Q: What inspired your work in neurodiversity and disability?
A: My work grows out of lived experience as a neurodivergent, disabled person in long-term mental health recovery. My backstory includes growing up in and out of mental health hospitals, developing chronic pain at a young age, and receiving electroconvulsive therapy (modern-day
shock therapy) in high school, which caused me to lose a year of my memory as a side effect. I started sharing my story after I started my mental health recovery journey, and since then, I’ve seen over and over again how important courageous storytelling is to perspective-shifting work and leadership development.
Q: How did law school shape your understanding of your disabilities?
A: I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD just before my second year. That updated diagnosis felt like receiving a new diagnostic map. I had experienced the symptoms and traits my entire life, but I had updated language to explain my experience. That combination of relief and frustration from years of misdiagnosis and differing labels, my previous experience of facilitating mental health support groups through the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and my internal struggles in law school got me curious about how to find new ways to talk about disability and neurodiversity in the workplace and the legal field.
Q: What is Questify Your Life?
A: I named my business “Questify Your Life LLC” after a framework I initially created in 2019 to navigate the beginning of my own mental health recovery journey. The system uses gamification techniques and positive psychology research to make daily life more manageable, doable, and fun.
I think of my St. Paul–based business as two sides of the same coin. On one side are my speaking and consulting services, where I present to organizations on neurodiversity, mental health recovery, and disability inclusion. On the other side is Questify Your Life as a Multimedia
Storytelling Studio and Creative Guild, which is a space to explore creative ways to support people, including online content, gamified group coaching, and more.
Q: How do you explain neurodiversity?
A: At its core, neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences, like those that the medical establishment calls autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other conditions, are natural variations of the human brain. Much like biodiversity in nature, neurodiversity reminds us that all brains are different, and that’s something to embrace rather than fix. Instead of viewing these differences solely as deficits or problems to be “treated,” neurodiversity encourages us to recognize them as part of the broad spectrum of human diversity; therefore, we can instead shift our focus toward building more inclusive environments rather than expecting individuals to change in ways that they cannot. But I find it lands better through experience than definition. In many presentations, I ask the audience to imagine an animal in a piece of clothing. For example, a sloth in a sundress. Then I ask them to describe what they see in their mind’s eye. Was it a real sloth or a cartoon? Vivid like a movie? If it’s a cartoon, it’s likely the sloth from Zootopia or Ice Age. If it’s real, it’s likely the sloth is in a tree, wearing a yellow dress. But those are just patterns of commonality; in actual practice, everyone imagines a different sloth. And some people, like me, don't get a movie in our minds at all; rather, I get depth, vibes, and story. That's called aphantasia, and I use it as an example that not all differences are deficits. When you do that exercise in a room full of people, you see immediately that even our most basic experiences of the world vary significantly. That's neurodiversity.
Q: Why does this matter for the legal profession?
A: There are already many neurodivergent attorneys and legal professionals—and more are openly identifying their disabilities as the culture shifts. When workplaces focus on providing opportunities to identify and increase individual strengths and accommodate (adjust for) differences, regardless of neurotype or disability status, the profession as a whole is better off.
Q: What do your presentations focus on?
A: My presentations typically focus on neurodiversity, mental health recovery, and disability inclusion, with elements of gamification, wellbeing, and inspirational content woven throughout. My most popular presentation is “Neurodiversity in the Workplace,” and its legal field adaptation,
“Neurodiversity in the Legal Field” has been delivered many times as a CLE, firm-wide training, and leadership and management session. Both offer practical ways to rethink assumptions about how people work and to build more inclusive environments.
The focus is practical: rethinking assumptions about how people work, understanding that disclosure is a personal choice, and building more accessible systems so people don't have to advocate so heavily just to do their jobs well.
Q: What does your guiding phrase mean to you?
A: I have a list of principles I try to live by. One of the most well-known is: "You determine when your backstory ends, and your journey begins." Everything I've been through—the hospitalizations, the memory loss, the misdiagnoses in between—is a very real part of my backstory. But it doesn't have to be the whole story. I get to decide what comes next and how I respond to the challenges that arise. That's the mindset I try to bring into every quest I embark on.
Q: What support made a difference in law school?
A: The faculty and staff who encouraged me to access accommodations after my first semester midterms changed the trajectory of my law school experience. I struggled throughout much of law school, and the people who advocated for me, mentored me, and pointed me toward the right resources made a big difference. School-based initiatives like the Wellbeing Initiative created community and shared resources. While local organizations like Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers and the Minnesota Disability Bar Association provided support and a network that extended beyond campus, and extended into my legal career.
Experimenting with self-accommodations and finding a study approach that worked for me was also important, though it was a sometimes frustrating process–finding the right study schedule and skills one week and then it not working in the same way the next. There was no single moment where everything clicked. It was always an ongoing experiment, and it still is.
What I did not anticipate was how much it would mean when others, classmates, professors, and staff, disclosed their disability status to me. When someone trusted me with that part of their experience, it made me feel much less alone in mine. That kind of mutual vulnerability is underrated as a support mechanism, and it is part of why I now share my own story as openly as I do.
Q: What challenges do lawyers face in this space?
A: Many lawyers still feel they have to hide any struggles they have, and that silence can make things worse. At the same time, the risks of disclosing and then being treated differently are very real. Ableism, both internal and external, is a significant factor that does not get named often enough, and the legal profession's deeply embedded culture of stoicism and self-sufficiency makes it harder to surface. Research consistently shows that lawyers experience depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders at rates far higher than the general population, yet the stigma around mental health and neurodivergence in the profession remains stubbornly high.
There are also structural challenges baked into how legal work is designed. Lawyers are expected to constantly task-switch while maintaining precision, manage enormous cognitive loads without much explicit training in skills like boundary-setting or recognizing when they are at capacity, and many may experience vicarious and secondary trauma without adequate support. A lot of professional culture still relies on unspoken norms, the idea that you should just know how things work. That kind of environment is hard for anyone to navigate, and it is especially hard for neurodivergent lawyers who may process information, manage time, or communicate in ways that do not map neatly onto those invisible expectations.
I regularly have people come up after presentations and tell me they feel less alone after hearing someone else's story. I know what that feels like firsthand, and it is one of the reasons I share vulnerable parts of my own experience. The good news is that a neurodiversity-affirming workplace does not typically require knowing anyone's disability status or having perfect systems in place. It requires curiosity, flexibility, and clarity, and a genuine willingness to meet people where they are in order to figure out how they work best. When organizations commit to that, they support neurodivergent employees and build stronger, more resilient teams across the board.
Q: How are you engaging with the legal profession now?
A: I primarily engage with the legal profession through providing CLEs, leadership trainings, and neurodiversity consulting. I do occasionally practice law through pro bono work and will continue to keep an eye out for opportunities that align with the work I am doing. I also co-chair the Education Committee for the Minnesota Disability Bar Association (MDisBA) and write MDisBA’s monthly newsletter.
Q: What's next for you?
A: Continued growth on both sides of my business. That means getting in front of more audiences on topics I care deeply about, continuing my advocacy and advisory work, and expanding the more playful side of what I do through additional content and gamified group coaching cohorts.
I never thought I'd be in a position to help people in this many ways; it’s an honor and a joy. The focus stays the same: build on strengths, support differences, and recognize that setbacks and accomplishments will coexist, because both failure and success are part of any good story.