The Path Was Never Linear: My Journey to Serendipitous Shift
What if that tangled mess of career changes and relationship struggles isn't a problem, but a serendipitous shift in disguise?
If you’re an overthinker trying to find a path that feels authentic, you’re not alone. I’ve been there. I know your story often feels less like a beautiful tapestry and more like a messy ball of reoccurring problems—a career change here, a relationship struggle there, a period of joy followed by emotional paralysis. Know this: you're not crazy. It is messy. But these moments aren't random. They're threads, each one an essential part of the full scope of your story.
The Messy Story: Big Shifts I Didn’t Choose
I created Serendipitous Shift as the embodiment of my own messy story. Each moment felt like a standalone event, out of time and yet a serendipitous influence on so many other things. The story loops and twists, and turns around in such a way that it’s created its own path. Usually, I’m moving forward on it, even in incremental ways, but every so often it gets…complicated. And it’s a story as old as, well, me.
When I was 6, my mom moved my sister and me from New York City to Geneva, Switzerland. A continent away from my father, I had to learn a new language, a new culture, a new household, and a new reality—one so different from my previous life, I had to evolve with it.
This experience taught me adaptability, curiosity, and how incredibly powerful my mind was if it stays neuroplastic and curious. It happened outside of my control, but making my first friend—who just happened to speak English fluently—within 48 hours of arriving felt deeply serendipitous. She became a huge part of my childhood until we turned 13.
When I was 16, my stepfather passed after a long battle with cancer. This experience taught me about the complex emotions of grief and liberation, and in that time, I learned about codependence in a real way as I also carried my mother’s overwhelm until I decided…no more.
It was my first experience with true, embodied clarity, and is now the foundation for how I guide clients to find their own sense of permission and focus.
From Misunderstanding to Mediation
Between 17 and 23, I spent countless hours in trainings on nonviolent communication, team management, and community curation for sleepaway camps. I received honest feedback from many mentors about how to communicate effectively and honestly, with consideration of the person I’m speaking to. I learned how to have uncomfortable conversations with many different people from many different backgrounds. I learned how to travel, internationally and on a low budget, with youth groups of diverse backgrounds.
These years created a solid, practiced foundation of mediation and healthy communication, bringing teachings and stories to my relationship support services. I’ve guided smart and struggling couples through tough moments of built-up tension, and brought them to the other side of conflict, in a real way that made a lasting difference. Growing up feeling out of place and misunderstood, the drive to help others understand each other better just grew as I learned how to express myself, better, more kindly. Offering a comment at a serendipitous moment, that invites change, growth, and increased self-awareness.
By 24, I’d spent weeks traveling with kids, picking up Italian, having powerful conversations, and five months finding independence in New York and getting curious about what life was possible. I just knew I was breaking away from the ‘expected’ path of college-career-family that most of my peers in Geneva had set themselves on. It didn’t fit me, and spending longer and longer stretches of time abroad over the years helped me build the confidence to set off on my own path.
The Biggest Shift: Choosing My Own Path
That was also the year I dropped out of my Master’s degree in anthropology, sold all of my belongings, and saved a bunch of money by moving in with my mom for four months before leaving Switzerland behind.
The moment of making that decision changed everything for me. It was the biggest, most serendipitous moment shift…and it took me four hours to reach it, after years of building up to that moment.
For the next two years, I traveled where my desires, curiosity, and random opportunities took me. Time in Brazil with family and spirits. Time in the US, learning Vipassana meditation and hitchhiking. Time in the Bahamas, cooking and serving at a Sivananda ashram. Time in Thailand, exploring the digital nomad lifestyle. Time in Europe, connecting with my ancestors in Moldova and arguing with my family.
I learned how to speak Spanish and Portuguese. I forgot how to speak German. I work-exchanged and took cheap buses to stay on a tight budget. I made friends I’ve visited in other parts of the world. I’ve had phone calls and offered support to people who gifted me the same on my travels.
I became more myself along the way, until I reached a clear stopping point. I was ready to try something different once again. That moment of clarity came after another months-long buildup, of realizing I was making decisions out of alignment. The moment itself? Out of nowhere. A sudden, serendipitous shift.
From Rootless to Rooted
At 26, I moved to Atlanta with $200 in my account, a 30-year-old car, and a lovely family hosting me for the first six weeks. I challenged myself to launch a freelance career, found small jobs that helped me pay my bills, and worked to get settled in a new place. It felt like a bigger stretch than traveling, a challenge I came to question for the next year, even as I worked my way into a full-time freelance career and my own place, roommate-free.
In practice, settled life felt like greater fluctuations than some of my intense bursts of long-distance travel, where I’d make the trip as cheap as possible, paying in time instead of money. I’d take 24-hour-long bus rides, hitchhike in small sections, find random rideshares on Craigslist until I eventually got my driver’s license and bought my first car (and crashed it three months later).
Each step forward came with its own kind of setbacks, from getting pink eye out-of-state and away from my home, to accidentally damaging the paint on someone’s car and suddenly needing to budget an extra $450 to pay them back when I was on a tiny income.
But at some point, I began earning a living. I began finding my footing. And after spending a few months visiting family and friends in Geneva a year later, I realized—Atlanta was home. It was a quietly perfect moment where everything was exactly right in my world.
Life proved me right when I met my husband shortly thereafter. It all felt serendipitous.
I continued to fluctuate, but always progressing forward nonetheless. From a pregnancy scare to a career change, major depression and rethinking our decisions, often. I made mistakes and struggled hard, he stayed the course and modeled recovering from tough experiences. We rode out the pandemic and got married at Probate court. We argued and learned, bickered and laughed. We cried together when my daughter arrived, and spent hours working through the cognitive dissonance of becoming parents. We lived through the fever dream of sleep deprivation by calling out to each other in Robert Downey Jr’s voice from Tropic Thunder—”SURVIVE.”
It was a steep learning curve, one that took up lots of time and energy. It shifted my priorities, putting my own growth a little lower on the list as I got swept up in life…and started to lose track of my own progress. I got lost many times over, and most of all in motherhood.
It was inevitable, as I leaned into what I wanted to try: breastfeeding, being with my daughter in the early years of her life, prioritizing presence and attachment above all else. I dove into the experience still coming down from having delivered a human under hypnosis. Six hours in trance, being there but not really, losing my words and speaking in monosyllables. Everything that unfolded as I was supported and loved on by my spouse and my teacher, both working tirelessly to meet my needs and help my daughter’s passage into this world.
Every Setback Is a Serendipitous Shift Forward
Every moment where I had a setback taught me how to move forward even better. Each experience, and many more, taught me to become the person and practitioner I am today.
From failure to loss, to embodied joy and a quiet peace. It was never a straight line. I’ve had to face and make many hard decisions. I’ve made more mistakes than I’ve shared here, and each one taught me something that has since become a tool, a lesson, a story, a practice in empathy and self-awareness. The hard stuff teaches me something before becoming a small memory, only revisited for the wisdom it can teach me and my clients.
To cut an even longer story short, life is a piecemeal series of events that inevitably lead you in the direction you want to go, if you pay attention.
If you become an active participant in the choices in your life, if you learn from each upheaval, each decision—each mistake—you can evolve and iterate, and end up taking a step in the right direction, as you define it.
If you’re ready to explore how your own messy threads can become a story of transcendence, I invite you to schedule a discovery call with me.