The Origin Story No One Asked For
My Anti-"Groundhog Day" Reckoning
I didn’t leave tech because I wanted purpose.
I left because my body stopped cooperating.
2017 looked like a live-action Groundhog Day: wake up tired, sit in traffic for hours, haul my energy into work that demanded more than I had to give, go home depleted, repeat. Not dramatic. Not catastrophic. Just a slow drain, like watching water carve rock.
Then one morning, the realization didn’t come in a whisper.
It hit like a bruise.
I hate this.
This isn’t my life.
Not some midlife manifesto moment, just a deep, un-ignorable fact: my nervous system was screaming while my brain rationalized.
So I started paying attention to the impulses I’d been ignoring. The parts of me that still felt alive:
• Volunteering for Search and Rescue
• EMT training
• Throwing heavy iron around in CrossFit
• Running until my lungs burned
• Moving until my body remembered what movement was for
Pretty quickly, something became obvious:
I cared about the body not because it looked good, but because it held the story of survival.
That took me back to school for Kinesiology, not just for aesthetics or performance, but for mechanics: how bodies adapt, how they break, how they heal, and why they hang on to stress like it’s a life raft.
But here’s where the story veers off the expected path: the more I learned about muscles and movement, the more it became clear that nothing biological exists in isolation.
You can’t separate the body from the mind.
You cannot talk about tension without talking about memory.
You cannot talk about exhaustion without talking about threat.
You cannot talk about resilience without talking about wiring.
While I was collecting degrees, I was also doing my own therapy work, the kind that doesn’t just make you “feel better,” but pries open old survival strategies and lets daylight in. That work made clear what textbooks couldn’t on their own: anxiety isn’t a thinking problem. It’s a state of being.
I finished that bachelor’s in March 2020.
The universe’s timing was impeccable.
The world fractured. Everything pivoted. So I pivoted too, straight into an MA in Mental Health Counseling and Wellness at NYU.
If the world was going to fall apart, I wanted to understand how people actually try to hold themselves together.
Where This Lives Now
What I do now is not “therapy in the traditional sense.” It’s work that acknowledges:
bodies that still react long after danger is gone
nervous systems that learned to survive and never learned to rest
thoughts that feel like the problem, but are only the surface of the real pattern
I help people heal where their anxiety actually lives, not just in thoughts, but in biology, in patterns, in lived experience.
You don’t come to me to think your way healthier.
You come to me to understand your system and reshape the conditions it’s been stuck in.
And Yes, I’m Human Too
When I’m not deep in someone’s nervous system story, I’m out walking, lifting, CrossFit-ing (because yes, it’s a verb), or watching sci-fi movies with my golden retriever Ripley, named after the movie Alien, because I have no shame in that.
If You Want the Deeper Work
This site is the front door.
The deeper essays, the ones that link biology, culture, survival, and why humans feel the way they do, live on my Substack.
The writing here is less biography, more territory mapping.
If you want explanation before application, philosophy before therapy, context before care, that’s where that lives.
This page is just the beginning.