I Was Recently Featured in Bold Journey — Here's What I Shared

Recently I was interviewed by Bold Journey, a publication that features stories about purpose, resilience, and the kind of lives people build when they stop doing what's expected and start doing what's true.

I didn't expect to find it as meaningful as I did. Answering their questions asked me to say things plainly that I usually hold quietly — about the career I left, the things I was avoiding, and why I do the work I do now.

Here are a few of the things I shared.

On finding purpose

For thirty years I was an investment management executive. I was good at it. My calendar started at 5:30 in the morning. One month every quarter I was in London, Singapore, or Geneva. From the outside, it looked like a life that was working.

What I didn't realize until my 50s was that all that motion was doing something for me. It was keeping me from slowing down enough to feel. I had become so skilled at managing my life — my image, my productivity, my performance — that I had lost touch with my own feelings, my body, and what I actually needed.

I went to therapy, and it changed everything. That experience was profound enough that I left my career, went back to school in my 50s, and became a therapist myself.

I didn't find my purpose by searching for it. I found it by finally slowing down enough to notice what was missing.

On the three things that mattered most

When Bold Journey asked me which skills or qualities had been most impactful, I didn't talk about credentials or clinical training. I talked about these:

The willingness to be a beginner again. I sat in classrooms with people decades younger than me, knowing almost nothing about the field. I took a suicide hotline shift for several years during training because I figured that would be the scariest part of the job, and I wanted to face the scariest thing first. Being a beginner gets harder the more accomplished you've been somewhere else. Your competence elsewhere becomes the thing you have to be willing to set down.

Self-knowledge — and the willingness to keep deepening it. My own therapy cracked something open. Silent meditation retreats deepened it. Psychedelic work has deepened it further. None of this is something I did once and finished. It's an ongoing practice, and it's the foundation of everything I now offer professionally. The career skills will come and go. Self-knowledge is the one capacity that compounds across every chapter of your life.

Life experience, and trusting that it counts. My grey hair is a feature in this job, not a liability. Coming to therapy as a second career means I'm not pretending to understand what it's like to manage a complex life. I lived it — a demanding career, a long marriage, parenting, supporting a disabled spouse, real loss, real recovery. The experience you already have is not wasted. It's the substrate everything else grows from.

On my parents

This was the part of the interview I found most surprising to write.

My parents gave me tremendous confidence. They told me consistently that I could do anything — and I believed them, which is a genuine gift. When I left my career in my 50s to become a therapist, they were proud of me again. That kind of steady belief is something I don't take for granted.

But I also shared a second layer: "You can do anything" became, in practice, "you should do everything." The over-achievement the world kept praising me for was also keeping me out of contact with myself. It took me until my 50s to see the difference.

I don't think my parents could have known to teach me that part. Most parents of their generation couldn't. But the foundation they built is what made it possible for me to eventually figure it out. You can't reexamine a belief in yourself that you never had in the first place.

The interview also includes a bit about my dogs and my motorcycle, which I'll let you discover on your own.

If any of this resonates — the part about looking fine on the outside while something quietly isn't working, the part about being too busy to actually be there — that's exactly the territory I work in.

Read the full interview at Bold Journey →

And if you'd like to talk about whether therapy might be right for you, I offer a free consultation. You can reach me at jillstherapy.com/contact.

Jill Sumiyasu, MA, LMFT, LPCC Licensed Therapist in Pasadena, California Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy · Psychedelic Integration · Depth-Oriented Therapy jillstherapy.com