The first time I pitched Zen Me Space, I was fifteen, standing at the end of a boardroom table in 2023, and the youngest person there by a long way.
Nobody had asked me to be there. I had noticed something, and I couldn't stop noticing it.
In offices, people have a place for everything: meetings, lunches, deadlines, phone calls. But when someone's head is too full, there's nowhere to go. They sit at the same desk, under the same screen, and keep going. I started to wonder why a workplace would plan for every kind of work except the kind that happens inside a person.
That was the gap. Zen Me Space was my attempt to close it.
Saying it out loud
The idea is simple. It's a dedicated space to pause, breathe and reset, set up with care and not as an afterthought. Saying it out loud in a room full of professionals was another matter. I remember how steady my voice felt, which surprised me, and how my hands didn't. I had practiced the pitch for weeks. What I hadn't practiced was the silence after the last slide.
Then someone said, "Tell us how this would work here."
They weren't being polite. They were already picturing it in their building.
Past the boardroom
Since then, Zen Me Space has grown past that first boardroom. It now operates in corporate offices across New Jersey, New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina. I've also taken it into private homes around New Jersey, which turned out to be a different kind of work. In an office, the question is usually about stress at work. In a home, it's about the people and the pressure inside the house. Each setting taught me something the last one couldn't.
Asking whether it works
What I'm proudest of isn't the number of places. It's that I keep asking whether this actually helps.
That's why I'm now running a survey of people who have set up a Zen Me Space and people who haven't. I want to know what works, what doesn't, and what I've gotten wrong. It would be easy to build something and call it a success. I'd rather learn the truth and make it better.
I think that's the thread through everything I do. In my water-testing fieldwork, in my cybersecurity classes, and in the committee rooms of Model UN, I notice what's missing. Then I try to build it.
Zen Me Space is the clearest example. It started with a question: what if there were a place for this?