A little bit about me

About Me

I always find writing “about me’s” challenging. So I started by asking others the words they’d use to describe me: curious, attentive, intentional, playful, authentic and perceptive.

I identify as a queer multiracial woman living with chronic illness, as a healer and activist, as a facilitator and teacher, and as someone who knows what it’s like in my body to hold the grief, rage and disillusionment that come from trying to exist —let alone thrive— in systems that constantly fail us, and were never made to serve us.

Background

My life experience is an interwoven tapestry that informs my current “clinical” perspective. My master’s in counseling grounds me in a psychodynamic and existential lens that harm and healing happen first and foremost in relationship. My background in working in residential treatment, inpatient psychiatric care, with our unhoused community, and in chronic illness care has helped me understand that sometimes that harmful relationship is with unjust institutions just as much as it is within interpersonal dynamics. From my frontlines and backlines activism work I have gained an experiential understanding of the inextricable nature of healing and justice work. I’ve also had to the opportunity to create offerings and workshops for healers and clients around this understanding.

Inspiration

In my practice and in my life I pull inspiration from the world around me, poets, authors, theorists, activists, and antagonists—to name a few: Audre Lorde, bell hooks, adrienne marie brown, Martin Boro and Liberation Psychology, Cara Page, Andrea Gibson, and Octavia Butler.

All of this instills me with a sense of humility, compassion, and a deep regard for the human struggles we experience collectively and individually, as well as the ways in which we have learned to fight to survive. I am the amalgamation of all my experiences, as are you, and I am delighted to begin to get to know you. ✩