Hello World

Welcome to my little corner of the internet. My name is Anastasia — it means resurrection. Fitting, don’t you think?

Here’s why.

At 23, I moved to London with nothing but a one-way ticket, two suitcases, and a heart full of ambition. I spent seven years building a life from scratch and chasing my dream of becoming an actress. Just as I was finally stepping into a full-time acting career, Covid hit. Overnight, the life I had been working so hard to create collapsed. With no safety net, I was forced to leave.

I landed in Italy — in a tiny Abruzzo village tied to my family’s past. It became my equivalent of a parent’s garage: a place to retreat when everything else failed. I was 29. I turned 30 in solitude, carrying more shame and failure than celebration.

This year I turned 34. It wasn’t much different — just me, my partner, and a couple of friends. A small gathering, but one filled with a little more warmth and less solitude.

Still, these past years have been a long battle. I had to reinvent myself, invent a new job title, and try to rebuild in the romanticized Italian countryside. But reality didn’t match the fantasy. My finances didn’t recover. My mental health crumbled under the weight of grief, inflation, low wages, and impossibly high taxes. The career I had poured my soul into had been cut short. The debts remained. And slowly, the sense of me vanished.

For a long time, I hoped I could just push forward, erase the past few years, and start again as if nothing happened. But silence and stillness have a way of making you face yourself. And I realized — I wasn’t the person I had been when I left London. But I hadn’t become anyone better either. I just… disappeared into the quiet.

I have lost myself in the dark, but I am not completely helpless. I know there is a way out — I’ve found it before, more than once. I just forgot how to follow it. Rinascita is going to be just that: a map. A blueprint for recovering what has been lost. It is the little flame in the dark that can revive sleeping embers and turn any disaster into a bonfire. One step at a time.