My name is Renato Zamagna. For years I had the job, the salary, the international career, and the life that looked impressive from the outside. A genuinely luxurious life, actually. And I was miserable inside it, slowly disappearing, completely dependent on external structures to tell me I was worth something.

Then I lost the job that was paying for all of it. In that moment it didn’t feel like a blessing. It felt like the floor was gone. I felt completely naked.

But it was only when that job disappeared that I realised how desperately I had needed to get out of that cage in order to stay alive. In order to be fully myself.

That loss triggered a total metamorphosis. It wasn’t clean and it wasn’t fast. But the version of me that came out the other side is fiercely self-aware and protects what he discovered in ways the old version never could. That was four years ago. I’m still in it.

What I do now is make that process public. Not to teach it. Because every time I say something out loud about myself, someone tells me they thought they were the only one. You’re not the only one.