Kazakhstan woman starts over at 42 after years in Trinidad

By 42, she thought she would have a successful career, a home, a car and a family, with the uncertainty of starting over far behind her.

Instead, after spending 17 years building a life in Trinidad and Tobago, she is back living with her mother in Germany and rebuilding her life from the ground up.

It is a reality she says she was so uncomfortable with that, for two and a half years, she kept her age hidden from her online audience.

She explained that she was not ashamed of being 42. What troubled her was comparing her life with others her age who appeared to have established careers, homes, cars and families.

At 40, she packed up the life she had built over 17 years in Trinidad and Tobago and moved back in with her mother in Germany to begin again.

Two and a half years later, she says she is still going through that process.

Growing up, she believed that by her 40s she would have reached a point where her life was settled and everything had fallen into place. The reality, she admitted, has been very different.

But she says she has reached a point where she no longer wants to feel ashamed about it.

Her decision to reveal her age forms part of a wider account of an unconventional life that eventually brought her to Trinidad and Tobago.

She said she was born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in 1984, when the country was part of the Soviet Union. Her family later relocated to Germany while she was a child.

Years later, following a difficult period in her personal life, she decided she needed to get away. She went to an airport looking for a destination far from Germany and was presented with several Caribbean options, including Tobago.

At the time, she said she did not even know what Tobago was.

She eventually booked a three-week stay on the island, but what was supposed to be a temporary escape became a defining chapter of her life.

She recalled arriving in Tobago, feeling the warm air and immediately experiencing a sense of being at home that she said she had never felt before.

Soon afterwards, she met the man who would become her husband.

Her Caribbean journey ultimately stretched across 17 years before she made another life-changing decision at age 40: leaving Trinidad and Tobago and returning to Germany.

Now 42 and living with her mother, she is publicly confronting the expectations she once placed on herself about what life should look like by a certain age.

Instead of continuing to hide where she is in life, she says she is ready to tell her story.

Starting over at 42 is not the future she once pictured for herself. But after more than two years of keeping her age private, she says she is finished being ashamed that her life has followed a different timeline.