Katrina grew up between the Philippines and Italy, and at 25 traveled solo through Southeast Asia to find her way back to herself. That journey became the foundation of her work as a brand strategist and social media consultant.
Losing her grandmother was the moment everything shifted. Katrina had been working as a saleswoman in Italy since she was 20, grinding without ever stopping to ask herself how she had ended up there. When her grandmother passed, the woman who had raised her in the Philippines while her parents were away, a single question surfaced: would she be proud of the person you've become? The answer wasn't clear enough, and that uncertainty sent Katrina on a path she's still walking.
She describes herself not by her job title, but by who she is. "I'm Katrina. I'm a passionate of life and I love exploring, exploring the world." The work came after the person. That sequence, identity first, profession second, isn't incidental to what she does. It's the whole method.
Katrina spent her first ten years in the Philippines, rooted in Asian culture, raised largely by her grandmother while her parents were abroad. At ten, her family brought her to Italy, and she had to rebuild from scratch: new language, new food, new way of reading people. Another decade passed. She became Italian in practice, if not entirely in feeling.
By 20, she was working sales. Good at it, probably. But the question of whether she was living the right life hadn't been asked yet. Her grandmother's death asked it for her.
Awareness is the most important thing. If you're not aligned with that kind of lifestyle and not aware of it, you're just wasting time.
At 21, she started looking inward. At 25, she left. Not back to the Philippines specifically, because she already knew that life. She wanted to be near her roots without retracing them exactly. So she went to Bali, then Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia.
That journey reminded me to live life so simple. I remembered the little girl that used to be so happy just running in the rice fields, and I wanted to be that girl again.
She came back to Italy, took her old job for a year to save money, and used that money to study: digital marketing, copywriting, social media, advertising. She already had the sales instincts. She needed the digital vocabulary to go with them.
The work Katrina built out of all this is, at its core, about helping people figure out who they are before they figure out what to say. She works with brands and individuals on their identity, their messaging, and the opportunities that open up once those foundations are clear. Social media strategy, brand identity, content creation. But the starting point is always the same question she had to answer herself.
"You don't know who we are to be able to communicate what we sell or what we do." — Katrina
The parallel is direct and she knows it. The process she went through personally, stripping back the noise, understanding what actually mattered, then building outward from that, is the same process she now runs with clients. Awareness isn't a soft concept she floats. It's the literal first step.
She also does project management, helping businesses structure how their teams create and execute. That side of the work, organized, systematic, structural, is what lets the rest of her life run quietly. Knowing how to organize things means she doesn't need to take every project that comes her way.
Katrina currently lives on Fuerteventura, a small island in the Canary Islands. She chose it specifically because it reminded her of Asia: sparse, raw, ocean everywhere, a small tight community, almost no commercial services. People who move there, she says, are choosing space over convenience.
The island gave her what she'd been looking for. Time to walk in nature, go to the volcanoes, do ceramics, learn to paint again, do things for no reason except that they're interesting. When there are fewer distractions, you stop running from the question of what you actually want.
But she's clear-eyed about the challenge this lifestyle creates, especially for someone who works in social media. Unlimited freedom generates its own kind of noise.
The hardest thing is not being able to manage your freedom. When you have too much freedom, it can cause a sense of FOMO.
Seeing other people's curated travel feeds while working in that same ecosystem makes it easy to confuse their dreams for your own. Her check is a simple internal question: would you actually be happy doing that, or are you just being pulled by someone else's content? Living small, literally and financially, helps too. Because she doesn't need much to live well, she doesn't need to say yes to every opportunity. That one adjustment has done more for her freelance stability than any productivity system.
She's thinking in two directions. One is building her own digital product rather than always serving other people's projects. The other is a longer-term idea: a physical creativity space where people can access stillness through making things. Ceramics, painting, art in whatever form. She believes creativity does for self-knowledge what travel does for perspective, it surfaces what's already inside you and gives it somewhere to go. Whether that space ends up on Fuerteventura or back in her home in Tuscany, she doesn't know yet.
She's also working on something with her partner: a service to help freelancers organize their own freelance journey. The gap she spotted in herself, needing structure to protect freedom rather than sacrifice it, turns out to be a common problem.
The throughline across all of it is the same one that started with a question she asked herself at 21. Awareness before action. Know who you are, then figure out what to build.
