About Me

If you’re going to read my work, it feels important to be clear about where I’m coming from.

I’m not a neutral observer. None of us is. The questions I ask, the patterns I notice, and the conclusions I draw are shaped by my own location in the world. Being transparent about that isn’t just a personal preference; it’s part of doing ethical work.

So here’s a bit about who I am, and how I’m positioned in relation to the work I’m doing.

I am white and Indigenous (Maidu), cisgender, a woman, and queer. I am also disabled, with physical, psychiatric, and cognitive impairments. I am also an ongoing breast cancer survivor. These experiences shape how I move through the world, how I experience systems, and how I understand care, access, and limitation.

I’m highly educated, trained as a therapist, and deeply embedded in academic and clinical ways of thinking. At the same time, I live on SSDI and work only very part-time. That combination matters. It places me both inside and outside of systems of power, credibility, and legitimacy.

These positions aren’t just descriptors. They shape what I perceive.

They shape:

• what feels obvious to me

• what feels invisible or missing

• what kinds of questions I think are worth asking

For example, my experience as a disabled person doesn’t just inform my interest in accessibility. It changes how I understand concepts like independence, distress, and “functioning.” My work as a therapist doesn’t just give me clinical insight. It also makes me acutely aware of how often therapy frameworks misinterpret structural barriers as individual problems.

At the same time, I hold identities that come with relative privilege. Being white, cisgender, and highly educated affects how I’m perceived, what access I have, and what kinds of authority I’m granted. That matters too. It shapes what doors are open to me, what risks I can take, and what I might miss if I’m not paying attention.

So this work lives in that tension.

It’s informed by lived experience, but not reducible to it. It’s grounded in clinical and academic training, but also critical of the limitations of those systems. It’s shaped by both marginalization and access, by both constraint and privilege.

I’m not trying to offer a universal perspective. I’m trying to be clear about the one I do have.

And from that position, I’m interested in understanding how therapy can become more accessible, more accurate, and more responsive to the realities of LGBTQ+ disabled people’s lives.

That’s the lens I’m working from.