A pretty big life altering chapter in my life started the summer of 2017. At the time I was a serious competitor in the busy olympics. I was living in New York City and working at a big fancy consulting firm where I had the job I was paid to do, the ones I did to advance my career, and an unhealthy number of company interest groups— effectively ensuring I barely had enough time for sleep.

During a workshop in Singapore that summer, I was juggling project responsibilities in both New York and Los Angeles. By the third or fourth day, the constant work, lack of sleep, and multiple time zones caught up with me. I woke up in the middle of the night, disoriented and overwhelmed, experiencing a panic attack. My mind shouted in colors and flicked through images and numbers like an unhinged kaleidoscope. It was a violent introduction to my own intuition, finally breaking through the noise that was my life.

Months earlier, my company had acquired two design studios. I visited one of the studios in Sweden to start building new relationships and to see what a top notch studio was all about. It was a renovated church on a lake outside of Stockholm, filled with the best energy. The designers there were grounded and collaborative, without the insecure, overachieving drive I was used to. They shared stories of swimming in the lake and ripping up the basement to build prototypes. I longed for that kind of work – full of light, peaceful possibility, and a genuine appreciation for the human experience.

When I returned to New York, things felt like a tight, scratchy sweater with arm holes I couldn’t find. I knew I needed to make the next move in my career and it was urgent. By 2018, I set out as a full time freelancer eager to figure it out but within six months, I ran straight into the arms of another corporate job. Despite the setback, this sense of knowing now lived inside of me. It’s hard to explain, maybe because this change is still unfolding, but poet Robert Frost once wrote, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.” That was the feeling I had at that studio in Sweden and it took a panic attack to know destiny was calling. Bold Type will be celebrating five years soon and there isn’t a renovated church on a lake but we aren’t far from the beach and I know in my bones that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.