Books, Mountains & Optimism

Karlsruhe, Palace Gardens, Germany.

I was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in the summer of 1981. My father was a fisherman and my mother was a housewife. My best friend was half Greek and half German, and whenever I went to her house, she would speak German with her mom, and I was so jealous. I wanted to be able to speak more than one language with such ease. From a young age, one of my biggest dreams was to live abroad.

I have two older sisters, and one of them gave me the gift of a love for books and reading. When the other gave birth to her son in 2004, I was unemployed and she was working, so I started working for her as a nanny. A couple of years later, I worked for a few other families in Greece, and eventually I started looking for families abroad.

In 2013, a Greek family living in Switzerland found me and were kind enough to invite me to work for them. In 2017, I went back to Greece for family reasons, but I quickly realised that even though I missed my family and friends terribly, life in Greece wasn't for me. So, in 2019, I found another opportunity to come back to Switzerland, knowing for sure this time that this is where I want to grow old.

After some "adventures", I found two wonderful families I now work for, with the best kids a nanny could ask for. I've made a lot of friends here, and I joined two book clubs made up of some wonderful women with whom I tremendously enjoy talking about books and everything else.

Besides reading books, I love doing jigsaw puzzles and spending time with my wonderful friends and my amazing boyfriend. I also really enjoy being out in nature. Switzerland has so many incredible places to explore, and I love hiking, swimming in the lakes, and snowshoeing during winter.

And my newest obsession is, of course, this project, Echoes Unheard. I've loved working on it: coming up with ideas, designing the website, researching the creatures, and watching everything slowly come together. Every part of it has given me so much joy.

As for who I am as a person, there's one quality that is particularly important to me: optimism. It's the quality I love most about myself and the person I always want to try to be.

In the first draft of this post, I wrote that I didn't really know why being an optimist mattered so much to me. But that's not actually true. I do know.

There have been times in my life when I was a pessimist, when everything felt dark and difficult and all I could see were the problems. Those were also times when I wasn't happy with my life. I've also known people whose conversations seemed to revolve almost entirely around problems, complaints about other people, things that had gone wrong, or situations they were unhappy with. I realised that wasn't the kind of outlook I wanted for myself.

That doesn't mean I believe we should pretend everything is wonderful or never talk about our problems. Of course we should. Everyone goes through difficult times, and being able to share those difficulties with a friend is important. To me, optimism isn't about ignoring what is wrong. It's about not allowing what is wrong to become the only thing I can see.

That's why being an optimist matters to me. It isn't always easy, and I don't always succeed, but it's something I consciously try to be.

And, in a way, I think creating Echoes Unheard is itself an act of optimism. I created this project by myself, but I did so wholeheartedly hoping that other people would love the idea, embrace it, and help it grow. I hope that, together, we can turn it into something much bigger than anything I could create on my own. Stefuto