Personal
Why any of this exists
I was seventeen when they found it. An aberrant right subclavian artery — a vessel that had been in the wrong place my entire life and had finally grown enough to press on my esophagus. It was repaired surgically in 2019. Two years later a second operation removed what the first one left behind.
The anatomy is corrected now. That part worked.
What nobody prepared me for was the recovery. Not the surgical part — that went the way it was supposed to — but the years after it, which took most of my early twenties and are the reason my twenties don’t look like anyone else’s résumé. I wasn’t building an office career in that window. I was getting back to functional.
I finished a degree through it and ran a catalog through it, which is most of what I’d point at if you asked what I was doing. I work remotely — that’s a fixed condition of how I work rather than a preference, and I’d rather state it plainly up front than discover it’s a problem later.
What I learned in the gap
The medical system fixed the artery and then handed me back a life it had no framework for. The information I needed existed. It was scattered across places I had no way to evaluate, written by people with no obligation to be right, and the parts that mattered most were the parts nobody wrote down.
I spent a long time trying to work out what was true. That’s not a metaphor for anything. It was the actual daily activity of several years of my life, and it is where the habit that runs through everything else on this site came from.
When you have been badly wrong about something that mattered, you stop wanting to be confident. You start wanting to be checked.
The Glow Project
The Glow Project is a behavioral health education company — not a clinical provider, and I’m careful about that line because crossing it would make it exactly the kind of thing that failed me. It’s three products: an application, a book, and a course. It came out of a forty-page business plan I wrote as my Berklee capstone, and it’s in development toward 2027.
There’s also a smaller piece of it I care about disproportionately: a support community and verified information resource for the condition I had, because when I was seventeen and searching, there wasn’t one.
Why this is on a portfolio
Because leaving it off would make the rest of the site read like a personality. The insistence on verification isn’t a professional style I adopted. It’s what I have instead of the confidence I used to have, and it makes me good at a specific kind of careful work.
I’m aware this is more than most people put on a site attached to a job application. I’d rather you know.