About

I'm Orion. I write about loneliness and purpose, mostly for people who look fine from the outside.

My path here wasn't a straight line. I've led nonprofits, coordinated research at a university, answered crisis calls, and worked as a psychiatric technician. I'm now doing graduate training in clinical mental health counseling.

Those jobs don't look related on paper. What connects them is that all of them put me in a room with someone on their worst day. The crisis line taught me the most: people almost never call because they've run out of advice. They call because there's no one else awake who knows their name.

That's the thing I keep coming back to. Most of what gets sold as a mental health problem is downstream of two absences — nobody expecting you anywhere, and nothing that needs what you're good at. Fix those and the rest doesn't vanish, but it becomes workable. That's not a small word. Workable is most of what any of us gets.

I'm also a person of faith, and I don't think you have to share mine to get something out of what I write. But it shapes how I see this: that being known is not a luxury, and that meaning is something you're built for rather than something you invent to feel better.

What this site is

A place to put what I'm learning while I'm learning it. I'm a counselor-in-training, not a licensed clinician, so nothing here is therapy and I'm not taking clients. When that changes, I'll say so plainly on this page.

Until then: read what's useful, ignore what isn't, and tell me if something landed. I read everything.