My power in personal branding frees me to speak my voice, embrace my vision, and live my true mission. I am happy living privately in my headspace, and I identify as an introvert at heart, eighty percent of the time. I hold my ideas, stories, and truths quietly in my mind until I am close to completion, or at least seventy edits into the process, before I share with anyone. I am somewhat of a perfectionist. As a neuroscientist and writer, I navigate between stories and words as if I am traveling in my own plane in the clouds through fact, fiction, memory, mis-memory, rain, sunshine, and rainbows. I am a highly sensitive person, I feel, feel too much, and it takes me time to process the world, to make sense of my senses. Studying the human brain, I was frozen by the complexity, where I could not wrap a single conclusion neatly in a Christmas bow. It left me with mountains of doubt, questioning. How can I even begin to answer the simplest of questions? It seemed the more I understood, the less I was certain of, and digging deeper left me with greater wonder. I hid from the world, where my solitude and personal exploration grew into social isolation, a series of rainy days.
A a year ago, if you were to Google me, you would not find me. I had no social media presence. I was invisible. I mistook privacy and introversion for invisibility. Introversion and invisibility are two very different words and experiences, and I needed to change the feeling of being invisible for my survival. I spoke with Kathy Yeu, and something opened inside of me, a little release, weighing heavy on my heart, lead, ice, or coal, loosening the tension of fear, doubt, and failure. Opening me to the self-compassion of being imperfectly perfect. As an artist I had to take the leap and risk sharing my voice, reliable and unreliable, with every intention to speak my truth. I need to allow the scientific truth to emerge organically.
My visibility here and now in the present moment reflects the core of myself - a living, breathing, and experiencing being. It breaks my silence, frees my voice, opens my heart, unites me with community, and connects me with great minds. It is a leap of faith where I say to you, hello world, I am here now.