So, what do you do?

liz

Earlier this week, I attended a dinner hosted by a dear friend and former colleague. A woman for whom relationships are like oxygen, she reached out to several dozen women she knows both professionally and personally and asked if we’d like to meet up. Nearly everyone responded enthusiastically. Schedules being what they are, ultimately 14 of us were able to come together for dinner. We started at 6:30pm. When I got in my rideshare to go home, it was well after 10pm.

This was the first semi-professional event I’ve attended since starting my leave, just over two weeks ago. [Note: I feel like I’ve just started and also been away for ages. It’s cognitive dissonance.]. It’s also the first event I’ve attended in my adult life without what I think of as my shield of worthiness, my armor of instant credibility.

Right now, I’m working on myself, including figuring out how to define myself other than by my job title. When I first started telling people that I was taking leave, it was from a defensive posture. I was convinced that, without the mantle of my job, I was somehow less valuable as a person (thanks, Jerk Brain!). I am so used to leading with my job as a kind of de facto membership card—“See! I really do belong here!”—that not having it leaves me feeling exposed and vulnerable. Who am I without that imprimatur?

I’d love to say that I had this breakthrough moment where I eschewed the institutionalized social convention and simply said that I was me, working on me, without once mentioning my regular job. But, I didn’t.

I still feel like a fraud. It isn’t rational, but it’s real.

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Published by liz

From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.

4 Comments

  1. Just wanted to say I think I understand how vulnerable you must be feeling. When asked, you can always say you are taking a personal sabbatical. I know what you are really saying is you’d like to be authentic, though, and just be honest that you are working on your well-being. Why on earth can’t that be enough? I’m pretty sure Brene Brown would think so.

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  3. Pingback: User ID – Seriously, Jerk Brain?

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