For many years, I believed that if I could understand myself well enough, I might finally understand my place in the world.

I've spent much of my life trying to understand what shapes the way people see themselves.

Not just how identity is formed, but why some people move through the world with a deep sense of possibility while others quietly learn to make themselves smaller. Why certain voices carry authority while others are questioned. Why some people feel at home in a community, workplace, or relationship, while others spend years trying to find solid ground.

I didn't begin asking these questions as a researcher, educator, or culture strategist. I began asking them as a kid growing up in Southeast Dallas, watching people navigate systems that often seemed disconnected from their lived realities.

Long before I had language for culture, power, belonging, or identity, I was paying attention.

I noticed that intelligence and opportunity were not distributed in the same way. I noticed that some aspects of ourselves appeared welcome while others seemed to require concealment. I noticed how quickly people could internalize messages about what they were capable of, what was expected of them, and where they belonged.

My own response was to work harder. I became disciplined, ambitious, and determined to earn my way into places that once felt beyond my reach. Education gave me access, but it also gave me distance. The more I learned, the more clearly I could see the forces that had shaped my opportunities, my identity, and the way I moved through the world.

Teaching helped me recognize how early people begin making meaning from the messages around them. Children notice whose language is celebrated, whose family is considered typical, and which parts of themselves make adults uncomfortable. They learn what to share and what to conceal long before they have the words to explain why.

I began to wonder what happens to those messages after childhood. Where do they go? How do they shape our relationships, our ambitions, and what we believe is possible for us?

That question led me to clinical rehabilitation counseling at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. I wanted to understand healing and learn how to help people make sense of the experiences that had shaped them. The program gave me valuable tools, but it also revealed the limits of looking at distress as something contained within an individual.

I remember learning about the high rates of mental health challenges among LGBTQ+ communities. The data was presented as evidence of a population experiencing disproportionate distress. I knew what was absent in that research was the world surrounding those numbers. There was little attention to the history of persecution, the threat of rejection, or the bullying and violence that many queer people experience.

A person could do everything asked of them and still encounter a door designed to remain closed. At Texas State University and later as Assistant Dean and Director of the Disability Resource Center at the University of Florida, I became increasingly interested in the conditions that enable success for all people. Today, that question feels even more urgent. As technology and artificial intelligence continue to transform the workplace, I often find myself wondering who benefits, who gets left behind, and what responsibilities we have to ensure innovation expands opportunity rather than narrows it.

My doctoral studies in critical race, ethnicity, and culture gave me another way to interpret what I was noticing. I began to understand that my identities did more than influence how others perceived me. They shaped how I knew what I knew.

Being Mexican American, queer, first generation, and raised in a working-class community taught me to notice contradictions. I knew what it was like to enter rooms I had worked hard to reach and quietly wonder if I truly belonged there. With time, I came to see that belonging was not something others could grant me. I learned to trust my own experience, honor my perspective, and believe that I was just as capable of greatness as anyone else in the room.

My academic work gave me language for structures and systems, but my career kept returning me to the people living within them.

When I transitioned into organizational culture and belonging, I thought I was shifting from individual work to systems work. In some ways, I was. But I eventually recognized that organizations enter our lives through ordinary human interactions.

This became especially clear when a former corporate executive told me that I was “too soft” to sit in a room with business leaders. I carried her words longer than she may have imagined. My resentment softened into compassion without erasing the impact of what had been said. Perhaps she recognized in me something she had once felt required to relinquish.

That experience reminded me that none of us enters the workplace empty handed. We bring our histories, fears, ambitions, losses, and adaptations with us. When we do not attend to what we carry, other people may be asked to carry it for us. The stakes become greater when power is involved.

A leader’s passing comment can become another person’s enduring question about their worth. It can follow them into the next meeting, the next opportunity, and the relationships waiting for them at home. The leader may move on within minutes while the person receiving the message reorganizes themselves around it.

This is why my work has never been only about engagement, inclusion, or organizational performance, even though each matters deeply to me.

My professional focus on culture, belonging, listening, recognition, and community impact grew from a desire to understand that exchange. I became curious about what organizations make possible when they treat people’s humanity as essential to performance rather than separate from it.

This work found me because each encounter showed me another part of the same unfinished inquiry: how we become who we are, what we ask one another to give up along the way, and what becomes possible when someone creates enough space for us to contribute without disappearing.