A bit more about me
“What a little psychologist,” my mother would call me. “You need to use more discretion,” my father would say (then laboriously spell it out like we were at a spelling bee, “D-I-S, C-R-E, T-I, O-N. Discretion.”). My parents were educators both in and out of the classroom.
From a very (very) early age, I became very (very) curious about the human condition. I had a penchant for irreverence, truth-telling, and asking direct questions.
These attributes got me in trouble—a lot.
I also didn’t quite fit in anywhere, except one blissful moment in seventh grade when I was surrounded by other squishy-hearted, silly, nerdy, “gifted” kids in a math magnet program. My friends “got” me.
My family moved to a new state the following year and things became… difficult. That wonderful time of true belonging, and the many prior and subsequent years of not really belonging (even though I met lovely people along the way), helped shape my current focus on human thriving.
In high school, I started tutoring some of my friends, and friends of friends, so my first meaningful glimpse at institutional failures in youth development happened then. There were these brilliant, committed thinkers who were being overlooked—and often mistreated—in their efforts to learn. That was one spark that inspired me to become a high school teacher later on.
College further directed me toward psychology, though it would take more than a decade for me to find my way. (All those memes about gifted over-achievers who melt into a burnout puddle, then enter a field like education, psychology, or social work? Those are true.)
I dropped out of Yale at the end of my sophomore year, exhausted, depressed, defeated, and unmoored.
Later, I’d realize that I had been just surviving for years by force of will, rage, and panic-induced, coffee-fueled academic effort.
I was good at school and good at performing “okay-ness” and “normalcy,” so the only person who really noticed how much I was struggling was my sister. She notices everything, though, so…
Anyway, I’d sort of muddle-alonged my way into this big opportunity.
When my high school counselor told me I wasn’t “Yale material,” it was because I was a Black girl who didn’t fit the preppy mold of my Ivy League-bound peers. (That wasn’t the issue—I returned to Yale after a 2-year hiatus and excelled.) I was out of place in that intensely elite, competitive, zero-sum, sink-or-swim environment, because it was antithetical to healing and thriving. I wasn’t alone. And I was on the brink of collapse before I even got there. I hadn’t learned how to live in balance. I had forgotten how to rest. In that state, I was no match for that place.
When I had to face withdrawing from college, it was one of several moments in my life when my spirit whispered, “I thought I did everything ‘right.’ What went wrong?”
When I returned to school and chose to pursue joy rather than “practicality,” my spirit was louder, saying, “Well, shit. Let’s see how this goes. Can’t be worse than where we were two years ago.”
I changed my major to American Studies and focused on learning about music, culture, social justice, and art. I wrote a thesis about George Herriman’s ground-breaking Krazy Kat and another about Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks. Still an over-achiever, I also drafted a thesis about Morrison’s Song of Solomon and one critiquing Disney’s representations of women and people of color, but never submitted those.
I was finally self-actualizing and embracing my weirdness. I was beginning to disentangle from scarcity.
In the years that followed, I worked in numerous child and youth service roles: camp counselor, after-school program facilitator, youth program director, then high school teacher and, finally, school administrator. I ADORED my students. And, I came to realize over time that, regardless, they weren’t getting all that they needed to thrive.
Even when the adults cared deeply. Even when the curriculum was powerful. We kept missing the mark and far too many students were launching journeys too similar to mine. Exhaustion, scarcity, imbalance…
One of the most significant areas of failure was our lack of a universally held liberation politic and a practice that designed beyond success or survival. Schooling’s hyperfocus on sorting, ranking, achieving, and socializing us all into the status quo would always get in the way.
There were crucial aspects of flourishing and well-being that public schooling was actively undermining. For my students navigating multiple, intersectional oppressions, the challenges were compounded. Our curriculum wasn’t fully designed to orient them toward their thriving—neither through political education, nor preparation for “the real world,” nor through a cultivation of their joy and passions and full, integrated selfhood.
And, truth be told, we adult educators often weren’t really thriving either. Teaching was grueling. We were over-worked, over-extended, over-criticized, under-paid, and expected to be everything to everyone.
Fighting to keep my students in school, to offset the harm they experienced, to protect them from indignities, suspensions, expulsions, dysregulated adults and peers, becoming undone by trauma, police on campus, college debts… fighting to make sure that not going to school wouldn’t ruin their lives… It was yet another moment when my spirit wondered what, despite the enormous effort we were all pouring out, had gone wrong. This time, my spirit was screaming.
BUT! Even still, so much, somehow, went right. Me, my colleagues, and our students did experience joy and liberation and connection and healing together. We performed Anna Deveare Smith’s “Twilight, Los Angeles” and analyzed Jill Scott’s “My Petition.” We gave each other awards for the ways we brightened the community. We had dance parties, put on plays, did impromptu vocal performances, and had inside jokes. (Okay, I wasn’t in on all the jokes, but there was laughter!) We also buoyed each other, cried together, and learned how to pause and breathe deeply. Together, we created some of the most affirming, inclusive learning spaces I have ever seen. Many of us are still connected, decades on.
Along with the challenges, the triumphs informed my research. I wondered how we could create conditions for more of that—more spaciousness, more ease, more connection, and more authentic self-actualization without having to be at odds with our institutions and society, or each other.
Seven years, three schools, one overstretched central office, dozens of colleagues, and hundreds of students in and I was an exhausted puddle again. This time, quite ill—hair falling out, in chronic pain, unable to sleep, and so on. I was beginning to understand what was, in fact, going wrong.
So, I decided to get a doctorate! (What a chaotic choice.) And the doctorate felt like a vacation. Even though I had to work a couple of jobs to pay bills; even though I ran into the nonsense that folks run into in The Academy™, I was given an opportunity to breathe, think, and wonder. Everything wasn’t on my shoulders. I had support.
Now, I was clear in my focus on psychology, because I wanted to know what scholars had to say about the thing that was beyond success and survival. I was there to study thriving.
What I found was a significant body of powerful work tied to resilience and positive development. I even found the delightful field of positive psychology, happiness reports, and whole books about flourishing.
But, when I asked, “What do we know about how people at society’s margins thrive?”, “What will it take to design for thriving generations into the future?”, I had to look outside of psychology for visionary imagining and liberation discourses.
I found writings on love and education by bell hooks, the esoteric healing-centered and transformative justice works of activist-scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer, June Jordan, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, classics in Black LGBTQ+ literature and thought penned by Audre Lorde and James Baldwin and others, fugitive historians and sociologists and so on.
Choosing to focus at an under-supported intersection, I organized a study centering LGBTQ+ and same gender loving young Black people, putting their stories into conversation with the larger scholarship and theory. The Bridge to Thriving Framework emerged out of this work.
The most powerful finding? — Nearly every participant said some version of, "Nobody has actually ever asked me about my thriving before."
I have heard this from many people since. And since, people have been able to articulate their thriving needs time and time again.
It turned out that little me was onto something—the way children instinctively usually are. Thriving was about irreverence and truth-telling and sometimes, even, indiscreet direct questions. (Sorry, Dad!)
Since completing my doctoral research, I have been delighted to see my framework resonate across different regions, age groups, professions, and humans in all walks of life. A person once told me, “Your work is soul-saving.” Another said the work, “helped them think about thriving on a more systemic level.” Organizations have incorporated the framework into their design. Teachers have used it with their students. It has inspired original art, even events! And more.
While I, like everyone else, don’t thrive in all ways at all times—when my pain or worries flare, for example—I have had the extraordinary good fortune to learn from visionaries across ages and stages of life about the power of community, selfhood, abundance, pleasure, relief, and those moments when we can simply be whole, uncontested, and existing in our fullness. I have learned about how to design for thriving. I have shared this wisdom. And I have watched hope, creativity, connection, and possibility blossom.
I hope you’ll join me.
With a bell hooks kind of love,
Dr. Kia
