As I’ve written before, OCD is frequently portrayed in the media as an annoying, often endearing, ultimately benign personality quirk. My experience does not bear this out. The unwanted thoughts permeate my brain to the point of obsession. I am overwhelmed with a belief that if I perform some action, it will make my anxiety about the obsession disappear.
During periods of high stress, my OCD becomes worse. Despite the chaos going on in the world at the moment, I have managed to maintain life in a fairly confined bubble. Limiting my use of social media, deleting the news apps on my phone, and distancing myself from symbols of other stressors is helping me to put more distance between me and my last major incident of OCD. As I stretch the time between events–defined as periods in which unwanted thoughts and their accompanying compulsive actions disrupt the activities of my daily life–I build up resilience and find more ways of coping when I realize the obsessions and compulsions are manifesting themselves.
Although I am proud of my progress, I am also nervous that my recovery is closely tied to the elimination of external stressors. There comes a point at which I will need to start adding back some of these stressors, because I cannot survive in a bubble forever. I’m nervous about breaking containment. Given my tendency to immerse and overexert myself, this fear is real. However, as I am learning, I have the capability and the capacity to modulate and regulate.
Just as with the new goldfish from the pet store, I have to acclimate to the water in the tank before I open the bag and swim off. I’ve never had much patience for floating in stasis, but I am getting better.
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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1 Comment
You write beautifully. This definitely put some things into perspective for me. I have a friend that suffers from OCD and I haven’t checked on her lately..
Seriously, Jerk Brain?! 
You write beautifully. This definitely put some things into perspective for me. I have a friend that suffers from OCD and I haven’t checked on her lately..
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