How I Got Here

I didn't arrive at this work in a straight line. For a long time, I thought I wanted to be a pastor. To be present with people in their most tender and uncertain moments, to hold space for questions without clean answers. The only problem was that I wasn't religious. But the more I sat with that tension, the more I realized it wasn't the theology I was after. It was the relationship. The presence. The belief that someone's inner life deserves to be taken seriously, in all its complexity. Eventually I found my way to a career grounded in science and reality, yet still open to the full landscape of what it means to be human — the exploration and healing of mind, body, and spirit — and without dogma deciding who was welcome. The therapist's office. Once I found it, everything clicked.

What I carry into my work is shaped by my own life as much as my training. Moving through the world as a fat person has given me an intimate understanding of shame, body image, and the quiet exhaustion of diet culture. My queerness has attuned me to the particular work of building an identity on your own terms. My familiarity with non-monogamy and non-traditional family structures has taught me how much courage it takes to live and love outside the default. And my own complicated relationship with faith, the longing, the rupture, the slow finding of something that fit, has made me a more careful companion for those walking a similar road, in whatever direction it leads.