About this site and its writer

Hi and welcome to biancaaguglia.com, the site of a regular person who tries to make the best out of life.

Since I never liked talking about myself in the third person, I won’t tell you who Bianca Aguglia is. Instead, I’ll tell you that I am Bianca Aguglia and I’m one of those people who love to think for themselves and have yet to find an idea they wouldn’t love to explore on their own. I’m also a writer, storyteller, minimalist, tree hugger, hiker, and bike riding fanatic.

This blog is the abridged diary for what I call the journey of a self-thought person. A collection of musings and ideas that come to me as I try to figure out life and make the best of it. While I do realize that the blog helps me first and foremost because:

1. Blogging is a combination of art and problem solving;
2. I love both the freedom of art and the more structured mental game aspect of problem solving;
3. Through art and critical thinking I end up understanding myself better,

I do hope it will help you also. I hope it will make you feel more connected, more inspired, and more excited about life and about the future in a logical, educated way.

Thank you for being here.

A short-ish bio

I was born in Romania, in 1977. That’s a year many Romanians still remember today because of its powerful earthquake: fifty-five seconds of magnitude 7.2 seismic hell that killed more that 1,500 people.

I live in Western New York now. It turns out 1977 wasn’t a good year here either: a three-day blizzard covered the area in five feet of snow with some drifts as high as 30 to 40 feet tall. The blizzard also caused the death of 23 people, shut down transportation and critical services, and caused enough chaos that, for the first time in U.S. history, a snowstorm zone was declared a federal disaster area.

That explains why, throughout my life, I’ve been around people who call 1977 the year of the earthquake, or the year of the blizzard. Me? I just call it the year of my birth. Typical self-centered human.

I’ve had quite a journey since 1977, but I’ll mention only some of its milestones here. The ones relevant to this blog.

• I studied Computer Science for four years in high school in Romania. That was more than twenty years ago.
• After a nerve-wrecking senior year spent studying for the college entrance exam, I was accepted into one of the top colleges in my country. I studied International Business for four years.
• I moved to the U.S.
• I changed a lot. I started going shopping almost daily and having constant conversations about diets. In Romania, shopping had been a strictly-when-you-need-it activity and diet was something you did when you were sick. In the U.S., they became time consuming, daily parts of life. In a few short years I became depressed by the mountain of things I had accumulated and the constant need to organize and clean them up.
• I changed again. I came across the 100-thing challenge which prompted people to reduce all their belongings to one hundred things. All of them: toothbrush, hairbrush, clothes, shoes, etc. I didn’t take the challenge. I don’t like following rules. I just like learning principles. I didn’t reduce my belongings to one hundred things. I just reduced them to the things that mattered to me. I became a minimalist.
• I became a mother.
• I started running. I’m the world’s slowest runner and feeling great about it.
• I quit my job in finance and became a massage therapist.
• I started looking into making a living online. Over the ten years or so that I’ve been doing this, I’ve purchased more than thirty website domains, set up about ten of them, created content for five, and made a total of less than $10. I’m on the right track.
• I dealt with major episodes of depression.
• I experienced great personal loss.
• I was affected by the feeling-like-a-fraud syndrome.
• I panicked about my death, the death of people I love, and the upcoming end of the world.
• I did a lot of soul searching to figure out my purpose and my place in this world.

That brings me to where I am today: at peace. That didn’t happen because I’ve found answers. Instead, it happened because I realized that some answers cannot be found, they can only be built, and it takes a lifetime to do so.

Just because I’m at peace doesn’t mean I’m happy all the time. I still have periods of intense sadness and depression. But they don’t empty me. They don’t take away my desire to keep going. Instead, I am able to look at them from an outsider’s perspective. I see them as normal occurrences that will take some proper care from my part. Once they’re gone, I can get back to feeling strong enough and curious enough to figure out more about life. To add more to Bianca Aguglia’s story.