“Where Is Minnesota?”

“Where is Minnesota?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

I remember standing in my quiet apartment, on the phone, staring at the wall and repeating the word to myself — Minnesota — as if saying it enough times would somehow make it feel familiar.

After five years in sunny California, I had moved back to India for a year. Then, in 2008, it was time to return to the U.S. again. I assumed we would go back to California. Instead, I learned we were heading somewhere I had barely heard of: Minnesota, where a new work opportunity was taking our family.

It was March 2008. I had just lost my mother and was deep in grief. The idea of starting over in a new place, with my nine-year-old in tow, felt overwhelming. I wasn’t working, I didn’t know a single person there, and there was no one waiting on the other side to soften the landing.

When I arrived, it was still winter. The cold hit my face in a way I wasn’t prepared for, and for the first few weeks, I barely stepped outside except to buy groceries and handle the basics. I was numb, trudging through each day like the living dead, doing what needed to be done but feeling very little.

And then spring burst in! Little flowers pushed through the ground, the grey gave way to expanding green, and suddenly Minnesota felt breathtaking — the land of 10,000 lakes in full bloom. I hadn’t expected that kind of beauty. I hadn’t expected how quickly the landscape could change. The chances life offers are immense, even when we arrive somewhere reluctant and unsure.

New friendships began and deepened over time. There were times of caregiving and times of loneliness. Minnesota became my home for the next decade, the place where I built a new life, became a single mom, and gradually discovered a strength and resilience I didn’t know I had.

There were mistakes, tentative learnings, a new kind of freedom alongside grief and bewilderment, and unexpected support that arrived just when I needed it. All of it layered together into those years.

Looking back now, it’s easy to see why naming my business Coach Me Life felt so natural. It was the first name that came to me, and it stayed. Life had coached me — through beauty and rawness, through loss and rebuilding — and it still does.

Today, I sit with women who are rebuilding their lives in their own unexpected seasons. I know what it is to feel unprepared, and I know what it feels like to discover that you are far more resilient than you imagined.

Have you ever found yourself living in a place you never planned — only to realize it was where you grew the most?