The Short Version
I did everything right. Then I set fire to it.
At fifteen I was painting in Salzburg with Jorg Immendorff. At twenty I got into architecture at the Angewandte in Vienna. I finished a business degree in minimum time, moved to Italy for love, built a company, had two children, came back to Vienna, married again, bought property, started an art career that caught the attention of Paola Antonelli at MoMA.
From the outside it looked like a life that worked. From the inside it was a series of controlled explosions. Every time something got too close to who I really was, I burned it and started over. A marriage. A career. A city. A language.
I wrote a book about it. Fifty-one thousand words. The book taught me what no degree, no coach, no therapist ever did: that the burning wasn't the problem. The burning was the method. The problem was that I kept hiding the fire.
Now I help other women who build too much and show too little. Who start projects like other people start sentences. Who have talent that scares them and ambition they apologize for.