nice to meet you

If you’ve reached this part of my website, my guess is that you’re trying to get to know me a bit and figure out if you think we’d be a good fit. Here’s what I think is relevant to know about me:

I’m originally from Hawaii (born and raised) and I moved to the east coast for undergrad. My BA is in Religion and I have a Minor in Sociocultural Anthropology, but not because I’m religious (I’m not), but because I have anxiety. As a gay kid growing up in small-town Hawaii in the 90s, I was told that I was going to hell. It was a hell that I had no real concept of, but it sounded scary enough. When I started undergrad, I decided to take a Religion course and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the academic study of religion (from a non-religious University) focused on the intersection of things I enjoy: literature, culture, history, and critical thinking.

I graduated with my B.A. in majoring in Religion and minoring in Sociocultural Anthropology.

I started working in the business sector of the trans adult industry in 2007. I started as a retoucher (I was terrible at it) and worked my way up to become the Creative & Editorial Director at one of the largest trans adult production companies in the industry. During this time, I started to present educational workshops to destigmatize and demystify the adult industry. As a public figure in my community, individuals often reached out to me looking for support resources. Mental health is a topic that gets discussed often in our industry and I found that the info I had (just from navigating the mental healthcare system for myself) was helpful to others. I decided that I wanted to use my privilege and position in my community to become a therapist and share these resources with anyone who needed it.

I attended Cal Southern University for my M.A. in Psychology and completed my practicum at the LGBTQ Center in Orange County, where I had the honor of working with my identified and allied communities.

Becoming a therapist is my second career technically, but my community work has given me long practice with the complexities of identity work and how we all understand ourselves out in the world. This framework of understanding intersectionality (which includes places of marginality and privilege) is a natural fit for the therapeutic modalities I often use with clients (narrative therapy and feminist therapy). I understand our identities to be informed by the limitations of the patriarchy and how we understand our respective intersectional identities in a larger context. I wholeheartedly believe in the ability for us to each re-author our own narratives about ourselves to create a story that is congruent to who we are.