The self isn't found. It's built.

What interests me, more than almost anything else, is the distance between who a person is and who they were told to become — and what it takes to close that distance, or to build something honest in its place. That question is less a hobby than a discipline. It's what I study, and increasingly, it's what I'm trained to sit with.

I hold a B.A. in Psychology, Magna Cum Laude, from Sonoma State University, following an A.A. in Psychology from Santa Rosa Junior College, and I'm currently a graduate student training to become a Marriage and Family Therapist. The coursework has been useful. It has also been humbling — the clinical literature is often better at naming what goes wrong in a life than at explaining how a person actually puts one back together.

Some of what I know about that gap, I know firsthand. A back injury in my youth led to a pain-medication prescription that, over time, became an opioid dependency; when the prescriptions ended, alcohol quietly filled the space they left. It took years to find my way out of that cycle, alongside undiagnosed ADHD and a suicidal crisis that, in hindsight, was the point at which the old version of my life stopped being tenable. I don't lead with this because it's dramatic. I lead with it because it's the evidence behind everything else I write — that identity isn't a fixed thing a person either has or lacks, but something built, sometimes under duress, out of whatever materials happen to be at hand.

That's the throughline in my work: identity and change sit at the crossing of developmental psychology and philosophy, not comfortably inside either one. Psychology is good at describing mechanisms — attachment, reinforcement, the slow architecture of a personality. Philosophy is better at asking what any of it is for. I'm most interested in the place where the two disciplines actually have to answer to each other.

I also work as a licensed real estate agent, which has turned out to be an unexpected extension of the same interest. Most home sales, underneath the paperwork, are really about a person mid-transition — a divorce, a death, a departure, an attempt to build a different life somewhere else. It's a strange but useful vantage point on how people move through change.

I write about all of this at Deep Dives with Dave, my Substack — essays on identity, relationships, political psychology, and the forces, clinical and philosophical, that shape how people become who they become. The project isn't to arrive at tidy answers. It's to take the question seriously enough to sit with its difficulty.