About Me
I’ve always loved humanity, but had a harder time with the individuals who make it up. I was raised in Utah, USA, in a very tight-knit religious community. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons to be colloquial.) I didn’t know a lot of intricate details about the people around me and their lives, but I did know whether they ever struggled to be seen or felt alone for most of their lives. Call it trauma bonding or call it community—It's a weird type of cognitive dissonance to have such deep empathy for people and their circumstances while also disliking being in their general company and disagreeing with most of their worldviews.
At the end of the day, a lot of the details weren’t the focus and we were told they didn’t matter. Ask any ex-mormon what “broke their shelf” and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about because it was an incredibly common way to say “put a pin in that one, kid.” Keeping the facade intact and being vulnerable enough to perform and connect while keeping the family secrets was the name of the game.
Unfortunately, the details matter. They actually matter a lot, and I got a front-row seat on that rollercoaster of a lesson. While attending college at Utah Valley University and studying Communications, I felt like I had just exited my own personal version of "The Truman Show" with the rose-colored glasses snapping in two and falling off my face. My simple homogeneous world was suddenly filled with so many different types of people, which is shocking because Provo had literally just been labeled one of the least diverse places in America. But education still drew so many people from all over the world to our little city, most of them students or refugees.
Graduating college is a big enough shift on its own. Factor in a post-Trump America, Black Lives Matter protests outside my bedroom window, and the COVID pandemic hitting in my supposed final semester and I left university in April 2020 with only a few credits left to focus on my career and mental health in an ever-changing political and social climate. During this time, I finally rejected my natal belief system and got diagnosed with OCD, which you can read about in more depth here, if you’re interested.* /journal/
So now, here we are. The world feels overwhelmed with the details and labels, and it feels like everyone is grasping at straws of identity to try to keep themselves safe. I get it! It’s scary out here, and biologically and evolutionarily, we are designed to keep ourselves safe and in existence. That isn’t always the best thing for humanity or quality of life. I think it’s important to recognize that only 1% of people are truly out here actively trying to hurt people, truly giving no regard to others’ wellbeing. The rest of us are trying our best—whether we mean to or not, we still end up hurting others, usually by protecting what we believe is in our own self-interest. Adding in the fact that the systems we live in are designed to benefit white male landowners and exclude everyone else puts us at an even greater disadvantage as we are pitted against one another in a constant blame game of “who is making my life bad?”
Ultimately, I think the world has a communication problem. The languages of healing and connection have either been bastardized by Religions TM or put behind a paywall asking you to optimize your emotions and track your healing so that corporations can sell you a cure for a disease we all allowed to grow above our heads until it blocked even the concept of heaven from our view.
The most basic principle of ancient spirituality is As Above So Below. Originally found in the Emerald Tablet in late eighth/early ninth century it read:
That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.
This sentiment is echoed through the Ouroboros in Egyptian hieroglyphs iterated as “every ending is a new beginning” or “all is one”—this is the concept of every law of humanity, every lesson, every thing has an equal and an opposite. Science even understands this as Newton’s laws of physics; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We’ve studied plants to understand geometry, which led us to studying and better understanding the planets and cosmos. The sun impacts our seasons and the moon mirrors menstrual cycles. Nature is our greatest teacher, and when the world gets too big and too loud, the only way forward is to narrow in the focus and spend time with the equal and opposite. I mean, in order to discover gravity, you might have to take a nap under an apple tree. So when the world needs fixing, the first place to turn is inward. To our Selves— our own inner ecosystems. Because at the end of the day, how are you supposed to know which direction to go in if you don’t know where you are on the map?
After 10 years of beginning, I finally completed my BS in Communication and Public Relations and am thrilled to attend Cardiff University in Cymru (Wales) this fall to complete a MA in Cultural and Creative Industries. While I value my traditional education, I think one of the greatest misdeeds we’ve done in modern culture is to segregate and create hierarchies of understanding, so I’ve also been personally studying Hellenistic Astrology and Yogic philosophy for the last three years and always believe in consulting indigenous cultures whenever something doesn’t seem clear. I’m still in what many (often attributed to the likes of both Carl Jung and Denzel Washington) called the “research phase” of life, and am hoping to continue learning in whatever way I can, through as many different cultural lenses as I am privileged enough to witness through the coming years.
I’m learning my life’s mission is to help us learn how to connect and communicate rather than fight and fear each other because if we look at nature and healthy thriving ecosystems, balance and diversity are key, and to borrow a phrase from Robin Wall Kimmerer, all flourishing is mutual.