I’m tired. It’s no mystery why. I haven’t been sleeping as much as I know I need to be. A lot of my last therapy session was focused on making changes to my evening routine to get to bed earlier and wind myself down so I can sleep well. I know better, but I haven’t yet chosen to do better.
It’s not a problem yet. It will become one soon.
Falling back into old habits and familiar patterns is easy. These behaviors are established and comfortable even if they don’t yield the outcomes we want.
What’s different about my experience this time is that I’m recognizing what’s happening in the moment, acknowledging it, and holding myself accountable for changing what I’m doing. Before, I would never admit out loud that I was “failing” (which I’m not, but that’s how Jerk Brain presents it to me). I would try to push through as if I had no choice but to accept what I was doing to myself.
The awareness is growth. The follow through is actually changing my behavior. I’m still a work in progress and the work is getting done.
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?! 