What Leaving Teaches You and What Coming Back Reveals
Today I was asked about my experience between the two worlds. To write the kind of introspection that weaves together mindset, body, culture, energy, values, and business, spanning the arc from leaving a 1,000-year-old Slovenian town to moving to New York City, and then returning home after 18 years…as a very different person.
I didn’t leave Slovenia because I was chasing something “more.” I was, in many ways, content. Content with the town I grew up in, with its layered history, its shared memory, and its inherited roles.
When you grow up inside a place like that, limitation doesn’t feel oppressive. It feels normal. The rhythm is familiar. The expectations are understood. The rules are rarely spoken, but they are everywhere.
Then, one day, an invitation came. With more reluctance than excitement, I stepped outside that ecosystem.
New York City did not expand my ambition, it rewired my nervous system
What struck me first wasn’t the size of the city, but the speed of consequence.
In Slovenia, effort accumulates slowly. In New York, the effort compounds immediately. You show up differently because the environment responds differently. If you move quickly, the city moves with you. If you hesitate, it moves past you. There is no ambient caretaking of identity. No one asks who you are supposed to be. No one waits for you to feel ready. The question is simpler, and far more confronting: can you deliver?
Body: The Physical Reality Most People Don’t Talk About
At first, New York City gave me something I had never experienced before: anonymity without erasure. I could blend in without disappearing, own my height instead of apologizing for it, and find clothes that fit my body and my style rather than forcing myself into what was deemed acceptable. In Slovenia, my body had always been noticed and labeled. As a teenager, I was called a “living wall.” Clothing wasn’t an expression; it was a compromise.
Then, I learned that the body is never just personal. It is cultural and systemic, shaped by the environments in which it is either allowed to exist without explanation or quietly written off.
While my body was celebrated for athletic performance, it changed once fast living of the City was replaced with life in the suburbs, where everything revolved around a car, and movement became structured rather than embodied. After my second, traumatic birth, I gained eighty pounds due to hormonal issues. “You’re tall, you carry it well,” doctors told me, as if visual acceptability were a clinical metric, and falling outside bounce-back culture rendered my body unworthy of care. Besides, by birthing two kids, my “dutiful purpose” was seemingly fulfilled…
Culture: Permission Versus Restraint
The biggest cultural difference I experienced had little to do with confidence and everything to do with permission.
In the United States, you are permitted to try and to fail. Failure is information. It is data that helps you recalibrate your next move. You are encouraged to dream expansively and to become visibly successful.
In Slovenia, you are often expected to be competent before you begin…And then better be careful not to become too successful, lest you risk social ostracism or systemic penalty. And yet, failure can feel like something others secretly wish upon you, because their own sense of identity has been bruised by it. That may sound blunt, but it is an honest observation.
This isn’t a critique so much as a recognition that cultures optimize for different survival strategies.
That single distinction quietly shapes how careers are built, how voices emerge, how risk is metabolized, and how failure is interpreted.
In business, in sports, in life.
Business: How Scale Changes the Questions
In New York, the dominant questions are about scale. Can this grow? Can it withstand pressure? Can it hold complexity? Can it move money, people, and ideas simultaneously? You learn to think in systems because everything around you is a system.
Back in Slovenia, I am learning that the intelligence is quieter, but no less real. It lives in continuity, craftsmanship, relational memory, and long-term trust.
Having lived deeply in both contexts, I now see the real point of friction:
Slovenian businesses often possess the depth required to scale, but lack the narrative permission to do so.
American businesses, on the other hand, often have narrative permission in abundance, yet lack the depth required to sustain what they build. It is, quite simply, easier to succeed in an environment that grants permission than in one that primarily rewards restraint, even when that restraint is rooted in quality.
Energy: What Each Place Expects From You
New York expects output. Slovenia expects integration.
In the United States, motion is rewarded. At home, coherence is. One environment sharpens your edge; the other sharpens your center.
The mistake is believing you must choose between them. The real advantage (the rare one) is having lived both long enough for them to coexist inside you. Even then, the hooks of external expectation and judgment can cut deeply and hold tightly.
Coming Back Was the Real Initiation
Leaving was relatively easy. Coming back was honest.
When you return, you see everything with new eyes: what still fits, what never did, what you have outgrown, and what you are finally ready to steward.
You also see yourself without the mythology of either place. You are no longer the small-town girl, and no longer the New Yorker. You are something more integrated, more precise, and far less performative.
And then, there is another detail: growing up in Slovenia, I always knew I was welcome to return; my parents made that abundantly clear. Home was never conditional. In contrast, when I announced I was moving back, many Americans assumed something had gone wrong. They asked (sometimes gently, sometimes not) whether I felt like I had failed. That question revealed more about the culture than about my choice.
In one place, return is continuity. In the other, it is often misread as retreat. Learning to stand inside that tension, without needing to explain or justify it, was part of the real initiation.
What I Carry Now
It will be three years since I came back, together with my husband, our kiddos, and three fluffs. Along with careers and businesses.
From New York, I carry decisiveness, scale-thinking, comfort with pressure, and speed without apology. From Slovenia, I carry discernment, relational intelligence, respect for timing, and a deep embodiment of place.
The embodiment of those worlds is where my work lives now. Not exporting American bravado, and not romanticizing European restraint, but helping people and organizations bridge worlds without losing themselves in the process.
