Several years ago I dreamt of becoming a university professor. I was young and naive and got a lot of ego-boost from my peers and professors who really praised me for how smart I was. I did some research projects during my undergrad (I studied Ecology & Evolutionary Biology), then went immediately into a PhD following graduation. At that point, my own idealistic expectations of myself (and of academia), combined with conflict with my parents and other personal life chaos, all slammed in my face as I tried to navigate grad school. I got depressed (though I didn't recognize it at the time), got nothing achieved, and eventually dropped out.

My life and my dreams all crashed before me, I became very distant from my parents, and I spent the next several years numbed out, trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life now.

Fortunately, it was during this next phase of my life, after the fire had burnt through everything, that I went through some incredible personal growth and transformation, alongside with my partner. I learned how to navigate relationships, I learned about differences and about universals. I learned how to love. I learned how to accept and embrace change. I revisited my past traumas and started to heal. Life became less chaotic and I could finally breathe a little and at least live a low-lying life.

Then roughly two years ago, due to some pretty big changes in lifestyle (moving, went back to do some school) and all the expectations that came with it, I went into my second depressive episode. This time around, even though the experience itself was darker and more tormenting, I was more aware of what's happening in my mind. I could hear all the voices in my head, I could describe my pain, and so I wrote about them and shared it with my few friends on social media. There wasn't much response, but something inside me started to change. By writing down my most vulnerable thoughts and feelings and trying to communicate them to others, it helped me to make sense of these experiences. The more I wrote, the more clarity I found. I started to really see and feel my traumas and pains, and after some gut-wrenching catharsis, my depression lifted.

What was even more incredible though, was how these experiences would then drastically transform my view of the world. As the fog in my mind cleared, I started to pay more attention to the world around me, more so than I ever have. I've always known about social issues, but nothing ever really clicked, and so I never really cared.

As I paid more attention, I started to see the problems of our world more clearly. After nearly 30 years of life, I finally looked outside my own little bubble. Everything started to matter now, and I felt so alive. I started thinking seriously about various topics, started asking questions, and started writing privately about all of them. I became genuinely interested in one discipline after another, slowly expanding my realm and my worldview, trying to make sense of the more fundamental questions and ideas that stretched across disciplines.

Slowly, as I learned more about the world and looked back on my life, I began to realize that everything that had happened in my life, from my idealistic career fantasies, to the conflicts in my relationships, to the trauma and the depression and all the growth that followed, can be explained and understood in one way or another. But as I looked out at the world, I began to notice, literally everywhere, that people are stuck in problems and debates because of some very fundamental misunderstandings about how things work. I started to realize that, nearly all of us have been binded to and blinded by our cultural assumptions of everything, from careers to relationships, to society, to science itself. And if the problems of our world and in our personal lives can be better understood, they can also be prevented or improved upon, if only we weren't so complacent about it all.