My siblings joke that I’m the mailman’s kid; they were loud and boisterous in social settings, and I was often at the edge of the room, an observer and a thinker. What I was watching for, before I had any words for it, was the incongruence between what people said and what they did. Small lies to save face, to stay liked, or avoid something they didn’t want to admit. Sometimes it struck me as an absurd social game, but I also played along, like everyone else. It took me a long time to stop trying to fit and genuinely appreciate the ways I don’t.

That kind of watching could have made me cynical, but it didn’t. I hold a lot of love and respect for people, for my family, and learned a lot by watching. But along with it I saw just as often was the beauty in what makes a person who they are, and the capacity in them they hadn’t gotten to yet. I’ve been told my whole life that I see people in ways they aren’t used to being seen. Admittedly I’ve also given people the benefit of the doubt long past the point it was earned, but I’d rather be wrong in that direction.

I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was little, but couldn’t bear the thought of euthanizing an animal. Funny that I went into mental health instead, as though that’d be less intense. I started in the depths of in-home work and crisis response, took on complex clinical cases, and eventually directed a psychotherapy clinic. I’ve sat with people whose lives had completely come apart, and those whose lives looked enviable from the outside. Those are not the same work – survival and thriving require completely different approaches. But in both, I kept finding more resilience than the circumstances predicted, and something in each person still worth reaching toward. People never stopped being fascinating to me.

People are simple and complicated at the same time, deeply flawed and full of potential, separate and not separate at all. Most of my work is helping someone hold all of that about themselves, while realizing that potential.