When you put the different parts of my life next to each other, they can look like they belong to several different people.
I’ve worked in technology and digital marketing. I spent nearly two decades teaching music. I’ve built and managed communities, developed content and training programs, worked with technical products, and created systems for organizing complicated work. I write about everything from AI and workplace culture to relationships and neurodivergence. Outside my professional career, I founded and run a nonprofit kitten rescue, which has somehow turned me into a person with strong opinions about both information architecture and deworming protocols.
For a long time, I thought these were separate chapters. The older I get, the less separate they seem.
I’m interested in systems because I’m interested in people.
I like figuring out how things work, but the technology or process itself usually isn't the most interesting part to me. I'm interested in what happens when a person encounters it.
Where do they get confused? What information are they missing? What assumptions did the person who designed the system make that don't hold up in the real world? Why are people developing workarounds instead of using the process that was built for them? What happens when someone doesn't behave the way the system expects them to?
That curiosity shows up in almost everything I do. It was there when I was teaching a student who wasn't understanding something the way it had been explained. It was there when I was managing technical communities and trying to understand why the same frustration kept surfacing. It's there in marketing when I'm thinking about the difference between the message a company wants to communicate and the question its audience is actually trying to answer.
It's even there in rescue, where a process that looks perfectly reasonable on paper can fall apart immediately when you introduce a frightened cat, an overwhelmed person, limited money, three different organizations and a veterinary clinic that closes at five.
The context changes. The questions don't change very much.
I notice friction.
I have a hard time encountering a problem repeatedly without eventually becoming curious about the problem itself.
Sometimes the answer is simply that something is difficult and will continue to be difficult. But surprisingly often, the difficulty is being created or amplified by the way we've designed the system around it. Information is in the wrong place. A process depends on someone remembering something no one ever documented. Two tools don't communicate with each other. The instructions make perfect sense to the person who already knows how to do the thing.
Once I see that kind of friction, I want to understand it. Once I understand it, I usually want to fix it.
That might mean rewriting something, reorganizing information, building a workflow, creating a resource, connecting tools, automating a repetitive task, or throwing out the process and starting over. I'm not particularly attached to the form the solution takes. I'm attached to making the thing work better for the people who actually have to use it.
Communication is part of the system.
One of the biggest lessons I've carried from one career to another is that communication isn't something you add after the real work is finished. It is part of the real work.
You can have the right information and still fail to communicate it. You can build an excellent tool that nobody understands how to use. You can create a perfectly logical process that depends on knowledge no one thought to share. You can answer the question you wish someone had asked while completely missing the one they actually did.
Teaching made that obvious to me very early. If a student didn't understand my explanation, repeating it louder wasn't going to make it more useful. I had to understand where the disconnect was and find another way in.
I've been doing versions of that ever since.
I also really like making things.
Not every part of this needs a grand philosophical explanation. I genuinely enjoy the process of taking something from an idea to a thing that exists.
I like the messy middle where I'm still figuring out what something is supposed to become. I like researching tools, sketching structures, finding connections, changing my mind, breaking something, rebuilding it and eventually reaching the point where all of the pieces start behaving like one coherent thing.
That applies whether I'm building a website, a content system, an educational resource, a campaign, an organization or something purely creative. The finished thing is satisfying, but so is figuring out how to get there.
It also explains why my definition of “creative” has never been limited to traditionally creative work. A good spreadsheet can be creative. So can a workflow. So can finding an unexpectedly elegant way to solve an operational problem.
The subject matter is almost secondary.
This is probably the part that took me the longest to understand about myself.
I used to think I needed to identify the one subject I cared about enough to build a career around it. Instead, I seem to be much more motivated by the kind of problem I'm solving than by the category it belongs to.
Give me something complicated with people, information and systems tangled together, and I'm interested. Give me a problem where the obvious answer isn't quite working and I can dig around until I understand why, and I'm even more interested.
That's how someone can move from technology to music education to community management to digital marketing and then spend Saturday afternoon redesigning an adoption process for a kitten rescue without experiencing those things as completely unrelated.
They're different shapes of the same work.
The thread is building things that help things thrive.
That sentence started as a way to describe the different parts of this website, but the more I use it, the more accurately it seems to describe what I've been doing all along.
Sometimes I build things from scratch. Sometimes I inherit something and help it grow. Sometimes the work is figuring out what's preventing something from working as well as it could and removing the obstacle. Sometimes what needs to thrive is a project or a community. Sometimes it's a person who needs information presented in a way that finally makes sense to them.
And sometimes it's a kitten who fits in the palm of my hand.
Those things don't require the same expertise, and I don't want to flatten them into some tidy personal-brand story where everything I've ever done was secretly part of a plan. It wasn't. I've changed directions, followed interesting opportunities, made mistakes, learned things I didn't expect to need, and occasionally ended up somewhere almost entirely by accident.
But I've carried the same instincts with me.
I want to understand how things work, especially when they aren't working. I want to make complicated things easier to navigate. I want to connect information and people in ways that are actually useful. I want to build things, improve things, and leave things more capable of thriving than they were when I found them.
The shapes keep changing.
The thread hasn't.