Yesterday started out with great promise. I walked the dog and worked out. Then, the intrusive thoughts started. In my experience with OCD, obsessions arise slowly. It begins when an idea enters my mind and then plants itself there. It’s like having an uninvited guest walk into your house, plop down on the couch, seize the remote, and change the channel to something you have absolutely no interest in but, for reasons you cannot explain, feel compelled to watch. For the next four hours.
I spent yesterday watching four hours of I don’t even know what. I just know that I couldn’t concentrate on anything that I wanted to focus on. The feelings that accompany episodes like this are shame and failure. When I have a day like yesterday, I try to bring myself back to the acceptance of the great paradox of mental health resilience. I know that it is raining and I know that the sun will come out.
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.
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Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
Are you familiar with the “Spoon theory” of chronic illness? (Google and wiki are your friends if you haven’t heard of it)
Anyway, reading your recent posts I just want to send you these:
🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄🥄
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OMG – my brain has been playing all the wrong tracks this week – I was thinking it is planetary. Here is to finding the sunshine coming through the clouds.
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That comment was from me, Harriet L Culver (HLC), formerly from Christ & St Stephen’s, who apparently registered with WordPress using an old username.
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