Life

In my second year of high school, I had zero interest in studying. I was convinced I could land a job without a degree—maybe not entirely unrealistic at the time, given how the tech industry was scaling up toward its peak.

My school organized a trip to a neighboring city for a student fair, where universities advertised themselves. Since I still had two years before final exams, I wasn't particularly interested in any of it. I was just wandering around when I noticed a stand about studying in the UK.

What happened next is burned into my memory. A guy at the stand spotted me, called out, and asked if I was interested in studying abroad. I wasn't—but somehow he convinced me to attend a lecture starting in an hour or two. We had to stay at the fair until early afternoon anyway, so I figured I'd kill some time.

Those 40 minutes completely flipped my understanding of higher education. I had assumed UK universities required perfect grades and that applying would be a waste of time. Turns out, the opposite was true: applying to the UK was easier than applying to Polish universities.

I got his contact, and the topic went dormant—after all, I still had two years of high school ahead. But near the end of my third year, the thought resurfaced. I reached out, and we started the process almost immediately. He also organized funded trips to the UK where prospective students could visit campuses, attend classes, and experience student life firsthand. I will be forever grateful for what he did for me—he changed the trajectory of my entire life. The university covered everything, so I volunteered. I got a spot and spent a week living like a student in the UK.

I was closed off at the time—not particularly open to making friends. Some of the other volunteers probably thought I was the weird kid in the group. Ironically, several people I met on that trip became my closest friends, people I still stay in touch with today.

So from one random conversation at a fair, I ended up moving to a different country, studying in a different language, making friends from around the world, taking my first real steps into independence, and figuring out life as a 19-year-old alone in a foreign place.

Those years taught me more than any classroom could. I was studying full-time while working part-time to support myself — building real friendships from zero, learning to keep going when there's no one to call, paying rent, cooking, doing laundry, and handling all the tiny daily things you never think about when someone else handles them.

I think about this sometimes. If I had walked past that stand. If he hadn't called out. If I had said no to that lecture. I'd have a completely different life. Different friends. Different memories. A different me.

That's the thing about accidents. You don't see them coming. One random Tuesday. One conversation with a stranger. And suddenly you're on a path you never planned, becoming someone you didn't know you could be.

My step-dad says traveling makes you richer; my mom that nobody can steal your experiences.

And I do travel, quite a lot actually. So far, I've been through Poland, the UK, Sicily, Spain, the USA, Puerto Rico, Croatia, and Fuerteventura. Each destination leaves something behind—a new perspective, a connection, a story worth remembering, or a magnet for my granny.

It started innocently (and incredibly brave when I look back at it): moving out of my parents' house to the UK for university. It evolved into taking trips abroad with friends and gradually transformed into moving out to different countries as if it was taking a bus to nearby city. I'd risk saying I spent more time at airports or in-flight than using buses and metro.

It's not sunshine and rainbows, though. Everybody sees all the places you visited, delicious food you ate, people you met and cultures you experienced. They don't see longing for places that felt like home, leaving friends behind or not being able to form life-losting connections because every destination you visit is just a page in a book; not a chapter. On one hand, you feel like a citizen of the world, constrained only by layovers at the airports; on the other, you're a stranger everywhere, without a real home, longing for stability and peace people take for granted. It gets lonely. It's tiring—the constant hustle, living out of a backpack, not knowing where you'll sleep next month. But the world is too big and too beautiful to stay in one place. It's not for all, but once you start living as a citizen of the world, you can't stop seeing the endless ocean of opportunities right in front of you.

While on the road I shoot a lot of footage, then edit it into something that lasts. I call it Memories on Tape—a bit cliché, but it does the job. Every trip or a chapter gets its own video. Years later, watching them back shows me (and all the people I've met along the way) not just where I was, but who I was.

It doesn't get easier. You just get better at carrying the contradiction. I've learned to build a life that fits in a backpack and relationships that don't need daily maintenance. I miss birthdays, I watch friendships fade, and some nights I want a kitchen I know instead of a view I've never seen. But I've also learned that you don't need a fixed address to feel like you belong somewhere. The same restlessness that makes me restless is what makes me pay attention — to people, to moments, to experiences, to the now I live in.

I can lose sleep over this. It's been with me since childhood, when my dad forced me into extracurricular English classes. I hated them then. Now I know they changed everything. Thank you Dad, I love you.

I don't see language as words or grammar. I see it as an imperfect human attempt on compressing the infinity of the universe into manageable pieces we use to share information.

The more languages I learn, the more I admire how machines communicate. They use infinite dimensions of vectors. No different vocabulary lists, no accents, rules and irregularities, and no forgot the word. They have one unified latent space to represent meaning itself — without compressing it into words. And human brain, also creates those vectors — some shorter, some longer. That's why I believe multilingual people switch mid-sentence. The distance to certain concepts is shorter in one language than another.

Although, it comes with a cost: you feel like an impostor in every language. You can't finish a sentence without borrowing from other language.

Across the years people have tried to fix this by creating synthetic languages like Esperanto or Toki Pona (my favourite). But you can't globally unify a language without diluting culture. And impossible-to-understand-prononciation will always exist (looking at you, Andalucía.)

I don't want new rules nor unified language. I want to prove there's another, better way of learning than what our teachers taught us.

Traditional methods obsess over grammar, teaching you 47 different rules before you even know the words to apply them. I believe in volume-vocabulary; absorb as much words as possible through exposure and let grammar emerge naturally. Eventually you need some structure — otherwise you're just pointing at things and hoping your speaker gets it. I developed this method of volume-vocabulary, used it on myself to learn Spanish in ±3 months, then forged into a system. My mom was my first test subject. After 4 months she quit her English tutoring, doubled her active vocabulary size and finally felt like making progress after 7 years of stagnation. That experiment later became LanguageEverest.

I picked up bachata completely at random. I was in Valencia with friends when we stumbled into a beach social—my first real exposure to bachata. People were dancing, socializing, and moving to the music. It was awkward at first. The only places I'd ever "danced" before were alone in the shower or at clubs where nobody cares what you look like.

The class itself was great. We rotated partners constantly, which meant you met new people every few minutes without the usual awkwardness—most of us were beginners anyway, and that shared inexperience made it easier.

I had already been looking for a new physical hobby besides the gym. Bachata became that.

There's a specific kind of freedom I feel when dancing, especially with strangers. No responsibilities. No expectations. No eyes judging you. Just a brief window where you can drop every mask, every worry, and truly be present. The music takes over. The movement becomes the only thing that exists. For those few minutes, you're living now—not yesterday, not tomorrow, just the rhythm and the connection.

I'm a volume doer by default, and bachata was no exception. Once I started, I went to socials three times a week. My level shot up fast—when you put in the hours, progress comes quickly.

In 2025 I set myself a challenge: attend 50 bachata classes or events. I almost hit it, but I couldn't sustain that intensity indefinitely—life gets busy. Still, I'm in love with it, and I use every opportunity to hit a class or a social.

Salsa comes with the territory—I'm not as enchanted by it, but where there's bachata, there's usually salsa, so I'm picking up moves as I go.

In Valencia, the best place to dance is definitely Miky House. It's a small, crowded, chaotic spot—but the people make it real. Most of my Valencia friends are dancers I met there.

I will die on this hill: ninety-nine percent of "I can't" is just a mental barrier nobody taught us to question.

Look at my life. A single conversation at a random fair rewired everything—my education, my career, the countries I lived in, the people I know. I had zero social skills. Zero network. Zero belief that someone like me could study abroad. But I went. Then I moved to countries where I knew no one, built a career across four nations, learned languages, started companies, picked up dancing at twenty-something. Every single one of these started with the same sentence: "I have no idea how to do this."

The thing nobody tells you: you were assigned a name, a religion, a city, a nation, a culture, a set of standards the day you were born. Before you could speak. Before you could think. And most people never stop to ask—is this actually mine? They follow the script. School, job, mortgage, retirement, death. A life lived in default mode because questioning feels dangerous.

But here's the truth. Being afraid to look stupid is the most expensive mistake you can make. I will happily be the dumbest person in any room. The one who asks the basic question everyone else pretends to understand. The one who admits "I don't get it" and makes people explain. Those who ask are fools for a minute. Those who don't stay fools for life.

Carving your own path is not comfortable. It's not safe. You will feel lost. You will question yourself at 3am. You will watch people around you settle into predictable lives while you're stumbling in the dark, learning, failing, rebuilding. That's the price. And humans? We're built for this. We didn't evolve to sit in climate-controlled offices clicking buttons. We evolved to solve hard problems, to adapt, to overcome.

You're here for a good time, not a long time. The clock started ticking the day you were born and it never stops. So what are you actually doing with it? Following someone else's map? Living by rules you never agreed to? Or are you building something that feels like yours?

Mental barriers are just that—mental. They dissolve the moment you decide to walk through them. The only question is whether you'll make that decision today, tomorrow, or never.