I still have the degree somewhere in a box. Chemical engineering technology first, at college, then a university program in Toronto to finish it properly. I remember exactly what it felt like to plan a life around that piece of paper. Certain. Mapped out. The kind of plan where you already know what year you'll get promoted and what your business cards will say.
I never framed it.
While I was finishing that degree, I took a part-time job at a retirement home. Just to pay the bills, the way you tell yourself a job is temporary right up until it isn't.
My manager asked me a question I wasn't expecting.
"Would you like to be an activity assistant?"
I said no. I told her I was a chemistry graduate. I had a plan. She looked at me the way someone looks at you when they already know the answer you haven't found yet, and said, "But you don't have a job right now. In the meantime, you can make extra money."
So I said yes, meaning it as nothing more than a placeholder.
I did not expect what happened next.
I found something in that role I hadn't gone looking for. Not a paycheck to bridge a gap. Something that took everything I already loved, all my ideas, all the parts of me a chemistry lab never made room for, and gave them somewhere to go.
It felt less like I'd found a job and more like the job had been waiting for me to show up.
I think about that a lot now, mostly because I almost didn't let it happen. I had a plan, and the plan didn't include this. If my manager had asked once and let me say no for good, I don't know where I'd be. Somewhere with a lab coat, probably. Not a bad life. Just not this one.
Fifteen years later, I'm still doing recreation-based programming, still applying therapeutic recreation principles in senior care and community settings, still finding it strange and wonderful that a placeholder job became the center of everything.
That's part of why Build & Launch exists.
Most young adults don't get a retirement home hallway and an offhand question that changes their life by accident. They get told to pick a path early and stay on it, and if the path doesn't fit, that's treated as a personal failure instead of information. I don't think a calling should have to sneak up on someone the way mine did. I think it should be something we go looking for on purpose, with someone alongside you who knows how to ask the right questions.
That's the four months. Not waiting for an accidental hallway conversation. Building the conditions for that moment to happen on purpose, for someone who might otherwise wait fifteen years the way I did to find out what they were made for.
If you want to hear more about how that actually works, fill out the inquiry form or come to a weekly Instagram Live session. I'll tell you the rest of the story there.