Becoming | 3: Lunch, Wine, and the Slow Art of Dreaming Out Loud

Because it was a question I hadn't let myself ask yet. What if we actually built something?

One lunch had turned into many. Weekly, almost. The kind that start at noon and end when the restaurant starts giving you looks — the polite ones at first, then the ones with more eye contact. Part debrief, part brainstorm, part thing I can only describe as a collective exhale.

We'd talk about Erik's thirty years in design. About my years building systems and frameworks inside institutions — where my entire job, if I'm being honest, was creating infrastructure for how epidemiologists talked to the world. I didn't build the science. I built the container the science lived in.

Systems. Foundations. Operational architecture.

The unsexy stuff that makes everything else run.

Here's what I hadn't fully appreciated until those lunches: I had spent a career doing for institutions what designers do for spaces. Creating the conditions for something to function. And somewhere between bad-for-you appetizers and a surprisingly decent house white, I started wondering — what if I pointed all of that somewhere else? Not at a government agency. Not at a nonprofit's program strategy. But at an actual business. A real one. Mine.

The question wasn't just can I do this?

It was do I actually want to?

And honestly? That one felt scarier.

Two things were happening at those lunches, and I didn't clock it until later.

The first: I was getting quieter on the inside. My nervous system — which had apparently been running a low-grade emergency protocol for about three years — was finally powering down. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just... settling. The meditation was helping. The slowness was helping. The fact that I wasn't white-knuckling my way to the next thing for once in my entire life was, shockingly, also helping.

The second: I was starting to dream. Not vision-board dreaming. Not manifest it and they will come dreaming. The scrappy, honest kind — where you say something out loud that you've never said before, then wait to see if it sounds completely ridiculous.

What if I built operational infrastructure through the lens of entrepreneurship?

What if I could be a partner — not an employee?

What if I could actually start over?

Erik didn't flinch. Which, if you know Erik, is its own kind of validation.

I had been building things my whole career. Programs. Teams. Systems. Always refining and scaling — I just never called it entrepreneurship because it lived inside other people's institutions. But the muscle was there. The pattern recognition was there. The obsessive need to optimize everything within a five-foot radius — also, unfortunately, very much there.

What if the only thing that had ever been missing was that it was mine?

That question didn't announce itself. It arrived quietly, somewhere around week four of lunches, dressed like a casual observation. And I just let it sit there. Let it marinate.

Next: we built a meditation room.