This is the Croatia story. The one where a pixelated FaceTime call from my mom, a particular shade of Adriatic blue, and a curly hair business plan that was never really a business plan cracked something open in me and reoriented my life toward joy.

Also: I jumped on a sea urchin. It did not deter me.

This episode is about the moments that change us. How they usually don't announce themselves. How meaning mostly shows up sideways, in the middle of an ordinary morning, when you turn your head slightly to the left and the sea is just there, waiting for you to notice.

Who are you? It's a deceptively simple question and one that deserves more than a quick answer. In this episode, I finally introduce myself because after two episodes introducing the podcast, it felt like maybe I should tell you about the person behind it.

I explore what it means to narrate yourself: how our brains build schemas and cognitive shortcuts to categorize people, why the labels we reach for are useful but never quite enough, and the difference between doing something and being something. I walk through a social psychology exercise on identity and invite you to try it yourself. What do you reach for first when asked who you are? What do you avoid?

I share my own winding path through research, a summer in psychiatric hospitals in Indonesia and India, three years of affective neuroscience at Stanford, and a moment in Croatia that cracked open everything I thought my worth depended on. That moment reoriented me toward the question that drives my PhD in counseling psychology and everything I do now: not what breaks us, but what we do after. Not the absence of suffering, but flourishing: what it actually looks like to live well in the moment.

This is a vantage point on a mountain range. Not the whole thing. But a beginning.

What happens when you discover a power so profound at age 10 that it terrifies you into silence for two decades?

In this episode, I share a story about a fourth-grade writing assignment that made someone cry—and changed everything. It's about stumbling onto the ability to make people feel through words, then spending 20 years too scared to try again.

Why do we hide our creative powers? What does it cost us? And how do we finally stop?

This is about fear, perfectionism, the myths we tell ourselves about writing, and what it takes to step out of the shadows and start again—even when you're terrified.

Also: behind-the-scenes bloopers, because starting is always the hardest part.

What if the meaning of life isn't hiding in some grand revelation, but in your fuzzy white blanket on a Friday night? In this inaugural episode, Michelle lights a pine candle (literally and metaphorically) and asks: why are we so obsessed with happiness when pain is basically part of the package deal of being alive?

Spoiler alert: This isn't a self-help show. Michelle doesn't have a 10-point plan to fix you. She doesn't even have one point. What she does have is curiosity about what lives on the other side of misery-- that space where grief holds hands with love, where meaning hides in the mundane, and where we learn to work with the flame instead of just getting burned.

Expect philosophy, psychology, sacred ordinary moments, and the occasional existential question asked at 1 AM. Also expect bloopers, because Michelle is very tired and her microphone smells like pine.

Welcome to a living conversation about meaning, eudaimonia (pronounced however you want), and what it means to be deeply, messily human.