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

The corporate ladder, a competitive bodybuilding trophy, a perfect relationship, I kept striving for what's next, until I simply couldn't anymore. And over time, my soul had quietly filed a missing person's report. 2023 is the year where the story actually turns.

There were years of unraveling before it: failed relationships, health issues, both physical and mental, talk therapy that helped but wasn't enough.

So in 2023, burnt out from work and seeking more truth and depth, a retreat deep in the Amazon jungle cracked open something that had been sealed shut for a long time. I came home questioning reality itself, finally seeing how unaligned I was living my life (and informing all my friends about my newfound realizations, lol). I went all in on esotericism and spirituality, seeking truth in places I'd never really looked before, within myself. In German there's a word, Leidensdruck, the pressure of suffering: the energy that finally makes you do the thing because the suffering has gotten too big to ignore. There was no turning back.

Later that year, I quit my prosperous yet soul-sucking career and started training as a breathwork facilitator and psychedelic integration guide, following a wild curiosity for the very medicines that had already helped me reconnect with myself and shift some much-needed perspective, on myself and on the world at large. It took real courage, and an equally real amount of delusional thinking, to make that leap. That's usually where the magic lives, though.

During this time I learned how to hold space. A deep fascination for psychology, human design, and astrology had already been in my orbit before any of this started; what changed is that I slowly wove everything together into a way of reading people and systems that's entirely my own. The kid who used to love to paint came back online too, slowly, and only because deep 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 understand the intricacies of the wild spectrum of human life and the systems we're connected with pretty deeply, because those two things were never actually separate.

Along the way I was looking for community, people who were on the same journey as me, willing to heal and grow together. I went into many spaces, online and in real life, to learn that real community brings with it unglamorous logistics and relational complexity. In many places I found how often leadership runs on old wounds dressed up as vision instead. So I got curious. To understand it, the way I understand most things: by walking straight toward the part nobody wants to look at directly, immersing myself in it, and learning from it. That curiosity turned into a real passion for weaving community: creating and stewarding spaces that honor the individual as much as the collective, willing to learn from the shadows instead of avoiding them, because that's exactly the work that lets a community's foundations actually hold over the long term.

That's the throughline, if there is one. 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're actually separate. As within, so without. As without, so within. These days I hold that fascination as a systems oracle. I am someone who feels into the deeper parts and looks into the dark corners on purpose, because that's usually exactly where the gold is sitting, waiting to be noticed. Once made conscious, what used to quietly run us from the shadows becomes something we can actually work with, live from, and build on, individually and collectively.

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

I wish I could tell you I've arrived somewhere tidy and finished, sitting serenely atop my own enlightenment. I have not. I'm still very much in it, and I fully intend to keep being in it, because that turns out to be the whole point. These days there's a lot more joy than there used to be, genuinely, embarrassingly so at times, but grief never fully left the building either, 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, the laughing and the 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.