I quit my job on a Friday and boarded a plane to New York on the following Sunday.

The Saturday in between, I spent desperately overturning my small London studio apartment, hunting for the “small item of personal significance” I’d been asked to bring along for my upcoming summer course.

This assignment — “describe yourself through a unique and meaningful artifact” — seems to be a fairly common ice-breaking exercise. It leads me to imagine that crippling anxiety isn’t the reaction most people have when faced with said task. Me? I was in full-on panic mode.

Still, I kept telling myself that if I only looked hard enough, I might recall the perfect object to “represent my story.” In my head, I couldn’t shake this picture of a hand knit jumper in a pattern so discernibly Norwegian that it could only have been produced by a grandmother. Something with reindeers and trolls on it, with a heartwarming tale of family heritage to accompany it. …