Pivot Points

Recently I’ve started reading Meditations by Stoic philosopher (and Roman emperor) Marcus Aurelius, and an axiom has struck me: “Frightened of change? But what can exist without it?” It led me to think about my own narrative arc; and I realized that my life, both professionally and personally, has been defined by the scary word itself. Change. And big change, at that. The kind that results not from steady progression (though I’ve enjoyed that too) but from pivot points: moments when I faced a choice and deliberately opted for the path that required me not to continue but to transform.

I like to think about this pattern of pivoting because it makes me also ponder the relationship we as humans have with change. Our brains are wired to seek out and appreciate the predictable. The prefrontal cortex registers the unfamiliar as a threat; change triggers a stress response that makes us resist it on instinct. Ironically, in other words, biological evolution (which changes things) has programmed us to dislike circumstantial evolution (things changing). Which makes good sense; our ancestors were right to see safety in patterns and danger in novelty. Sometimes we today might even feel it’s unfair, on a level both cosmic and deeply personal, when the sand starts to shift—just as we are starting to get used to it!

Yet as author Gabi Abrão writes in her (extremely) aptly titled booklet Notes On Shapeshifting, “Anchoring yourself to the only proven truth—that life is a boundless mystery full of change and surprise and stimulation—you will feel less cheated by the nature of existence because you are living in pure awareness of it.” Abrão says that our resistance to change, while understandable, is not aligned to reality. Indeed, in choosing the transformative paths, I’ve “anchored” myself to the “truth” that life is metamorphosis. Looking back now, with more life experience, I’m grateful but surprised at how willing I was—have been? still am, hopefully?—to embrace the morphemes.

The Geography of Transformation

The first big pivot was geographical: the decision to leave Baltimore—my birthplace and a quintessential American city—for Hanover, New Hampshire. I chose Dartmouth College (for its esteemed English program; I strongly sensed that I would be a writer in some professional capacity) over Johns Hopkins University, exchanging urban density for rural New England.

Both places have something in common. They’re centuries old and stand on indigenous land: Baltimore on Piscataway territory and Hanover on Abenaki. But today their expressions point to very different conceptions of American life. Baltimore, with its population over half a million, is metropolitan to the core: light rail and buses connecting a vibrant and often televised downtown, multicultural neighborhoods with their own special personalities, hidden enclaves of wealth, sports franchises of legend, headquarters for well-known brands on the storied shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Carved and polished over time, “the city of marble steps” is an economic gamma but an alpha at heart.

Beloved Hanover is the antithesis, a freshwater gem from a bygone era. Situated along the Connecticut River, which traces the border between New Hampshire and Vermont for 406 miles, it shutters after sunset and houses about two percent of Baltimore’s populace. The river—which goes all the way down to Long Island Sound, and is the inspiration for each student’s need to pass a 100-yard swim test in order to graduate—sure enough makes life on campus pretty serene.

But back when I enrolled, my veins were urbane, and it alarmed me to see a (literally named) Main Street fold into itself like a black hole at six o’ clock every day. The famed New England wilderness, beyond this modest commercial district, did what the folklore said it would: Prevail. The Latinate motto of Dartmouth was right: “Vox clamantis in deserto”—a voice crying out in the wilderness.

But the scenic pivot forced a philosophical one. Change beget discoveries.

I learned to communicate with people who, while speaking the same language literally, spoke a different one culturally—with unfamiliar slang, expressions, and reference points. Overnight I became adept at code-switching between worlds.

As there was no public transportation system, I steeled my legs and learned to bike or walk anywhere I needed to go—the perfect preparation for my future in New York.

Winter too revealed itself differently than I had known it; I discovered that it’s often the wind tunnels blasting between tall urban buildings that intensifies how cold one feels, evidenced by my sudden, newfound ability to stand in the New Hampshire snow wearing half of the layers I’d anticipated needing.

Amtrak rose, in my increasingly granite-laden brain, from an ancient or obscure mode of travel surely not at home in the new millennium to, frankly, a necessity—and all told a pleasant one, even meditative. There were no direct flights between my hometown and the Hanover hub, White River Junction, so long train rides (eight hours to visit family) became second nature.

Perhaps most importantly, I learned the particular patience required when the thing one needs most can only be delivered from some far-off place to a small wooden mailbox.

Another Subtitle

This geographical pivot catalyzed smaller but equally consequential transformations. Upon discovering Dartmouth lacked a Journalism major, I faced a crossroads typical of many pivot points: retreat to the familiar or forge ahead into uncertainty. Rather than transferring to an institution with an established program—the path of least resistance—I crafted my own interdisciplinary curriculum rooted in Sociology with complementary English coursework.

The process was illuminating. Working with advisors across departments, I discovered how journalistic inquiry intersects with sociological frameworks—how understanding social structures and cultural contexts enriches reporting. The English components provided the technical foundations of narrative craft, while Sociology offered methodological approaches to observation and analysis, which traditional journalism programs don’t necessarily stress.

The circumstances evolved, so I had to evolve too. I had to fundamentally rethink my education. In designing my own major, I was forced to interrogate what drew me to journalism in the first place: Was it the craft itself? The pursuit of truth? The desire to witness and document? This self-examination revealed that my interests extended beyond the mechanics of reporting to encompass the deeper currents of how stories emerge from and shape social realities.

The concept of the "sociological imagination"—C. Wright Mills' framework for connecting personal troubles to public issues—became central to my academic approach, culminating in my Capstone project. This project explored how American comic books through various eras have grappled with this very imagination, serving as cultural artifacts that reflect and shape social consciousness. I was particularly drawn to Wonder Woman, whose creation represented a fascinating convergence of psychology, feminism, and media innovation. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, not only invented the first lie detector test but translated this technology into the character's iconic "Lasso of Truth"—a symbolic alternative to violence as a means of extracting truth and achieving justice. This exploration revealed how popular media both reflects and reinforces our collective understanding of social structures and individual agency, a perspective that would have been unavailable to me in a conventional journalism program.

The resulting education proved more expansive than what I might have received in a conventional program. Instead of learning journalism as a set of established practices, I approached it as an epistemological enterprise—a way of knowing that draws from multiple disciplines and methodologies. This perspective has informed my professional life in ways I couldn't have anticipated, providing intellectual flexibility that transcends specific career categories.

Institutional Scale and Identity

Years later, after graduate studies at Georgetown in Washington, D.C., I transitioned again, this time to New York City—drawn by the seeming abundance of job opportunities for aspiring creatives like me. (A pivot, perhaps, from the capital of the nation to the capital of the world?) The speed of the move was breakneck: one summer Friday I received a job offer from a small startup in midtown Manhattan, and by Monday morning I was working there, a news editor in the iconic MetLife Building.

A couple roles later, I’d face an even more profound pivot when the (different) startup I was working at was acquired by Oracle.

Rather than continuing the writing-focused path I had always envisioned for myself, I moved to demand generation—a seismic shift that required not only new technical skills (marketing automation, lead scoring, campaign analytics) but also a fundamental reimagining of my professional identity as someone who had built their career around the craft of words.

Oracle itself represented a dramatic departure from the startup environments I had embraced throughout my career. Until then, I’d pretty deliberately sought out organizations in their formative stages, drawn to the hands-on resourcefulness that startup culture demands. I valued the immediacy of contribution—the sense of building with ‘hands in the soil,’ as it were.

This tech giant offered something entirely different: an organization of immense scale, resources, and established processes. And it wasn’t just a company, it was a brand—not based in the so-called little brother ‘Silicon Alley’ of New York but in Silicon Valley proper, home of transformative enterprises like Apple, Google, and Uber that were actively reshaping society. Where my previous startups had been relative unknowns, Oracle stood as a household name with global influence, its software powering countless international business systems.

The metamorphosis did a ton for me as a professional. It took me west of Tennessee, over the Rocky Mountains and into California for the first time in my life, a journey I welcomed: escaping an Upper West Side winter to see palm trees in person for the first time since childhood, while concurrently stepping into the epicenter of innovation, San Francisco. It also challenged me to reconsider how value is created and how individuals contribute in business systems of various scale.

Some might been deterred by moving from a company with 100 employees to one three orders of magnitude larger, fearing their voice would be lost in the symphony. But I didn’t fear this and that’s not how I viewed what happened. I didn’t perceive it as a reduction in agency but as a chance to learn and grow with institutional support I had never experienced before. At Oracle I gained expertise I might not have gained elsewhere, because I became certified in Eloqua, their proprietary marketing automation platform, for free as an employee, when normally this would have cost thousands of dollars. This certification equipped me to, in the future, strategize and architect pipeline-driving omnichannel nurtures as a team lead at companies like DoorDash and HashiCorp.) I enrolled in online courses to bridge the knowledge gap between myself, a relative newcomer to the field, and my more experienced marketing colleagues. This dedication culminated in my contribution to "The Power of One," a global campaign significant enough to merit coverage in the industry-leading publication Ad Age.

This adaptability has served me well at HashiCorp following its IBM acquisition—another environment where scale and legacy intersect with innovation. Each institutional context requires different interpretive frameworks, different modes of contribution. The pivot points between them are not merely professional transitions but opportunities for fundamental recalibration of how one understands their relationship to work itself.

The Paradox of Deliberate Uncertainty

What connects these pivotal moments is a paradoxical relationship with uncertainty. Each transition involved deliberately choosing circumstances that would require adaptation, rethinking, and growth rather than continuation of established patterns. This runs counter to our biological programming, which rewards familiarity and predictability.

Yet there's a deeper wisdom in cultivating this capacity for pivoting. By repeatedly choosing the unfamiliar, we develop what psychologists might call an "uncertainty tolerance"—a cognitive flexibility that transforms potential threats into opportunities. We learn to recognize that our greatest capabilities often emerge precisely when we abandon the illusion of security that comes with the familiar.

This isn't to romanticize difficulty for its own sake. Rather, it acknowledges that meaningful growth rarely occurs within comfort zones. The deliberate pivot—the conscious choice to embrace change rather than resist it—represents a form of agency that paradoxically emerges through surrendering to uncertainty.

As I contemplate future pivot points that inevitably await, I'm reminded of another observation from Marcus Aurelius: "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." Perhaps this is the ultimate wisdom of pivoting—recognizing that the challenges inherent in change aren't obstacles to growth but the very substance of it.

The path forward will undoubtedly present new crossroads, new opportunities to choose between continuation and transformation. Having experienced the profound value of past pivots, I find myself not dreading these moments but anticipating them—curious about what new capacities might emerge from the next deliberate embrace of uncertainty.