What does it even mean to have a mission in life? Like, who decided that existence needed an objective and why did they not include a tutorial? Half the time life feels less like a calling and more like a long-term psychological experiment I did not consent to, and yet I’m still expected to find meaning in it. If life had a clear point, I assume it would not involve this much dissociation, caffeine, and pretending we’re fine.

For me, a mission isn’t about destiny or some clean, inspirational arc. It’s about understanding why people do what they do when their nervous systems have been pushed past safety and never quite found their way back. My mission is to help children, teenagers, and eventually adults who have been hurt understand they are not alone, especially when their own minds have turned against them. Trauma has a way of convincing people they are isolated, defective, or fundamentally wrong, which is a hell of a thing to carry while still being expected to function.

Professionally, I want to work in psychological diagnostics for children who have experienced child maltreatment. I want to be part of the process that recognizes behavior as communication, not defiance, and symptoms as survival strategies, not character flaws. I want to help build action plans that actually make sense for traumatized brains, including all the fun extras like anxiety, depression, dissociation, hypervigilance, and a stress response that never learned how to turn off. Healing doesn’t mean erasing what happened. It means helping the brain learn that danger is not constant anymore, which is way harder than people like to admit.

Outside of the clinical world, my mission is louder and more emotional and honestly a little feral. I want to tear down this idea that we’re all supposed to be happy, healed, and emotionally regulated to be worthy of love. Most people are walking around with nervous systems shaped by loss, neglect, or fear, smiling through it like that isn’t exhausting. You are allowed to feel wounded. You are allowed to be impacted. Acting like pain is a personal failure instead of a human response is psychologically lazy at best and harmful at worst.

I believe people are allowed to be complex because the brain literally is. I mix dark humor with heavy psychological themes because that’s how survival often shows up. Humor is regulation. Humor is defiance. Humor is sometimes the only thing standing between someone and total collapse. I’m allowed to laugh at my own self-deprecation. I’m allowed to find it darkly funny that I’m still here after years of my brain running worst-case scenarios like it was a full-time job. I’m allowed to love my life and hate it at the same time, because ambivalence is not a flaw, it’s realism.

We love pretending humans are simple beings with simple needs, but psychologically that’s nonsense. Yes, we need food, water, and shelter, but we also need safety, connection, and attunement, especially early on. When those needs aren’t met, the brain adapts, sometimes beautifully and sometimes destructively, but always logically. We want love because love is regulation. Love is safety. Love is the thing that tells the nervous system it can finally unclench.

At the core of everything, my mission is to love widely and without restraint. Not in a naive way, but in a deeply intentional, psychologically informed way. Love is not finite. Connection does not weaken us. Being seen does not make us fragile. To be loved is to be seen, and I want to love people by seeing them fully, including the parts shaped by trauma, defense, contradiction, and survival.

If I can help people understand themselves instead of hating themselves, then I’m doing what I’m here to do. And if I can make someone laugh while they realize their reactions make sense, their pain is valid, and their complexity is allowed, then that feels like meaning. Or at the very least, it feels like a reason to stay, which honestly might be the point.