Correspondence

liz

Once upon a time, in January of this year, I was a fairly reliable correspondent. If you sent me an email or text, I’d respond quickly. I checked my voicemail (which I hate, but that’s for another post) and called people back. Over the last few months, I have become a terrible correspondent.

Partially, I’ve been focusing on myself to a degree that I haven’t in the past. Also, I’ve found interactions draining. I’m doing much better mentally than I was earlier this year, but that’s also because I’ve stopped running myself ragged trying to be a people-pleaser. I’ve also given up being relentlessly upbeat when I don’t feel that way. My energy is different now.

I feel a strange mix of guilt and contentment with this situation. It’s something that I’m still working through. A good topic for therapy.

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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

  2. I didn’t write these words, but I wish I had.

    “But it’s all right now, I learned my lesson well
    You see, ya can’t please everyone, so ya got to please yourself.”

    “If you gotta play at garden parties, I wish you a lotta luck
    But if memories were all I sang, I rather drive a truck.”

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