Why I started Peak Reinvention

I was a child who could not read some things until much later, and I could not really speak either. Maybe it was something with my eyes. We still do not know. What everyone could see was that I was bright. What no one could see was how I was going to take in the world at all, when I could not get it off a page and could not ask for it out loud.

So I found another way to take it in. I sat close to the people who knew things, and I listened. Everything I could not read for myself, I got by ear. I was a bright kid nobody could quite see, and slowly, on purpose, I made myself into someone who knew things. That was the first version of myself I ever built, and it handed me the one conviction I have never put down since. Everyone has worth. Intelligence comes in shapes the world does not look for.

I learned that from both sides of my childhood at once. My mother and father came from two different families, one with money and one without, who lived in the same house, so I grew up inside both at once. The one without money never wanted for anything, because they had a beautiful life. Standing in both, I could see that worth had nothing to do with money, in either direction. The person is the thing. I have never confused the two since.

After that, I did it again, and again. Each time, I carried the best of the last version of me into the next one instead of throwing it away. American Studies, because I wanted to understand how people actually live. Accounting next, not a degree but courses I took because it turned out I liked the math. Then banking and international tax, working in the financial industry without a financial background, partly just to prove the hard thing could be done. A PhD at Columbia, which I chose because I knew it would buy me freedom. I was right about that. Then the reinvention that cost the most to choose. I became the first woman to have a baby on the tenure track in my college of business, when it simply was not done, and I chose both, the work and the child. I spent thirty years inside a heavily male culture, learning every rule well enough to act within it, bucking it quietly, and only now, at the top rank, can I finally roar.

None of that is the reinvention I am proudest of. The one I am proudest of has no line on any résumé.

To be a good mother to my son, Andrew Rowan, who had Asperger’s, a form of autism, I had to learn his world and meet him where he was, instead of asking him to come to mine. Then his illness came, and it took his senses from him one at a time. He woke each morning and had to wake from his dream again, and he did it anyway. We learned how to give him a good death. I did not know a person could learn such a thing until we did.

I stay the way he did. I have battled depression for years. Checking out has always been the easy thing for me. Andrew is the reason I do not. This is also where the word Peak comes from, for me. Not the summit you finally reach. The truth that a person is already at a peak, already whole, even on the mornings when nothing feels right. We are already in it. Staying is the reinvention. There are mornings I would never have gotten out of bed if I had not reinvented myself to do it. I could not exist if I did not. That was never a strategy. It was survival.

For decades I did this quietly, for everyone but me. I saw the capable person before the world agreed they were there. I walked people through the hardest passages of their lives, the ones they believed they had to cross alone, all of it inside institutions, under someone else’s name.

Maybe you know the wall I mean. By every outside measure you are doing well. You are capable, and you have quietly hit something you cannot name, and what built the last version of you will not build the next one. I know that wall from the inside. I was the bright child nobody could see, stuck against something no one could explain, and I have come up against it many times since.

Peak Reinvention is where I finally turned all of it toward my own life. It is my next reinvention, the unconstrained, fully-me one. It exists so that the thing that kept me alive, reinventing on purpose and carrying the best of who you have been into who you become, is something you never have to figure out alone.

Amy