I had a happy childhood. Loving parents. Safety. Stability. But to really understand me and my voice, there’s one part of my story that is inextricably linked to how I experience the world: My dad is blind.
This one life experience shapes how I myself experience the world and how I show up in this industry. It’s the experience that gave me my empathy—my ability to truly put myself in someone else’s shoes, to shift my perspective in the most radical ways. It was an early life lesson, one everyone should be taught: We are not all the same, and we do not all experience the world in the same way.
I choose to look at it not as what I’ve lost, but what I’ve gained. I learned to think more about the world beyond the visual. To notice sound. Texture. Emotion. To listen harder. To pay attention. To connect.
Marketers love to talk about “experiential.” But too often, we’re building toward the same tired version of it—shiny, fast, visual-first. We’re so focused on what catches the eye, we forget what moves the heart.
Throughout my career, my internal motivation has always remained the same: When we are building campaigns and creating messaging, how do we use all of this to connect with people beyond the surface—on a deep, human level?
And when you start paying attention, you can already see this deeper kind of connection in the wild.
