Hi, I am Tania ♡

I am the founder of milyundias and this is my story.

I was born in Switzerland in 1990 as the first of three children. I’ve had a wonderful childhood and experienced many beautiful things with my family throughout my life.

I’ve always been a bit of a wild child, I always wanted to do things differently, and have always been on the run from “normal”. Many would call me “Rebel” or “Dreamer”. Deep inside I always felt that I was supposed to do things my way and I’ve always been on the lookout for total freedom.

As an Aquarius this is pretty much the norm.

In 2011 my father was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer, and with it came a sudden realisation that life was actually not unlimited and that it’s not only happening to others. His sickness came when I was at the peak of my life. I had just started studying and against my nature was excelling at school, I had moved out and found a job and I was having the time of my life.

Life pretty much went on as normal, I changed my routine and spent as much time as I could at home with my parents, while still making sure I was living life to the fullest.

My father’s sickness was always in the background, but our parents made sure we were not being influenced or getting worried about him.

I finished studying and started an internship in sales. Funny enough, I also was pretty career-oriented and felt the urge to compete with my Dad for success and monetary achievements. So although inside of me a little voice was screaming for independence and freedom, I was also looking for the classic career, the 9-5 job and salary that went with it.

Shortly into my internship, my uncle crashed his small plane and became paralysed from the neck down. This was a big shock for me and really brought me out of balance. I was having a very unsatisfying work experience in a global company. I hated my job, I hated the vibes, I hated the competition between the departments, the back-stabbing, and to be honest the absolute unnecessary, ridiculous hours of trying to foresee how much we would sell of our products. I was quite disgusted by the superficiality of the whole and I just wanted out.

However I still completed the 6 months and was later offered a job as Project Manager in a big moving company - which, of course, I took. I was the envy of all my friends, I had a salary I could live off for several months and I was just living the dream! Or so I thought... Hello hierarchy, hello coming out of school and not being taken seriously, hello zero responsibility, hello not wanting to do the best as a company, hello adult acne, hello anxiety attacks, hello despair.

I was hit in the face by a world I just couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand the idea that we wouldn’t want to use reusable resources, take decisions considering the environment, that we wouldn’t want to do our best as a company, the best for our customer. I was hit in the face by a vertical hierarchy, by a head-down-just-do-what-he-tells-you attitude, by the realisation that I was just there to look nice, smile, shut up and just execute.

During that time, we knew that my father was going to die. I was torn between spending time with him and spending time at work (again: I was spending most of my time on Facebook, having coffee, being on WhatsappWeb so it looked like I was working, and not knowing what to do).

I didn’t know how to tell my Dad how much I loved him and how scared I was to go through life without him. I was so afraid of saying thank you, so afraid of telling him all that I felt and asking him a million questions that I knew I wouldn’t have time to ask. I was so afraid of all that and I figured I should just keep on working, since our family was so keen on the career thing. When my Dad decided to go to hospice to die, it was the first time I told my boss that he was sick and that I actually needed a few days off because he was about to die.

My Dad passed away on Saturday the 14th of November 2015 and this day I lost my best friend, I lost my fellow dreamer, I lost someone who always saw something special in me.

Yet my boss asked me to be back at work on Monday.

I think this is the exact moment I decided I was never going back into that life. I had not lost a glove, I had just lost my father, and this person expected from me to be doing a completely unnecessary job TWO DAYS IN. Lucky I had quit my job a few weeks earlier, so I knew I was going to be out quickly.

In retrospect, I wonder what went through my mind. I wonder how I believed "not bothering others” (aka quitting my job and letting my boss do the work) was the better option. I wonder how it was so difficult to say ‘I love you’, ‘thank you’, and ‘my heart will never be the same without you’. But now I know: as a family, this is what we learned. We learned that we needed to look good on the outside. We learned how to hide feelings. We learned how we needed to behave like people and society expected it from us. We learned that duties are more important than feelings. Now I do understand. And I am doing my most to cancel these values. I do my best every single day to teach myself that telling my true feelings, that being vulnerable, that saying no, that listening to my gut is alright, is accepted, is needed.

This journey to the self started when my Dad passed away. Something shifted in me. Something that I had suppressed my whole life bursted out and made sure I was never putting it back down.

I decided to go travel to South America and go learn all the stuff that I always wanted to learn but never did: fix a car, grow a garden, milk a cow, ride a horse. All the things that would enable me to be self-sustained one day. One perk of not really doing work was that I had plenty of time to get ready for travelling. So I read and read and planned and planned. And I came about an e-book that told me what I had always been dreaming of was possible. I had found my new bible - someone who was actually experiencing total freedom and lived from travelling: Jamie Bowlby-Whiting and his book The Avant-Garde Life. It gave me all the confidence I needed that even if at one moment I would have no more money on my bank account, there were a million ways to sustain myself.

So a few days after my 26th birthday I took a plane to Argentina and left Switzerland. And not even I knew it was forever.

I travelled for several months and landed in Lima, Peru.

The place I call home today. The place where I adopted my two dogs. The place where I suffered a months-long deep depression. The place where I would hit myself in the face because I hated myself so much. The place where I felt like I was battling all my demons at once. The place where I discovered unconditional love. The place where I started healing. The place where my heart started to breathe again. The place where I discovered Reiki, and Meditation, and Yoga. The place where I connected with Nature and started learning about all her secrets. The place where I understood we call her Pachamama - our Mother Earth. The place where I started accepting all of me.

As I am writing this post, in November 2020, I am sitting at a desk in Switzerland. And it is just another lesson that life gives you what you need.

I left Lima for a month in March 2020 to take time off and travel through India, engaging on a trip to the deepest part of me, a trip to the goddess in me (this was really the theme of the trip). And as it had to happened, I stranded in Switzerland, the place that I so badly wanted to escape the last 5 years. Peru had closed borders and I left India in a hurry on an almost 40h trip to go back to the only place I could: my ex-home. Don’t get me wrong, I went back to Switzerland regularly, even spent 3 transformative months here figuring some stuff out in 2017. I still have some of my best friends here and I love visiting my family. I love this country, its landscape, its people, all the possibilities we have.

But still, I haven’t called it home in almost 5 years.

Yet as it was supposed to happen, I needed to come back to make peace with a lot of things that haunted me to my core, but which I always buried very, very deep down. Things I had run away from, but that always were keeping up with me. My relationship with my Mom, my old values, years of resentment, fears, adversity from my family and my constant thirst for getting their approval to name a few.

So here I am today, writing my first blog post on milyundias (which means a thousand and one days in Spanish - I will tell that story, too) and going after the little voice that has been speaking to me for a while now; to share my story and help others go through what I went through. All this in the hope they will find comfort, find a community, find that they belong, find perfection in who they are as they raw self.

To me it’s all about giving you tools to get to the bottom of yourself, discover all the magic that is in you and start living the life that makes your heart happy - because we all deserve it.

milyundias iS about finding your magic and creating the life you love. ♡

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