Liz and I spent a few months together in Berlin. We met, we hung out, we simply clicked. I do not even remember how we started talking, but there was an immediate connection. When we parted ways, I started writing her letters.

She kept some of them - mostly because I did not send them in bland, boring envelopes. I went all out. I tore colorful ads from fashion magazines and transformed them into envelopes. I unleashed my creativity and artistic eye for detail. A few years ago, Liz sent me a photo of one of them. I will probably showcase it here.

I recall writing these letters from Strasbourg, where I studied for a year in 1999/ 2000. Or from the campus at the University of Sussex. In the summer of 1998, I took part in a summer session on International Political Economy at the University of Sussex. I lived in student housing with a German student, a Korean student, and others I do not recall. It was one of those typical English summers - agreeable, 20 to 22°C, with occasional rain. We studied in the South Downs rolling hills, close to Brighton. And I wrote my letters to Liz.

These letters were not filled with mundane updates - at least, that is not how I remember it. We shared our dreams and ambitions. We were young and hopeful. We had a vision. We wanted to defend human rights and have careers at the UN. Liz went on to intern with a human rights NGO in Tbilisi, Georgia, and studied at some of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. to become a lawyer. I took a zigzagging path that eventually led me to build a career in consulting. I am not sure I have hit all of my professional goals, but I have certainly seen many organizations from the inside.

Even when our letters turned into emails (as early as 1999), I printed some of them out and glued them into my journal. I told Liz about how I wanted to work for a multinational corporation - naively believing that a job in the private sector would magically solve my self-doubt.

Spoiler alert: it did not. I also confessed I wanted to learn to surf in California. To this day, I have never taken a surfing class in California, but I did make it to yoga in Bali - I count that as a win. My younger self certainly would have.

In past centuries, women confided in each other through letters. Jane Austen reportedly wrote over three thousand letters to her sisters, mainly to Cassandra (160 to 170 have been preserved). But men also corresponded. Johann Wolfgang Goethe is rumored to have written between 15,000 and 17,000 letters. Letter writing was a cherished pastime of the academic elite. Crafting a letter was and is a way of creating a testimonial - of your life, your dreams, your ambitions.

And so writing a letter to Liz was my outlet. It allowed me to dream big, to confide in my friend in the US, to yearn for the future.

This ability to dream big is a gift we often lose as we get older. Life gets in the way. We encounter organizational realities. We meet our life partner - or we do not. We have children - or we do not. We care for aging parents. We get lost in life and the many obligations.

But now, two decades later, I view writing these letters in our youth as a powerful act. Not leaving an audio message on WhatsApp. Not sending a short email. These days, most of my friends barely send emails anymore.

The act of sitting down, taking the time to write a letter, to marvel and reflect - and send it off to your friend in Manhattan - is, in my eyes, as much an act of service to the friendship as it is to oneself.

To let yourself have a friend that acts like a container of hope and spaciousness and dreaming big, of creating a bucket list of the world’s possibilities. That’s an act of rebellion, of self-love.

For me, knowing that the letters would traverse the Atlantic Ocean from some corner of continental Europe to New York gave me peace of mind. If the letter could make it there, surely I could as well one day (I still haven’t lived in New York, but I keep nearly moving there - a missed internal job transfer from Frankfurt to NYC, making it to the final interview round for a role there with UNDP). That the letter would travel farther than I do - at least at this moment in time - assured me. That it carried all my ambitions, all my secrets, to one trustworthy friend. This friend continues to be my witness, and this thought is very comforting to me.

To this day, Liz and I meet when I am in New York - more recently, at least twice a year. It is a good rhythm for a friendship. We spend time together, and we are still able to be witnesses to each other’s lives. We narrate who we were and who we are. We make sense of it all. Maybe because we always clicked. Maybe because we sent those letters. Maybe we were just lucky to meet back in 1998 during a cold Berlin winter.

This act of writing letters to Liz turned into emails. Then into WhatsApp messages. But recently, I have been wondering: should I download a more secure messaging app for our conversations? Or should I go back to writing physical letters again? When I ran this idea by her - this notion of returning to letter writing - Liz lit up. She liked the idea.

So yes, I think it is time for letters again.

Picture: An envelope I crafted back in 1999 - letter to Liz.

Sometimes it doesn’t end with summer. In the fall, I’ll use the frozen fruit I picked months earlier - red currant in particular lends itself well to that.

This is the Good Girl deliberately being a Good Girl. Making jam. Something tangible. No PowerPoint slides. Just jam.
Love in glasses.

When your love language is acts of service, this is how you show love - by making jam and gifting it to people you care about.

And why Bonne Maman jars?
They’re simply the best.

People even sell them on eBay. The right size. The right design. A reminder of times that seemed easier - less complex, less full of global conflict and cruelty. Though judging by the stories my great-grandcousin Madeleine recorded during World War I in her French village in Lorraine, times were always cruel.

Red currant jam. Apricot jam.
Love in a glass.

Sometimes it’s okay to just be a good girl.

Picture: the red currants I picked on 25 June 2025.

But specifically this year, 2026, I have observed that that is not always the case. Sometimes I have to repeat my no two or three times, especially vis-à-vis men. When I told my friend in Berlin about that, she wasn’t surprised at all. She said it happens to her all the time. Honestly, it hasn’t happened much to me in the past, but this year, 2026, I had to insist and had to get creative in the ways I was saying no.

Example one. April 2026.

This acquaintance of mine - the last time I talked to him was in November 2024 for ten minutes at a dinner party in Berlin - tries to invite himself to my house. He is somehow under the impression that I want to invite him to my house and cook for him, and then we go get a drink.

I say no. I inform him I spontaneously decided to fly to New York City and am not available. I make an alternative suggestion that we could meet the day before for coffee in town for thirty or forty-five minutes.

He doesn’t get it. He still wants to get invited to dinner and suggests that evening - the Monday evening. And I say no. I am very clear about it, stating I am very busy, I have a lot of deadlines. The usual SNAFU - my mom is in a nursing home, I have a deadline for submitting a book proposal. I am not available.

He doesn’t even respond anymore, which clearly shows that cooking at my house and then getting drinks was just part of his grand plan and that I really didn’t matter that much. Maybe I was just a prop in his going back to his hometown fantasy.

Example two. May 2026.

A male acquaintance - nice guy, very reliable, very stable, an acquaintance from my times in Frankfurt when I was working for Deutsche Bank internal consulting from 2014 to 2016 - reconnects with me after four or five years of radio silence. We quickly catch up in May 2026. I limit the phone call time to thirty minutes. It ends up being forty minutes. That is enough of an update for me. He’s pretty much still doing what he does. He also invites me to come visit in Northern Bavaria. But honestly, the only place I visit in Bavaria is Munich to see my nephews and my niece.

Then two weeks later - I am in Bali - he sends me yet another message on LinkedIn and asks me whether I can help his foreign wife who has issues finding a job.

I actually tell him that his foreign wife never struck me as a person who really wanted to work. And as long as he is the provider and pays for groceries and rent, she doesn’t have much of an incentive to change. I recommend they get a job coach. The kind of favor he was trying to get from me is what a professional does for money. We go back and forth two more times. He explains his foreign wife wasn’t socialized to be professionally ambitious and I really don’t care. I have no stakes in this. He tries to minimize the ask by phrasing it as just a friendly chat. And I say no again, reiterating they should get a job coach and that I don’t have time. I have to say no three times in total before he stops reaching out.

It doesn’t even occur to him that he is basically asking me to perform unpaid care work for his wife instead of just hiring a professional and dealing with his marital issues.

Example three. October 2025.

My good girl cousin makes me show up at her aging father’s house in late October, dealing with his sick housekeeper situation, instead of asking her brother. I tell the aging uncle it would be nice if somebody could thank me given I am investing my free time dealing with this. He throws me out of the house.

The cousin, even though I gave her feedback several times since about the way she is doesn’t set boundaries and upholds a fragile care situation on the back of women, never interacts with any of my observations - via WhatsApp and e-mail. She just tries to bypass it because she is very averse to conflict and tries to maintain family harmony at all prices. A therapist by training, she does not seem to apply her insights to her family of origin.

In the end, I just stop responding to her messages, block her on WhatsApp in February when she calls me on a Monday night past 09:00 pm and it eerily feels like late October all over again. I send her a letter - which is another way of being very creative with saying no. Except she refuses delivery. I send it on the nineteenth of March. Today is the twenty-fifth of June. Return to sender. So I now send her a regular letter and an e-mail with the same content.

The pattern across all three individuals is the same. They are only interested in the service I could provide, not in me. So focused on what they could extract from me, the person and her needs do not matter. They see a competent woman. A personal assistant at best?

Which brings me to the question:

If I were a man, would they have heard the first no? Would they even dare overriding my first no and ask again and again?

When I say no, I mean it. That should be the end of the story. Apparently, it isn’t.

Picture credit: Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

I film another clip about impostor syndrome – how I gave away my knowledge for free in 2019 to a nascent online community for female entrepreneurs – how ironic as ultimately, they used the clip as marketing for their paid offer.

And that brought me back to 2018. I work at a Swiss bank in Zurich. I met my co-founder there. We liked each other and realized that many women we knew in banking did not know how to invest their money. Even at the bank, there were so many female professionals who earned a decent amount of money but didn’t know how to invest it, not growing their wealth or leaving investing up to their boyfriends and husbands.

How could that be?

We were adamant: women had to take control of their finances. That was the basic premise for our community.

Both of us overachievers, used to working in demanding consulting roles and in rigorous corporate structures, we went all out. We created personal finance online classes in German and English, and investing classes in English and in German. We filmed them in Berlin at our own cost. We launched a social media strategy, consisting of a weekly newsletter in English and German and an Instagram channel. We even hosted a one-day event called Make Your Money Moves in Frankfurt in May 2018. We had a postal address at a hipster co-working space in Kreuzberg, Berlin. It was a lot of work and also a lot of anxiety. Would this fly?

Our few personal workshops with women in Munich and Zurich showed strong interest in the material - and even more in being part of a community. They also revealed the main crux: many women felt like they needed to have profound knowledge about investing before tackling it themselves. Or they wanted someone else to take charge altogether and not deal with it at all.

My then boyfriend - a very smart Asian-American who had worked for Apple as a programmer - had suggested a lean startup approach. Simply create a website with three different membership offerings and take the feedback as our initial data for building out an MVP, a minimum viable product. And take it from there.

Fast forward to 2025. My former co-founder and I remain friends to this day because this experience tied us together. It created a unique bond, but we had differences. I wanted to get investors on board, build out the community as a marketing platform - a way for financial service providers to attract more female customers. My co-founder didn’t. Honestly, I wanted to work hard for a few years and then make an exit. Have the money in the bank. The startup idea had the potential to do well.

But what happened instead? We created a lot of value for free. We did not figure out our monetization strategy. We were busy bees who excelled at creating content and making an impact. But we somehow missed the most crucial element. Get paid.

Shortly afterwards, I went back to Startup school. I completed the Founder Institute program in Hong Kong, and the Founder Gym on the US West Coast. What did these programs have in common? Determine product-market fit early on, always ask your potential customers whether the solution you offer is a remedy they would pay for.

I still dream of the million in the bank. I like the safety of money. I love the social impact I can create with my euros.

My former best friend observed later: Luzie, you are just waiting for your next big opportunity and the next startup. So true.

You like money? Own it.

In a way, Madonna is my spiritual guru.

I remember how in Q4 of 2017 I came back from one of my trips to my Lisbon-based Asian American boyfriend, who could never really quite make up his mind about our relationship. I was the one who pushed and scheduled the visits and anxiously waited for him to call me back on the weekends. I was at the suitcase carousel in Zurich. And “Express Yourself” played. When I hear a song, it is often like a message from my higher self, or the universe, or whatever. Madonna was clear: Never be second best. Always choose yourself first. Express yourself.

That particular boyfriend? I anxiously waited for him to call me back on the weekends when he was back in Stockholm with his ex and his kid. He would never call on these weekends. It made me very anxious.

We broke up on New Year’s Eve 2017 in Lisbon. Ever since, we are actually friends.

Oddly enough, so many years later, I have - due to my undiscovered, unexplored attachment patterns - latched onto yet another guy who seems to be emotionally unavailable. My Palestinian-Jordanian friend in Dubai said it best on Sunday: Focus on data points and detach. Does he get back to me? Yes or no?

He doesn’t. Our last exchange was over two weeks ago. Since – radio silence.

So me listening to "Express Yourself” this morning is a déjà vu. This time, I am not standing at a suitcase carousel in Zurich on the 1st of January 2018. I am driving in an old used Volkswagen on the 17th of June 2026, after two splendid weeks in Ubud, Bali, and a very eventful Sunday in Dubai.

The message is the same.

What is different this time is this: in mid-May I sent the current guy an e-mail. I said I thought about him when I was in New York in April. That I hoped all was well. That I missed him. I was vulnerable without expecting the perfect outcome. He wrote back within hours stating he misses me too. A very unexpected outcome. I was completely detached. Since then, two WhatsApp messages, then radio silence.

The pattern did not begin this year, nor did it back in 2017 during my trips to Lisbon. In 2007, my emotionally unavailable father, who had finally become more warm and accessible, just died. Survivor me managed quite well, moving to London for yet another corporate consulting job two months later. Got a French boyfriend in Saint-Raphaël at the French Riviera - distance built in. But my nervous system may have internalized a strong message: Do not trust their presence. They can disappear any day. And you have no way to prepare for this.

I am aware of it. I know that the best thing now is attachment and grief therapy. To soothe the nervous system, to forgive my late father, to change.

And then “Like a Virgin” comes on.

If this were a typical saccharine Hollywood rom com Substack essay, I would write in such a way that after two weeks of radio silence, the current guy finally responds to my message. Pours his heart out.

But no. Not true. Madonna that spiritual guru has a message for me. “Like a Virgin”, she sings. The message is clear: “Hey you, sit with your feelings, with the unease of it. Stop being the caretaker of others for once. Focus on yourself”.

Leaving space for my 17-year-old self who made her grand debut in Ubud exactly one week ago. She showed up and said “Hey you, drop the bougie woman act. Make money and art”. This morning at 05:45 am I researched art classes in rural Germany. Found one I will attend on Sunday afternoon.

I am pulling into the bakery with the good atmosphere and the bad WiFi. I am wearing my USD 18 red dress from old Navy and my EUR 350 Hermès silk scarf Cheval de fête. And my Trench coat. This is work after all - dress for success. They will serve me hot chocolate and strawberry cake. I hesitate between that cake and a green concoction. But the bakery employee is adamant: “It is strawberry season – get the strawberry cake”.

As I finish this draft, Madonna sings “Die Another Day”.

But first, let me provide context.

For the last two to three years, I took on the role of the bougie, well-educated French woman who didn’t need to work anymore. I moved back into my childhood home. Maybe I imitated my aging French mother - now in a nursing home. Maybe I became her. I lived in the house, I decluttered it, did a little bit of consulting work so my muscles wouldn’t atrophy, some of it pro bono. I wasn’t happy.

Then I travelled back to Bali. That does not NOT sound like a cliché, I know. The directionless 48-year-old woman on a quest for orientation? The Bali hype (Eat Pray Love took place over 15 years ago after all). But this was not cliché for me. I have ventured out to Bali since 2015 and my lovely and slightly combative Indonesian friend was in town.

Two Emirates flights and 19 hours later, I landed in Denpasar airport. The automatic passport immigration controls were new, the lack of signage and instructions were familiar. Modernization twists without the logical structure flow for foreigners to follow. Everyone - including the huge swarm of Indian visitors that had descended onto Denpasar - just stood in line for manual, official-looking passport control. The air was humid, the decor was the same as four years ago when I last came here.

Six bad sleep nights and two good sleep nights later - and a completely different personal Indian drama now fully processed - I was ready for the big reveal. On a random Thai dinner night with said Indonesian friend, I told her about myself at age 17. Back from high school in the US, I took an art class every Friday and Saturday to prepare a portfolio for art school, and worked for a local newspaper. I was a go-getter. I was even a class representative. Clearly, 17-year-old Caroline had her shit together.

And 17-year-old me was not going to go away any time soon.

She stayed through the scary snorkeling trip in Nusa Penida - with enthusiastic local instructors who did not instruct at all, the water rough, manta rays promised but nowhere to be found. She stayed through the rides over the island. She was not a fan of the rocky ferry boat ride return to the “mainland” (Bali) either. But she stayed.

And on a Wednesday morning in Ubud, the 17-year-old saw her chance at breakfast. Full night of rest, up at 05:00 am, morning pages written.

This is what she said to my current 48-year old self:

Hey. You. Drop the bougie French woman act. Enough now. I am not judging you at all. Just reminding you of who you are. This is what you do now: make money.

This is what a 17-year-old sounds like when she means business.

She said: This is what you do: Focus. Focus. Focus.

Focus on what makes you money now. Don’t wait. Don’t hesitate.

If last year’s app development team pays you EUR 100 per hour on an advisory basis - do it. If you can mentor women at the UAE accelerator for USD 100 per hour - do it. If the Eastern European female entrepreneur in the UAE has friends that need storytelling advisory services for their LinkedIn profiles, go all in. Ask the Canadian PwC deals partner for referrals.

Get your act together. Save money again. Invest it. Buy an apartment. Sell the house.

You can do it. You are a young, powerful, independent woman. You always made money - so of course you can do this too.

Why did I appreciate her input? She did not criticize me at all. She just reminded me of a better, more pragmatic version of myself.

Ironically, the same day, I had to set friendly yet fierce boundaries with a male acquaintance. After four years of silence and a short call just to reconnect in May, he wanted me to provide free career coaching to his foreign wife. But his foreign wife was like my bougie act; easy on the eyes, well-educated, didn’t seem to have a strong urge to work and “do life”. After all, he provided, paid for rent and the groceries. So I said to him: No, I am not available for this. If she wants to change, find a job coach for her.

The former Good Girl had no stakes in that. No need to perform helpfulness (or shall we say unpaid care work?). Not anymore.

One morning later, I talked to my successful Malay friend in Singapore who successfully exited her first startup and was on to the next one. Had bought her apartment in Singapore. Travelled the world for work. Just did well. And after that call, the inner critic appeared. Told me: Look buddy, you should be back in Germany and work instead of having fun at Batik stamping workshops in Bali.

But this time around, I said:

Shush, inner critic. First we buy the blue opal earrings - good for perimenopause. Then we go to Museum Puri Lukisan. Then we take it from there.

And that is where all three ended up: The 17-year-old one, me (the 48-year old Caroline), the inner critic.

At a museum for contemporary and traditional Balinese art right smack in Ubud. It is surprisingly peaceful on the compound even though traffic has really gotten bad in Ubud. There is a lotus flower pond and Koi fish. And lots and lots of paintings featuring Balinese demons and deities. The inner critic is happy because art soothes it. And also: How can it not have a field day surrounded by its Balinese demon buddies?

And the 17-year-old says: there you go. Art and money apparently make all three of us happy. For one moment, they all congregated. Yay!

And by the way, leaving your own emotions unaddressed also costs you.

We have all been there. You go through some sort of change. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the introduction of a new service center, a company-wide ethics training after a scandal, or simply implementing a new tool that people don’t want to use.

Emotions run high. There’s resistance. People don’t want to try something new. You wonder whether you are back in kindergarten. But there’s not much you can do. You have to deal with people’s emotions.

Cue Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a Swiss-American psychiatrist. In 1969, she introduced a very impactful framework: the Change Curve. Originally developed to describe the process of grief after losing someone dear, it also applies to organizational transformation.

The five stages she identified are:

• Shock and denial

• Anger

• Bargaining

• Depression (the famous valley of tears)

• Acceptance.

The curve looks neat on paper, but as with all emotions, it’s rarely linear. Someone can move through all stages and reach acceptance - and then something triggers them, and they find themselves angry again.

Why is this framework so helpful? Because it legitimizes emotions. It provides language for what people feel during change. Emotions exist. People bring them to work. You cannot separate the personal from the professional.

There are many ways to use this framework. You can include it in a manager handbook, turn it into a short peer-to-peer workshop, or even talk about it during a company call. The point is to give people a safe space to acknowledge where they are on the curve.

If you are a senior manager, model it. Say where you are. Maybe your company just went through a merger, and you belonged to the smaller entity. Parts of your old brand are gone. Of course, you feel something. Talking about it helps others do the same - and move forward faster.

I personally think that the Kübler-Ross Change Curve is one of the most useful tools in transformation because it’s simple and effective. By acknowledging emotions instead of ignoring them, you remove one of the biggest blockers to progress: resistance.

Kübler-Ross created this model to help people process loss. Decades later, it helps organizations process change. The underlying experience is the same.

I have a couple of adult female friends who resist seeing a therapist to process their post breakup life. I wish they would the change curve!

The real power is not to hide emotions. It’s to talk about them.

Picture credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19631021

I mean I wish. I wish it would be such a nonchalant affair.

I got a personal trainer. She put together a customized training plan for me. We tried out the exercises at the machines in a nice enough gym in Hannover.

So I expect I can just breeze into my (new) local gym and complete my exercises.

I look at my app. The first exercise is supposed to be the leg press. Honestly, it doesn’t look very enticing. I decide to skip it for the time being and start with the hyperextension machine. I approach the machine and… it looks different from the one in Hannover. I would not know where to put my hands. And my legs – are they supposed to go under this buffered round device?

For the time being, I remain optimistic and give myself a pep talk: “Let’s move on to the rowing machine. That one was nice”. Plus I used to be a member of the rowing club when I was a teenager (that is, until I steered the ship wrong and we nearly collided with a big canal ship – I never recovered from that).

But I cannot find the machine. By now, I have been in the gym for 10 minutes. I asked the nice receptionist to help me switch the weights. Because again, the machines differ from the ones in Hannover. He helped me. I never ask for help, I despise having to do so. This is a SUPERGAU (“größter anzunehmender Unfall”). I am feeling a bit helpless. I am like Louis XVI who was beamed from Versailles to Ramallah.

For the life of me, I cannot locate the rowing machine.

And I give up.

By now, I have developed tunnel vision (last time I did so? Friday afternoons in the Deutsche Bank towers when I had to finish an “important” power point presentation for some board relevant initiative and my friend Daniel walked by me and commented “Caro ist im Tunnel”). But now, I have it again. Caro is clearly in the tunnel. A long one. And it is not a pleasant one. I don’t know where to look. There are all these buff men working out. I feel like I am being judged.

I have the impression I am 13 again. The intellectual nerdy girl who can command a room to sign Amnesty International petitions.

When I was in High School; I was average in PT at best. I was always amongst the last few to get picked for a ball game. Also, all throughout High School (in Germany), not a single boy asked me out. Different story in the US, where I went to High School at age 17.

And this feeling slowly resurfaces. I feel like a total loser. And like I am getting judged.

The gym is not a territory I know how to navigate.

At work, I steer big change projects. CEOs listen to me – reluctantly. I have no qualms putting men in their place.
But the gym is a different animal.

All my biggest issues – not feeling pretty enough, just being a nerdy teenage girl – resurface.

I guess nice French clothes and tons of fellowships and crazy good work experience did not make that complex go away.

So I leave.

But as I leave the gym, I open the gym app. And I find the personal training appointments. I tell myself “OK Caro, you book a personal training session with a female trainer tomorrow and you ask her to show you all the devices”.

Why?

I am 48.

In the middle of peri-menopause.

Back aches.

A mother with Parkinson and Dementia. I know I have to do this. Future Caro is urging me on.

So the next day – TODAY – I complete a personal training session with a girly girl trainer. Her name is Irina (name changed by the author). She is German and Russian. Easy for me to relate. She has long hair, nails, wears a ring. She is the queen of the gym. At one stage, an elderly man asks her jokingly “Are the men behaving? Do I have to discipline them?”. And she just responds “They always listen to me”.

She is cool. It’s ok for me to be not so perfect around her.

By now, you may have figured out this is not really about the gym. This is about giving yourself permission to conquer new territory.
Even though you feel like a total loser and like you don’t belong.

Because you do.

You might not always feel comfortable at first. You might feel like people scrutinize you. Think: What on earth is that chick doing here? Who does she think she is?

But who cares.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s the board of a Fortune 500 or DAX or CAC40 company. Or a private equity fund. Or a conference on female health (or peri-menopause!)

Get yourself in that room. And teenage you – she would be proud of you. Pretty sure she is smiling at you and giving you a thumbs up.

Shoutout to my friends who listened to me and encouraged me - Melissa, Moriah and Julia.

Picture credit: Photo by Danielle Cerullo on Unsplash

I did not call her. I don’t know why she showed up here. Oh wait, now I recall. My daughter - my nice daughter, a therapist, married with kids, such a good girl, called her. She called her so my niece would manage my housekeeper’s little health scare. What was so bad about a bit of heart palpitations? Nothing. You have them, you get over them. No need to call the Red Cross. But my niece insisted. And since my daughter - the one that will never upset me even though she secretly behind my back says I am patriarchal – is not here, I had to make do with it.

But the audacity of the niece.

Tells me to take it easy and sit in the living room. Makes it clear she has it all under control. Acts like this is just another crisis she manages without breaking out into a sweat. Says in a loud voice she took time out from her busy Monday evening to steer this ship. And that someone could thank her.

Thank her? I have never heard a woman asking to be thanked. That is their job. Do the care work. Heck, my late wife – the refugee child from Silesia – took care of my mother when she was sick even though these two clearly did not get along. That is just the way things get done on a big farm. A farm with acres of land that has been in the care of farmers for generations and generations. Always the men. That is how it is.

The niece would not shut up. She said my son could take care of me for once. No one dares express this to me (even though I know she is right). When I told her my son has work to do and asked why they had called him, she said she has work to do as well.

When I said she could stay overnight, she said no.

She has been saying no for a long time now.

Maybe it is the French blood. She is half French, after all. The French are like that - they like to go on the barricades. It is in their blood. But then I think of her mother. A pretty charming person. Fun, likes to joke. Not complicated at all. So where did this rebellious niece come from? Where does the fighting spirit come from? This is sorcery.

I tried to shush her - as early as when she was 8 or 9 years old and wanted to contribute to conversations about politics with her father and me. I tried to shut her up. Conversations about politics are not for girls. Girls are supposed to be nice and compliant and attend finishing schools and learn how to cook and run a big farm.

But it did not work.

My late wife contradicted me once in a while. She was a bit of a rebel but she also knew her place in this agricultural society.

And much later – the niece was in her thirties. I asked her the most important question: whether she did not want to have children. She just shrugged and said it was not her calling. I said to her it was a pity because the intelligent women should have children. That is society’s contract. Have kids. Society decides on the fate of your womb.

I failed to ask her why. She might have told me that in Germany, having children is career suicide for women in a corporate setting. That unpaid care work is still mostly assumed by women. That there is research about it - Prognos Institut, 2024, “the invisible value of care work”.

And two years ago. She came to visit with her brother. Her brother who is smart and the saviour of the family, so successful, a CFO with four kids and a nice wife. And the niece just had the audacity to put her feet on the sofa. Like she was at home in my home. Like she was in yoga class in Bali. This is not Bali. This is rural Western Germany. The rules here have not changed since 1955. Or no - since 1825. Make it 1377.

And last summer – I had just gotten out of the hospital, I was confused. I tried to guilt trip her: I stated that she also did not come to visit me often. And she just said no. No seemed to be a full answer for her.

I am still flabbergasted. I have not recovered from this.

When I threw her out of the house today, she just said ok. She went on to smoke cigarettes in the courtyard with the pretty old oak trees. The oak trees that always provided shadow to my ancestors.

I told her twice she could come back. She was totally at peace and said no. She was happy in the courtyard.

The oak trees seemed to agree with her.

Authors note: This is a creative take inspired by an article I wrote in October (2025): In rural Germany, the patriarchy is alive. And it is thriving.

Picture credit: Photo by Sabin Zablau on Unsplash

Fall 2019. I knew I had to get a job. But not just any job! By then, I knew I was good at venture building - after all, I had just failed one and learned my lessons, I had paid my dues.

So I figured why not get another job building a startup from scratch. But not just anywhere. No - I ended up finding an add by a venture builder in Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City in South Vietnam. Coincidentally, this is where my mother was born in 1943 and my French grandfather had spent large parts of his career working in Southern Vietnam.

Bingo!

The venture building platform was led by three Swedish guys. These guys were smart - they ran a software company out of Southern Vietnam, thus generating the cash necessary to cross-finance their venture builder. And they were savvy. They took business models that had worked elsewhere - such as a platform for tutoring English to “hungry” Vietnamese - and copied it for the Vietnamese market. I would not say this was the most creative. But it worked.

So I applied. Completed three interview rounds. And then decided to fly to Saigon in October 2018 to meet the guys and the team in person. Better safe than sorry, as they say. Also: trust your gut.

I went, wore my best red Claudie Pierlot dress and my favourite Pretty Ballerina flats. Met the guys and the other founders to suss out the culture. Asked the Swedish guys a couple of questions about equity (in the startup), because I am smart like that.

I still remember the firm handshake from one of the guys. And not just any handshake. No – the one where the person who shakes your hand puts their other hand on top of yours. How much more can you convey sincerity?

It seemed to be a done deal.

And then – nothing at first. A few days later, just a plain message via the application tool once I was back in Germany that I would not get offered the role. I sent follow-up e-mails asking for feedback. I was a bit flabbergasted.

What had happened? What had I done wrong? Had I appeared too self-assured? Too cool for school? Not passionate enough?

The Swedish guys never got back to me. Talk about perfecting the art of ghosting.

I hate getting ghosted. I get ignored once in a while in online dating and that creates wounds. You engage in a conversation and all of a sudden, the other party disappears. It hurts. Another thing I hate? Talking about feelings in public.

Online dating, job interviews - (any) feedback is so much better than total silence.

Years later – in the summer of 2024 – my hot rugby playing Indian friend with teddybear vibes who had repeatedly invited me to visit him ghosted me after I had agreed. Another person that did not provide an explanation for their behavior. This time around, I told him off. Wrote a message after ten days and shared that this was simply bad manners. That I had a plane ticket to book. Then, I blocked him (must have been an overreaction due to the ghosting I had experienced in my life). Ten months later, I sent a message stating I missed the friendship and that his ghosting me was in complete opposition to how he had always had my back the years before. Never heard from him.

We are not supposed to talk about these less than glamorous moments in our lives. The moments when we have had it. When we block someone and tell them off. Good girls don’t. But I decided it’s time to break the stigma. A participant in my March 2026 survey wrote about the “rage behind the good girl smile”.

I can relate.

Picture credit: Photo by Jamie Trinh on Unsplash

So I added my short observations about racism in small-town Germany. How I encounter random white men who make racist comments like they are talking about the weather.

Artifact 1:

2025, my part of town. I encountered a neighbor last year who made weird offhanded remarks about Berlin - he wouldn’t go there, too many foreigners, et cetera. I felt very uncomfortable and told him: I used to live in Berlin, I was always comfortable there and our family is very international.

This clearly was a man who subscribed to the views of the AfD. Just a random neighbor, not one I greet and talk to on the regular and accompany when they walk their dogs in the nearby forest. But still. The fact that he felt secure enough to say this to me left me speechless.

Now you have to know that I currently live in my childhood city. It has 20,000 inhabitants. It’s quite bourgeois. It’s pretty. It’s nestled in rolling hills between Hanover and Bielefeld. It has a castle and a “Hofreitschule”. It doesn’t get more picturesque than that.

Artifact 2:

Last month, I went to one of my favourite bakeries, part of a beautiful former hotel. The interior design is minimalistic, I am able get work done, listening to the Killers or Mariah Carey or Madonna on my BOSE, while around me all these white-haired ladies in tasteful pastel puffy jackets have the times of their lives and exchange gossip.

I noticed a man in a wheelchair and asked whether he had enough space to navigate. My mom is in a wheelchair; I pay attention. He said he was fine. While his wife was getting cake for him, we started talking about the state of politics in Germany. He mentioned he doesn’t vote for the Social Democratic Party anymore. I told him I used to vote for the Green Party and I am completely disillusioned ever since Gaza happened. That should have given him the first indicator that we wouldn’t necessarily have similar political views. But no.

So I asked: how come you don’t vote for the SPD anymore? I am a political scientist by training, after all - understanding citizens’ motives is fascinating to me. He responded because they changed the Grundgesetz (Germany’s constitution) in the 90s and allowed for more migration.

And I just said: I am German-French and I come from a family that encompasses five nationalities.

Mic drop.

He didn’t know what to say anymore.

These men assume they are safe. They see a Caucasian woman who looks like a good girl who surely will nod along. But they read me wrong. For all I know, I could be a foreign spy or say be working for Al Jazeera as a journalist. Their remarks are not exactly a flattering exhibit for a country that prides itself of being an export nation.

Who modelled this type of behaviour ? None other than the German chancellor Friedrich Merz (Christian Democratic Party). Last fall, he claimed that “foreign” men were roaming the streets of Germany and making women feel uncomfortable. He suggested people ask their daughters. And the daughters reacted. “Radikale Töchter” - a German feminist collective - launched a petition. We are the daughters, they said, and we don’t agree. 250,000 signatures. I made a clip about it - about yet another politician thinking he could leverage a certain segment of the electorate without asking them, without even bothering to run a focus group.

Public dissent. You would think that is something a democracy would want to protect. And yet, just three weeks ago, the Ministry of the Interior cancelled the funding for one of Radikale Töchter’s ongoing democracy projects. No explanation given. Luckily, they raised the missing EUR 120,000 to bridge the gap.

None of these men own my country. I am a citizen as well.

So when they talk shit like this (excuse my French!), I will course correct in a calm manner. I don’t need to raise my voice. I don’t want people like that to determine the future of my country. I also write letters - including to the President of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), encouraging him to use his political leverage on the government. I hold stakeholders accountable.

This is my Germany as well.

Artifact 1:

Friend of a very good friend. We all hail from the same adjacent small towns. The last time this friend and I interacted was during a 15 minutes dinner conversation in late October 2024.

But he was very enthusiastic about coming to my house while he was visiting his mother with his son. Eager to cook with me. Even when our joint friend shared this “vision” with me, I thought that it was odd - where did this enthusiasm come from?

Then I spontaneously decided to travel to New York City, so I told our joint friend I was not even going to be available. But this guy was undeterred. He seemed very set on his idea of how things would unfold during this visit to his old stomping grounds. He sent a text message: I know you are traveling on Wednesday and how how about I come to your house on Tuesday night, we cook together, and then we go get a drink?

The audacity of it all.

I read this and a code red alert popped up in my mind. Wait a minute. Is this just another person expecting me to do unpaid care work for them? Because cooking at my house - what does that entail? Grocery shopping. Cooking. Putting the dishes in the dishwasher. Cleaning the house. While I have to catch an early flight the next day.

So I told this person: sorry, too busy. We can get coffee for one hour on Monday afternoon. He got back to me suggesting Monday night (he still hadn’t let go of his fantasy of us cooking and me showing him the house - which I had NEVER offered) or else getting coffee on Tuesday afternoon. And I just responded: I am super busy. Business development deadlines. Book proposal due. Family obligations. Your dates don’t work for me. Wishing you all the best.

The incident made me stop in my tracks. Why do people project onto me? Who is this fantasy good girl version of me? Do I know her?

This was not the first person exhibiting this behavior this week.

Artifact 2:

A LinkedIn “acquaintance” at best. She seemed harmless at first - an HR recruiter based in a small Swiss town. She had wanted to connect, but did not provide a rationale why (bad LinkedIn etiquette). Then I put 1 and 1 together that we might have a shared interest in political advocacy work. She confirmed and then sent me a very enthusiastic message about how she has a need to witness and talk about what’s going on in certain conflict regions of the world, make her voice heard - and that she commended me for my work. She wrote: I see you (but I don’t have a need to be seen, I just get things done - that was all on her). Then she followed up with: would be nice if we could set up a virtual coffee.

My reaction: this woman is way too intense. Hence I never responded. But I noticed a pattern - when I published a comment on LinkedIn, she would comment afterwards. At one stage she called out Amnesty International, saying they hadn’t identified the perpetrators of an international human rights crime - which Amnesty of course had. Her behavior seemed a bit unhinged. So when this Thursday I published a post encouraging others to share their mistakes (and not an Instagram career highlights REEL of their life), she immediately commented: yes, we have the same vision, we’re aligned. She sent me another message about how exciting she thought my post was, that she has tons of ideas, and whether we could do a virtual coffee.

Again - who is this fantasy version of me she interacts with? Treating me like I am her BFF? Did she not get the memo? If I didn’t respond to her first message, that was the message.

I blocked her.

I am the first one to admit that two years of living in small-town Germany, being exposed to a lot of implicit expectations about women and their time (remember the story about my 93-year old uncle who had thrown me out of the house after I had invested my time dealing with his housekeeper’s health emergency) is taking a toll on me. When people seem to project a fantasy version of me that does not exist, it exhausts me.

So I write about it.

Fantasy Good girl Caroline does not exist. She has left the room a long time ago.

I continue with my day. I work on my Good Girl Gone Rogue book proposal, I record podcast episodes, I dump old paintings my mother's friend gifted me at the recycling station, because there's always stuff to dump at the recycling station when you live in a house formerly inhabited by family members who like to collect old items and not declutter the attic on a regular basis.
And then eventually at 3:41 pm, I think, okay, I now have reiterated several drafts of the message to this woman, so I just respond.

My reply is very matter-of-fact.

I write: "Hello, it seems like there is a straighforward solution. Ask your brother to not only organize the transport, but also pay for it. There are actual studies that show that women assume a disproportionate amount of care responsibility for kids and older parents. I include the source (the above-reference study by Prognos Institute).
And then I proceed by saying, "Nichts für ungut" (no hard feelings), eBay Kleinanzeigen is a marketplace. Communication on this marketplace should be focused on the items at sale, not on your personal circumstances. I wish you all the best.

The good girls in rural Germany drive me nuts. They sound like they need therapy and better boundaries. They have no concept of TMI (too much information). They message random strangers on a second hand marketplace, not spending a single second reflecting on how the recipient might feel. Even in my darkest moments of frustration pertaining to care work for my mom, I would never do that to strangers. I would talk to my friends (and my therapist).

When I need to dump objects - remember, one of today’s activities consisted of doing so - I drive myself to the recycling station and get rid of them. It costs EUR 5 or 12 depending on the load. So liberating.

But I am also grateful. Yet another story of my life and excellent fodder for this Substack.

I am ready to perform, ready to deliver.

04 April 2026. I watched season 6 of GIRLS on HBO yesterday evening. Season 6 was aired in 2017, so it’s been a while, but my HBO subscription is valid until 07 April. It felt like it was as good a time to just watch season 6.

It hit me: I had forgotten that Lena Dunham is very often in the nude in GIRLS. She shows up naked. You see everything - her breasts, her pubic hair, the pear-shaped body, the belly fat. She’s real. I am in awe and slightly shocked, being much more prudish than her. I tend to wrap it up. Watching Lena Dunham flaunt it all in 2017 (when season 6 was aired) reminded me of a TikTok clip I made for Good Girl Gone Rogue about putting on my French girl uniform. The uniform I wear when I turn my past mistakes into gold. Or at least make my audience believe I am above it all.

And this brings me to the sujet du jour:

Perfectionism.

Women are often taught to be good girls, to achieve an ideal that is an impossible one: have the perfect body, be smart, successful.

When I put on my French girl uniform like in February 2025 in the United Arab Emirates, facilitating a class on failure culture, talking about all of my mistakes, the failed startups, the erroneous business assumptions - this notion that I once created a venture for women on personal finance and investing and we did not figure out our monetization strategy - then that is me emulating Lena Dunham’s example. Stripping.

Lena does it by appearing naked in the show that she wrote and produced. I do it by outwardly projecting that image of the perfect German-French business school–pedigreed woman, management consultant who talks about failure.

What differentiates us is that she shows her body, I put on my armor.

But here is the common thread: This is about shedding perfectionism. How are we taught to be(come) perfect? Perfect little wives, perfect little management consultants, perfect mothers, perfect best friends, perfect daughters who shoulder unpaid care work, perfect sisters, cousins, nieces, perfect former BFFs - perfect everything.

And what is the price that we’re paying?

Never feeling at home in our bodies. Not being able to lovingly speak to ourselves “You got this; your errant ways are totally fine” (I had to listen to Louise Hay for years to be more kind to myself). Not being able to say: Ok and now I take a break and admit to myself I am in the trenches of my life. Always comparing ourselves to someone else’s impossible timeline.

Feel free to add - I am sure you have your very own examples.

Good Girl Gone Rogue’s philosophy is: That’s cool, you can be a good girl, you can grow up in the systems and learn to comply with the rules. But these ecosystems will put so much pressure on you to be perfect that you will spend more time coming up with coping mechanisms and ways to manage this world than to be yourself.

What I am trying to say is: all is well. You can put on your good girl French uniform like I did because it makes you feel safe and it helps you project a very strong image of success where you talk about your failures. You can also be Lena Dunham in 2017 in season 6 of GIRLS and wear your birthday suit.

You pick.

The goal is to shed the notion and the pressure to be perfect.

Start small. Forget to comb your hair and hop on the train anyway (happened to me yesterday).

Addendum:

I wrote this on a Saturday night, Easter Saturday at 7:30 pm, stranded in my childhood home. All by myself.

Really not having a clue what I am going to do next.

But she does something that is so much more valuable than this.

She asks me in her very direct, no-nonsense manner what my actual value proposition is.

I am unable to provide her with a short definition. Noticing this, she helps me reflect. She, as a financial advisor, tells her international female clients that she’s their chief risk manager.

And that gets me thinking.

Ultimately, Good Girl Gone Rogue is all about changing your behavior. You stop being a good girl - the person that people walk all over - and become a rogue woman. A rogue woman: a person that understands the rules, carefully assesses them, weighs them, and decides: does this work for me, yes or no? If it doesn’t work for you, you stop engaging, you opt out, and you write your own rules.

Here is my value proposition: I am your chief transformation expert. I focus on behavioral change. The theory, the nice intentions are not enough. You need to know how to evolve from being a good girl to going rogue.

Does this sound abstract? Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

I love vignettes so much. I learned about them when I was 17 and attended high school in Georgia in the United States - short stories that will help you retain a key fact in your life.

The following vignette is about a family member of mine. A good girl, to the extent that she does not take up with her elderly 93-year-old father that he's a patriarch who threw me out of the house in October when I helped out. That evening, before he banned me from the premises, I said to him: 'I have invested my valuable time on a Monday night to help out with the situation. It would be nice if somebody could thank me.' He was speechless. His system did not compute…

It did not upset me; I had expected this. Several times I gave the good girl family member (who happens to be a therapist in real life) feedback via WhatsApp, via e-mail, about how the family system benefits from women’s unpaid care work. The good girl family member never reacted – she would not go there. Better not upset the fragile family peace (must have been her reasoning).

I sent her a five page letter via registered mail this March. In it, I provided ample examples of her behavior and stated: I analyzed the system. The system is not effective. If the system expects me to play the role of a woman in 1955, even though it’s 2026, I am out.

Maybe five or ten years ago, when I was 43, 38, I would have complied with this family system for the sake of family peace. Not anymore.

This is an example of behavioral change. And this is what Good Girl Gone Rogue is all about. Understand the system, understand the rules, and then you can adapt your behavior. Don’t expect others to change. This is not about emotions or feeling hurt. Quite the contrary: You step on the balcony and run an analysis and if you don’t like what you see, change. Systems don’t want you to opt out. They want you to comply and do the unpaid project management.

I will continue publishing my stories. But from now on, each one will connect back to a behavioral change insight that you can put to good use. I am happy to share my personal tales, as I believe that someone else’s lived experience is a powerful vignette and can inspire.

And ultimately, I want YOU to benefit. To ideally have an EUREKA moment and think: Oh wait, something similar happened to me! What would the rogue version of me do?

Because my esteemed readers: Why else would I publish this newsletter?

She responds with a “Thank you, dear”.

We’re good.

My initial reaction was to write about them. But that would be me – a European woman – appropriating their stories. While I just want to honor them.

I focused on their question instead: Who’s telling your stories? And instead of appropriating these two women’s insights, I just want to... use their impetus as an opener for an article about myself. Because after all, isn’t self-reflection the ultimate goal?

Coincidentally, on a Sunday night (two days ago), I looked at pictures of myself from 2019. 2019 was a splendid year. I had gone on three trips around the world just because I couldn’t stand being in Germany anymore. Germany sucks my energy, doesn’t give me much back. It’s a very non-creative environment for me. Lots of tasks, obligations, having to fit in - be a good girl.

In 2019, I went to LA, Singapore and Hong Kong in that order three times. I had so much fun – and it was educational. For example, I attended Sophia Amuroso’s “Girlboss Rally” in Los Angeles in June 2019. Or the RISE Tech summit in Hong Kong. I also phased out a startup I had built for one and a half years on personal finance and investing. I was free. I looked at these pictures on Sunday and noticed how happy I looked. The pictures of free happy Caroline had an effect. The thought came to me, Caroline, you have done so much. You have attended so many conferences. You got so many fellowships. Where is all of this?

And I ended up for one hour and 40 minutes creating a huge document with the AI. The AI was enthusiastic about doing so. I mean, that’s the AI’s job, right? Encourage me to hash out things.

What are the stories you tell?

I dictated everything:

• The price I won at age 10 at a drawing competition, first prize.

• The fellowships I got, the fact that even as recently as four years ago, Sequoia Capital awarded me a fellowship so that I could complete an accelerator program, honing my pitching skills to investors.

• I included all the student jobs I had ever done, but I also included all of the unpaid project management work that I had done for my family of origin, including steering the renovation of a house that eventually we sold (which I had recommended from the get go) to pretty much project managing my mom’s declining health, managing roadblocks imposed by both my brother and my mom, because both of them for the longest time didn’t want to see the reality of her declining health.

• I mentioned my political advocacy work, the campaigns I created from scratch including the one where I signalled to a German minister: Just because you say no, doesn’t mean it has to be stay a no.

Doing so helped me reclaim my story because for the longest time I had looked at my “successful” friends and beaten myself up by comparing myself to their material achievements and telling myself: You’re such a loser, how come you’re not as successful as them? For the longest time, I was under the impression that I hadn’t worked enough in my life. One of my American friends once said to me: “Caro, you’re cruising along” (I probably shouldn’t have given a dime about her statement). You know how sometimes when you have a strong inner critic, these types of remarks stay with you.

What the AI came up with once I had fed it everything, from the odd student jobs to the unpaid political advocacy work to everything, was that regularly institutions had gotten me cheap, from being an audit assistant with a master’s degree at the European Central Bank in 2003-04 to Deutsche Bank hiring me as a senior consultant, claiming I didn’t have enough financial services consultant experience, which was absolute BS, to UBS hiring me as a director, even though they probably should have hired me as an ED (executive director).

• This was a magnificent, interesting pattern to become aware of. Institutions had hired me at one level while I was performing at the next highest level --- but were their actions merely reflections of my own self-belief and lack of self-worth?

• Another pattern that the AI excavated was that I had done a lot of unpaid project management work for my family of origin, the curse of the capable oldest daughter that everybody just relies on and no one thanks.

• Yet another pattern: I had a monetization problem, but definitely not a resilience or talent problem, because I had managed care work and becoming invisible in small town Germany, survived the sudden death of my father, renovating a house, so many different challenges. Seeing that reflected back to me did something to the way I tell my stories.

To answer the question, who’s telling your stories, for the longest time my strong inner critic told my stories.

He’s an important advisor because sometimes he just wants me to stay safe, but he’s certainly not my most strategic advisor, and he doesn’t allow me to step out of my comfort zone. And to just recognize that was such a milestone, such a revelation.

The second insight or practical tool is to re-narrate the stories using a different medium. I adapted a technique popularized by coaches like Gabby Bernstein and the late Louise Hay - but made it my own by recording new outcomes to problems on my phone and listening to it on repeat. Future Caroline tells present Caroline a story – a good one about overcoming roadblocks. I behave like the challenge has already been resolved – the lack of funds, the lack of a romantic partner. I tell present-day Caroline what it feels like to have found solutions and workarounds. What it feels like to have EUR 1 million in the bank. To create impact by helping people with financial support; to have money coming in every year from my various digital products and services (including the ones created by “Good Girl Gone Rogue”).

So I narrate a new story about a problem in my life, and I do so repeatedly. In short, I have become my own narrator.

Who is telling your stories? You. The magnificent, proud YOU. Not the small you. The rogue version.

Here I was. Strasbourg was small and picturesque, and for me, that translated to: a city made for people with small mindsets. The Tudor style architecture that the city is so famous for made me feel like my surroundings were closing in on me. Sometimes you just don’t vibe with a place.

That also seemed to apply to Sciences Po and its teaching methods. The professors at Sciences Po kept telling us we were the elites but wanted us to memorize theories and take notes like schoolchildren - not to discuss the theories and learn that way. We were not supposed to challenge their thinking, let alone the system. We were supposed to be compliant like pre-teens.

I did not appreciate this at all.

So, I requested meetings with the school's director, Renaud Dorandeu. I don't even recall how I lined them up.

Mr. Dorandeu was an approachable and diplomatic person. He listened to me voice my concerns about the learning methods. He agreed, he asked questions, he gave me his time. His course of action was very strategic. He did not leave me - the German-French young woman going on the barricades (so French!!) alone in my grievances. He talked to me, treated me like a stakeholder that mattered. And we know from messy transformation projects how crucial it is to engage in a dialogue with the hardliners who question the system (like I did).

Professor Dorandeu could have said to himself, "I don't care about this German-French female student from Berlin. If she doesn't like how we teach here, she can return to Germany."

But no, he listened to me politely. Smart man.

• Did I change the system? No.

• Did Sciences Po make some changes? Yes.

• Did I adapt? Yes.

In a way, the dialogues with Mr. Dorandeu were the perfect training ground for Good Girl Gone Rogue - this Substack. I used my voice, I got heard. Thanks to the process, I unearthed my learning preferences (definitely not the Sciences Po way!) and my French faible for meritocracy.

In my view, elitist academic systems like the Grandes Écoles system in France are outdated. They do not make space for social mobility. They put you in a box and once you have been assigned to a certain mold, it is difficult to move beyond it.

But I am grateful for French Hip Hop and my French passport. And when it serves me, I’ll go full French girl - the vintage Hermès scarf, the Chanel lipstick, the whole shebang.

Picture: France Gall Italie 1965. Unknown photographer. Retrieved from Wikimedia on 13 September 2025.

The good thing about being sick is that even I, with my very intense INTJ brain that never wants to shut up, I was forced to slow down. Recuperate in bed, watch “Heated rivalry” on HBO Max.

My mind kept wandering. Out of the blue, a vignette emerged from my past:

21-year-old Caroline, a political science student in Berlin, attending a hip hop class in Dahlem, not being able to follow the choreography, and dropping out after one (trial) session.

My internal theater:

• I cannot do this.

• I am just not girly enough.

They played the Men in Black theme song by Will Smith. I watched these other girls - in my memory they were all blonde, looking they all hailed from Münster, a conservative affluent town in Western Germany. The blonde girls all knew the moves. They knew how to follow the choreography, while I didn’t.

Isn’t this the main insight? They knew the choreography and I didn’t.

I never perceived myself to fit in with a certain brand of femininity. The scripts had always evaded me. But somehow these girls, they knew how to carry themselves. They knew how to move. They knew how to be blonde. They knew how to have long hair. They knew the codes. I never did.

And this experience felt eerily familiar. When I was 8 or 9 years old and went to a trial ballet class at Vogt’s Balletschule (ballet studio), I also thought:

• I cannot do this.

• I am just not girly enough.

What made me think this way? Was it the ballet teacher’s very critical eye, did she stare at my little 8 or 9 year old’s small belly?

Was it me already comparing myself to my much more feminine, extroverted, girly-girl neighbor Jasmin, a year older than me?

No matter what, I had a déjà vu. This is how I judged myself, closed myself off. And the memory resurfaced – when I got sick, in February 2026.

Much, much later in life – I am 48 now, I have moved from Berlin to Frankfurt to Washington, D.C. to London to Singapore to Zurich to so many places - I go swimming every two or three days in the beautiful local outdoor pool, again in my hometown.

I don’t ask myself: Am I pretty enough to belong here?

Swimming, the exercise of being in an aquatic world, gives me peace of mind. It doesn’t elicit the same body issues I seem to have had with dance. Because when I swim, I wear my functional yoga-inspired swim bikini, I have my Arena goggles on, and I glide into the water and just enjoy myself. I have a very feminine body - curves, and “the girls” are not exactly small, but I don’t care. I don’t need to perform. I don’t need to be pretty or fit in. I don’t need to converse with anybody.

Of course there are men in the pool, but they do their thing and I do mine. I don’t have to perform for the male gaze. And of course I have a belly, but I don’t care. No strict owner of a 1980ies ballet studio is here to judge me.

While intellectually I know that I am attractive, I never put much of a premium on it. I always “knew”: looks are ephemeral. Intellectual success, ambition, the ability to get things done - those stay with you.

Earlier in life – after the first ballet class episode? - I made a silent promise to myself, one I perfected to the point of becoming Miss Ultra-Independent.

What was it?

As a child, I had watched my pretty, feminine (French) mother financially depending on my father. They had their own issues to address – my father having been dirt poor as a refugee child from Silesia, my mother having too easily given up her job as a teacher. I watched my parents’ quiet tug of war about money - it was never loud, but it was always in the background - and I told myself: I will never be like this.

I made a silent promise to myself: I will never depend on a man for money.

These days, I wonder where my ultra independent ways have gotten me.

The hip hop class vignette from 1997, emerging while I was in bed with the flu – and the vignette of 8 or 9 year old Caroline not being enough for ballet class – they all point to the same, recurring question:

When do I ever feel enough?

One of the best kept insider knowledge nuggets that exists? Very often, you don’t get a job because you apply online and jump through the HR recruitment process hoops.

No – you get the role thanks to a lucky coincidence.

Case in point:

I did not apply for my role at Deutsche Bank Internal Management Consulting. I got it thanks to a Feng Shui workshop. Yes, a random workshop. There were four participants, and I befriended one of them. We simply clicked. She asked me what I did for a living, so I told her, “I am currently a freelancer and need to get a job again – in management consulting.”
To which she responded: “Oh, I’m friends with the head of internal consulting at Deutsche Bank – I actually work for Deutsche Bank myself. Shall I connect you?”

All I could do was nod: “Yes, please.”

A few days later she put me in touch with the Head of Internal Management Consulting. I interviewed with this senior manager– a woman. During the interview, we did not even discuss bank strategy or my resume – the first thing she noticed was my (lucky) green Hermès silk scarf and we assessed our joint preference for these pricey items. And mused about pop culture and the latest news from Gala (a German weekly journal full of articles on royalty and stars).

We did not talk KPIs, we did not discuss methodology or project management offices. It became obvious early on that the conversation served as a chemistry and cultural fit test more than anything else.
So while I also had to complete the HR interviews to get the job offer, I didn’t follow the official recruitment process. I was more than qualified for my role – Deutsche Bank is not exactly a charity. My future boss had served McKinsey for years and years and only took on candidates that matched her requirements.

But here you have it: I got my job thanks to a random weekend workshop on improving the energy flow in my apartment.

Good girls apply for the job – Rogue girls go on a Feng Shui adventure.

Picture credit: Photo by Hannes Köttner on Unsplash

Who knew working on Capitol Hill in 2005/2006 made me understand the essence of this quote?

In 2005, I was awarded a prestigious fellowship to work on Capitol Hill. Only two Germans per year received the fellowship issued by the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMFUS). I was one of them. Like always, I just aced the interview. That is one of my strong Good Girl traits. Charm them, convince them, get on their good side.

So I moved to Washington, D.C. in September 2005, in tow: my American boyfriend Matthew. We found a quaint apartment in Adams Morgan and life started. After a few unsuccessful applications, I landed my assignment with the Senate Finance Committee. I knew I wanted to work for the Senate, not the House of Representatives. And working for the International Trade Team of the Senate Finance Committee resembled me striking gold not only once, but twice. After all, I had written an entire Master thesis (in English) on U.S. interests regarding China’s World Trade Organization (WTO). International trade policy was my turf. It felt like coming home.

The offices were crowded, the Senator had a small hostile dog, the brown bag lunches were abundant. I refined my networking skills and made new friends with people from the World Bank and think tanks. Because that is what DC life is, too.

DC back then was also oddly preppy. A small world so focused on policymaking and lobbying that there seemed to be little space for anything else. The uniform for women was Ann Taylor inspired. Preppy, bland, boring. This was not the Village (in NYC). The one man who knew how to dress? Joe Biden, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back then.

So day in, day out, I went to the Senate Dirksen Building on Capitol Hill. I had the prestigious business cards with the golden US Senate emblem to prove it. I watched the very capable staffers of senior Senators like Ted Kennedy and John McCain refine the fine print of legislative drafts. I observed the masses marching on the National Mall. My life was filled to the brim with networking, understanding policy, attending events and writing about bilateral trade agreements in the works, port security issues and simply observing the more experienced staff writing speeches for Senator Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the Committee.

And then, something unexpected happened. It might have been sneaking up on me and I was not aware of it. One day in May 2006 – I had already served the Committee for eight months – I looked around on Capitol Hill and asked myself: Am I pretty enough?

I did not ask myself whether I was competent enough (I knew I was). I wondered whether I was pretty enough.

Let’s take a step back and put this into perspective. In 2005 and 2006, in particular the Senate was a place shaped by elderly white men in power – the Senators. It was the Senators and their staff. And quite a few of the staff members were ambitious and young twenty- and thirty-somethings. Amongst them: young, polished and pretty female staffers. The gender divide was unmistakable.

This is not to say these women were not capable. They were. I am merely reporting back what it felt like to be working on the Senate side. One day waking up, strolling through the corridors of the Dirksen Senate Building and wondering: Am I pretty enough?

My favorite organizational psychology professor is Edgar H. Schein. He created a model of organizational culture that I push on my clients every chance I get because it is so easy to apply. The model consists of three layers:

1. Artifacts – visible behaviors, symbols, structures.

2. Espoused values – stated strategies, philosophies, what people say they believe.

3. Basic underlying assumptions – the unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that truly shape behavior.

No surprise then – I was moving in a system whose dominant artifact was: elderly white men make the rules. They chair the committees, they shape policy, they make the decisions.
And can we also reflect on the basic underlying assumptions? Elderly white men are in charge, capable young (female) staffers run the show behind the scenes.

To this day, I don’t know why I didn’t stop in my tracks and ponder: This is a place where capable young (female) staffers run the show behind the scenes. How do they ascend the career ladder? No – I asked myself: Am I pretty enough? Was this a remnant of a 1950s mindset I had inherited? Or was there something hidden in the Capitol Hill organizational culture?

Remember Simone de Beauvoir saying: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. Could she have meant that on Capitol Hill, one is reminded of survival rules for being a woman in a male-dominated world? A very specific, gendered, definition of being a woman?

I worked for the US Senate 20 years ago. I write this article in November 2025. The more I reflect on my past professional experiences, the more I realize that writing about them is my ultimate Gone Rogue activity. A Good Girl works, a Rogue Girl captures the power asymmetries.

By describing my experiences and impressions, I bring to light the unspoken - including the work environments women are socialized in.

Could “Becoming a woman” be translated into our modern times to “Becoming a Rogue Girl”?

Picture credit: Photo by José Matute on Unsplash