I have an astonishing story about how reaching out to one person changed my life for the better.

I offer it here to give readers hope that a happy accident can alter your fate. It wasn’t likely an accident in my life: it was the simple act of deciding to enter therapy in 1996 when I worked in the gray flannel insurance field and was floundering, chained to a desk in a cubicle in a nowhere job in a no-way-out life.

At least, I had no idea the future that awaited me. I was 31 and going through a life crisis so met with a therapist. The insurance only authorized 5 visits because I had a pre-existing condition. I was in danger of losing my job yet again. The therapist was a career counselor by day in Manhattan and on the weekends he conducted therapy sessions.

Instead of doing therapy, he gave me vocational counseling and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The result, he told me, was that a library career might be good for me. With that, I applied to and was accepted at the 3 library school programs in New York City.

I think about this often: how one fortuitous meeting with a therapist altered the direction of my life forever. Eighteen years later, I would like to try to contact the therapist to tell him I’m eternally grateful for his help.

Hey, you don’t ever know where reaching out can take you.

I had the courage to consider going into therapy at the second worst time in my life.

Reaching out enabled me to change my life for the better.

I’ll end here by suggesting a person reaches out to the right person at the right time in the right place.

My two experiences with talk therapy and my 10 sessions of cognitive behavior therapy and my short fateful meeting with the career counselor: I submit this as a good endorsement of reaching out for help.

Reaching out for help might be hard yet the alternative: going it alone the rest of your life: might be lonely.

You deserve to feel better. You deserve to have a good life.

Reaching out. Something to think about.