I grew up in a warm and loving family, with a British Mother and a Guyanese Father, both psychologists, who migrated to Canada, early in their lives. My brother and I, are first generation Canadians and proudly embody both our brownness and whiteness. We flow easily between chicken curry and afternoon tea.

In reflecting back on childhood experiences outside of my family home, there are times when I felt like I fit everywhere, and times where I felt like I didn’t quite fit perfectly into any space. I later learned about the concept of “racial liminality” - the fluid experience of living in social, cultural and psychological “in-between” states - of straddling multiple racial and cultural identities, beyond the mono-racial boundaries that society often wants us to choose.

My brother and I are well acquainted with the sentence, “where are you from” and have answered that question thousands of times, while watching people’s brains scan with uncertainty about how to place us into a category that feels comfortable. I welcome all curious questions, while also understanding how incredibly groundbreaking it was, for my parents to marry in Canada, in 1973, just six years after interracial marriage became legal in the USA. I am fiercely protective of my family, a behaviour I believe is rooted in a lifetime of acutely observing the different ways that the world approaches our white family members and our brown family members.

My lens and work in therapy is inherently interwoven with my identity as a daughter, sister, auntie, cousin, granddaughter, friend, first generation settler on this land, cisgender, able-bodied, trauma survivor. I have been shaped by love, trust, care and security, as much as I have been shaped by extremely difficult and traumatic life experiences. The unwavering love and stability cultivated in my childhood may have led me to trusting individuals that ultimately caused me harm; and this unwavering love and stability has ultimately saved me. I am embodied proof that healing happens collectively, in relationship to others.

I identify as being a racialized person and have experienced many privileges in the world, with being a lighter-skin racialized person. I have been blessed with an abundance of access to education, and have fulfilled my deep yearnings to know as much as I can about my cultural and ancestral identities through spending significant time living, working, and travelling in Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Belize, Barbados, St. Lucia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia, England, Greece, and Portugal. I am ever-curious about identity and culture, about constructs of race, and about how power is distributed among us, often based solely on the perception of our identities - and how this power, or lack thereof, impacts our perceptions of ourselves.