Welcome

Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
…
“Thee it behoves to take another road,”
  Responded he, when he beheld me weeping,
“If from this savage place thou wouldst escape”
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno

I am so glad you are here.

If you found this page, you likely got my resume and/or internship application and got curious about me, or what I might have to say about social work.

I guess we should start with this: I came to social work the roundabout way. After a 23 year career as an engineer, I found myself unfulfilled, burned out, depressed, suffering from panic attacks, and living with a legal substance abuse problem that was a poor coping mechanism for a professional life that I had been steering in the wrong direction for two decades.

I embarked on a long journey of healing, growth, change, sobriety, and mental health. I absolutely did not do it alone. In fact, I found that at every step when I fell, there was a social worker standing there, offering a hand back up to my feet. These wonderful humans were patient, kind, validating, non-judgmental, and provided me with a space to unpack more than two decades of buried trauma, grief, depression, and anxiety.

Somewhere along the way I fell in love with the study of mental health, of humanity, and began to realize that a core reason I had burned out so hard as an engineer, was that I should have been in a helping profession from day one. I just did not know myself well enough back when I set out into the wilds of my undergraduate education to realize that.

I am proud to say that I consider myself very successfully in recovery from substance abuse, depression, and anxiety. Like Dante the Pilgrim, I truly needed to take another road, and that road led me to you.

I invite you to explore the pages here, as I offer you a candid take on some of the major forces that seem to be challenging our collective mental health. These writings are both a product of my experience and of my education in social work, which actually began on my own, long before I was accepted to the University of Denver.

I absolutely do not know it all, and I approach every day with an empty cup, an open ear, and a full heart…but what you will find here is a perspective that I bring to social work because I have lived a very full life of struggle, and now I am dedicated to helping others as I was helped.