Quick Take: I knew the power of words long before calling myself a writer.

What Happened: The first time I saw what my writing could do was in high school. The principal was considering expelling me for some reason. I wrote him a letter. I don’t know what I said, but he invited me into his office the next day for a conversation and changed his mind.

Years later, around 2012, I applied for a job that required me to write a sample notification bulletin. They provided me with the internal problem, and I had to find a way to communicate the issue to clients without giving away too much. I watched my future boss’s face as he read it, impressed, a little surprised, and I knew I got the job. It was around this time that I wrote my first poem and shared it with a few friends.

I’d been journaling since my teens — tiny notebooks filled with observations, confessions and other random stuff. In 2015, I took a creative writing course, and feedback from the instructor and classmates made me realize I wanted to share my work with the public.

Impact: Writing became more than an outlet; it was a means to connect, persuade, inspire and evoke emotions in others. Like a cute duckling, Writing followed me everywhere — into jobs, classes, and creative projects.

Key Insight: The signs were always there. Writing wasn’t something I decided to do; it’s something I’ve always done. It’s such a numinous feeling to have an archive. A body of work! And now, I’m not holding back!

Build and Shift: I designed and implemented the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) at a Toronto-based healthcare software company, establishing consistent practices, governance, oversight, and reporting across the enterprise.

The EPMO created a unified framework for prioritization, ensured projects aligned with strategy, and gave leadership visibility into progress, risks, and portfolio health.

This work was meaningful because it turned scattered information into a transparent, coordinated system that enabled informed decision-making, emphasized outcomes over outputs, and reinforced a focus on client value.

Looking Back: Even though it was my first ground-up EPMO, it didn’t feel foreign. I had lived and breathed project management for years. This time, I wasn’t just delivering within a framework; I was building the framework itself. That was so amazing!!!

I knew what needed to be done, and the challenge was bringing structure where none existed before. It felt like putting a skeleton into an organization, finally giving projects a body to stand on. I was proud to see my experience translate into something foundational.

Final Note: The one thing I would do diffrently, is to ensure the entire organization has bought into the idea. Just because the CEO wants something doesn’t mean everyone else does. Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come.

Quick Take: Palmsupward is my creative home base.

What Happened: In 2019, I launched PalmsUpward.com. I chose the name because it is the Dhyana or Cosmic Mudra in Buddhist meditation, a sacred gesture that signifies receptivity, unity, calm, and deep contemplation.

This site started as a way for me to communicate with my future family. I wanted them to hear about me, directly from me. Now it’s become an integral part of my life — an ecosystem that will lead to who knows where; those unknown possibilities are exciting.

Initially, I made four posts in July and two in September, but by January 2020, the rhythm had taken hold. Since September 2025, I have started posting weekly, with extra pieces whenever inspiration strikes.

On Planet PU, I experiment with poetry, satire, visual art, and commentary — all orbiting one central question: What does it mean to live freely within systems that confine?

Impact: Through writing, art, and serious silliness — from mock movie posters, Sleeping With The Enema and The Evil Bread to darkly comedic dispatches like Purification Picnic, The Goebbels 9000X, and Propaganda Made Me Do It — PalmsUpward has evolved into a record of my artistic growth and a place for questioning the world and myself, out loud.

Key Insight: Before PalmsUpward, there was OnceToo. I was encouraged to start it as part of the creative writing course I was taking back in 2015. I can’t recall why I stepped away, but its existence proved the calling was already there. Like my first poem back in 2012, it was an early pulse, a reminder that even false starts are evidence of direction.

Consistency builds clarity. Showing up week after week helped me realize that creativity isn’t a side project — it’s the throughline of my life.

Quick Take: A rebellious response to performative leadership, the corporate worship and reinforcement of power structures, with a playlist for every mood.

What Happened: Landing in my inbox, from projectmanagement.com. The article argues that success in project management isn’t about performance, but about power. It celebrated influence over integrity and how to play the game instead of changing it.

My response, Workplace Revolt Set to Music, wasn’t just a disagreement; it was a counterpoint. I unpacked the author’s logic, exposed the rot in her premise, and reframed power as something earned through transparency and trust, not exclusionist strategy. I called out the culture that rewards politics and optics over real work, meaningful change, and genuine progress. I had loads of fun with this piece. Maybe too much. lol!

Impact: This piece marked a shift in my writing. It wasn’t just commentary; it was confrontation. Readers told me it put language to what they’d felt in silence. It affirmed that I can critique in my creative voice. That righteous anger, when shaped by rhythm and reason, can move people.

Key Insight: This article was an absolute pleasure to write. I’m looking forward to more. Power shouldn’t be about who controls the room, who talks the most and the loudest. It should be about who opens the doors. Who provides opportunities for others to grow. It’s about having the emotional intelligence to recognize that someone else’s shine doesn’t diminish your glow. (that might be a quote).

Build and Shift: Rolled out an OKR framework that connected organizational goals with team-level execution. Alongside OKRs, I introduced CFRs (Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition) to embed accountability and continuous improvement into the process. Created templates, facilitated adoption, and built reporting to track progress.

As part of this work, I also learned about the Whole/Total Product framework, the idea that a product isn’t just the core offering, but the complete experience surrounding it. Outlining and understanding this concept helped me think differently about how goals connect to value.

OKRs weren’t just about hitting targets; they were about ensuring teams were building toward the complete product and client experience. That shift expanded my perspective on delivering what truly matters, and I was able to map all the areas of the organization and what parts of the product each area connects to.

Looking Back: Although I was familiar with OKRs, the depth of knowledge this project imparted was amazing. I started from scratch, reading John Doerr’s Measure What Matters and completing additional research.I was in my element. Learnanddoium (you’ve probably heard me say that before 😁).

This work was meaningful because it transformed abstract strategy into something concrete, visible, and actionable across the org. I loved being the champion, from working with a board member, learning and research through presenting to the board and the entire organization and guiding the rollout.

Final Note: An organization may need something but they may not be ready for it because that thing requires a fundamental personality makeover. Some things you cannot half-heart, you’re either all in for the long haul, willing to make those foundational changes, or it may be a waste to start.

I’m deeply concerned when time, resources, and talent are underutilized or misdirected. This kind of waste isn’t just inefficient, it undermines people’s potential and organizational performance.

You can often tell what an organization values by how it invests in its employees. Aligning professional growth with individual interests and company needs; supported by opportunities for learning by doing is the foundation of effective succession planning. These are not perks; they’re essentials.

That’s where CFRs intersect: they aren’t just about tracking goals from strategic conversations, but about creating accountability, actionable feedback loops, and recognition that connect organizational ambition with opportunities for individual growth.

Quick Take: A digital portrait series where humanity and imagination merge.

What Happened: I’ve always loved seeing women with antlers, and when I decided to create my first one, Transcendence, I wanted to do more than slap antlers on a person. I imagined the animal being part of their being, where they can switch forms as needed, literally or figuratively, to help them overcome whatever situation they might be in. The second image I created was probably Black Lion.

Next thing I know, what began as playful experimentation with texture, light, and anatomy evolved into a meditation on identity — a merging of human, animal, and elemental. Forms Beyond the Flesh evolved from a single idea: that our inner lives also deserve a physical form.

Each portrait is a negotiation between what we show and what we conceal. Horns, feathers, scales, the cosmos became metaphors for emotion, instinct, and history — the parts of us that resist containment. The series allowed me to explore hybridity as both defiance and freedom: refusing to be one thing, staying fixed in one form, or ignoring our intersectionality. In some ways, too, I am also redefining beauty.

Later, I was inspired to start mapping various things. The heart across a face, coronary branches across faces — veins that resemble roots, rivers, and lightning. Life’s internal architecture made visible, reminding me that what sustains us also connects us.

I’m most proud of Origins, Angel, Angel II, and I even started toying with mechanical form with Skin.

Impact: These portraits are not just illustrations. They’re incarnations of thought, feeling, and resistance. Each one extends my exploration of epistemic phenomenology: the idea that lived experience is knowledge worth studying, especially the aspects of your life that others cannot see or the parts we wish to, or wish we could, ignore.

Through art, I become.
Through form, I remember who I am.

These pieces blurred boundaries between artist and subject, physical and digital, self and species. Revealing that the act of creation can itself be an act of becoming.

Key Insight: Like this project, form is never final. The body, like art, is a site of inquiry and change is its only constant. I am looking forward to all the various things I haven’t touched on yet.

Build and Shift: I guided a software company in the PropTech sector through their transition to Agile practices by first mapping existing workflows and processes, then identifying the areas with the lowest resistance to begin with.

I designed pilot sprints, introduced team-level ceremonies (such as stand-ups, planning poker and retrospectives), and gradually expanded adoption as successes proved the model effective. The phased approach allowed teams to see incremental wins and build trust in change.

Looking Back: I remember the exhilaration of watching a team go from rigid handoffs to rapid iterations. Every sprint felt like a micro-revolt against old constraints. It challenged me too, because I had to coach, reframe mindsets, adapt tools, and fend off pushback. And I didn’t have all the answers.

However, it was rewarding to see teams take ownership, learn in real-time, and gradually shift their perspective on work. It taught me that cultural change is slow, messy, and full of friction, but when it begins to take hold, you can feel its momentum.

I enjoyed assisting the teams with getting comfortable with the process, speaking up when something doesn’t feel right, working with the product owners on backlog grooming and guiding the overall learning.

Final Note: It’s great to have a plan but you can’t fall in love with the plan so much that you don’t want to change it. The plan is your plank, you gotta jump off and make adjustments as you go. The best thing about this project compared to the ones above, everyone participated. That doesn’t mean they all bought in 100% from the beginning but they were open to giving it a go and that made all the difference.

Quick Take: Hello World! I wanna make people laugh.

What Happened: When I enrolled in Second City’s improv and writing programs, I wasn’t planning to become a stand-up comedian, but I did want to write jokes. I wanted to understand how humour works. How timing, structure, and absurdity can coexist in the same breath. What I found was a life lab.

In those rooms, I learned to write with rhythm, listen with precision, and trust my instincts. I can feel when something is great, or crap, or done. Sketch comedy taught me the value of economy: every line, every word, has a job to do.

Improv gave my overthinking brain a break: you can’t plan authenticity, and you either are courageous or you’re not. Screenwriting brought it all together — dialogue, movement, silence, and the invisible tension between what’s said and what’s meant.

That training became the foundation for everything I create now — poetry, satire, parody, scripts, and commentary. The sketches, blackouts, and monologues from that time gave me a new language for critique: make them laugh, then make them feel uncomfortable as hell about what they just laughed at, then make them think. (I’m kinda joking about the uncomfortable part).

Impact: Second City made me realize that humour doesn’t function only as an escape; it can be a mirror. It let me translate discomfort into connection and outrage into irony. It’s where I learned that comedy and tragedy are roommates, and one of them is always late with the rent.

That experience made me braver on the page — whether writing about race, work, or the human condition. It shaped my rhythm, my wit, and my refusal to whisper. The truth, my truth, needs to be loud. (I am still learning to speak up).

Key Insight: I learned that much of the material I wrote was already humorous and definitely not for everyone. During table readings, people were either laughing hella loud or shaking their heads in disbelief (which was hilarious to me).

My biggest takeaway is that I already write jokes. I don’t need punchlines to be funny. What I found most helpful is related to timing, the element of surprise, and permission to release myself from self-censorship and overthinking.

Laughter is revelation in disguise. If I can make people laugh, I’ve already established a connection; what I do with that opening … is art.