But let me back up. To the day I resigned from my banking job.

By the time I’d left, I’d spent nearly ten years doing it. Every morning, I was awake shortly after five o’clock. Before seven, I was at my desk, at least one cup of coffee already drunk, and several more on their way.

The day I quit was like any other, but the week preceding it wasn’t. Earlier that week, an arrogant and important client had sworn at me. Specifically, he’d told me I was stupid, “f-cking stupid” to be precise. But that wasn’t what bothered me. On trading floors, everyone gets sworn at. What incensed me, to the point of very taboo tears, was that he’d hung up on me. I don’t know about you, but there’s something so profoundly ill-mannered about putting the phone down on someone else’s voice. It’s just completely…dismissive.

Anyway, having spent the last several years frustrated and near my own boiling point, it was this act of dismissive arrogance that pushed me to the edge. And it was a third shot of tequila that evening that finally pushed me over it.

“If you stay in banking,” my best friend Meghan said to me that night at a Mexican bar in Manhattan’s West Village, “one thing can happen.” She paused for effect, and went on. “But if you go, anything can happen.” Stunned into silent contemplation, I looked out the window at the blizzard that was putting its finishing touches on blanketing the city in a soft white.

The next morning, head heavy with a hangover, and body leaden with responsibility, I sat at my desk and began my morning routine. But my mind was anywhere but work. My mind was on Meghan’s prediction that ‘anything’ could happen if only I had the courage to let it.

“Frank,” I whispered into the phone, requesting advice from a friendly client who’d looked out for me from the day I’d begun work in Foreign Exchange. “Should I finally do it?” I asked. Frank was just the sort of person I needed for advice. A happily married soccer dad who lived in the suburbs with his three soccer kids and beautiful soccer wife, surely he’d persuade me to be practical.

“Do it,” he said. “Just do it.”

And so I did. Forcing myself to think about anything but, I walked into my boss’s office, and told him I was leaving. Surprising even myself, I very calmly explained that, on a whim, I’d found an internship at a TV station in Mongolia, and that I was going to take it.

“If I knew then what I know now,” he said and I held my breath, expecting a lecture on career and obligations, “I’d do exactly what you’re doing,” quipping that he’d have chosen anywhere but Mongolia to do it.

That afternoon, I packed my things and left. After all the years of deliberation and hesitation, my exit came down to little more than walkingout the door, just like I’d done for the past ten years. In the end, it really was that simple. Of course, it wouldn’t be for long. Just because I’d left my neatly designed world behind, didn’t mean I’d shed its duties and trappings. I was only just getting started, and the battle was, and is, uphill.