Where It Started

I came out in high school and started a Gay-Straight Alliance, learning early that community is something you build, not something you wait for. That advocacy earned me a scholarship to Colorado State University, but more than that, it is where my radical heart began. I was a young person who simply couldn’t fathom oppression, who felt the wrongness of it and refused to look away. Long before I had the language for equity or justice, I had the instinct: that people deserve to be seen, safe, and free, and that I wanted to spend my life helping make that true.

Studying History as a Mirror

At Colorado State, I pursued a BA in history, dreaming of becoming a teacher who taught LGBTQ+ history. I wanted young queer people to see themselves reflected in the past, to grow up with role models and a steady sense of self, the way I wished I had. I worked in the LGBTQ+ Student Services office and led its student group, driving programming and school policy. Turning my own story into support for others, I came to understand that showing up for a community, consistently and openly, is its own kind of education.

Women’s History at NYU

I continued to graduate school at NYU, earning a master’s in women’s history. There I studied the deeper foundations of gender, sexuality, race, and colonization, the histories that quietly shape how we understand identity, power, and belonging today. It changed how I saw everything. I learned that the struggles I cared about were never isolated or new, but part of long, interwoven systems, and that understanding those roots is essential to changing them. That grounding still lives in my work as a clinician, reminding me that every person sits inside a history, and that context is where real understanding begins.

From History to the Corporate World

When I couldn’t find work in history, I took an entry-level recruiting role at a digital marketing agency with zero business knowledge. I listened, built relationships, and kept saying yes to the next scary thing, recruiting, then account management, then, after years of learning by fire, VP. My real asset was never one skill, it was a willingness to try. As an openly queer and trans professional, I found even deeper meaning beyond my formal roles: driving DE&I work, leading LGBTQ+ Business Resource Groups, mentoring younger queer and trans colleagues, and launching a gender-affirming financial product crafted by queer and trans creatives.

Leading People, Growing a Startup

In 2020, I left my company of ten years to join a SaaS startup, Fohr, and build a Client Service discipline from the ground up. I stood up the sales practice, scoping, capacity planning, onboarding, and first-ever career-growth framework that helped grow revenue from $16M to over $50M. But the numbers were never the point. For me, it was a chance to try a different kind of leadership, one based in care and vulnerability. If you invest in people, they invest in you, so I led a team of fifty with mentorship, structure, and ways to grow, hired 57 people in two and a half years, and grew our diversity by more than 50%, because my greatest joy is watching everyone shine.

The Leap into Social Work

A few years later, I was burned out. My sobriety was shaky and my mental health was suffering, and I found myself asking a bigger question: could I do something completely different? The idea of becoming a therapist felt impossible, but it wouldn’t let go. So I took the biggest leap of all and left corporate for social work. I got into only an online program at first, but I tried anyway, loved it, and reapplied to Hunter until I got in. Trying has never meant being fearless. I’ve been scared through most of this, but the only way out is through.