On the Search for Human Individuality

I have spent a lot of my life collecting experiences that did not obviously belong together.

Retail merchandising. Nursing. A master's in public health at Columbia University. Management consulting. And now this. If you are trying to find the thread, I understand.

Here’s what I think was happening in my head when making these pivots: I did not feel like I knew enough yet. Not enough about people, not enough about the world, basically not enough about what actually makes a life feel like my own. So I kept going. I wouldn’t say I was lost, because there was always something else worth understanding. Another corner of the world I had not seen yet. I needed to collect enough of it to feel like I had a real picture.

Growing up “shy” (aka observant) and pushing myself to become this person who is client/patient facing a vast majority of the time, gave me the ability to pay attention to people and situations in a specific way.

I realized that when I walk into someone's home I am not really looking at the furniture. I am looking for the thing that tells me who they actually are. And it is almost never the most expensive piece in the room. It is the one with a story behind it. The bowl that came back from a trip somewhere. The object that stops a conversation because someone across the room needs to know where it came from or who made it. It’s the same with how someone chooses their outfit.

What I am noticing more of though is how there are the same things in the same way everywhere. Fast fashion and manufacturing and supply chain logistics have increased production of the same thing. AI can generate a fully styled room in seconds. “Google it”, “buy it from Amazon”. Everything is available and somehow it has never been harder to find something that actually feels like you.

People are buying more and more and still walking around with this quiet sense that something is missing. Not because they have bad taste. But because they have not had the space or the support to figure out what their taste actually is.

I started Alight because I think that matters. Not in a precious way. In a very practical, this is your one life kind of way.

This is for the person who is ready to stop decorating their home the way a catalog told them to. Who has been quietly buying things trying to find the right feeling and has not found it yet in the usual places. Who knows there is a version of their life that feels more like them and just needs someone patient enough to help draw it out.

With that to say, the thread that has been stringing my assortment of careers together is a desire to help people - physically, creatively, analytically. So my latest venture is to help people find that “thing” that makes them feel unique and distinctly human.

— C

March 2026