I'm a cultural historian and psychotherapist. I write about why so many people feel like they are failing at life, and what that feeling reveals about the world that produced it.

I trained as a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned a PhD in cultural history before leaving academia as a new mother caring for a terminally ill parent. I was searching, somewhat desperately, for a life in which intellectual work and ordinary human dependency didn't feel so fundamentally at odds. At the time, leaving felt less like a decision than a confession of failure, albeit one made in sensible shoes while carrying a diaper bag and answering calls from neurologists.

History can show you the architecture of a bad century and why the room was built the way it was. It can tell you remarkably little about what it feels like to be in that room, convinced you are the problem — or why your seat is still warm from someone else. Psychology sits you down inside those feelings, but not always inside the conditions that produced them. It took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize that treating every impossible situation as evidence of my own inadequacy might itself be historical evidence.

Writing about this often requires putting myself directly in the soup: participant, specimen, and occasional punch line all at once. I've found that humor can keep people close to material they might otherwise experience as unbearable, overly theoretical, or simply too humiliating to look at directly. Sometimes a joke is just a joke. Sometimes it's the only socially acceptable way to admit that something is profoundly wrong.

I came to psychoanalysis first as a patient, then later as a clinician. Over several years working with individuals and couples in community mental health, I became increasingly interested in the gap between what people believe is wrong with them and the conditions they are actually trying to survive. Contemporary life does not simply reactivate old wounds. It creates new ones. Forms of support people once relied upon—economic, social, institutional, familial—are eroding all at once, and much of the resulting strain gets experienced not as history but as private failure.

The book I'm writing, The Inheritance Complex, explores what happens when insecurity becomes ordinary enough to feel personal. It argues that we are being asked to carry more than private life was ever meant to hold, and that the burden has become so familiar we've stopped recognizing it as historically produced. The project moves through workplace wellness programs, rescue dogs, public restrooms, family estrangement, perimenopause, and other strange infrastructures of contemporary American life, tracing how collective problems get redistributed downward and reappear as private shame. It keeps returning to the same question: not what is wrong with you, but what are you being asked to carry? And are you carrying it too?

My essays and reporting have appeared in The Nation, Psyche, Dwell, and elsewhere. "The Nap Room Didn't Love Me Back" was among The Nation's most-read essays for two weeks after publication, which suggests many Americans are eager to discuss the emotional limits of corporate care, provided someone first disguises the conversation as a joke about sleeping at work. "The Capacity to Be Alone Depends on the Sense of Being Held" is among the most-read essays in Psyche's history.

I am completing a doctorate in clinical psychology at The Wright Institute, where my research focuses on perimenopause as a developmental transition shaped not only by biology, but by changing forms of care, embodiment, identity, and social expectation. I will complete my predoctoral residency at Access Institute in 2026–27.

I grew up between Athens, Georgia and a farm in rural Missouri. I now live in Berkeley, California with my family, where I have become extremely well versed in the somatic experience of stepping on Legos.