Back in high school, my Italian teacher said I wrote “horrors.”

Not errors. Horrors.

Later, I became an engineering student. In fact, I was good with equations, decent with data, useless with words. Language and communication felt like enemy territory.

That should have been the end of that story.

It wasn't.

I spent years studying water. Not poetically, but literally, from Italy to Canada and from Spain to Germany. I completed a European double doctorate at two universities across two countries, under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship, researching advanced water treatment. I published papers. I became a water scientist.

And I kept noticing the same gap.

The research was solid. The communication was not. Scientists who had spent years on a problem could not explain it to the person next to them on a train. Important work on the most important element on earth, which, without it, we die, disappeared behind jargon. Funding got justified by buzzwords no one could define.

I watched good ideas go unheard because no one (me included) had learned to say them clearly.

Then my personal life broke down.

A period of silence with my family. Therapy, which I didn't expect to change how I write, but did. Three years of daily journaling. Pages and pages of trying to say what was actually happening inside me, in language that was actually mine.

That's where the voice came from.

Not from writing courses. Not from a style guide. From being forced, repeatedly, to tell the truth about my own experience in words that fit.

In the summer of 2025, I wrote around one LinkedIn post per day for 90 days.

The fear was there every morning. I wrote anyway.

By the end, I knew two things. First: I had more to say than I thought. Second: the posts I remember are the ones I actually lived. The ones I didn't live, even the well-written ones, are already gone.

That's the bar I hold everything to now.

Today I work as an Innovation Consultant in Munich. I help EU-funded projects communicate what they've built to the people who need to hear it.

The water science is still there. So is the engineer who was terrible with words.

Both of them ended up here: writing.

If you're trying to figure out where to go next, or how to say what you actually mean, you're exactly who I write for.