I did a (15K) thing!

liz

The Hot Chocolate 5K/15K is an annual race put on in multiple cities around the country to benefit the Make-a-Wish Foundation. This was my third year in a row to run it. It’s a fun event, with volunteers handing out chocolate candies and marshmallows along the course, in addition to the usual water and sports drink. In Houston, it tends to draw a crowd in the 5,000-person range, which is a good size for a split run like this one. About two-thirds of the participants opt for the shorter distance. The rest of us slog it out for the full 9.3 miles.

My run was ugly, but I did it. My goal was to keep moving forward at a pace under 14 minutes a mile, and I accomplished that. I signed up for this race immediately after I finished last year’s. If I hadn’t, I don’t know that I would have done it. I haven’t had the motivation to run in months. The last distance run I did was back in August when Hilary and I ran the Dublin Rock n’ Roll Half Marathon.

One of the (many) insidious aspects of depression is the way in which it feeds vicious cycles. Running eases my anxiety, helping me to keep depression at bay. At the same time, depression keeps me from running. It saps my motivation, increasing my anxiety.

It feels good to have accomplished something hard, even though I know it’s far from the best I can do. At the moment, I’m doing the best I know how. It’s something I think we all live with, the gap between our capability (or desire) and our capacity at any given time. Most of us have far more capability than we do capacity.

When we talk about unleashing our full potential, what we’re really saying is learning how to be and do our best, not just what we know how to do at that moment. The first step in being our best is acknowledging the gap, and that’s hard, because it means admitting to ourselves that there’s more work to be done.

I’ve already signed up for next year. I want to learn how to be better. Time to get training.

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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.

3 Comments

  1. I thought a bit about your statement here: “When we talk about unleashing our full potential, what we’re really saying is learning how to be and do our best, not just what we know how to do at that moment.”

    I think I may take issue with it. Our full potential is a continuum, not a finite point. You ran to your full potential this weekend. Own it and love yourself for it. Elsewhere on the continuum of life, your full potential may be elsewhere. Be kind to yourself.

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    1. I love this perspective. Your interpretation is different from mine, in that I mean to say that I sometimes get stuck and let myself off the hook by saying “I’m doing my best”, when I know I’m not. Like, I use “my best” as a shield for having to do the hard work of looking inward and recognizing that I’m more capable than Jerk Brain is telling me I am. I agree that the relentless pursuit of an impossible standard is self-defeating. That just gives us reasons to keep beating ourselves up. I’m proud of the best I know how to do right now and I’m looking forward to finding out just how much I am truly capable of. #shutupjerkbrain

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