I used to be extremely good at a life that wasn't actually mine.

I spent years doing everything "right." Climbing the corporate ladder at a company you've definitely heard of. Winning a competitive bodybuilding trophy. Striving to build a life, that looked from the outside like it had absolutely nothing wrong with it.

And somewhere underneath all of that, a part of me had quietly filed a missing person's report on myself. 2023 is the year the story actually turns.

There were years of unraveling before that turn, though. Failed relationships. Health stuff, physical and mental. Talk therapy that helped, genuinely, but wasn't enough on its own.

So in 2023, burnt out and hungry for something truer, I went on a retreat deep in the Amazon jungle — and it cracked open something in me that had been sealed shut for a long time. I came home questioning reality itself, seeing for the first time how out of alignment my whole life actually was (and, yes, informing every single one of my friends about my newfound realizations, at length, unprompted). I went all in on esotericism and spirituality, looking for truth in places I'd genuinely never looked before: inside myself. There's a German word, Leidensdruck — the pressure of suffering, the exact moment the suffering gets too big to keep ignoring and you finally do the thing. That was it. No turning back after that.

Later that year I quit my prosperous, soul-sucking career and started training as a breathwork facilitator and psychedelic integration guide, chasing a wild curiosity for the very medicines that had already helped me find my way back to myself. It took real courage. It also took a genuinely delusional amount of self-belief. Turns out that's usually where the magic actually lives.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I learned how to hold space. Psychology, human design, astrology — all things I'd already been quietly obsessed with — slowly wove themselves into a way of reading people and systems that's entirely mine now. And the kid who used to love painting came back online too. Slowly. Only because the shadow work finally gave those dormant, shunned-away parts of me somewhere safe to land. I learned how to feel again. Express again. Be clumsily, messily me again — a whole beautiful mess of a human who also happens to read the wild spectrum of human life and its systems pretty deeply, because honestly, those two things were never actually separate.

Along the way I went looking for community — people on the same road, willing to heal and grow out loud together. I showed up in a lot of spaces, online and in real life, and learned fast that real community comes with unglamorous logistics and real relational complexity. I also noticed, more than once, how often "leadership" is really just an old wound wearing a vision statement. So, naturally, I got curious. Because that's how I understand most things: by walking straight at the part nobody wants to look at, climbing all the way in, and learning from the inside. That curiosity turned into an actual passion — weaving spaces that honor the individual and the collective at once, willing to learn from the shadows instead of stepping around them, because that's the work that actually holds a community together over time.

If there's a throughline here, it's this: I'm fascinated by systems — the ones we run internally (mind, body, spirit) and the ones we build externally (organizations, communities, businesses) — because I don't think they were ever actually separate. As within, so without. As without, so within. These days I hold that fascination as whatever you want to call the pattern-reading, systems-sensing thing I do. I've landed on Systems Intuitive for now — still workshopping, ask me again in a year. Whatever the name, it means feeling into the deeper layers and looking straight at the dark corners on purpose, because that's usually exactly where the gold is sitting, waiting to be noticed. Once something's made conscious, it stops quietly running you from the shadows and becomes something you can actually work with, live from, build on.

If there's one thing I know in my bones and not just in theory, it's this: the gold is almost always sitting exactly where we're too afraid to look. Creativity was never something I had to earn back — it was always mine, just buried under everything I thought I had to be instead. Retrieving it, letting it out messy and unpolished, turned out to be its own kind of power. And real inner transformation always drags outer transformation along behind it, whether you planned for that or not. It's basically a law.

I wish I could tell you I've arrived somewhere tidy, sitting serenely atop my own enlightenment. I have not. I'm still very much in it — and fully plan on staying in it, because that's kind of the whole point. There's a lot more joy these days, genuinely, almost embarrassingly so at times. But grief never fully left the building, and I've stopped trying to evict it. Both at once, loudly, is honestly what being alive feels like to me now. All of it — the intensity, the softness, the structure, the mess, laughing and crying sometimes in the same afternoon — ends up on canvas eventually. That's what the rest of this site actually is. Not a highlight reel. The whole spectrum.