Hi there! I’m Devin
13 Fun Facts About Me
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I wish I could show you before and after photos of my mind, just like on any good home renovation show. Your jaw would drop. Ages 23 to 33 were a wild ride.
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I think I’m getting pretty close! Pretty good for a recovering Type A person who spent most of her life living from the neck up.
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I’m a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and High Sensation Seeker (HSS).
Myers-Briggs: I test as an ENFP, but I identify as an introvert.
Enneagram: 471
Astrology: Aquarius sun with a Virgo moon and Sagittarius rising
Human Design: Reflector
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This chipmunk-sounding speed helps my ADHD brain stay interested and focused.
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I believe that there are so many overlooked milestones in life that are worth honoring and celebrating. To celebrate my journey to remission with the autoimmune disease ulcerative colitis, I designed an immersive party where guests were greeted by a gastroenterologist in a white coat who welcomed them to their colonoscopy and invited them to crawl through a 12-foot colon tunnel to enter the party. See more here.
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There really is no in between and I’m still at a loss for how it goes from one state to the other so fast. It’s like my belongings scheme against me—one dish not put away signals for the trash to pile up and an audience of dirty clothes to assemble on the floor.
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As a night owl, waking up at 6:00 AM seemed like an impossibility my entire life. Now I wake up and write down my dreams and then bounce on a trampoline. I’ve discovered that in this half-awake state, I have less resistance toward doing creative tasks
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I found out at age 32 after years of pain and self-gaslighting that I have Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disorder.
Zebras are the mascot for EDS.
I love this quote: “Why do you need a label? Bc there is comfort in knowing you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse. Bc you cannot find community w other zebras if you don’t know you belong. And bc it’s impossible for a zebra to be happy or healthy spending its life like a failed horse” (source)
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My kitchen has a disco ball, tons of art supplies, and a costume rack. My refrigerator is covered with magnets holding up my paintings. I love to have friends over for tea, dance parties, and craft time.
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I’m either an absent-minded professor who cannot seem to close cabinets or a hyperfocused queen who gets so lost in my own world that I forget to pee all day.
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So much of my stuff are things I found off Craigslist, in thrift stores, and for free on the side of the road. I love bright colors and brass. My style is funky eclectic rainbow mid-century Grandma.
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Like John O’Donohue’s “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.” Oh to be able to write like that one day! Writer are my rockstars.
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The container store is my happy place. I’m delighted by artist Ursus Wehrli’s The Art of Clean Up (2013).
My Story
My Story
Act 1: Where I Started
Chapter 1: Following “The Plan”
Growing up I was a Type A-overachiever-perfectionist-people-pleaser.
I remember sitting at my Princeton college graduation when the speaker said something like “If you think you know where you’re going to be in 5 years, you have no imagination!”
I thought to myself, “But I have a plan!—I’m sitting next to the man I’m going to marry, I’m heading straight into my PhD in social psychology at Cornell. I have a 5-year plan AND a 10-year plan. I even know the names of our future dogs…”
Flash forward a year, I realized I’d been living with a checklist model of success. Some part of me believed that when I checked off all the boxes, a banner would unfurl from the sky saying “You won at life!” and I’d live happily ever after.
Despite having the boyfriend, apartment, dog, and career I’d always dreamed of while researching topics like happiness and judgement and decision making, I was severely depressed.
I was confused about how the careful, well-thought-out decisions I had made (aka “The Plan”) had led me to be so profoundly unhappy.
Act 2: Exploration
Chapter 2: Dropping Out of My PhD
I shocked everyone in my life by leaving my PhD, chopping off my hair, ending my 5-year relationship, and taking a gap year to find out who I really was and what I really wanted in life.
I realized that despite all my studying and reading, I didn’t like myself.
I decided to put myself into experiences that would force me to become the woman I’d always wanted to be:
I wanted to be more assertive so I signed up to be a clinic escort at Planned Parenthood and have people yelling at me telling me I’m going to hell.
I wanted to be able to play and go with the flow more so I took improv classes.
I wanted to embrace making mistakes so I took abstract painting classes.
I concocted a whole curriculum for myself and came back to life!
Chapter 3: Starting communiT Boston
At some point, I started to wonder about how I could use all my psychology knowledge (5 years of research at Princeton, Harvard, and Cornell) to help others. I was so used to approaching strangers to get them to fill out surveys about topics like happiness, and I began to wonder if I could invite strangers into experiences that would actually put a smile on their faces.
My friend, Ashley Kirsner, and I started communiT Boston, an organization devoted to using art and play to connect strangers in novel ways on the subway in Boston (the “T'“).
We created all kinds of different public art projects like asking strangers to write down their sorrows and shred them in a paper shredder on the subway platform or getting strangers to dance on a glow-in-the-dark bubble wrap dance floor.
Our projects transformed public spaces to draw the attention of passersby and created common ground to connect people who might otherwise have never connected.
Chapter 4: Joining nXu
These public art projects eventually led to me being tapped to be Design Lead at nXu.
I spearheaded the development of nXu’s experiential socio-emotional learning curriculum for high schoolers that effectively acted as a “school for life” and helped students explore their purpose in life and translate it into action through passion projects.
I designed experiences that brought together high schoolers across race and class lines to ponder life’s big questions.
My favorite experience I designed at nXu was the 90th birthday party we threw for our 15-year-olds as part of their onboarding weekend bonding retreat.
Students donned gray wigs and reading glasses and walked into the party room where they saw their portraits digitally aged to look 90 years old. One by one they were encouraged to stand up and deliver a toast celebrating all that they had accomplished in the 75 years since completing the nXu program.
This powerful ritual was a favorite of students and helped cement a lifelong bond between them.
Chapter 5: My “Life MBA” in NYC
I thought about going to business school to build my own business but realized that 2 big things people got out of business school were 1) a network and 2) skills to be able to go out and build cool stuff.
I decided that moving to NYC would be my “Life MBA” and I would try to meet as many collaborators as I could and learn through building lots of my own stuff.
I moved to NYC knowing 1 person and within a month, I had architected the sold-out, 350+ person Love Immersive experience—a choose-your-own adventure love language exploratorium through 6 floors of a Manhattan townhouse.
Guests were greeted by a personal cupid and sent on an immersive journey through the space in which each room was dedicated to a unique love language (touch, words, service, quality time, gifts) and contained art installations for people to explore (e.g. ordering different hugs from a “hug bar” in the touch room). Through this fun, playful experience, people learned about their preferences for the ways in which they wanted to give and receive love and how their preferences impacted their relationships.
My “Life MBA” in NYC was a success! I met a lot of amazing people and built some pretty cool things in New York, including events at MNGFL and a project with Odyssey Works.
I’ve now spent a total of 10 years architecting experiences that summon “aha moments” by helping people to tap into their own wisdom and internalize important life lessons.
Act 3: Where I Am Now
Chapter 6: Healing Work
My own journey with chronic illness (the autoimmune disease, Ulcerative Colitis, as well as the genetic connective tissue disorder, Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome) brought me deeper into healing and trauma work.
When I couldn’t work, I studied and trained on my own terms in every healing modality I could find, including diving deep into modalities described in the classic book on trauma, The Body Keeps Score.
I’ve studied power with Kasia Urbaniak, trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Somatic Experiencing (SE), Reiki, and now Family Constellations, hypnosis, and somatic EMDR. Every day, I feel so grateful to be able to share these tools with others as a life coach
I believe that “knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle” and play and imagination are two of our society’s most underrated tools for transformation and personal growth. (I recently threw the colon party—a ridiculous playful immersive party to honor my healing journey with my diva colon).
Looking back on my life story I just shared with you, it seems very streamlined and linear. But as I was living this story, it seemed all over the place and full of moments of breakdown and confusion (including late in life discovery of ADHD and HSP, navigating sexual assault, grappling with eating disorders, overcoming creative blocks, chronic pain, navigating complex PTSD, changing friend circles, moving to new cities, befriending inner critics).
When lost, I’ve always tried to lean on my core values of creativity, compassion, curiosity, and generosity.
Our values help guide our stories, and our stories dictate who we are—how we feel about ourselves and how we show up in life. I believe that when you change your story, you can change your life.
“Devin will meet you wherever you are and show you a loving path to where you want to be.”
—Hannah
