For 16 years, Anna Skorobogatowa introduced herself through someone else.
“The spouse of…” became a familiar opening. Behind it was a woman with two master’s degrees, three children and a life stretching across nine countries and four continents. There were also two evacuations, countless adjustments and the work of helping everyone settle.
Somewhere along the way, her own ambitions slipped to the bottom of the list.
Today, Anna Skorobogatowa is the founder of Not Just a Spouse, coaching expat and diplomatic spouses one-to-one as they work out who they are, what they want and how to build a life on their own terms. Her work begins with a question she knows intimately: “What am I doing with my life?”
It is an honest starting point for a woman whose next chapter began when she could no longer keep putting herself last.
A Life across Borders
An international life can sound glamorous when told through destinations. Nine countries. Four continents. A family discovering the world.
Anna’s account brings another part of that picture into focus: the person helping everyone feel at home, while struggling to find her own place.
Across those moves, she got her family settled. With three children, her attention was repeatedly directed towards the people who needed her. Her two master’s degrees, meanwhile, collected dust.
That detail says something the geography cannot. Anna had invested in her own education, yet her qualifications remained unused while other responsibilities took priority.
The two evacuations belong to this story, too. They sit alongside the relocations and family life as reminders that her years abroad included disruption as well as discovery.
For Anna Skorobogatowa, the question became increasingly personal. Where was she in the life she was helping everyone else build?
Anna Skorobogatowa: When Putting Yourself Last Stops Working
Anna speaks plainly about the moment that pattern became impossible to sustain. Her marriage almost did not survive. Her body forced her to stop.
Those statements need no embellishment. They reveal the strain behind a life that, viewed from the outside, might be described simply as international or adventurous.
She had to find herself again.
There is no neat account here of a single revelation solving everything. What Anna shares is the need to pause and confront a question that had been waiting beneath the responsibilities: what did she want from her own life?
That question would eventually become central to her work.
Her experience gives context to the name Not Just a Spouse. It leaves room for marriage and family while insisting that the person within those relationships also has an identity, ambitions and choices of her own.
Turning a Personal Question into Purpose
Through Not Just a Spouse, Anna now works individually with expat and diplomatic spouses who are trying to answer their own questions about identity and direction.
Her coaching focuses on helping them understand who they are, identify what they want and build lives on their terms.
These are deceptively simple aims. Knowing what you want can be difficult when you have become accustomed to considering everyone else first. Even asking the question may take practice.
Anna brings lived experience to that conversation. She knows what it means to introduce yourself through a partner’s role. She knows how much can sit behind that introduction, including an education and a sense of self that deserve attention.
Her story gives her work its personal foundation. The woman who once wondered what she was doing with her life now makes space for others to explore that same uncertainty.
The name of her business carries that intention into every introduction: there is more to the person than the role.
Making Space for Other Voices
That interest in people’s experiences also runs through Unpacked, which Anna co-hosts.
Together, she and her co-host share their diplomatic journeys and give their community a voice. The conversation extends beyond Anna’s individual story, creating space for other perspectives within a life often described through postings and destinations.
This work connects to her coaching. Both make room for the person living the experience: their questions, their perspective and their account of what life across borders actually feels like.
Having spent years introducing herself as someone’s spouse, Anna now participates in conversations where those personal stories have space to be heard.
Lebanon, Coffee and Connection with Anna Skorobogatowa
Anna Skorobogatowa is currently based in Lebanon, a country she says has stolen her heart.
Alongside her work, she enjoys exploring, swimming and a good conversation over coffee. These details offer a glimpse of the woman beyond the founder: curious about her surroundings and drawn to connection.
She previously organised monthly coffee mornings for Beirut’s international and diplomatic community. Now, she is considering bringing them back, with a little twist.
For the moment, that remains a possibility. Yet it fits naturally with the thread running through her story: making room for people to meet, talk and feel part of a community.
After years of helping her family settle across countries, Anna’s life now includes a deliberate question about her own place within it. Her work carries that question forward, inviting other spouses to consider what belonging on their own terms might look like.
Editor’s Note
I kept coming back to one detail in Anna’s story: two master’s degrees gathering dust.
Behind those degrees were hours of study, effort and plans. I wondered about the woman who earned them, and how often she had told herself there would be time for her later.
That is what moved me about Anna’s honesty. She tells us her marriage nearly did not survive. She tells us her body made her stop. She allows those difficult truths to remain part of the story of the business she built.
As women, we can become so familiar with being needed that asking what we need feels almost unfamiliar. Anna’s journey asks us to give that question our attention.
I hope a reader recognises herself here and pauses long enough to ask what she wants next. A relationship can be a cherished part of our lives. There should also be room to introduce ourselves by our own names, and to feel that those names hold a life we have chosen.
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