Episode 3: Introductions

Who are you? It's a deceptively simple question and one that deserves more than a quick answer. In this episode, I finally introduce myself because after two episodes introducing the podcast, it felt like maybe I should tell you about the person behind it.

I explore what it means to narrate yourself: how our brains build schemas and cognitive shortcuts to categorize people, why the labels we reach for are useful but never quite enough, and the difference between doing something and being something. I walk through a social psychology exercise on identity and invite you to try it yourself. What do you reach for first when asked who you are? What do you avoid?

I share my own winding path through research, a summer in psychiatric hospitals in Indonesia and India, three years of affective neuroscience at Stanford, and a moment in Croatia that cracked open everything I thought my worth depended on. That moment reoriented me toward the question that drives my PhD in counseling psychology and everything I do now: not what breaks us, but what we do after. Not the absence of suffering, but flourishing: what it actually looks like to live well in the moment.

This is a vantage point on a mountain range. Not the whole thing. But a beginning.