I didn’t come to this work from a distance.

Like many people drawn to questions about relationships, sexuality, and identity, I arrived through the slow realization that the stories I had inherited about love and intimacy didn’t quite explain the complexity of real relational life. 

My orientation to this work continues to grow out of a conversation between scholarship, lived experience, and the quiet intelligence of nervous systems that often knows something long before theories catch up.

I am a licensed marriage and family therapist in my third year as a Ph.D. student in Critical Human Sexualities, and I bring over a decade of experience supporting emotional regulation, relational skill-building, and identity development across therapeutic and educational settings. 

In my academic life, I study the relational and cultural dimensions of sexuality—particularly within Queer communities, consensual Non-Monogamies, and kink/BDSM spaces. I’m interested in exploring relational ethics and how power, attachment strategies, cultural narratives, and identity formation shape the ways people attempt to love one another. I’m also interested in the places where those narratives start to crack—particularly how people learn to navigate intimacy in a world where the cultural scripts for relationships often feel too narrow for the lives we’re actually living.

I hold multiple, sometimes conflicting social locations. I am white, mostly able-bodied, and professionally credentialed, and I also move through the world as Queer, Gender-Fluid, NeuroSpicy (or NeuroSparkly, depending on the day), Non-Monogamous, Kinky, and a single parent raising a child who is also AuDHD. These identities shape not only my lived experience, but the lens through which I approach this work—particularly around how power, privilege, stigma, and cultural narratives influence who is allowed to feel “good” or “bad” in relationships, and whose messiness is treated as human versus unacceptable.

I also approach this work as someone practicing both non-monogamy and kink.

What began as specific relational shifts eventually unraveled into something much larger: a confrontation with my attachment patterns, my nervous system, and the inherited beliefs I carried about what love is supposed to look like in order to count as safe, mature, or successful. Living inside those questions (sometimes with clarity, sometimes through jealousy, rupture, grief, and repair) continues to shape how I think about relational responsibility, consent, power, and care.

Before becoming a therapist, I spent several years working in early childhood education, including as an aide in a day-treatment classroom with autistic preschoolers and later as a preschool teacher. That work centered on emotional regulation, relational attunement, and the slow, patient process of helping developing nervous systems find safety in connection.

Parenting a neurodivergent child has deepened that understanding in ways no professional training ever could. Together, these experiences continue to shape how I hold space now—especially around pacing, accessibility, and the understanding that people enter relational conversations with very different thresholds for risk, visibility, and vulnerability.

Rather than positioning myself as someone who has solved the questions this work raises, I approach them as ongoing sites of inquiry. Scholarship helps. Clinical training helps. Language helps. But insight has never exempted me—or anyone—from grief, fear, jealousy, longing, or uncertainty.

Becoming Otherwise emerged from that recognition: that many of us are trying to navigate love, identity, and intimacy with inherited maps that were never designed for the terrain we actually inhabit.

And that sometimes the most honest thing we can do is pause, look at those maps together and begin asking better questions.

Most of the work begins there — in the willingness to stay with the questions.