I gave my first sports nutrition lecture ~10 years ago to a group of teenage rowers. I remember feeling nervous and reading mostly from my PowerPoint slides.

So imagine my delight when I received an invitation to speak to a group of high school rowers. It was truly a full circle moment. I’ve now come to love teaching and presenting, especially when I can fuse my own art into the materials to make it more relevant and engaging.

For much of my career, I followed a straight path of strictly ‘nutrition and dietetics.’ But in the past few years, I’ve ventured out more, exploring my curiosity in the realm of art, writing, and storytelling. It makes me happy to now see how these skills are weaving together in a way that allows me to bring so many parts of myself into my personal and professional work.

So continue to follow those sparks in your life that make you come alive. Pursue the hobbies and interests that make you turn your head with curiosity and wonder. Give yourself permission to go down a new path and explore and discover. You may find all of these paths lead back to the same place. Home. To yourself.