The Calling That Found Me
How a trip to Paris, a Titanic survivor, and a second lay-off led me to writing
For eleven years, I woke up excited about my work.
I planned dream vacations for families. I sent honeymooners to Hawaii. I planned group trips to Europe for milestone birthdays. I spent my days talking about places most people only fantasized about—running my own travel business, seeing the world, doing what I loved. That work wasn’t a job. It was an expression of who I was. It gave me freedom, fulfillment, and pride in what I’d built from nothing.
Then the pandemic arrived. In a matter of weeks, the business I’d spent over a decade building was decimated. Travel came to a standstill. Commissions evaporated. The freedom I’d built my life around was suddenly gone.
But that’s not actually where this story starts.
The First Time I Lost a Job I Loved
Before the travel business, I was in corporate—and I loved my role there. After years of hard work, I’d finally made it into my dream job in marketing. I had great perks too: Rolling Stones concerts, basketball games, and hockey games from the company suite. It was sweet. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I was good at my job, I got along well with my coworkers, and I believed that my loyalty and effort would protect me.
Then my company merged with another and moved its offices to Texas, leaving its Colorado employees behind. Just like that, my job was gone. I was devastated. It was my first lesson in the rules of corporate: the relationship isn’t reciprocal.
So I built something of my own. Something nobody could take away.
Except they could. And eventually, the pandemic did.
Back to Corporate
After the travel business collapsed, I went back to corporate as a place to land while I figured out what came next. I told myself it was temporary. But temporary turned into years.
Being back in corporate was much different than the first time. Having lived the freedom of running my own business, it felt more like a cage than a career. I knew what it was like to wake up genuinely excited about my work. I knew what it was like to own my time, my decisions, and my results. Going back to a world where none of that was true felt suffocating.
I became someone I didn’t recognize. Miserable on Sunday evenings. Exhausted by Tuesday. Counting down to Friday. Going through the motions of a life that didn’t feel like my own anymore.
The Winding Road
I didn’t stay still. I kept looking for the way out.
I tried selling on eBay. I spent hours sourcing products, listing items, managing shipping. It felt like a second job that paid like a hobby. It wasn’t the answer.
I tried day trading. I studied charts, read books, stayed up late watching markets. I made a little money, lost a little money, and sweated though the ups and downs. I learned that I needed stability, not volatility. This wasn’t the answer either.
I earned a data analytics certificate. Three months of evenings and weekends learning something I thought might open a door. It taught me another important thing about myself—staring at data all day long was too boring for me. This led me to search out something more creative.
Each wrong turn was getting me one step closer to the calling that was waiting for me. I just didn’t know it yet. At the time, all I felt was the exhaustion and frustration of searching and not finding.
A Plane Ride from Paris
I didn’t know I had reached my limit when I boarded a flight home from Paris. I had spent a couple of weeks traveling in Europe on a trip that ended in my favorite city. Traveling was the only time I still felt fully alive. As I watched the movie A Star is Born, I started to cry at the sad ending. This was not unusual. I’d seen the movie before and cried every time. But this time I couldn’t stop crying even after the movie ended. And I realized that I wasn’t crying because Jackson took his life in the movie, I was crying because my job was taking mine.
That plane ride changed everything.
After I returned home, despite being at my breaking point, I still didn’t leave my job. Instead, I started writing. I remembered a transatlantic cruise I’d taken the year before that had inspired me to write a book, so I began exploring that idea.
That search eventually led me to a real Titanic survivor whose story captivated me. The more I studied her life and the era, the more fascinated I became by what life after such a tragedy might have looked like. I began inventing a novel about a woman forced to face the sea again in order to save her family’s business. I became completely absorbed in the research, devouring books about the Titanic, ocean liners, Paris, and World War I. It lit me up in a way I hadn’t felt in years.
As I continued working on the novel, I found myself looking forward to my evening writing time after each long day at work. The hours that previously felt draining suddenly became sacred. I would sit down exhausted and stand up feeling fulfilled by the work I was creating.
What started as a writing project quickly became an obsession. I wasn’t just reading about Paris anymore. I was walking its streets. I took a transatlantic cruise from Southampton to New York, retracing Titanic’s intended path. I went to museums in Southampton, Belfast, and Halifax, all cities that shaped Titanic and the aftermath. I traveled once again to Paris to stand in the places that shaped Nora’s story. I visited the churches she would have known, walked the neighborhoods where she would eventually build her business, and spent hours absorbing details no history book could fully capture. The deeper I went, the more real the story became.
The more I wrote and the more I researched, the more alive I felt. It didn’t just feel good; it felt like coming home to myself. Slowly but undeniably, I realized this wasn’t a hobby. This was my calling.
The Second Layoff
By the time my second layoff came, I wasn’t only ready, I was relieved.
So relieved, in fact, that the morning after my last day, New Year’s Day 2026, the first thing I did was play “I’m Free” by Kenny Loggins so I could dance in what I saw as a proper way of ushering in my new year of freedom.
I hadn’t set out to write historical fiction. Writing was just my way to escape when I was at my most miserable.
But somewhere between the corporate job that was extinguishing me and the novel that brought me back to life, I found something I hadn’t been looking for. A story that felt more real to me than the life I was living. A character who needed me to tell her story. And a new version of myself I didn’t know existed.
When the Sea Was Still is the novel that grew from my calling. The heroine is based on an actual Titanic survivor whose story astounds me. Nora Osterly is the name I gave her. Two years after the disaster, she boards the Olympic—the sister ship of the one that nearly killed her—because life has given her no other choice. She carries grief she hasn’t yet named, trauma she hasn’t yet faced, and a courage she doesn’t yet know she has.
I recognize parts of myself in her. The fear. The uncertainty. The feeling of standing at the edge of a life-changing moment and moving forward anyway.
Rather than waiting until the novel is published, I’ve decided to share Nora’s story here as a serialized novel—a new chapter each week. Most readers will meet Nora when the book comes out. You’ll meet her first.
Nora is about to board a ship she never wanted to see again.
Her journey begins next week. If you’re not already subscribed, join us. I’d love for you to come aboard.
I think many people assume a calling arrives as a lightning bolt, when sometimes it shows up as the one thing you keep returning to after a long day. What stood out to me is how many detours you were willing to take before recognizing what kept pulling you back. Looking back, those "wrong turns" often make a lot more sense once you know where they were leading.