A little
about me.

I’ve wanted to be a counselor since my junior year of high school, when I looked around at friends who confided in me for everything and wondered—not without some trepidation—why they felt safe doing it. I noticed the trend continuing: people confiding in me about their lives, especially their pain, and seeming to leave those conversations better off than before. Counseling emerged as the way to become that person on purpose: half the training teaching me how to carry what people entrust to me with real boundaries, the other half teaching me how to help them effect real change, toward lives they can tolerate, survive, and want.

My work looks scattered on paper: an empathy study asking whether people feel animal pain the way they feel human pain, a literature review on stereotype threat and self-concept in adolescence, teaching files for statistical sampling, a paper about a fictional woman’s displaced rage. Explicitly stated, it has always been one subject: caring. What helps or hinders it, and how to offer it to the people the standard pathways miss: mothers inside a transition most clinicians can’t name, students drowning in statistics, adolescents navigating stereotypes, women carrying Amy Dunne’s kind of disenfranchisement. Not through politics, law, or biochemical medicine, but through minds: I want to teach people how to help themselves and keep moving through their lives.

The degree arrived in August, but my desk didn’t slow down. I’m revising an animal empathy study completed in 2024: I taught myself the statistics I didn’t have a foundation for, because I always wondered if I misunderstood the results, and the data deserved better. I’m rebuilding a paper on Gone Girlfor a theory journal as an exercise in intellectual care, because I think Amy’s kind of rage belongs taken seriously in a therapy room before it belongs anywhere else. Finally, I’m living a year post-undergrad, which turns out to be its own identity transition, taken from the inside this time.

The path here ran anything but straight. A diagnosis close to home sent me looking for clear, accessible information about BRCA gene mutations and genetic testing, and I found almost none of it in a form that made sense to someone navigating it for the first time. That gap had followed me long before I had language for it, visible in the experiences of people I love. Coursework in health promotion and research gave me the tools to do something about it: the BRCA resource now in build, a guide for people trying to figure out whether and how to get tested, particularly for adoptees and non-birth children for whom the standard pathway simply does not apply.

My path has taken me through unfamiliar territory more than once: places where the information ran thin, the resources never arrived, or the options never had someone like me in mind. It shapes how I think about care, communication, and what research is actually for, and it explains why the gaps, the overlooked questions, the underserved people, feel less like an abstract research interest and more like an orienting instinct.

The rest of this site carries the evidence: my desk shows what the work looks like this month, writing shows what it sounds like, projects show what it adds up to. This page remains the most stable exposition; everything beyond it updates as I do.