I was young, fresh out of my master’s program at New York University with razor sharp focus and a plan when the first major chapter of my life began. For fifteen years I worked as a psychotherapist. I had fears, about launching my own practice and being of help to people double my age but they felt paper thin compared to the fire moving inside me, one I would only be able to define when I launched my second business seven years later, a co-working space for mental health professionals in mid-town Manhattan. My psychotherapy gig, at once a passion, morphed over the years into a massive burden. Even so and only afterwards could I see how it brought me a deeper understanding of human complexity, the power of intuition, and how in knowing myself, I was becoming the creator and shaper of my destiny. Because I’d spent many years in therapy meeting my shadows and expanding my mind, I was able to do what I did next. I left everything. I got on a plane to Berlin, Germany to pursue a calling so revelatory it felt as if I’d solved the cure for cancer. Yet, I had no idea what would come next. One year later, I launched my career as an artist, a vocation I never imagined for myself which six years later I put on the back-burner to dive deeper into my love for words, writing being the one thread I can trace back to my early-teens when I discovered the power of journaling, now asking, thirty years later at forty-three, for my full attention. I write for the same reason I left New York and the two successful businesses I spent most of my twenties and thirties creating. I write from the place of deep yearning that made me work my ass off all those years, the fire that helped launch my second business to free me from the first, the weight of my psychotherapist work something I could no longer hold. I write to unshackle myself. Writing gives me the permission to play. It’s only when I dare to do that—play with words, imagery and feeling—that I can fully process and transform my experiences. That which is pestering, confusing and holding me prisoner, I alchemize. I’ve been called a wordsmith, but the act of writing also feels shamanic, an act of ritual magic, a sacred space where I use my words to manifest my reality, my sword cutting out what no longer serves, my hands molding the unknown into something I often haven’t imagined before. The most exciting thing is to discover, through writing, something new about myself, to be surprised by an insight that gets formed, only on paper, through the play (and the struggle) with words even when the most difficult place for me to be is the unknown. This paradox is what makes writing so intimate and magical. I hold space for my opposites, all my conflicting truths and in that dynamic brew, I come alive, I find answers, I feel centered. I find freedom. I’m forty-five years old, just at the beginning of this new adventure and I want to sharpen my sword. I want to cultivate my voice. I want to explode into the being I’m becoming through words. I want to be in dialogue and connection with others as a means to do that which is why I see furthering my education as crucial to my development.