About
Hi, I'm Esther!
For most of my life, I coasted on systems that weren’t really systems at all. In high school, I leaned on procrastination and pressure as my motivators. I could put things off until the last possible minute, then flip a switch and produce high-quality work under stress. It carried me all the way through graduation.
I doodled my way through classes until 10th grade, when I started taking AP courses. Even then, I still procrastinated and relied on pressure to make my work look polished so no one could tell I started late. Somehow, it worked. I graduated with a 4.3 GPA and even spoke at my graduation.
To me, that was proof that I could keep performing even if everything behind the scenes was chaotic. Then I went to Brown and decided to study neuroscience, which has always been my favorite subject. That is when the cracks started to show. Multitasking felt harder. Managing my time became more of a challenge, especially because I loved being involved in a lot of clubs at once. I avoided anything I didn’t want to do. I still managed to pull things together when it counted, but it came at the cost of stress and major inconsistency in my daily life. I still thought of my life as a bunch of separate points like school, personal life, and work, all facing in different directions. And I thought I was handling it just fine.
Then I went to grad school. I moved across the country and started at the University of Pennsylvania.
During that time, I worked as a clinical trials researcher in Penn’s hospital, became a TA, and started building publications. That was my day life. At night, I barely slept, either because I was being social or avoiding going to bed. The weight of my patterns started to hit me. Every now and then, I would think, maybe I should stop trying to push through the chaos.
But I stayed the same. The old mindset was still loud. If it ain’t broke, right?
Well, it broke in medical school. Getting into med school had been my dream since I was a kid. I knew it would be challenging, but I assumed the challenge would come from the curriculum itself. When I started at Emory, everything intensified. Yes, the academics were difficult, but it was the everything-ness of it all. The attention. The energy. The mental stamina. The structure. The discipline. The constant demand for all of it at once.
The demands stacked higher. My life felt more fragmented. My sense of time disappeared. I treated sleep like it was optional. My coping habits, like procrastination, time-avoidance, and general avoidance, only made everything worse.
I couldn’t push through anymore. Trying to balance work, school, and any kind of life outside of both wasn’t just difficult. It felt impossible. I realized I had been running on survival mode for years, and that strategy finally reached its limit. Something had to change. Up until then, I only knew what I knew.
Now, I had to learn something new.
Of course, I tried to flip a switch and become this new version of myself overnight. I barely knew what that even meant. I was winging it like I always did. And for a couple of months, it sort of worked. Then school got even more intense, and everything started falling apart because I was falling apart. My physical health, my mental health, my relationships, my grades, my career progression. All of it began to suffer because I did not understand how to operate in this new world.
That was when I discovered executive function coaching. First as a client, I learned to step back and understand my own brain. I learned how I interacted with time and material, why I avoided certain things, what avoidance looked like for me, and what I actually needed to stay aligned with my goals and values. I learned practical systems that did not just manage my ADHD. They supported my life.
I realized my life had always been made up of separate parts coming from every direction. With the right tools, I could finally shape my mind and direct its energy like a focused beam of light.
Prism EFC grew directly from that experience. It came from learning, often through trial and error, how to build flexible structures that allow for growth without burning out.
Today, I use that same mix of science, lived experience, and compassion to help others create sustainable strategies so they can balance school, work, relationships, and self-care while staying aligned with the bigger vision of who they want to be.
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s building systems that support your life and leave room for you to breathe.
