Before America
In Almaty, Aigul's days had a shape she trusted. She worked as a treasurer in budget planning at an oil and gas company, spent evenings with colleagues she loved, and filled weekends with museums, theater, and friends. She knew who she was and what tomorrow would look like: a kind of quiet confidence that only becomes visible once it's gone.
“I just knew what to expect from tomorrow. Which was very different when in immigration.”
Her first move abroad wasn't to the US at all; it was to London in 2017, when her husband was relocated for work. She had studied English since kindergarten and assumed she'd walk into an office and pick up where she left off. She was wrong.
Arriving and starting from zero
“I realized that I'm just not there yet in terms of the language. I cannot just walk in with my finance background and get a job.”
Instead of forcing a finance career in a language she didn't yet own, Aigul enrolled in a master's degree in human resource management and worked as a postgraduate student at her university. It was, she says, her first real adult trauma, not a crisis, but the slow grind of rebuilding a life and an identity from nothing, among people who didn't know her at all.
“The real life hit when you need to reinvent yourself, rebuild your whole life from scratch. No one knows you; you just have to work on it.”
The hard middle
Then, just as she was finishing her degree, COVID hit and London locked down. In 2020, only two industries in the UK were still functioning: the National Health Service and entertainment. She couldn't become a doctor overnight, so she signed with an agency and ended up on the set of the third Fantastic Beasts film for Warner Bros.
Pandemic protocols kept sets tiny around eighty people total, versus the two hundred-plus normally on a production. With so few people to talk to and nowhere else to be, Aigul spent her days on set practicing English out loud, holiday after holiday, until it started to stick.
“I cannot say I perfected it, but I improved my English because I had no choice but to talk to people.”
She's candid that none of these pivots felt graceful while she was living them. Finance to a master's degree to a film set, each one driven less by a five-year plan than by an inability to sit still, and a refusal to let fear be the last word.
“Every time starting from scratch, you feel like a beginner. My main fuel is very deep interest, even if I'm afraid, I'm still curious.”
Where she is now
After five years in London, Aigul and her husband moved to New York. Her time on film sets had pulled her toward production, and she began working with Rushka Bergman, a film director, former fashion editor at Vogue Italia, and Michael Jackson's longtime personal stylist. Through that work she built a professional network and, just as important, her confidence.
The move from London to New York was, in her words, far easier than the leap from Almaty to London had been. This time she knew the language, understood the culture, and critically decided from day one that she was building a permanent home, not waiting for life to happen to her. It took about three years to fully feel settled.
“This time I was not living the phantom life I had in London. I'm building home here because we're not planning to move, we're planning to stay.”
Today Aigul works as a professional life coach, another reinvention in a decade full of them, this one built deliberately rather than forced by circumstance.
What's next
She's working toward a second, international level of accreditation in coaching, and she's clear-eyed that this won't be her last transformation. A decade of rebuilding herself in three countries has taught her to expect, even welcome, more change ahead.
“I don't think coaching is the last stop for me. Whatever I am, I just want to still be curious, evolving, and bold.”