Life always happens day in and day out, whether or not we feel like escaping. Designing, I told myself, was the opposite of escaping. In the context of escaping life, however, I see capturing my life as redesigning it, conjuring happy thoughts of new beginnings and changes we think might help make our lives work better.

I spent the next ten years healing everything in me that might obstruct my mission to create a life I loved. Patterns, stories, life circumstances, family dynamics, relationships, and life, good and bad, all served as teachers of lessons I needed to hear and learn.