It was hard to get up yesterday morning. I had stayed up late Monday night finishing my final paper for the course I’m taking this term and my mind was so wound up that it took a while for me to fall asleep. Originally, I had intended to get up early to do my usual online workout, but I slept through my alarm. When I finally opened my eyes, my body felt heavy. I recognized the feeling immediately as the inertia of depression. I froze. What have I done? In truth, nothing. It made perfect sense that I was exhausted and needed to rest. However, after so much time spent in recovery from depression, it’s terrifying to sense the shadows returning. What I’m learning is a recalibration of my sense of personal mental wellness.
Wellbutrin is an extended release tablet, meaning that it delivers a continuous steady stream of medication over a longer period. I can feel the difference a single dose every other day makes in that I’m experiencing more range of emotion and quicker shifts between moods. That said, I need to develop a keener sense of when a mood is just a mood and when it’s a harbinger. I’ve been on high alert for so long that I have to remind myself that blips are normal, manageable, and actually healthy.
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.
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Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 