I will never forget the fear I felt during orientation day at school when I was just a prepubescent teen. My whole class and I were between 11 and 12 years old, and THE big, dreadful question had just been laid upon us:

What do you want to do when you grow up?

Throughout my entire childhood, my number one goal was to explore, to experiment, to discover, to play with all the different facets and aspects of the sweet little person I was discovering myself to be. I wanted to be a singer, a storyteller, a mermaid, a wizard. And now, all of a sudden, before I had even developed the slightest grasp of the world, it was asking me to choose how I could contribute to it when I had only just begun discovering myself.

Throughout our entire educational experience, we are graded and immediately put into boxes. The smart kids, the slow kids, the athletic ones, the artistic ones...

Instead of revealing our true, unique nature, it felt like the education system was formatting us into becoming docile employees, moderately good at many things, instead of helping us uncover our true, unique inner mastery.

But perhaps that was never the role of the education system all along. Perhaps it was always our own responsibility.

You see, I believe that inside every individual resides a genius, a part that is accessible only through a deep connection with oneself. Imagine if our education system taught us emotional intelligence, meditation, true critical thinking, and how multifaceted we all are.

Just imagine what kind of world we would live in today if we had been given the opportunity in school to learn how to face our emotions, how to access that inner genius, how to truly think for ourselves, and how to ask deep, thoughtful questions.

What’s holding you back from living your most beautiful life is this system we all grew up in. The system that told you there’s only one right way of doing things. The system that told you to stay small and modest. The system that taught you that dreaming big was dangerous. The system that encouraged you to work endlessly in service of a large corporation that may not necessarily treat its employees with respect, care, or a true sense of humanity.

This system taught us to survive, not to thrive.

The good news is: you can do it anyway.

The good news is: you might be the first person in your generation to break free from the chains that never truly allowed you to dream or pursue what genuinely lights you up.

The good news is: you can exit the tiny, limiting box society tried to fit you into.

I have so many friends, including my mom, who work corporate jobs. And don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, there are some companies that are truly great at treating their employees well, providing real security, good salaries, and a healthy team environment. So please don’t take this as a critique of the corporate world. Many people are happy working corporate jobs, and we need amazing teams to empower the many incredible brands that we all collectively love.

However, that’s not what I am talking about.

What I am talking about is corporate greed, the capitalist system that is overshadowing all of our lives with the premise that, in order to survive and make money, we need to work ourselves to the bone doing something that may bring us financial security but no sense of personal expansion or genuine service to others. This energy is tainting everything, and it is one of the reasons so many people are exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsure of where to go or what to do.

To deny the economic challenges we have all been facing since 2020 would be like living under a rock, or in a privileged bubble with some serious blinders on. So many businesses have had to close their doors since then, and many people have lost hope that they can truly do what they love in this lifetime.

One thing I know for sure is that the human spirit is incredibly multifaceted.

I don’t know a single person who is just one thing.

I don’t know a single person who is just a mom or a dad, just a doctor or a lawyer, just a business owner or just a sales manager.

I have a friend who is a stone sculptor and also an actor. I have another friend who is a chef and is also writing his debut film. I know a mother who is writing novels. I have a musician friend who is building a fashion collection. I know corporate girlies who are launching a matcha bar with their besties.

The people around me are so multifaceted, and yet somehow it still feels, so often, as though the world is asking us to be just one thing.

Yet whose voice is it?

Is it the voice of our parents or grandparents? The voice of the schools and universities we attended? The voice of society? Whose voice is trying to limit us this much?

Or is it... our own?

Our own fear of expansion? Of how big we truly are? Of how much we are capable of doing in this life? Is it our pragmatism telling us that, to be good at something, we must focus on that one thing alone?

I was talking to my friend who’s a chef, and he was telling me how, when he’s cooking, he enters a trance-like state of hyperfocus. During that state, his greatest ideas for his debut film come through. I asked him, “Eventually, when you release your debut film, will you stop being a chef?”

He replied, “No, never. I’ll use half the money to open a restaurant and the other half to keep making movies.”

I loved that answer.

Because that’s exactly how I feel.

When I became a popular content creator, I felt like people had put me into a box.

They were comfortable having me neatly placed there.

So when I started releasing music, many people didn’t really get it.

It felt odd to them.

Yet it only felt odd because of the boxes they had created in their minds for me.

I remember analyzing the rise of Addison Rae and how she, too, started as a content creator on TikTok. She and her label managed what many would call a successful rebrand, shifting public perception so that people began to see her as a serious artist rather than merely an influencer.

Yet Addison’s core probably hasn’t changed.

What changed was the marketing.

What changed was the way people were taught to perceive her.

That got me thinking.

Why can’t we be two things at once without one canceling out the other?

It’s the same thing I’m experiencing nowadays with the whole topic of belonging to a market as a creator. When I started content creation in 2011, being an international creator was one of the most prestigious things you could achieve. To have an audience all around the world, to work with international brands, to travel, and to connect with people everywhere felt incredibly exciting.

Now, brands are specifically asking creators to have one dominant market they are affiliated with.

Again, we have to choose a box.

Your country of residence becomes your box.

Your language becomes your box.

Your niche becomes your box.

It’s all just boxes.

But what if we want to transcend all of it?

I was born in Belarus. I lived in America. I grew up in Switzerland, and I have now lived in France for almost ten years. I speak Russian, French, and English. How do you expect me to pick a box?

I am an artist, an influencer, a singer, a composer, a writer, a spiritual seeker, and an art director, all at once. I don’t belong to a single country. I belong to this Earth and beyond. I refuse to be defined by statistics and demographic analytics, or to have the value of my work determined by such transient metrics.

My whole life, I have been striving to live from my genius, that genius which we all possess. I have spent years continuously connecting with mine. And I can tell you, it does not like to be restricted or boxed in.

So whenever I feel the outside pressure telling me to focus on music, or to just focus on content creation, or to just focus on making money, or to just focus on creating art, or to focus on the French market, or the Swiss market, or whatever market, I let all those voices pass through me.

And I always come back to my inner genius.

I may hear all of those perspectives, but I will do it my way.

I listen.

And I do it anyway.

I hear them.

And I do it anyway.

Because the one thing that’s holding all of us back is the belief that someone once told us there is only one way of doing things.

But that’s not true.

That is an utter lie.

Transcending these constrictive boxes is the true liberation of creativity. It is the only way to unleash our genius, our entrepreneurial instincts, and our deepest gifts. It is the only path toward mastery.

It most certainly is not found in conforming to the tiny little boxes imposed by culture, family, tradition, education, society, algorithms or any other external structure.

Rather, it is found in transcending them through our inner genius.

With all my love,

xxx

Kristina

Leave a comment

I would like to preface this article by saying that everything shared in this piece comes from direct experience. Nothing has been invented or exaggerated. However if this triggers you in any way, or you might deeply not resonate with it, it’s totally okay. Take only what resonates with you and don’t ever forget that questioning everything, even this article, is incredibly important. Simply because we live in a day and age where discernment has never been more important.

A couple of years ago, I had the most intense, overwhelming, mind-blowing, life-shattering spiritual experience of my life, that I am still in many ways integrating.

This experience changed everything about how I operate in my daily life. And I don’t expect anyone to fully understand it, perhaps only those that have had similar experiences. But I still would like to share for those with an open mind and heart that have always felt like there is so much more to this world.

Before I keep going I would also like to add that I do not subscribe to any “new age” or “religious” dogma. I grew up Christian and still to this day I pray to Jesus. I remember when I was a little girl, his loving presence always brought me such comfort and peace. This love is something that is with me always. However I feel a huge difference between religion and faith and I see God everywhere. Not only in the church. So please don’t come at me after reading this article with comments such as “what is this new age thing, you need Jesus in your life.” I already have him in my life.

Now let’s move on.

As I just told you, I grew up with a very strong faith. And to this day, my faith is that which has allowed me to surmount incredible challenges, profound difficulties and to continuously rise stronger and wiser. But I would say my understanding of the spiritual world was somehow always veiled. Until an experience that would become the premise of a lifelong questioning.

During my childhood I had two severe accidents, with one of them fracturing my spinal column. That accident was what we call an NDE (near-death experience), where for a moment, you are quite literally in between life and death. I was literally a child when that happened. But it left a mark on my psyche for the rest of my life. I saw a tunnel, a long black tunnel with a portal of light at the very end. I felt so magnetized towards that tunnel and yet something pulled me back into my body, saying now is not the time yet.

When I became conscious again, I had to re-learn how to walk and spent so much time in and out of hospitals. This affected my childhood enormously and opened so many questions.

What is the nature of reality?

What is it that I saw?

What was the voice that I heard saying now is not the time yet?

As I grew up and especially as I entered my teenage years, I started questioning God and spirituality. I could not understand how a loving God could allow such terrible things to happen in this world. I was angry at God. My parents during that time were fighting all the time and their relationship was falling apart. And as their love was crumbling, I was too. I would say “Love obviously doesn’t exist, for how can it be one moment and not the next? And if love doesn’t exist, then God doesn’t either, for God is supposed to be love.”

For a few years I had declared myself an atheist. But needless to say it didn’t last for long. For in the silence of many sleepless nights I could feel God’s presence within everything and I was brought back constantly to my NDE and that loving voice saying “Now is not the time.” Often, I would also feel presences in my room — passing spirits. I felt like I could speak to them if I wanted and I could see them even clearer if I focused. But I was always too scared.

When I launched my blog in 2011, I had just read “The Secret” and I was determined to focus entirely on work. I always felt like I was a total misfit, not only because I lived in 3 different countries growing up, but also because of the things I often felt and not feeling at ease talking about them with anyone. Fashion, music and the beauty world became my escape, a place where I felt free, where what I felt could be turned into visual art. I became obsessed with Alexander McQueen and his deeply mystical fashion shows that always carried an otherworldly energy. I would listen to Kate Bush and it would connect with my heart in inexplicable ways.

Art had always nourished something so profound inside of me and I felt like through it I was connecting with something otherworldly.

When Kayture took off, I put on absolute spiritual blinders. I was focused on work, on building a community, on creating content. I had no idea what the spiritual jargon was and yet I was living in a form of absolute toxic positivity. Because I had read The Secret, and The Secret says that what you focus on is what you create, I would only focus on the positive and in many ways it worked. Yet it felt in many ways and quite often like I was becoming a shell of myself. There were so many things I simply didn’t allow myself to ever feel, to ever express, out of fear of focusing on them and thus creating undesired experiences. And yet this affected my private life tremendously. I felt like I didn’t have honest friendships and I struggled to be in a relationship, for the very reason that I wasn’t honest with myself.

I had all the professional success, I had everything I’d ever dreamt of on paper, and yet everything felt shallow and fake. I felt like no one really truly knew me, I felt like what I had built was beautiful in many ways but something important was lacking.

When I started focusing on music more and more, a huge shadow work process began in my life. I started opening drawers inside of myself that I had kept closed for years and years on end. All the darker, less positive material inside of me came rushing to the surface. My NDE, the spirits I saw in my room growing up, my existential thoughts, my dread, my grief — it all came up. I entered a huge phase of darkness and I dove into my inner underworld. I felt like I had to understand it, to explore it, to retrieve parts of myself that were lost in it.

During that time, everything in my life came to a peak before crumbling right before my eyes. I was signed to a music label, working with my dream brands, performing at festivals, working with some amazing artists, I was friends with all the coolest fashion people, and yet everything felt somehow built on an unhealthy foundation. Right before 2020, I left the record label, the team that I had been working with since 2011 dissolved as we all went our own individual paths, and last but not least a man I had developed strong feelings for lied to me and a relationship I was hoping to build completely fell apart.

The last week of 2019, I isolated myself in my apartment. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. For days and days, I lay on the floor of my living room crying. Everything I had built for so long felt like it was slipping through my fingers. I was exhausted from fighting, from so often feeling unsupported and on my own. I was going through such a deep heartache, and so I decided to start meditating.

That was the first time I had ever done a meditation in my whole life and something so heavy immediately lifted. I felt God holding me. In the silence of meditation, just letting my breath guide me, I came face to face again with that infinite space — beyond the beyond, beyond words, beyond understanding — where everything is and isn’t simultaneously. I meditated every day; it was the only thing that helped me feel better.

And one day something happened.

In the midst of a deep meditation that lasted for probably two hours, my heart started beating really fast. All the sadness, the dread, the fear, the distress came rushing back in. I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. I kept repeating to myself “I have nothing to lose, nothing to lose, nothing to lose.” And something inside of me let go. I thought I was going to die. But instead, I dove into the pits of the void and re-emerged on the other side.

My whole body was shaking. I felt a current of intense energy surge up my spine, blasting powerful energy throughout my whole body. I thought I was going to have a seizure or a heart attack — instead I started seeing bright colors around me, and I could barely keep my eyes closed as my eyelids were shaking on their own. I started naturally chanting and toning as that immediately brought relief. I could not understand what was going on and I genuinely thought I was going crazy.

Yet I was not. These bright colors formed a circle around me and I saw elongated bright blue lights standing all around me. I heard them speak to me telepathically, very clearly — telling me that if I saw them any clearer than that, I would be too scared. That I would receive important information now and that I needed to take notes. I know how crazy all of this sounds, and you are absolutely free not to believe me and also to doubt the veracity of my words — in fact it’s even healthy to be skeptical.

So I took a notebook and I started writing what they were sharing with me. In the course of a couple of days, I filled 5 notebooks with esoteric, metaphysical information, things I had never heard of before. After that experience, I could barely go outside, because whenever I would see someone in the street I would start receiving telepathic information about them and I didn’t yet know how to control my channel, which felt completely wide open.

Luckily — or not so luckily — lockdown happened and I took it as an opportunity to study. I enrolled in online courses, I trained with healers and spiritual teachers to understand what had happened to me and I received so much guidance and understanding. I was not going crazy; I had experienced a huge awakening.

The blinders were officially removed. And I no longer knew how to function in this world, nor could I function like I used to.

I decided to share about this online and even wrote a book called “Through the Veils of Mystery” which basically talks about this experience in more detail and has many channeled poems in it. But I felt like people from the fashion industry were not vibing with this new facet of me. I was confronted with a huge backlash and many people chose to unfollow me during that time. I again felt like the misfit, the misunderstood weirdo, and yet I was also discovering a whole new world and meeting so many people who had experienced the same thing I had.

Once the lockdown was over, I enrolled in many spiritual retreats, I studied breathwork and shadow work, I read all the books written by Carl Jung, I learned about reiki and magnetism, and I began studying the life of Jesus, reading all the books about him and his life. I got curious about other important spiritual figures such as Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Quan Yin, Green Tara, Hathor, Kali Ma and so on. I began studying the divine feminine energy and my whole world was being lit up again.

I have realized that these teachings, this wisdom, need to come back today. Because we have lost our foundation. And flowers cannot grow from soil that isn’t fertile.

So I wondered: when did we lose our magic? When did we lose our connection to our God-given powers to heal, to remember, to feel, to know? People associate magic with something dark and evil but magic is simply energy. It’s neutral. And energy can be used for both good and bad.

Yet denying it is denying the core of who we truly are. That which interconnects us all.

I grew up in Switzerland where hospitals like the CHUV have people that are capable of completely healing severe burns through hands-on healing and prayers. That has been recognized by the state. Places like Lourdes have documented thousands and thousands of cases of miracles — unexplainable miracles. People coming to Lourdes in wheelchairs and then suddenly being able to walk again.

And yet somehow we have fallen into a materialistic worldview where we only believe what we see, out of fear of the unknown.

The Inquisition and the many genocides of indigenous tribes, of druids, witches and healers have sown throughout history a danger around the supernatural in the human psyche. That fear is still deeply ingrained in us. We have learned to trust science blindly. Even though during the Victorian era people were quite literally prescribed small doses of opium or small dosages of poison to treat stomach aches.

The way women give birth has been adapted to facilitate the work of the doctor and not the woman, and to this day doctors treat the symptoms more than they treat the cause of them. We are confronted with a systemic issue. A world that has been trying to strip us of our connection to our sovereign powers because for centuries they were threatening the economy and the many institutions which thrive off of people’s suffering.

So I finally got an answer to that one question I kept asking myself when I was a teenager: how can a loving God let such atrocities happen? And the answer is free will. In God’s love we are free to experiment and choose various experiences. We are free. God doesn’t restrain us from making mistakes — even terrible ones. We are free to try it all out if we want to. That’s our greatest gift in this world. A gift that comes with its price.

Magic is to be found in the ocean, in the flower, in the sea shell and in the eyes of your lover. It is permeating all things and all people. It’s the vibrancy of all life, of all things, of all beings. Everything is made of the same stuff — that stuff is energy, that stuff is everywhere.

Magic is everywhere.

It is who we truly are.

For a few years now I have been able to integrate these experiences harmoniously into my daily life. I am able to create my art and my content in an integrated way — to enjoy fashion, beauty, travel and music, while somehow always having a spiritual, mystical energy contained within it. To use these creative vehicles as an expression of love, of beauty, a celebration of the divine and of this gorgeous world made of physical matter.

Spirituality isn’t about denying the material world.

Instead it’s about being anchored in this world, in love with its beauty and its many gifts. Honoring matter and honoring spirit simultaneously. Honoring the source of it all.

Because that’s where we all truly come from.

And that is an undeniable fact.

With all my love,

xxx

Kristina

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Let’s be honest, in the last 6 years, everything has changed.

Sometimes I honestly wonder if it’s for the better, but then the optimistic part of my brain catches up as I sincerely don’t want to be the kind of person that resists change, that resists evolution and that gets stuck in nostalgia, saying how “everything was so much better before”… yuck.

I am sure many people were angry when the toaster was invented, saying that oh how sad that the art of grilling one’s own bread on the stove will now soon be lost, or how many people were angry when the internet first came around. Yet look at all the jobs that emerged from it (not from the toaster, from the web… although I am sure the toaster industry is absolutely thriving).

We now live in an era of absolute uncertainty and quite honestly, chaos. The economy is terrible, AI is replacing countless jobs, people are getting fired by hundreds of thousands, all industries are trying to save costs and optimize their profits and meanwhile everyone is becoming a content creator.

The other day, I was at my therapist, and while I was in tears sharing about something traumatic that happened to me when I was a kid she asked me “Have you thought about sharing that on social media?”

I was genuinely flabbergasted.

I am not even kidding. And let me tell you, my therapist is over 60 years old… She went on to then tell me how everybody in her surroundings is encouraging her to start sharing about psychology on social media and how she is seriously considering becoming a content creator. I paid a 85 euros one hour session to have her listen to my childhood traumas and yet somehow she still managed to talk about herself for the 1/3 of the session. Thank god it was only my second session with her and let me tell you, I am definitely looking out for a new therapist. Yet this is somehow also telling of our generation, and I am not talking about age, I am talking about the time we are all living in.

When I started content creation back in 2011 it came from a visceral need to connect. I was born in Belarus, Minsk, my parents were 19 when I was born and my dad was finishing his university studies. He got the opportunity to do his masters degree in a University in Kentucky so when I was 4 years old my whole family relocated on a University campus in Kentucky, USA where I shared a 1 student’s bedroom with my mom and my dad. Eventually, once my dad got his degree, he also got a job offer in Switzerland which is where we moved when I was 7.

So at the age of 7, I was already confronted with 3 completely different cultures. Many experts say that 1-7 are the most formative years in human’s psychology and that everything stems from our experience during that timeframe. Well my experience was to constantly have to move, to feel 0 stability in my life, to constantly have to make new friends, adapt to new foods, new homes, to learn new languages and that nothing was ever really mine. I never felt like I fully belonged somewhere. I always felt like a stranger, like some sort of outsider.

So when I discovered the online world during my teenage years, my life completely changed. I felt like blogs were these micro communities of like-minded individuals that were connecting from different corners of the world, where people could be totally themselves, where there was no judgement only understanding because we were creating these online portals, these online bubbles where we could be truly free from the constraints of society.

I felt like for the first time I sincerely belonged somewhere.

So I began a blog in 2011. Everything about it was made with my whole heart. The articles were literally like diary entries and the pictures where my vision boards made real, me turning my dreams into a reality.

Needless to say there were so many online creators that I was so inspired by and watching them thrive never triggered any sense of jealousy or comparison in me. If anything, it was also the first time I was seing people live the kinds of life I always dreamt of living. I was in awe, I was so grateful to have access even if simply virtually to all these incredible people, to their opinions, their styles, a little piece of their lives.

I remember how hard I was working on my blog, posting at times every single day. Very quickly, I knew that it was my soul’s calling, that’s what I wanted to do. And I wanted to become absolutely great at it. I wanted to connect with people deeply, from heart to heart. Content creation become my job. It quite honestly became my life. No matter how hard I was working, the feedback, the audience’s appreciation and interaction was so incredibly gratifying and it honestly always kept me going.

Yet look at what’s happening today? We could sit down and truly argue for hours : is it really quality that’s now thriving online? Is it quality that’s driving good numbers? Are the people who are creating content from their heart the ones that are making good money? I would personally say : no. I would say that no matter how hard you work today, engagement from an audience is far from guaranteed. You need to be strategic and you need to hook people’s attention very quickly. Creating content from your heart is the cherry on the cake, but I wouldn’t say it’s prerequisite sadly.

So many things happened from 2011 to 2019 for me, lots of trial and error, lots of success, absolutely incredible achievements : I made it into the Forbes 30 under 30ies list, I was an official L’Oréal ambassador, I was attending some of the most exclusive fashion shows front row and was working regularly with some of the top brands such as Cartier, Dior or Bvlgari. And yet during that time, I could already feel like something was up.

We all know what happened in 2020. I think we all still collectively underestimate the trauma we all went through during these times of immense stress and complete uncertainty. The economy was changing, so many businesses had to shut down and simultaneously a new social media platform became the new big thing : Tiktok. That was the beginning of the video format. Quickly after that, everything became about videos. Creators that have become experts at writing and photography had to now quickly learn to become video editors or they were going to be left behind as the new wave of creators was on the rise.

For a while, I am not going to lie, I really resisted that change. You see, as much as I can come off as an extraverted person, in truth I can be very shy and incredibly introverted. I am very quiet and I enjoy a very slow paced life, even when I travel. I don’t like to live my life through my phone screen, I don’t like to film myself all the time and also I don’t like to share everything about my life either.

In an era where we are all “encouraged” to show everything about our life to create engagement, from our food preferences, to our morning routine, to our relationship, to our fashion choices, to our home, what is there left that is just for us? That’s not up for sharing?

I had built a way of creating content that I was happy with because as much as I was giving, and trust me I was always giving A LOT, I could always keep a sense discretion and respect of my privacy. I always had a lot of people ask me for vlogs and Youtube content and no matter how much I tried, I always hated it. I hated how intrusive it felt in my life, I hated how much of my daily life I had to film for it to be interesting, I hated that I had to think about filming myself when I was going through difficult moments, I just hated it. I am a human being. I need to process what I experience before sharing about it. I have to live before I can speak about it. And I felt like the rise of the video format was going to change everything. And it did.

Now we live in a world where we have to connect from heart to heart with people within 3 seconds. Because all of our attention spans are so short by being bombarded daily with so much content that we all collectively produce, and that we all collectively struggle to digest, that we can’t even read a book properly anymore without zoning out or dissociating. The video format does it all for us, we don’t have to think anymore, we don’t have to read between the lines, we don’t have to do anything. It’s a total brain rot. Yet blog articles were contemplative, reflective, they were bringing you in and in the long run they left you with a feeling of peace, inspiration and joy. Many of us don’t feel so good after having a tiktok brain rot session now don’t we?

So what happened? What has changed? Is it really as bad as it sounds?

Honestly, I do believe that in many ways having to learn to speak to the camera and to convey a simple, clear yet engaging message to a wide range of people is an incredibly constructive exercise, not only does it genuinely teach us so much about ourselves it also helps us to become better communicators and to thus connect with people more efficiently. And eventually I do believe that it is absolutely possible to connect with people from heart to heart and to do things on our own terms.

Because at the end of the day, we are talking about human connectivity here. We need to come back to the root of it, the “why". And my why was always to create a sense of belonging, to connect with from people all around the world, to create a beautiful, exciting, thrilling live for ourselves and to inspire our audience to do the same thing, to remind them to never stop believing in themselves. That’s the root, that’s the core, the people, their hears, their dreams. And regardless of formats, strategies or whatsoever : you are the algorithm, you are the format. I told you that I really struggled with filming Youtube vlogs, fine. Perhaps my format is not a vlog. Perhaps I’m more comfortable to have a sit down chat with a cup of coffee and that’s when I’ll be able to be the most generous with my audience and share content that will bbe the most valuable to them.

This era is pushing us like never before to know ourselves. To know ourselves truly. Deeply. To know what works for us and what doesn’t. To shift, to pivot, to try, to fail, to get back up again, because what’s amazing about the present times is how much opportunity there is.

On another note, if it feels like the 2011-2019 era was all about aspiration/inspiration now it does however feel a lot about comparison and competition. First of all because there has never been as many creators as there is today. And yet likewise it is also a great opportunity to become even more strongly anchored within our genuine identity, to claim our story, to claim our roots, to claim our heritage, to claim all of these things that make us so unique and different. So this competitive energy can actually be shifted back into an even heightened sense of inspiration, where whenever something we see triggers a sense of jealousy or self-comparison, then it is a very clear indicator that there might be something in it for us to pay special attention to.

AI will never replace true creators, true stories, true personalities, real people with real lives. And no matter what will happen in the next couple of years and the truth is that nobody really knows what will happen, one thing for sure is that the only constant in life is change. So we either stay behind, or we evolve with our times, seing the change as an amazing opportunity to build even more resilience and to own even more fiercely who we really are.

So remember :

Don’t ever close your heart to fit into a machine.

Don’t ever let social media numbers determine how wonderful you are.

Stay true to yourself, stay focused and remember : you got this.

With all my love,

xxx

Kristina

I have missed writing, oh how I have missed writing.

How hard it has been to pack up years of my life that feel untold, into a 1min video, where my heart yearns to say so much but doesn’t even know where to begin. So I will begin here. I will begin with what I have on my heart right now. You see I do understand that we live in a world where it’s all about video content and speaking directly to the camera, but I have always been so fond of writing. It feels like I’m writing in my diary. It feels personal and intimate. I don’t have that feeling when I film myself, I struggle to express myself authentically. But when I write, it all just flows out of me. Effortlessly.

Some of you may know me from Instagram, some of you have been riding along with me since many years and remember when I used to write articles every single day on Kayture.com, my first blog that connected with millions and millions of people all around the world. Of course the blog had gorgeous pictures, but it was especially about the words, words that connected us together, written articles that were deep, that were true.

Now Kayture.com is sadly offline, paying the maintenance to keep it online for all these years was really expensive and because the website had no longer any traffic, I decided to archive it. And yet, there are many things that were left unsaid in regards to these times.

So let us begin with that.

What happened to Kayture. Today I would like to tell you the story I haven’t yet fully told. And perhaps I won’t be brave enough to say everything, but I will do my best to say as much as I can.

So let’s travel back in time, back to 2018.

I have been writing on Kayture for many years and was working with a team of several people that were there full time, helping and supporting me. Our team work, our team energy was at the core of the success of Kayture, because reaching that level of popularity requires likewise a level of logistics that is very hard to achieve alone. In this article I won’t be mentioning names, although many of you guys remember them, just out of respect for the people concerned. As I have been saying since the beginning of my career, I am a multi-faceted artist and I have been making music since I’m a child. Even with the success of my blog my heart was always yearning to pursue simultaneously music. So I did.

In 2018 I signed with an indie record label, which was a very exiting new step in my career, I was finally able to release an EP, to tour, to release music videos and connect with fellow artists, to collaborate with them. All of it was so thrilling yet I had an immense pressure from the label to re-brand myself in order to be fully perceived as a singer, and no longer an influencer. I of course listened, thinking this is what I needed in order to be taken seriously in the music industry, forgetting that everything that I had built for all these years was my actual strength. So the re-brand began. At that time, I was going through an incredibly difficult time, my love life was in absolute shambles, I was going from one heartbreak to another, and I had no sense of self-identity. My aesthetic was getting darker and darker, moodier and moodier, which reflected how I really felt. I felt dark. I felt lost. I felt sad. My music reflected this existential crisis I was going through. Eventually, I even archived all of my social media content, to open a new creative chapter focusing more on my music. This confused a lot of my audience. Losing a lot of them.

With this big shift, the team that was working on Kayture also started dissolving as we all went our own individual paths, pursuing our own individual journeys. In 2019, my record label had put me in the studio with a bunch of producers that were skilled at making rap/r&b/urban music asking that I make a successful first album. I was sleeping on the couch of the studio, working day and night trying to get it right. The boss of the label would come in and tell us “We have interest from Virgin radio, we need to write a hit for them, just focus on writing a hit.” Yet how could I write a hit when I was working with people that had a completely different creative vision than me? As you can imagine, the album turned out to be a total disaster, although, back in those days I already had written songs such as “The Right Way” which is out only now. Yet if you heard the first version of it, and how badly it sounded back them, speaking purely from a production point of view, you would be chocked.

Everyone was disappointed, the label was disappointed in me, I was angry at them. And then 2020 hit. I am not going to go into details of what happened during this time, because I wrote a whole book about it called “Through the Veils of Mystery”, but that was one of the most difficult yet also most beautiful times in my life. I experienced as some would call a sort of awakening and re-connected with spirituality like never before. I left the label. The confinement began. And I was all alone. No label. No team. No partner. My family in another country. Just me.

During these years, Tiktok and video content started taking off. Yet my whole life, I had developed the skill of writing. I struggled to jump on board of the video train. I felt utterly uncomfortable with it. Yet I kept trying and trying. But nothing was working, I was losing clients, contracts and eventually I lost my beloved appartment which I couldn’t afford anymore. This apartment used to be my safe space. My temple, where I felt safe, where I had built so many memories. And I was loosing it. No matter how hard I tried, money was simply no longer flowing in like before.

So I had to move back in with my mom. I had a huge debt because I stayed in that apartment longer than I should have hoping for money to finally come in. When I moved back to Switzerland, a part of me felt relieved. Another part felt like I had failed. Failed at everything I had build all these years. Failed at my audience, failed at my dreams, failed at my love life, failed in my finances, just failed. Yet my spirituality kept me alive, kept me afloat. I focused on healing my heart, on taking care of myself. I struggled to create content regularly because I was feeling so sad. The only instances when I felt good were in deep meditation. Yet I knew if I wanted to create desirability for potential clients and to get brand deals, I had to show the best side of me. So I never really shared how bad I felt, I think nobody really knew.

Eventually, I opened a new website called www.kazabazan.com where I launched a podcast, articles and online courses. But it didn’t received as much positive engagement and feedback as Kayture did. No matter what I tried, no matter what I shared, I felt like I had lost my connection with my audience.

So I kept working, working my ass off, to re-connect somehow, to find my way back to joy, to my “why”, to why I started sharing content in the first place. I focused on beauty, on curating a beautiful space, a space that when I look at it, I feel inspired. Focusing on beauty brought back that spark in my heart. But the deeper connection was missing. Little by little, I started booking jobs again and eventually was able to afford rent again. I moved back to Paris, a city that I always deeply connected with, a city that always enchanted me with it’s poetry. And here I am now, writing to you this article right now, sharing these heartfelt words with you.

You know, in all honesty, I am really trying my best, but I often feel like it’s not enough. And I have come to the conclusion that I need to accept that I am not really doing okay, and that it’s okay. Perhaps this comes from incredibly high expectations in regards to what I had previously achieved and wanting to reach that level of connection with my audience again, but perhaps we are simply living through different times. But yes, I struggle. Immensely.

I don’t know where to even begin sharing all of this in a short one/two/three minute reel because my heart feels so heavy and the world doesn’t need more heaviness right now. So I am just trying to lift myself up, and it honestly sometimes feels like a battle. I try to focus on what brings me joy, what brings me a bit of lightness, but the unbearable sadness comes back even stronger after a while. As I said, meditation is the only thing that helps, it’s been my foundation.

I still have so much I wish to share with you all.

This is just the beginning of my story.

I have left out a lot of details a part of me isn’t ready to speak of.

But perhaps one day I will.

If you are struggling just know you are not alone.

This article isn’t meant to bring your spirit down.

It’s here to help you feel less alone if you’re feeling sad.

And it’s okay, to not be okay.

I love you.

No matter who you are.

x

Kristina