What a difference

liz

A year ago, the woman in this picture walked out of the office (and started a blog) intending to spend three months recovering from major depression. I had this vague notion of starring in my own personal remake of Eat Pray Love. Oh, how mistaken I was.

On that day, only a few weeks removed from planning to end my life, I was in worse shape than I could appreciate. It didn’t take me three months to find myself. It took me a year. And I am still a work in progress.

Today, the woman in this picture started back at work.

I’m happy to be alive. I’m enjoying being alive. For a long time, neither of those two statements were true. It’s taken a lot of therapy and working on myself to get to this point, but it has been so worth it. I share my story not because I think it makes me special or heroic, but because I want others who are struggling right now or who know (or think they might know) someone who is struggling to know that they are not alone, that help is available, and that there is hope for the future.

This isn’t the end of my journey to mental wellness. However, it may just be the end of the beginning.

To all of those who have come along with me and supported me in my recovery: Thank you! Your encouragement means more than I will ever be able to express.

Now, to figure out how to reset my password and get my email back on my phone…

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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.

7 Comments

  4. Wonderful to see this. You have been an inspiration to me. Thank you for your writings and honesty. They were very encouraging. Wish you all the best.

    Martha Romig

    Sent from my iPad

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