ABOUT
I help young people say who they are. It took me a long time to learn how to say who I was.
Academic and career coach. Twenty-plus years of helping people find their direction and their words.
I did not plan any of this. It was only much later that I could see none of it was random.
I did what I was told.
I finished high school as a strong student, so I did what strong students were supposed to do: a Bachelor of Science. Nobody asked me what I was interested in. I'm not sure I could have answered. That question, the one no one asked me, is the one I now ask every student I work with.
So I went to find out who I was.
After my degree, I went to Pakistan. A year and a half volunteering, then working. I loved it, and somewhere in it I found public health, something that was actually mine, not assigned.
The name didn't open the door. The experience did.
I did a master's in public health at Columbia University and assumed the name would be enough. It wasn't. Every interview asked the same thing: not where I studied, but what I had actually done. So I went and did an internship in Khorog, Tajikistan.
Khorog.
That internship became three and a half years. I moved from public health to training and development to workshop facilitation to higher education. And it was there that people started asking me to help with their university applications. I said yes, with no idea it was the beginning of everything. Years later I went back and lived there another five.
Then the thread appeared.
Back in Canada I ran an employment program for immigrant women. I kept volunteering with the Spark of Hope Foundation, identifying students for scholarships, preparing Syrian girls for their interviews. And slowly, the thing I had done for friends in Khorog became the work I could not not do.
"There are decisions you make from your head, and decisions you make from somewhere quieter and truer. The second kind will teach you who you are, even when they cannot yet show you where they are leading."
PUBLISHED WORK
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Chapter 10, "Without Yet Knowing", the decision to move my family
to Tajikistan, and how everyone saying no taught me who I was.
What I believe
Ability is rarely the barrier.
Vancouver or Dushanbe, first language or third, the gap is almost never talent. It is access, and someone who has walked the road.
Your story is already there.
The work is telling the difference between 'I don't know how,' which anyone can learn, and 'I don't belong,' which is a lie.
The path doesn't have to make sense yet.
I spent decades not knowing where any of it was going. It connects now. It just doesn't look the way you thought it would.
Whether you're a parent whose teen is staring at a blank application, or someone who believes a young woman's future shouldn't come down to what she can afford, I'd love to talk.