Start over. Breathe in, breathe out, and don't freak out.

Restart. Breathe. Inhale. And don't lose your mind.

There are times when life forces us to stop. Mine arrived with a burnout. After months off work, my energy seemed to have disappeared. But a job opening on LinkedIn changed everything: an opportunity in marketing, at a travel company. It was a dream!

After years as a designer, I felt like I wasn't evolving anymore. At the time, I was attending a postgraduate course in Marketing Management at Porto Business School, and I believed it was the right time to give my career a new direction, to restart. I joined that company full of hope – but three months later, I was fired. An injustice I don't want to dwell on, but it made me think: do I really want to go back to working for someone else?

During my unemployment, I focused on MARY, my clothing store. I started attending more markets and realised that many only accepted handmade products. That's when the seed was planted: what if I created something entirely made by me, from scratch?

easybreezy was born this way, from an unlikely place: from my passion for sewing, which I rediscovered in classes after being laid off; from my love for the sea, for the freedom and energy it gives me; and from a surge of self-love – stepping out of my comfort zone and proving to myself that I could do it.

easybreezy cushions are more than mere objects. They are pieces of that journey: resilience, courage, and a breath of freedom. They are sewn slowly, for those who also need to pause.

With all this, I realised that overcoming burnout and restarting means creating a new rhythm, more conscious and more aligned with who we are, without external pressures or imposed expectations.

Restarting is not erasing what's behind, but learning to move forward with more awareness. It's accepting mistakes, valuing pauses, and realising that our well-being must come first, even when that involves difficult choices.

Breathe. Inhale. And don't lose your mind. That's my mantra – and that's where every stitch, every fabric, every detail comes from.