I've never once had the map before I started walking.

San Francisco — New York from November.

It started in surgery.

I trained as a nurse at Villanova and went straight to New York, where I spent years in plastic surgery — NewYork-Presbyterian, Weill Cornell, Lenox Hill, assisting Dr. Sharon Giese. Operating rooms are the most procedural environment on earth and also the most human one. You learn to hold both. You learn to notice the small shift in the room before anyone says anything about it.

Then it got strange.

I joined Neuralink as Surgery Team Lead on the PRIME trial — the first brain-computer interface implants in human beings. There was no playbook for that. There couldn't be. Nobody had done it. My job was to build the operational scaffolding for a procedure that had never happened, and then to keep rebuilding it as we learned what was actually true.

After that I ran study operations at Nudge, another neurotech company, doing a version of the same thing: taking something ambitious and half-formed and turning it into a process people could actually follow.

And then I left.

Not dramatically. I'd spent a decade building other people's zero-to-one, and I wanted to find out what happened if I pointed that at my own. So I started writing, publishing, and making things — about food, about the body, about how careers actually move, which is almost never in the direction anyone planned.

I had a career coach through most of it. I leaned on people. I want to say that plainly, because the version where someone figures it out alone in a clean straight line is a story, and it isn't mine.