A childhood of creativity, a teenagehood of chasing belonging, and a young adulthood getting into design. Then I left. I moved countries three times, and three times I arrived somewhere new, starting from scratch, growing relationships, building a life. I became a mother - twice - in a foreign land, which undid and made me in ways only mothering can.

Professionally, I kept arriving at places to build the next thing - a new design practice, a new digital offering, a new framework for how strategy and creativity could work together. But every time, I discovered the same thing: you cannot build the next thing without transforming the conditions that enable it. The organisation has to change to hold whatever you're building.

I was doing change work before I had the language or frameworks for it. At the Sony Design Centre, it was about bringing human-centred design to shift from hardware to software-as-a-service. At Kontrapunkt, it was about being the first interaction designer in a branding company - trying to bring digital as the glue to all the other services. At ustwo, it was a shift from doer to leader at a studio that promoted me from within. Becoming the boss of my friends. It was baptism by fire. First-time manager with a team of twenty, while raising two small children and commuting for two hours every day. It culminated in a stress-related sick leave - and one of the most defining moments in my life. It also led to a learning that people can carry the shadows of relationships in their bodies. And that mine had a breaking point. I had to decouple from my identity. It was the first time I felt that a part of me had to die for something new to emerge.

And in the last chapter, bringing strategy and design together at Vertical Strategy (which was acquired by Bain & Co.), I learned how business strategy views the world and where it sees design fitting into it. Values mismatch, I left.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, I caught sight of a pattern. Walking into the unknown, full of trust that I will figure it out. Willing to pivot, to learn anew. Crossing the edge first. Only to then turn around and get other people along for the ride.

Each threshold taught me to see something at a larger scale. And at every scale, I kept finding the same thing underneath: the real problem lived in the relationships, the unsaid, the story the system was still telling itself.

This insight was what eventually pulled me toward coaching - and toward ORSC relationship systems work, regenerative leadership, depth psychology, somatic practice, and the Slavic animist worldview I had carried since childhood without having a name for it. They may seem like separate streams, but for a dot connector like me, they were always rivers, converging towards the ocean, posing this question: What actually needs to change here, and what does it cost to cross that edge?