01. My Full Story: 0 to 26

(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to a chat with Uma, with me, your host, Uma R. Chatterjee. On this podcast, I bring together all of my roles as a neuroscientist, researcher, board certified mental health peer specialist, mental health advocate, community builder, and a survivor with lived experience to bring you honest and unfiltered conversations, exploring our true human experiences in their fullest form. Every week, I'm bringing you conversations bridging the gap on all things neuroscience, psychology, mental health, lived experience, advocacy, psychedelics, and more. This is a space for raw unfiltered truth, to truly explore ourselves for who we are and how we are. I cannot wait to connect with you, answer all of your questions and co-create this with you. Welcome to a chat with Uma. Hello, my beautiful friends. Welcome to episode one of the show, A Chat with Uma. I am firstly just so honored and grateful that you're joining me here today on this journey, on this exploration, on this new show. And I just can't wait to explore everything with you and co-create this space with whatever is most supportive, what is most expansive, what brings us together the most, and what interests us the most, and where we can be just the most honest, authentic, vulnerable, and true versions of ourselves and how we look at ourselves in each other and how we create space with each other. So, hmm, I am so excited to do this with you. And I decided to kick off the show with after a lot of deliberation and just wanting to talk about all the things, all the topics. I decided to start the show, actually, with an overview of my life story. And that's for a lot of reasons. I think because ultimately how I navigate hosting and creating the show for my side, the conversations that I look out for and that I bring to the table myself are really all coming from my vantage point, my lenses, my experiences, and my knowledge and awareness, which is limited and as much as I'd love to just be an open and complete vessel of everything, I totally acknowledge my biases and limitations and also just my perspective and what interests me and why I'm talking about anything I'm talking about. So, to really set the scene and the tone and the foundation for the show, I think it's worth finally giving a comprehensive timeline and story for myself. I know a lot of you who are listening to this probably know different aspects of it because different situations and different vocations and roles that I have and different speaking engagements I do all warrant different parts of my story being talked about that are relevant. But I've gotten questions a lot about someone, for example, who knows about my cancer journey, but then here's that I was in a cult and it's like, oh my gosh, tell me about the cult or hearing about my experience with OCD and then bonding with me over that, but then through social media or something else talking about being a neuroscientist then asking about that experience. And so, I think it's worth for the first time in my own space finally putting this comprehensive story out there. Now, before I get into the story though, I do want to acknowledge a few limitations and things to consider when hearing the story. One is that as much as I would like this to be the most comprehensive, open, full version of my story, as a human being, what we have to acknowledge and understand is that the story that I'm telling you right now is the version of the story that makes most sense to me given the ways that I've introspected and reflected and looked back and have worked on my own experience of healing and making sense of what has been my life. And so, the things that I have selectively looked at are the things I'm gonna talk about and there can be so many things that I may have a different perspective on later or things that I haven't even thought about that might be important or formative or just part of my story that I might not even have access to right now or might have just not thought about. So, this is a version of my story as someone who is 26 years old, is a neuroscientist, has a psychology background, is a mental health peer specialist, is an advocate, is someone with a ton of lived experience who has been through cancer almost dying, living with several chronic illnesses being through occult, being through a lot of abuse and reconciling all of that and putting all of that in perspective is how I look at my story. So, we might totally revisit this if I have some giant breakthrough or some different true directory in life, which of course I will have. I'm only 26, so I have no idea what the future will hold. If there's anything I've learned about life in my 26 years, it's that I have no idea what is coming. So, that's a long-winded way of saying that take my story and the lens and the insights I've gained and the way I present my story with a grain of salt because I am too. And I'll also tell this story based on questions I've been asked to because I have so many questions in my DMs and emails and meeting people in person through my peer support groups. Just everything I do, I get questions about my story. So, I'm really keeping those in mind, the ones that have been asked the most and things that have prompted me to look at things in ways I haven't previously considered before. So, that is an example of the value of co-creating this together because anything I share is only as good as the conversations that we get to have with each other and the things that you ask me and the things that you bring up that you wanna explore and talk about. And so, thank you in advance for helping me tell my story. And I'm excited to keep doing this video. I'll also say that the way I'm approaching sharing my story right now is as much of a high level overview as I can do so that I can just be comprehensive and make this make sense, while also giving enough detail to paint a picture and elucidate the points that I'm trying to make. But if you feel like I'm not giving all the detail about a specific situation, that's because, you know, a high level story, if I were to go into the depths of the details of every single thing, this would be like a 30 podcast episode series and I don't think you don't want that. So, for the purposes of the story, it's gonna be more high level, but I do promise you that for different parts of this experience and different themes and different, just crazy shit that's happened, I will do deep dives. Whatever you'll want, the things that I'm already thinking about, the things I've asked the most about, I will absolutely be doing severed episodes, deep dives into those topics. And of course, I interrelated, but it will be a lot more focused on that. So, keep that in mind when I am telling my story. Another pre-frame for how I'm sharing the story is that oftentimes I will talk about how things were for me in the moment with the perspective of what I thought was going on and the awareness I had at the moment and then I will also add in the retrospective insight into what I know now and at least the perspective thus far that I have gathered about that situation to paint a picture of what it was like for me at the time and what I figured out was probably to the best of my knowledge going on at the time. And I will try to make it as clear as I can when I'm talking about how I felt and what I thought at the time and when I'm looking at it with insight. So, without further ado, let's get into the life of Uma from birth to now and now being 26 in 2022. For anyone listening in the future. Also, keep in mind that if I'm not going into too much detail about specific people, naming specific people, it's out of respect for people and their own autonomy and their own experiences, especially living people. I can only really speak in integrity about my own perception and my own lived experience and that is valid and so I'm going to do it. But I'm also considering being respectful of as many humans as I can. I'll probably. maybe naming some people, but overall, just know that that's why there may be some omissions. That being said, let's get into it. Okay, let's start at the very, very beginning. And for me, that's not even when I was born. That was more so the situation I was born into. So my parents both immigrated here from India in the 10 to 15 years before I was born. They're actually quite old when I was born. There were 35 and 41 and there's a reason for that. They both came from lots of lack and struggle and just hard lives in their own respected rights. And they also were very much the outliers in their communities and their families and kind of like the black sheep in different ways. So they both had that in common and it kind of ends there with what they had in common. They were both married really late as a result of that and other things. And they actually had an arranged marriage because for South Asian Indian communities, that's very common. So they had an arranged marriage and they, let's just say they should not 100% should not have been together. They very much did not get along. They were not compatible. They very much just like each other and that came out very eruptively. They had a very unstable and unhealthy relationship. Yet they stayed together out of obligation. This is all prior to me being born with a lot of turmoil that maybe we can get into another day. But that's honestly like its own drama series. But anyway, they stayed together out of fear and guilt from the community and their families because as per culture, divorce was not an option. It was not allowed. It was frowned upon and it was just an embarrassment to their families. So they were together. Yet they avoided having children for a while because they didn't want to because they didn't want to be together or create a family. But once again, familial pressure resulted in them being forced to have children because they were both the oldest in their families. And that was what was expected of them. So they did. And here I am. So suffice it to say, I was born into a lot of verbal and physical abuse and hatred. And just an unhealthy environment, that's not to say that my parents didn't or don't love me. It's an aunt. That is true. And they were doing the best they could. And that best was a very horrible situation. I also didn't speak till I was around three or four years old, which at the time my parents thought was because I had been exposed to so many languages. I was around like four to five languages at a time because of being an immigrant household. And Indian culture comes with the few languages. So they just kind of thought that I was taking into many languages. But in reality, in retrospect, I actually just was developmentally challenged in that way. And there's something called Einstein syndrome, which has to do with people who don't speak for a while in their childhood. But do not follow the trajectory of most children who do not speak in their childhood, who have other developmental struggles or disabilities. I ended up not having that. In fact, people with Einstein's syndrome end up having the same or better outcomes as the average children and often are on the gifted spectrum. So that ended up being me. But we didn't know that at the time. So I thought that to be interesting as part of my childhood. And it really shaped kind of how I navigated being a young kid. I didn't have words outwardly. So I didn't really learn how to express my emotions or verbalize things and communicate in an effective way. And I very much lived in my inside world. I had a lot of thoughts and feelings that I couldn't get out. And I felt alone and confused and overwhelmed all the time. In retrospect, again, I also am and was a very highly sensitive child. In fact, there's a theory called the Orchid and the Danilion theory, which basically talks about children who are Danilions, who are the typical children, most people, who are able to survive and thrive in any given environment and are pretty resilient, not in that they go through a lot and they're strong, but that they can handle kind of whatever and they're not affected much by their outward environment unless it's very severe and very, you know, just the extremes of human experience. And then there are the Orchids, who are incredibly sensitive, incredibly easily overwhelmed, incredibly perceptive, and they tend to be very affected by their environment, in utero, in life, etc. And what's interesting about Orchids is that depending on the environment they're in and how they are nurtured as an Orchid, they can either end up on one or the other end of the spectrum of humanity and existence. They either end up having the worst outcomes in the worst scenarios where they are not supported and they usually, you know, end up with the most illnesses, the most physical and mental illnesses. They are of the people who end up with the most substance abuse disorders and, you know, the people who just have very extreme outcomes of homelessness and, you know, just just the worst things you can think of. They also, though, on the flip side, if they are nurtured and supported and end up in a generally helpful environment, end up having the best outcomes of society. They end up being the highest earners, the most innovative, the most productive, the most creative, and just the most flourishing and thriving people out there. And they also have the best health outcomes, better than the average person, which I find better than the resilient dandelions, which I find really interesting. And this concept is something I'm learning about now through my own treatment and research as well. So I'm applying that to the past. But what I should make clear is that nobody had any concept of this. Everyone was in survival mode. We were in, you know, economic, relative poverty. We were in just steeped in abuse and surviving survival mode. So this was not a consideration at the time. So I was navigating life, being so overwhelmed, so confused, so mentally ill, physically ill, and no one really knew that it was going on or what to do with me, or that it wasn't even a thing. So that's something the framework for most of my childhood in life. And then other than that, I mean, I went to school at normal ages. I was in so many activities because a huge priority for my parents was to kind of compensate for what they didn't get in their childhoods in terms of opportunities and being able to compete in things and learn things and skills. And so part of the American dream was for their children to do that. So what little resources they did have they dedicated entirely to me, being in literally every single activity you could think of any given moment of any day when it wasn't in school, through elementary school. So I was in many forms of competitive dance, many forms of competitive singing because I showed high aptitude for that growing up. I was, I almost got my black belt in Taekwondo, moved right before that. We'll get into that. I was on math teams, spelling teams, swim teams, just anything you could think of I wasn't. And so I didn't really have friends. I didn't have hobbies. I didn't really play or learn how to play or be like a typical kid. I just did stuff all the time, all the time. And so I really learned that my value came from performing, especially because I wasn't so many competitive things. And I did so well that it became if I did things that I got approval or rather I didn't get demeaned. Even though I didn't really want to do most of them, I didn't choose to do most of them. I was forced into it. But I did them. And I kind of, my whole childhood was do stuff, get awarded, get by or known. So that was a big part of what framed how I navigated life moving forward and the issues that arose later on. I also didn't have friends. Really, I was very much considered a weirdo. I felt completely isolated. I think a lot of factors contributed to that. Mainly that I was neurodivergent. I was an orchid. I asked questions and talked about things. It didn't make sense. I probably fixated on stuff a lot. I was wondering the meaning of life while people playing with their barbies. I just didn't know how to relate to kids and I just felt so less than because I was made fun of so much and I was bullied because that's what kids do. And I was also pretty big as a kid, which later on we learned, had a lot of physical reasons for, but it didn't really make sense because I was doing so many physical activities and my food intake was severely restricted as a result of being big because that was what the correction attempted was by my caregivers and then myself and yet I just was a big kid so was made fun of that for that as well. And I was just very fearful of everything, like everything was massively fearful, doing anything, thinking about anything. And I guess this is as good of a time as any to bring up mental and physical illness. I don't ever remember feeling okay. In retrospect, and having awareness of what mental illness looks like, particularly OCD and depression, first, that's what I've had in my whole life as long as I can consciously remember. I had been doing severe compulsions since as early as four or five years old and I remember contemplating not existing and wanting to dip out of life as early as I can remember it because everything felt too hard and painful. And that's really all I had, but as a kid you don't really know. You know what? I'll rephrase that. As a kid, I had no idea what any of that meant because I just didn't grow up being taught to survey my mental state or look at how I'm doing, how I'm feeling, anything, right? If you're in survival mode around your family and everything's about getting by and doing and what you look like outwardly because that was a huge focus from my Indian background. Our community was so focused on outward competitiveness and comparison and your value was entirely derived, at least for me and my family, by what I did compared to somebody else. There was nothing inherent. I was never taught inherently that I was worthy for any reason. So all of that to say, I didn't really have an awareness of what feelings were like of surveying my internal state. I was never asked how I'm doing or taught to look at it. I didn't know that I was experiencing anything abnormal other than really looking at other people and they look like they were fine. So I just as a child does made everything about me that I was the problem and I was choosing something wrong and I had no idea nor did my surroundings really look for any signs of distress or label it as such to be able to have the resources or wherewithal to get me any sort of help. So I was just navigating life like this is what life is like and I have to figure out how to make it work or I won't. So that's in some my childhood being get it to so much more, you know, the underpinnings of my food restriction and performance and all of those things, but this sums it up for now. Then moving into kind of pre-adolescence, my parents had a massive falling out. I mean there was already tons of abuse and I mean the police were over all the time for domestic abuse and my parents, you know, lived on different floors of the house and it was just a taller situation. But at one point close to before sixth grade started, my one of my parents left and left from New York came to Texas and so my other parent decided we were going to do that as well to make sure that my the parent that moved didn't just escape financial responsibility because another part of my upbringing was finances were at the forefront of everything. I was told about our financial situation from as long as I can remember understanding what numbers were and I was constantly aware of how close we were to needing another home or if we needed or wanted for anything we could potentially be homeless and so money was at the forefront of our life and that dictated us moving to Texas. So sixth grade was pretty okay I mean things kind of started going more downhill in terms of my mental health was becoming a real problem but it was just kind of attributed to being a problematic American teenager who was too privileged is the way it was looked at in my situation. But it was getting worse and I was also starting to get physically worse in that like I said before I was in so many different activities and I was very very active yet my body was always big and I really couldn't lose weight and I was really tired all the time but I kind of just thought I was tired because I was doing a lot but it got to the point where I couldn't really do as many physical activities anymore because my body was just shutting down and I was getting slower and bigger and it wasn't making sense and so that's really when in retrospect what we now know to be autoimmune diseases were really growing and taking further form and starting to scream in my body. And OCD was also getting worse in that there was more for it to attach to because I was starting to have more time rather than being consumed by every minute every second of my day being in some sort of activity. So I started to notice it more without noticing or without realizing it was OCD of course. So in sixth grade things were getting worse and because of things starting to get worse particularly at home with me and a lot of dissonance and really me starting to question outwardly a lot of my parents in the way they navigate the world and how nothing made sense that was seen as very disruptive and very disrespectful and my parents were trying to think of if they needed to send me to boarding school in India or at least they threatened me with it. So for the time being they the summer after sixth grade they sent me to India with my little brother for the whole summer to stay with different family members and just like have a break from me and I had never gone to India alone. I'd only gone a few times in my life and it had been with my parents so but I was 12 and the airlines would let me do it so me and my brother went to India and what I'll say about that whole situation content warning about sexual abuse is that I stayed with a family member and was sexually abused at night every day for a month and I was 12. I didn't have any concept of what sexual abuse was. I didn't know anything about my body. I didn't know anything about sexual health, sexual education, like literally nothing other than seeing some stuff on TV occasionally and not knowing what any of it was. All I remember is just being in complete terror and my body knew something was very very off and it really imprinted into me. I didn't know what it was though and so it happened and then I went on the rest of the summer with that experience and that fear and then I came home and I decided to tell one of my parents about what happened without knowing or calling it sexual abuse. I just told them what happened and how much it scared me and basically I was told that I was probably imagining it and I was probably misunderstanding it because I didn't really receive physical affection at home by my parents so I didn't know what normal physical affection was. So basically I was written off and that was the end of that. What resulted from that seventh grade onwards was just a complete downward spiral of me and everything. I simultaneously was in the highest achieving classes I had been in the gifted program my whole life. I had been in advanced classes, skipped grades and certain things was just naturally apt for school on one hand but I starting seventh grade lost pretty much any ability to focus or function or do any work or you know do anything and I just stopped performing and so all I was writing on was my natural capabilities or intelligence or whatever was stuck in my brain I guess and I also just became even more withdrawn from here. people because before I was isolated and alone but I tried to make friends and I would find my way as the odd person in two certain groups and situations but starting seventh grade just lost all interest in friendships especially because talking about what I now know to be my depression and my mental state really scared people and I think the worst of it was that I started self-harming very badly in seventh grade and I luckily had a teacher who forever will be in my heart. She was my gifted and talented teacher I had her for two periods a day. She started noticing that things were changing and she even noticed the signs of self-harmed and decided to take me under her wing and she also knew that my parents were not the safest place to talk about any of this because she tried and it was just met with complete dismissal and avoidance and so she knew I really had nobody else to support me and so she I mean she didn't know about the sexual abuse I didn't talk about it because I didn't have words for it and I had just been told that it was nothing I didn't even assess or have any connection to how as a seventh grader how that might impact my well-being but really taking a broken person who was already pretty kind of dysfunctional and then dumping that on there and it just became a complete shitstorm. Needless to say though she was there for me as best as she could and that was one small lifeline that I will forever be grateful for and she told me a quote it's probably a cliche quote but it was the only form of support recognizing where I was at at the time which she kept telling me to not put a permanent solution to a temporary problem and by that she was referring to dying by suicide for whatever I was going through right now which is something that was at the top of my mind all the time and so I think with her support is how I had any sort of lifeline to hold on to moving forward but I only got to have her in my life for seventh and eighth grade and so that's kind of what seventh and eighth grade look like. Another super relevant part of my childhood in relation to stuff I've already talked about is that I was a competitive singer and dancer and the dancing I was actually better at than the singing oddly enough because of what happens later you'll hear but the dancing kind of fizzled out because my body started deteriorating throughout early adolescence but the singing is something that stuck and I was very very competitive at it as a child I just apparently while I didn't talk for a while I would hear anything and I would just start like vocalizing it in exact replication of it and my parents found that interesting and noticed that about me so they took me to a very well-known Indian singing teacher in New York who heard me sing the Barney song but like verbatim because it's kind of one of the only songs I knew at the time and decided to take it under her wing and from there I was put in adult singing situations as a child I didn't understand what I was singing really but in retrospect what we know now is that I have perfect pitch and so I was able to just recreate anything I heard and I also I guess had a voice that people found to be good whatever that means and so I was labeled as a prodigy and I was just kind of told to do things and I did and it was to the point where there's a very very famous Indian singer named Pundit Juss Raj you can look him up he was looking to adopt me and have me as his protégé and like travel with him and be trained as like the next you know Indian classical vocalist of the world and I was 10 and I was like hell no I'm not doing that in my reasoning for that at the time was that if they didn't eat meat and I didn't want to become a vegetarian so thank you meat for keeping me safe at the moment I get I get but that's just to illustrate to you the level of what my singing career started as at a very young age and then it kept going because it didn't go away with my physical abilities and in this really feeds into another aspect of my childhood that was very formative for me which was being a child of immigrants and on one hand being at home and being completely insulated by my culture and due to in retrospect I know a lot of the discrimination and racism and hardships that my parents endured by being in this country and being made to feel other they were very incentivized to keep me insulated by the culture that they were raised in and so I grew up till about 11 not really having any exposure to Western culture except for Disney Channel and random things I would learn from school by listening to people talk about things like I knew Brittany Spears's name but I didn't really know who she was or anything about pop culture in general and that really carries over to my life now because I to this day have so many references I don't understand or things I haven't watched cartoons I don't know random events that happen in the world and I'm still learning so much I have such a backlog I feel like to catch up on with references but me to say I was very much torn between two cultures morally and culturally and what not because on one hand we had everything at home and the rules that were prescribed by Indian society and expectations of what a woman is of what my role as a child is what I'm supposed to do for my family a very collectivist and insulated culture and then we had the outside world where I was at school every single day and exposed to the people around me who I was made to feel otherwise so I was incentivized to go more the route of being on the Indian side because I was made to feel so other and I didn't understand yet that was the culture I was being raised and I was also really raised to see that outside culture as bad because they had different values and they did things differently and I was just following what I was told at home while also questioning it because a common theme of my whole story is that I kind of question everything all the time in my head but I didn't really know to do with it so I very much lean towards the Indian side till I was about 11 and moved to Texas and became more of an adolescent and gain more exposure via the internet and technology and venturing into different friend groups and trying to find myself and also going through a lot of abuse and losing a lot more trust in the side of the Indian part of my life because there was even more compounded mistrust in my family and in the community and culture that was supposed to support me and keep me safe yet all I met or all I found from them and all I was met with really was judgment and comparison and disdain and fear especially for being different and being outspoken about being different so I really shaped how I navigated moving into teenagerhood and high school also in the transition from middle school to high school is da da da when I joined the religious cult and we'll definitely do a deep dive in the whole cult situation how that happened and whatnot but just as an overview of how that came about in context of my whole story I had questioned everything about everything my whole life as I talked about with my upbringing I was raised by immigrants with culture and language and religion that made no sense to me for many reasons like it just wasn't explained to me I didn't feel a tether to religion it was just a lot of performative acts that were very fear mongeries so if I didn't do these prayers and sit and do these things then I would fail my class or I wouldn't win this award or whatnot and it was really sad to me because I was raised around a lot of people from different faiths especially Christian and Judaism faiths where people's the children seemed at least to be very enthralled by the religion or very committed and had a lot of conviction and could explain it a lot better so I always wondered why I didn't have that and if it meant that my religion was stupid also I was made fun of for it for being a minority so that definitely fed into my kind of rejection of and the incentive to question my religion. But really, I question everything, including my culture and religion. So from around nine, ten years old onwards, I started exploring other religions. And I kept asking different faith leaders and people the question of why do bad things happen to good people. And I never got a satisfactory answer for that. And we can go into depth of all the questions and answers, but at another episode, but suffice it to say, I never got an answer. So I kept exploring and depth other religions, trying to look for some hope. And this really was compounded after being sexually abused, because, you know, once I devolved into becoming less and less functional and less and more and more traumatized and mentally ill and struggling to continue to exist, I was really looking for a reason to continue. And then, right as I finished middle school, I was taken by force to an event where a white person was talking about Hinduism, which was full circle, the religion that I was raised in. And this, because a white person was talking about Hinduism, I was really intrigued because up to this point, the only exposure I'd ever had about anything Hinduism was Indian people. So because of that inherent white supremacy and upliftment of white people, because at the time, I had this belief for better, for worse, because of everything I'd experienced that white people have figured out white people are better than me. Because a white person was talking about Hinduism, I took it seriously and I listened and I asked the question, why do bad things happen to good people? And this warped concept of karma was explained to my 14-year-old self about how very confidently and certainly they said, well, whatever you do in your past life, you reap the consequences in your next life. And at that point, that was the closest thing I could find to an answer. And that is how I got in the cult. And I started participating very strongly behind my family's back. And it was all consuming. I always had doubts in my mind, but the cult really convinced me that doubts were a symptom of the perils of the world and were a trap. In the very trap that the cult really taught me, it was a solution to get out of, which was misery and being stuck in this material world and not transcending to the divine world where everything was free and beautiful and perfect. So I kept myself quiet and placated them and hoped that I was just going to become good enough. And OCD really played a huge role in that because all the uncertainty, all the doubt that I felt was preyed on by the cult by providing me with the semblance of certainty that kind of sort of made sense, but not really. So that's the stage for getting into high school. I had joined a cult. I was severely mentally and physically ill. I had virtually no support system. And I was performing but barely and barely getting by. And that was basically high school. I engaged in a lot of exploration of rebellion in high school as well. Rebellion in retrospect of two things. One of my culture and everything that I had been taught was bad, including following the footsteps of my peers and doing things like partying and drinking or even having friends that were of other races or, you know, just doing all the rebellious things that teenagers do, but were completely blacklisted as, you know, you'd be disowned if you did any of these things in my culture, my very conservative strict culture. And also in rebellion of the cult because a lot of these things work in the complete antithesis of the cult. But I told myself that I was getting all of these "bad things" out of my system so that I could, you know, purge those desires and then I could just fully dedicate myself to the cult and, you know, go live there and serve them. So I kind of looked at high school if nothing else is just a time to get it out of my system and whatnot. And the only really ambition I had in high school was to get out, to get the fuck out of where I was. And all I really thought was gonna come of my life at the time was potentially pursuing a career in law because one of the only things I really did other than singing competitively a lot in high school was I was on the debate team and the constitutional law team. And although like I really struggled to do any work for it, I got by on sheer luck and talent in arguing and making conversation. And that was kind of the only place I was getting, you know, awards and was hopeful that maybe I could make somewhat of a difference in the world if I managed to live through what I was going through. And I was really passionate about social justice and remedying so much of the judgment of people with different lives and different identities, which I then realized I could just be a kinder person. And the law wasn't as much of the problem at the time as was just people's attitudes. So there wasn't really a strong basis for me to go to law school or become a lawyer. And also I was too broken to really do anything at the time. And in terms of mental health, by the time I entered high school, things were getting really, really, really bad. And the self-harm suicide attempts, all of that was kind of seen as me being problematic and me being whiny and being spoiled from being in this country and having too much privilege. So nothing was really done about it until I was committed to the mental hospital for the first time when I was 14. And long story short, court and center imposed, like legally imposed therapy and medication was told to my parents that I had to go through. And so the solution to appease that was to just like take me once and then I was on like a dosage of medication that didn't actually do anything. And I tried seeing some therapists, but I oftentimes was just able to see them a few times and then I was taken away because I was financially not the one in charge of it, nor was I in charge of my medical care. I did see one therapist a few times that I really connected with and her response to me was to get emancipated. And I made the mistake of telling my parents that because they were so abusive and that was my, you know, almost legitimacy of everything happening and being abusive. And so I never saw that therapist again. So really not much mental health help. I was then hospitalized in mental hospital a second time when I was around 15 or 16. And those were under different circumstances actually. One of my caregivers lied out of retribution to get me arrested for something I didn't do and it ended up being that I was sent to the mental hospital for the second time. And once again, they could tell that I had some severe issues and they imposed legally that I needed to go see someone. And so once again, I saw someone for the bare minimum amount that would appease the legal system and then that kind of went away again. So it was a shit show and I was in a cult and I was barely getting by. So going into college was a confluence of being pretty hopeless about life except for potentially succeeding through the cult to escape my suffering and go the cult way. And also really having no actual professional or career aspirations whatsoever because at the time I just you know was passively suicidal and didn't I was just getting by and looking back, I can see that I really didn't think I was going to be alive. I wasn't thinking about living because I was trying so hard to just survive and get by moment by moment hoping that something would just magically save me, something being religion, I think. at the time. So I started at UT Dallas because I was somehow able to get in there amongst, you know, most of my grades. Actually, I had also gotten into American University in Washington, D.C. because while my grades were suboptimal, I did do really well by luck on standardized testing, by like literally just my brain sort of kind of working on its own and also more importantly, with American, it's a really big like pre-law and law school, it's in D.C. And I had won awards in debate and constitutional law through high school, including from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a I won a national Supreme Court competition and so I had the route of potentially going to American and pursuing law but I had very little in me to actually go do anything so I didn't go. And financially it also, I had a partial scholarship but not a full way to make it through and I was at this point completely financially independent for a while. So I went to UTD instead with really just the goal of getting the hell out of where I was from my home and just maybe scraping by to get a degree so that ultimately I could go be full-time in the cult and do something to serve that mission. And early on I kind of realized like UTD probably wasn't going to happen but I thought maybe with enough bullpower I could somehow pass but for two years I tried to function and I could barely get out of bed. I mean I was so physically and mentally ill with no diagnoses of anything except depression and I had started going to the school psychiatrist and therapist to get proper care because I had not had that through my childhood or adolescence and I mean it really wasn't working. Now we know it's for a lot of reasons but also I just didn't have the diagnoses I needed of what I was actually going through beyond depression. And then physically I had hardly any healthcare growing up and I was just disintegrating physically but I had no idea why and I didn't have access to proper treatment and so after two years I had pretty much failed all my classes. I had a 1.83 GPA and I fully believe that I just was not capable of anything academically. I didn't belong there. I had no purpose and I just had to go do something I was good at because this wasn't it and I need to get out of there. I thought there was the problem with no context of physically and mentally being dysfunctional and being incapable of doing it. I mean I would go to class and if I ever made it to class I would go through the cycle of sitting on my hands trying to not compulsively write down every single word that the professor would say and then I would fail and then I would do that and then I would freak out because I didn't hear a word they were saying because I was so busy writing it down and formatting it that I would just record the whole class and tell myself I'd go home and listen to it and write everything down and memorize every single word because I thought that's what retaining memory was it was actually a form of an example of OCD for me and then I could sustain that and so all I could do was work and I should also mention I was a psychology major at the time because the only real interest I had was in figuring out what was wrong with me and why I suffered so much see a common thread in how I get myself into things me search so that was two years of my life and then I left and I decided to start music school because the one thing I seemed to be good at was singing and while I had no formal American training on things like reading music or you know even terminology of what pitch or notes or anything was I had two things going for me I had a perfect pitch so I made up for all my informal or my lack of formal education by just being able to identify any note anywhere anytime replicate anything like a robot and was recognized for that and then also I had a long standing history of performing and winning awards and for my singing so that those two things both got me into Berkeley College of Music and I did that while I worked at Starbucks was just kind of getting by still physically and mentally with no real understanding of what was going on with me and just hoping that it would stick and I took on the identity of a singer songwriter and started performing and recorded a single was working on an album to the best of my ability I started performing everywhere and I ended up playing three sold out shows at the House of Blues that I had lined and I was really just writing on my innate talent all the while being completely fixated on just performing perfectly and having panic disorder and having panic attacks any time before I performed and really just gritting my teeth and suffering through it because I thought that's the only thing I could really do so that was from age 20 to 22 and then during that time also is when I met my now husband and what's important about that amongst you know all the reasons why my husband would be important to me in my life is that he met me right when I was at my worst at my first attempt at college feeling really lonely and confused being fully immersed in the cold being sick is all hell without knowing what was going on with me and also just being really isolated and not really ever feeling understood and feeling like a complete alien on this planet in the way I navigated and thought about the world and then I met him and he was the first person in my whole life that I just felt instantly like we completely just understood each other and irrespective of how this was going to work out on paper and if we were going to be able to have a relationship I just knew that he was the person for me and he would forever change my life and so I just fell in love with him instantly and was not in a place to be in a healthy or normal relationship and it showed but we stayed connected and he was my best friend and my favorite person and a lot of things happened from meeting him. One of the biggest ones was I was 19 when I met him and then you know in being in connection with him I realized that I couldn't tell him about my involvement in the religious group I was in the cold and that's because I knew deep down that it didn't make sense and there were so many plot holes and questions and issues I mean vague right now but we'll get into it when I talk about the cold basically like legal things and if you looked up this group you would see just a lot of about the organization that I had been brainwashed to think about and talk about differently and also just the philosophy of the cult itself like if I talked about it with him I would be inadvertently raising the questions that I was conditioned to not ask or talk about or address and he would ask me those questions and I would either have to lie or be honest and still stay a part of it and that really got to me after a while and also part of the cult was this belief that you're not supposed to have any material attachments to people in the world because it was all a distraction especially if they weren't in the cult because it was all a distraction and would keep you from ascending to God realization in their minds so a relationship was a no no it was just like an absolute taboo and so I knew that this relationship would be a complete challenge to my commitment to the cult and I decided because after a lot of turmoil and a lot of fear that I could not not explore this relationship and if this exploration of this relationship meant that I needed to distance myself from the organization out of shame for a little bit then I had to do it because it was so compelling that it would either be a distraction from my religious path or I would be lying. And so what I told myself was that I had to explore this relationship and I'm doing myself a favor religiously because I am going to let it burn me. It's going to ultimately go to shit and show me why it the cult was right about relationships. And then I would have once again gotten it out of my system in quotes and then I could fully commit myself to the cult. So I told myself that and started my relationship with him and started music school and was just kind of waiting for it to fizzle out. And while we're married six years later, so there's that. But anyway, that was all happening. I was in a relationship with him. We were living together. I was music school. I was really, really, really struggling and aimless and I put myself in some really horrible professional situations to get me by during that time. And part of our relationship and living together made me realize that I had some very strange abnormal behaviors and ways of thinking and living. And I kind of only realized that by living with him and seeing the difference in how we navigated life and him noticing and watching me do things and reflecting them back to me in a compassionate but confused way. And me realizing for the first time that I have OCD. So I figured that out around 21 and decided that for the sake of our relationship and the sake of me wanting to be maybe more functional. Like maybe this was a solution to all my problems. I brought this question of OCD to a psychologist who told me that yes, I have OCD but this person was not trained in OCD. So they treated me with modalities that were actually harmful to OCD and didn't address even like close to the majority of what my actual obsessions and my compulsions were. So I was just not helped by it. Let's wrap it up for now. So I basically struggling really badly with undiagnosed and untreated OCD, PTSD, bulimia, depression, anxiety, self-harm, panic disorder, skin picking, a whole lot of things. And trying to make this music thing work and it's just I'm just flailing around and I have no enjoyment of life and I'm just dead inside and miserable and basically so so tired and slow and inflamed and in pain and feeling like I'm just disintegrating and kind of waiting for life to take me away. Really that's the best way I could describe my life up to 22, 23 and then as fate would have it. I hadn't gone to the doctor for a while because I didn't really have proper financial capabilities or medical care but I realized I probably should go to the doctor for some in a few years and I went and I was 22 and they found a lump in my throat and long story short it took six months of misdiagnosis because of my age and different people looking at it and different treatments but finally they figured out six months later that it was actually cancer and I needed immediate treatment. So diagnosed with thyroid cancer and that was the catalyst for me to quit my job at the time which was very very let's just say traumatic and very unhealthy and not good for me and I quit that job and then I went through surgery and treatment for the cancer and I was at a complete low in my life because on top of all of my suffering, all my everything I was now going through cancer at 22 and it was really serious it was really hard and to top it all off I had the cancer in my neck and so the surgery they did was to take out my whole thyroid gland and one of the side effects and the rare risks of the surgery is damaged to vocal cords and vocal nerves which as a singer in music school trying to make it as a singer songwriter at the time was you know a huge fear of mine and as fate would have it that's what happened. I woke up from surgery and number one I was told that my surgery took an extra hour and a half ish beyond what was expected because in taking out my thyroid gland they realized that I had probably had Hashimoto's thyroiditis my whole life which explained a lot about the mysterious undiagnosed untreated physical horrific issues I had had for so long and as a result of having Hashimoto's for so long that was untreated my thyroid gland was glued to everything around it from years and years of scar tissue and so my surgery took longer to scrape my thyroid out as my surgeon told me and in that my things were damaged and things were messed up and part of that was my vocal nerves which I woke up and for the next three to four months I could hardly talk and be heard by anything and it was horrific and you know we thought maybe it was just a slow recovery and eventually it would come back but it didn't and so I had to realize that I probably was never going to be able to sing again and there goes my singer somerader identity which was a huge huge crisis and turning point for me because on top of everything else I had gone through I had now lost the one thing that I thought I was good at that the one thing that I thought I could maybe do with myself the one thing I had any self-esteem and it showed me that I really had no sense of purpose or self-esteem outside of the one thing I thought I could do and the one thing I was worth a shit for and so I was really faced with on top of you know cancer that also they found spots of metastasis and I went through a lot of misdiagnosis and mistreatment and trauma that we can talk about another day but at the end of the day dealing with such horrific life-threatening cancer at 22 and then losing my entire identity to it I was left with what the actual fuck is my life I have nothing almost I have reached an all-time low and you know through going through cancer and like maxing out my insurance and meeting copious amounts of justified psychotherapy to help try to deal with what it is I was going through at least through that I was finally diagnosed with PTSD not from just the cancer but from things throughout my whole life that had been untreated and I was able to start engaging in actual consistent therapy and treatment for better for worse as we'll get into later but I was at I was at least looking at that and realizing I needed to do that to actually continue to live and also another silver lining from the cancer was that I finally got you know so many evaluations of my entire body and my dysfunction that I had not gotten in the past because I didn't have access and this kind of forced me to do so and forced my providers to do so because we needed full evaluations of me to figure out what was going on the full picture medically my medications and whatnot right so in that there was a lot it was just of hitting the jackpot of all the things that we had previously missed in my life the fact that I had four autoimmune diseases four autoimmune diseases I had fibromyalgia polycystic ovarian syndrome hydrodynamic hydrodynamic superativa skin cyst autoimmune disease and Hashimoto's and just tons of dysfunction in my body all the different all the different psychological diagnoses the trauma that came out it all kind of just came to a head at 23 like as I was going through the cancer treatment and had you know not really a job and no school no anything I was just going through treatment and at a complete standstill at the time and I'm going to be brief about this because we'll go into this in another episode but that is when I started experiencing psychedelics because I was at an all-time low and I had been afraid of doing anything close to psychedelics for a long time, but at this point, hearing so many people's experiences and what was possible, I figured I had nothing to lose and psychedelics really provided me a lot of just support and insight into how I was navigating life at the time and what my real problems were beyond just what I thought they were and I've had an interesting trajectory at psychedelics, but I will say that I attribute a lot of my upturn and my pivot and my ability to come out of that situation to psychedelics and to my husband and how much love and support he, me, how much he believed in me and really showing me that this was the opportunity to revisit things I had thought were impossible in the past and just relinquish this very little I was holding on to in my life of what I thought my life was worth and what my life was supposed to be and opening up to what may be possible if I decide to stay alive and continue moving on. So middle of 2019 for context by the way, I was 23 and going through all of this and then I decided that starting January of 2020, I was going to go back to UTTD to my psychology to my 1.83 degree to just test the waters and see if it was possible for me to slowly inch my way into finishing my degree with no real plan or ideas or hope or anything but just just to see if I could do it because honestly I don't know what else I was going to do and so I did. I started back at my degree the beginning of 2020 and I took three classes, one of them being intro to neuroscience which was a class I immediately failed the first time I tried because I was like I can't do science I'm too stupid like I don't understand what a cell is like this is never going to work for me and I just went back and took that class and made an A made almost a hundred in that class and made these in my other classes too and it really challenged everything I thought about myself because I truly believe like if you had asked anybody after I had left UTTD the first time I was like I will do maybe anything else in my life I will never go back there I will never do that because I can't it's just impossible it's too much and I did that and so from there without inertia I just was like okay I guess I'll finish this degree and figure something else out at that time I had been working from home and marketing and business management just because it was something I knew how to do and was easy enough so I was like I'm just gonna get the degree and then go back and do this and figure out if life is worth living but I went and I just went hard at school also working and slowly but surely retook pretty much all the classes that I had failed minus some that I was in the lottery take and brought my GPA up from a 1.83 to a 3.517 making straight A's through all my classes and at that point I thought maybe possibly I could go become a therapist become a psychologist because I'm getting a psychology degree I seem to really care about the human brain and human mind and go be a therapist and what's interesting is that after taking that neuroscience class all I could think about and all I did was think about the brain and neuroscience and neuroplasticity and how our cells work and I had written that off as a completely written neuroscience off as a possibility for my life because I still had this belief that okay I could do psychology like I could do this side of things like I can work with the human mind I can bullshit my way enough through concepts because I didn't believe I was capable of actually learning anything but I could at least fake it but neuroscience and science like I've never done well I can never do well I can't do it I'm too stupid all the things so I just like I'm just gonna love it from the side but I'm never gonna do it and so towards the end of my bachelor's degree I decided fuck it I'm going to apply to clinical psychology programs and see if I can get accepted to a program and become a psychologist therapist whatever I've got a story that looks at me hopefully and in the process of applying I had to ask my professors for recommendation letters so I asked my neuroscience professor and he's an MD-PhD so I figured he'd be a good letter and I did really well in this class and his response to me was like I've never written a psychology recommendation letter so this is interesting and I will write it for you but I'm wondering why you are not applying to neuroscience programs because you clearly loved this class you were fantastic at it and I just imagined you do something with neuroscience and to that I was astonished because I'd never believed I was capable or even honestly even thought of it as a possibility I didn't know what what live research was I didn't know what a PhD in a biological science looked like I didn't know anything so I kind of laughed it off but agreed to at least apply to the master's program of neuroscience at my school thinking I probably won't get in so I don't even have to contend with it and then just I left it at that I applied to the master's program and then I applied to PhD programs and then I got accepted to the master's program and for the PhD programs at the time I was applying because at with a 3.0 GPA because I had not fully finished my degree and I had fully brought it up to 3.5 so my chances for getting into like the programs I really wanted to go to for psychology were not very high and so I didn't get into the top programs but I did have opportunities at kind of safer schools that I didn't really want to go to but we're was just accepting maybe I might have to do so I had the choice of my masters in neuroscience and this really scary thing or take the safer route and go to the safer psychology schools and I think for the second time in my life first time being going back to UTT the second time in my life I was like okay I'm gonna try this and I'm probably gonna completely fail and suck but whatever I'll try and I did I took the risk and I went to the master's program in neuroscience and started my semester with like no background other than my one neuroscience class I had taken science classes because I just completely avoided them like the plague and was too stupid I felt too stupid I went into these masters level neuroscience classes was a complete during the headlights was overwhelmed by fear and I had just only then started proper OCD treatment so I wasn't very good at coping with my uncertainty in fear and nonetheless with all of the fear and the uncertainty and the confusion I also felt madly in love with what I was learning and the implications of what I was learning in terms of how I'm learning about like I kept wondering when I was learning psychology and psychological principles and about how treatments were conducted for different disorders and my questions were always just but why but why but why does that work how does that work why are we getting this what's driving this in the brain and in these classes I was finding those answers I was finding a language and a lens to finally look at things at the depth that I was looking at and then bring them back to conscious experience because I'm an interdisciplinary person and I felt madly in love with with neuroscience and I had this debilitating fear at the same time and I just coexisted with both of that I then joined my lab that I'm in now the colver lab and started doing neurobiology research I'd like the cellular molecular level with mice I had never done anything like that in my life I didn't even know it existed because I grew up very nontraditionally and did not have exposure to most of these things and I dove headfirst in from that I fell in love and decided that this is what I'm going to do in some capacity the rest of my life and I'm going to relate it back to humans I really want to study the deep preclinical underpinnings of what drives this stuff and then bring it back to how I can help humans in translational ways And I started pursuing my own independent project on the side, which people don't do in academia, but I did, because I didn't know any better ignorance actually worked out in my benefit for once. And I started studying my very own disorders, comorbid PTSD and OCD, in the context of psychedelic assisted therapy and doing my own independent research and presenting that at like five conferences, winning a ton of awards, really building up in a sense like the backlog and catching up to so much of what I had missed for so long academically on my very non-traditional path. And all this while very much still struggling with my mental health and mental well-being and my physical illnesses, but getting better and getting hope and finding purpose and finding meaning after so long and really creating my own belief system and by no means being in any place of certainty or understanding of everything. And I have such a long way to go, but just my life has changed so much in this time. And I should also circle back and entrust the kind of temporary hiatus from the cult and how that turned permanent. So I left that hiatus of I'll be with my partner until it doesn't work out and then I'll come back and I never did. And slowly but surely as I built more distance from it, I started making connections and realizing it might not have been what I thought or was trying to tell myself it was and really started exploring with that space the questions and confusions and fears I had that I had suppressed for so long. And then I met a friend who was in a cult herself and started telling me about the cult labeling it a cult. And I realized how similar it sounded to my experience, but I didn't want to just identify with that without properly considering it and whatnot. And I was also then back in school and I took a social psychology class where part of the class was all learning about cults and every single thing overlapped with what the group I was in did, which was astounding. And on top of all of that, serendipitously, the therapist I was seeing who I'm still seeing, my primary psychologist who I was seeing for PTSD and EMDR treatment at the time, also happened to be a spiritual abuse and cult expert specialist in her dissertation. She developed the first spiritual abuse questionnaire that's out there in psychology. And so she seemed to be the kind of perfect person to explore this with and really come to realize that I was in a religious cult. And so of course, I never went back. But coming to realizing it was a cult took a while from leaving that time. And since then, we can go into this in a cult episode, but I have been shocked and harassed and threatened. And it's really as much as my uncertainty doesn't really let me fully believe anything. All signs point to that's a cult. And that's why I'd ever went back. The thing with leaving the cult though was that I was kind of left without a system to put all of my fear and uncertainty and this desperate need for safety and reason and security into. And I also hadn't resolved all of those needs and fears and distorted ways of thinking and my pathology within me. So it was perfect. It was a perfect situation to just glom onto something else and something I haven't talked about as publicly, which was kind of joining a second cult, the cult of spirituality and becoming involved in groups and in connection with people who were really, really abusive and also prayed on people's uncertainty and suffering, particularly with mental and physical health conditions. And we'll talk about that in depth another day. But that's just to highlight that I was in a really horrible place with my mental and physical health and dealing with the cancer and being in this space of like that spirituality cult. I was very much trying to seek understanding and insight through that lens and then started moving away from it when I started finally going down my own routes of exploration instead of trying to subscribe to other people's belief systems. And so many things made a role in that including being more honest with my husband who really helps me work through my own lenses and reflects back to me so much of what it is I'm doing and thinks just like me outside of myself. And also working in therapy, working with psychedelics and really having to be honest with myself about what it is I got myself into. So that was a huge formative experience for me through moving through the cancer and going back to school and falling in love with science and really just learning to navigate life with an open mind and creating my own sense of meaning and my own belief system and that being ever evolving. There's so many things that overlap so this is another facet of what my recent life is looked like which is becoming a board certified mental health peer specialist and how that happened was I got diagnosed with cancer in 2019 as a 22 year old and I was completely alone and confused and didn't know how to navigate the nuances of cancer at a young adult age. There seem to be so many resources for children and pediatric cancer and then a lot of resources for just older people like the typical you know picture of cancer was either a really young person or a really old person but someone navigating the depths of you know adulthood and just now building a life and dealing with cancer it just seemed so isolating and confusing and so I started seeking out support on the internet looking for people like me and I couldn't really find a place to do that or experience that support and so I decided to start some form of a support group for young adult cancer survivors and a lot of people joined and we just had like weekly informal conversations as survivors together and I felt so passionately about creating spaces and harnessing our lived experiences to create healing spaces that I tried to figure out how I could do this in a more formal and you know ethical way and just make sure after all of the trauma and abuse that I had gone through with people who had abused their power I wanted to make sure that I was doing things in a supportive way because I didn't know what I was doing and I came across something called peer support in the OCD community actually there was someone who was running mental health peer support groups by certified mental health peer specialists and I was kind of skeptical of what certified means but after doing research I realized that this was through the United States government it was through health and human services and you were fully certified as a mental health professional through each state that you went through your training from so I jumped in head first and I became a board certified mental health peer specialist went through all the training went through the internship was supervised and fully began my practice I then formalized my cancer support group the cancer fiber collective and started offering full capacity mental health peer support as well as doing one-on-one work with people and that has been such an important part of my life and something I've considered as I navigate the world and figure out how I'm building my future in this time of I suppose you would call my re-awakening or like coming back to life or I suppose even coming to life because I really wasn't alive before I've also become really involved in advocacy work and just kind of naturally becoming involved in all the different fields and subjects and spaces where I felt like my lived experience mattered to make a difference to raise awareness to help with advocacy and legislation and making a change and I felt so strongly I was living at the intersection of being a professional as a researcher and a mental health peer specialist and doing all of these things from this perspective of studying things and providing a service and I felt like my lived experience was what fueled all of that and so I really needed to harness my lived experience and make a difference and so I started doing things like mental health advocacy which I kind of had always done in some capacity or another you know supporting people around me and raising awareness for mental health since I came from a community where mental health was really not talked about in a time where most people weren't open about their mental health. So whatever awareness I had, I had been doing advocacy, but it became a lot more formalized and I felt more empowered with the titles and the rules that I had taken up in the last few years. I also became involved in the field of psychedelics because there's so much work to do in terms of raising awareness and destigmatizing the field and really bridging lived experience in anecdote with the research being done and legitimizing it undoing a lot of the harm from the past that has happened to the field unjustly. And so I started organizing and volunteering and I am now the director of media at the intercollegiate psychedelics network so that's something that's really passionate to me and a huge part of my life. And I'm also an advocate for the International OCD Foundation which has happened recently and is a culmination of just being outspoken and really bridging the gap and being really passionate about being a researcher and being someone with OCD and really bringing those together to help deepen the field, deepen the research and humanize what the condition actually is. It faces so much pervasive stigma and lack of awareness even in you know psychological sciences and neuroscience let alone the whole world and so it is just within me to do what I can to utilize all of my roles to bring awareness to this so that is all a huge part of my life. So all of the things I'm doing, all of the things I'm involved in, my research, my education, my advocacy, my work as a mental health peer specialist, organizing, creating, education, all of it brings me to what am I doing now and where am I going and on one hand I can tell you I don't actually know and on the other hand I can tell you that this will all be a part of my life in some form or fashion. So on the practical level of what am I doing next? Well I am currently going through interviews for PhD programs for neuroscience because I would really love to continue my education and make a difference in understanding the neurobiology of things like OCD and PTSD and potential therapeutics like psychedelics understanding how they work. That's something that really lights me up and I'd love to continue the research I've been doing in a more formal way. On the other hand I'm also so passionate about bringing the people, the lived experience into my education and understanding and being an advocate, being someone who raises awareness and makes a difference alongside the people doing it. And so how does that play a role in my life? I'm really trying to figure out where is the best place or places for me to go to be as much of myself as I can. And while I don't know exactly what that looks like, I have hope and a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty and a lot of hope of making that part of my life and living as fully and openly and honestly and interdisciplinary and with an open mind as possible. This podcast is born from that. It's a place for me to create the conversations that I really love to be out there in the world where we are bridging the gap between everything on the professional medical side and the actual people who care about it, the people who are living through these experiences themselves to create full conversations, empowering everybody on all sides to move forward in a way of compassion and understanding and empowerment and joy and just bringing together all of my backgrounds to have these full true conversations and that starts with me. So I hope that sharing this form of my story in this very raw perhaps slightly disorganized way gives you some sort of framework and context for how and why I'm approaching these conversations and these topics that we're going to be talking about. I hope that this allows you to see my humaneness and parts of who I really am and how I speak and think about the world beyond what any sort of role or what letters or titles or professional bios or whatever the hells out there like the assumptions you would make from those. So I hope that me sharing my life and my story up till this point, me 26, almost 27, where I am graduating right now. I hope that this gives you context and a foundation as to why I'm doing this podcast and how I am going to navigate conversations, what perspectives I'm bringing to the table, the questions I have and the vantage point at which I look at life and people and our experiences and our characters and what's changeable, what's unchangeable, navigating acceptance and curiosity and compassion and honestly just getting a sense of the level of unfiltered honesty and truth that I speak from for better, for worse, that's just how I am and who I am. So thank you so much for holding space for me and receiving my story and I'm sure I will have updates with different insights and different understandings of what has happened and who I am and how I am and I feel a responsibility to bring those insights and perspectives to the table as they come so that you have more of an understanding of the biases and lenses I'm coming in with and you can take all the conversations I have with those greens of salt. So welcome to a chat with Uma. This is starting with a bang an overview of my life and from here we're going to be getting into so many conversations on so many things all related to how we exist in the world, how we're doing, how we're navigating things, what's coming out in the research and what's being done in the fields of mental and physical well-being to understand how some of us operate and what we can do about it and just getting to know people at the level to which I kind of just cut through to because that's just how I am and I can't wait to be on this journey with you. So if you like this episode and you are here for conversations like this, conversations at this depth about these things and more, then subscribe to the show. Please leave me a rating and review and let me know your thoughts and share this with anyone who you want to have these conversations with and to deepen perhaps your relationship with and just create a space of honesty and safety in your life and let me know of all of the questions and topics you have, anything you want me to cover on the show, I got you, this is for you and this is for me and we're doing this together so welcome to a chat with Uma and I will see you next week every Monday with a new episode on all the things, mental health and well-being, neuroscience, psychology, psychedelics, lived experience, advocacy, life, love, everything. Thank you for being here and I'll see you next Monday. [BLANK_AUDIO]