A big part of my mental health recovery journey has involved time spent on my own. Until I began cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in earnest in early 2020, I had done everything in my power to avoid being by myself.
When I was alone, all I had were my thoughts. There were no distractions from my feelings. Although I didn’t know it then, I was experiencing the full force of OCD. Alone, intrusive thoughts ran wild in my head, egged on by Jerk Brain. The stress and tension these endlessly negative and hurtful thoughts created had to be let out. I found relief in a compulsive behavior, talking to myself out loud.
Human beings talk to themselves as a normal part of life. Mostly, it’s an inner monologue. In my case, it was over the top. The longer I was alone, especially when I was traveling for work, the worse it got and the harder it became to conceal. The compulsion would come over me in public. I was terrified of how people would judge me, the assumptions they would make. Of course, the more I tried to control it, the worse it became.
The tools and techniques I’ve learned through CBT have addressed the underlying cause of my compulsive talking to myself. Now, I can be alone with my thoughts and feelings and they do not become intrusive obsessions. The need to speak to myself out loud is no longer a compulsion.
Most surprising, I’ve found that I really enjoy my own company. That may be one of my biggest victories to date.
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?! 