In 2019, I left a career in banking that looked perfectly respectable on paper and felt increasingly unbearable to live inside.

I was depressed, coping in ways that were becoming increasingly unhealthy, and trying very hard to function like everything was fine. Eventually, I reached a point where it wasn’t. And that year, I tried to take my life.

There is no clever career-pivot language that makes that sentence prettier, and I don’t think there should be. Healing from that experience forced me to look at my life differently. I knew I didn’t want to return to work I hated just because I was good at it, especially when part of me was terrified of ever ending up in that place again.

So I started writing.

I made a blog and began talking publicly about depression and all the uncomfortable things I had spent years pretending I could outwork. Somewhere in the process of learning how to make people care about those stories, I fell completely in love with marketing.

And because apparently I can’t experience anything without eventually turning it into a research question, that became the beginning of everything that came next.

I threw myself into a Master’s degree determined to prove I had made the right choice.

Over the next several years, I worked across SaaS, behavioral health, nonprofits, small businesses, and some of the top marketing agencies in the country. I learned how brands grow, how audiences behave, and how quickly ambition can become another thing you are constantly trying to optimize.

I also burned out badly enough that I once blanked on my own address. Yep, scary af.

That experience brought me back to the question underneath everything I had been doing since 2019: what is all of this doing to us?

Today, as a doctoral student in organizational psychology, I study the intersection of work, identity, technology, social behavior, and mental health, especially the ways social media quietly starts shaping how we think, work, create, and see ourselves.