my body has been abused and aggressed in a myriad of ways. Without realizing it, I fed it things it could not process, I pushed it to tolerate ingredients that were off limits, I made it collateral damage to my sleepless nights of workaholism and of my less-than-ideal and ever-changing diet.

My body is like a beaten woman or an abused child who need to find faith again. Faith in themselves, in life, in something.

I realized how foolish I had been, expecting my body to mend in a few months or a year, after three decades of working it harder than it was equipped to work in the first place. It was just like telling that poor beaten woman or child, „Hey, the circumstances have changed now, so I expect you to forget every bad thing that ever happened to you and start anew. And be happy and cheerful. Like… NOW. Okay?”

No, it’s not okay. I may have been giving my body the medicine and diet it had long craved for, but I wasn’t giving it other more precious things. Patience. Love. Respect. I was expecting it to reset itself and forget everything.

Like pressing a „Delete” button and installing new software. It doesn’t work like that.

I may not have won the genetic lottery with this body of mine, but I have had bestowed upon me the incredible luck of a body who went beyond its limits, above its in-built parameters, like a machine that outsteps its technical boundaries.

This „broken” body of mine has survived bad diagnostics, wrong diagnostics, excruciating pain, several threats of major unnecessary surgery, long years of testing and needles of all shapes and sizes piercing its skin.

And from this body I asked nothing short of perfection. No less than that.

I don’t know if my liver can ever SMILE, like really smile, after all it’s been through the past decades, but I will damn sure do my best to make it smile.

Not just by religiously following my medical protocols, but adding something more to the mix of pills I take daily. Something I never tried before, not really and not consistently. A high dosage of patience and love. From myself to myself.

It was about time.