It Started With the Feeling That Something Was Off

In 2007, shortly before I turned eight, my life changed completely.

Years earlier, while working aboard a cruise ship, my father had met an American family who encouraged my parents to consider building a life in the United States. That relationship eventually created an opportunity for our family to legally immigrate through employment sponsorship.

So I left behind the country, family, friends, and life I knew and arrived in New Hampshire.

I still remember my first night in America. I remember walking through a Market Basket and being amazed by the amount of food and choice in a single grocery store. Even the wooden houses looked strange to me. Everything felt bigger, newer, and unfamiliar.

Our beginning here was modest too. Much of our furniture was given to us. Our first car was inexpensive and old. For years, I slept on a mattress on the floor beside my mother.

But America introduced me to something different: possibility.

If Bulgaria taught me to appreciate what I had, America showed me how much could change.

My mother reinforced that lesson constantly. She is one of the most selfless people I have ever known. She taught me to treat people like people before judging anything about them, to remain grateful, and—perhaps most importantly—to believe that circumstances did not have to determine the rest of my life.

She made me believe that if I cared enough about something and was willing to work for it, I could pursue it.

It took me a long time to actually live that way.

As a kid, I never felt particularly interested in following the expected path.

I wasn't the athlete. I wasn't the popular kid. I wasn't especially interested in partying or doing things simply because everyone around me was doing them.

By junior year of high school, years of small comments and adolescent judgment had gradually taught me a different lesson: being yourself gave people something to criticize.

So I learned how to disappear.

I wore basic clothes. I kept my haircut simple. I learned what to say and how to act so that I could blend into the room instead of standing out from it.

There wasn't one dramatic moment when I made that decision. That was precisely the problem. It happened slowly enough that I didn't realize how much of my personality I had muted.

Ironically, while I was becoming quieter in the real world, I was building an entirely different version of myself online.

As a teenager, my obsession with professional wrestling and gaming led me to create a WWE gaming league called OCW. What started as something fun became a project I would run for roughly a decade.

Over the years, dozens of people passed through it. I built and maintained its website, organized events, created characters and storylines, edited promotional videos, managed conflicts, announced and commentated matches, and tried constantly to make the next event better than the last.

I loved the competition. I loved the creative control. I loved being responsible for something other people cared about.

Most of all, I loved being needed.

After an event ended, everyone else might move on to another game. I would stay behind updating the website, creating the next match card, or preparing whatever came next.

At the time, I thought I was just running a wrestling league.

In retrospect, it was the first thing I ever built.

It taught me how naturally I gravitated toward leadership, storytelling, community, and obsessive attention to the experience other people were having.

Years later, those same instincts would show up again in a very different form.

In 2019, my perspective changed again.

I experienced my first panic attack.

I didn't know what was happening at the time. I genuinely believed I was dying.

The experience affected me far beyond that day. For a period afterward, things that had consumed enormous amounts of my time suddenly felt strangely unimportant. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to see people. I wanted deeper relationships with the people I loved.

For the first time, I started seriously thinking about the fact that time was finite—and therefore about what I wanted mine to mean.

Strangely, I found myself returning to lessons I had already experienced as a child.

Presence mattered.

People mattered.

The way we spent our lives mattered.

That experience didn't create Toxic Society overnight. What it changed were the questions I was asking.

I became less interested in simply building a life that looked successful and more interested in whether I was actually choosing a life that meant something to me.

Those questions stayed with me.

I first came across the phrase Toxic Society through professional wrestling when I was around twenty or twenty-one. The name stuck with me immediately.

The original idea behind it, however, was very different from the company we're building today.

At first, Toxic Society was essentially a way to point at everything I believed was wrong with the world around me.

It was angry. Critical. External.

I wanted to expose the things I saw as toxic.

Then I started to develop myself more, and the idea changed with me.

Over time, I became less interested in simply identifying what was wrong around me and more interested in examining the decisions I was making within that same world.

I started to recognize how much of my own life had been shaped by conformity.

For years, I had worried so much about how other people perceived me that I had voluntarily made myself less visible. Only in the last few years have I begun deliberately reversing that.

I changed how I dressed. I changed my hairstyle. I became more comfortable standing apart without feeling like I had to explain myself.

The irony isn't lost on me:

Someone who once used clothing to disappear eventually created a clothing company partly about having the confidence to be seen.

That connection is personal to me.

Clothing cannot determine who someone is, but I know firsthand that the way you present yourself can either become another form of hiding or a way of expressing something you finally feel comfortable owning.

That is part of what fashion became for me—and part of why apparel made sense as the first medium for Toxic Society.

For much of my professional life, I have worked in manufacturing and production leadership.

I was given leadership responsibility young, and those environments shaped the standards I bring into anything I build. They taught me to think in terms of process, consistency, accountability, and what happens when “good enough” becomes acceptable.

That mindset follows me into Toxic Society.

To me, the small details are part of the larger idea. A garment, a package, a design, the way someone is treated when something goes wrong—if our name is attached to it, I want to be proud of the entire thing.

That doesn't mean we'll get everything right.

We're building this in real time, and I would rather be honest about that than manufacture the image of a company that appeared fully formed.

What matters to me is that as we learn, grow, and become capable of more, the standard rises with us.

Toxic Society also would not exist in its current form without my co-founders, Aparna and Daniel.

The earliest version lived mostly in my head: ideas, messages, and characters I could describe but couldn't necessarily bring to life myself. What transformed it from something I imagined into something we could actually build was bringing together people whose abilities were very different from my own.

Aparna is my fiancée as well as my co-founder, so her place in this story extends far beyond Toxic Society. She is the person I chose to build my life with, and when it came time to turn this idea into something real, she became the person who could give it a visual language.

I tend to see the larger direction—the meaning behind a concept, what I want someone to feel, the story a piece should tell, and how the different parts of the company should connect. Aparna can take those abstractions and turn them into characters and artwork with an identity of their own. A large part of the visual world people will come to know as Toxic Society exists because of what she is capable of creating.

Daniel's place in my life goes back much further.

We've been best friends since we were kids, but calling him a friend has never really captured our relationship. He is my brother in every way except blood. We grew up together, and he has been one of the most constant people in my life.

As Toxic Society grows, he will lead much of our outreach and community relations: building relationships, helping us stay connected to the people behind the brand, identifying where we can genuinely help, and eventually helping turn our intentions around community impact into something tangible.

He also happens to be one of the most brilliant people I have ever known. His mind works in ways that have impressed and inspired me since we were young—especially when it comes to mathematics, computers, systems, and solving complex problems. That ability gives him another valuable role behind the scenes, helping us think through technical infrastructure and problems that require a completely different way of thinking than my own.

That difference between the three of us is part of what makes this work.

I bring much of the direction and larger vision. Aparna gives that vision an artistic language. Daniel helps connect what we're building back to the people and communities we hope it can positively affect—while bringing an analytical and technical mind that strengthens everything underneath it.

The idea may have started with me.

Toxic Society became something bigger because it stopped being mine alone.

I don't know exactly how large Toxic Society will become.

Of course I want to build something significant. I am ambitious, and one of the deepest changes in my life has been learning not to assume that the circumstances in front of me are the only circumstances available to me.

But size is not the only definition of success that matters to me.

If something we create makes even a handful of people reconsider the direction of their lives—if someone finally starts the project they've been afraid to start, expresses a part of themselves they've been hiding, or simply realizes that they have more influence over the direction of their life than they thought they did—then this will already have meant something to me.

I'm not writing any of this from a finish line.

I'm still learning how to live more deliberately. I'm still learning when to challenge myself, when to change direction, and when to ignore the pressure to become whatever version of me would be easiest for other people to understand.

For much of my life, I adapted to the world around me.

Now I'm much more interested in deciding what kind of life I want to build within it—and what kind of impact I can leave behind.

Toxic Society is part of that decision.

Those questions always frustrated me because they seemed to assume I was missing something. I never felt that way.

My mom would remind me to be patient. She saw those questions as curiosity rather than judgment, and as a chance to offer a different perspective.

She is the most pure-hearted person I know and taught me from a young age to give when I can and to understand someone before judging them.

My dad shaped me in a different way. He is endlessly curious and the smartest person I know. He will educate himself on almost anything and form his opinions from facts and evidence. Growing up, I learned so much just by listening to him talk in the car and hearing the way he thought through the world around him.

Between the two of them, being loved was never something I had to wonder about.

That’s why I’ve always believed that family is defined by who loves you rather than who you are related to.

I grew up in Westford, Massachusetts, and some of my favorite memories are the simplest ones.

One was watching America’s Got Talent together. We would rush to get our dinner into the living room before the show started. No matter what happened that day, I could always look forward to that.

I was happy, secure, and life felt full of possibilities.

At eight, I wanted to be an Olympic track star because I loved to run. It made me feel free, like I could keep going forever.

At ten, I wanted to be a lawyer because I was so good at arguing. It didn’t matter whether I was right or wrong; I could make an argument for it.

This probably would have made me a pretty good lawyer, but really I just had a passion for what I believed in.

My dreams changed constantly with whatever interested me or whatever my latest hobby was.

And that was fine.

In fact, it was celebrated.

I had my whole life ahead of me, so why choose one thing?

At that age, most of my dreams were about what I wanted to become.

When I was eleven, I had one of the first experiences that made me think beyond what I wanted for myself.

One freezing winter night, my mom, my aunt, and I were walking through Boston to pick up some food.

I had my hands shoved in my pockets, fixated on the idea of being back inside. As I trailed behind them, a homeless man approached my mom and asked for change.

Without stopping her conversation, she reached into her bag and handed him everything she had—fifty cents.

“Thank you so much. God bless you,” he said.

And we kept walking.

Something about that moment made me feel sick to my stomach.

What struck me most was how normal the interaction seemed.

My mom wasn’t surprised when he approached us. She had seen much more of life than I had, but to me it was new.

I wondered why I got to go home that night.

We would pull into the driveway, and my dad would carry me inside and tuck me into bed. The next morning, I would wake up to pancakes, and my biggest worry was getting a cavity from the maple syrup.

I wondered if that man had ever had that.

And if he did, when he closed his eyes, did he see it? Did the memory of pancakes warming on the stove somehow make those freezing winter nights feel a little warmer?

I wondered how I would feel if that were my mom or dad standing out there while people walked past them with such indifference.

Because at the very least, he was someone’s son.

I didn’t feel pity for him. I felt an overwhelming sense of humility.

I wasn’t better than him.

I had simply been given a different circumstance—or, even scarier to consider, maybe the same one, followed by a completely different outcome.

I remember wishing I could have done more.

That was one of the first times I understood that being fortunate came with something else: a desire to give back.

As I got older, that feeling stayed with me, even as my attention shifted toward figuring out who I was and what I wanted to do with my own life.

As a kid, that uncertainty felt exciting.

By my late teens, I started to worry that it meant I lacked focus.

The huge possibilities I had imagined when I was younger began to feel less realistic, and I felt pressure to get serious.

Underneath it all, I still wanted to do something good in the world—to give back to my parents and help the people around me.

So I continued on the only path I really knew.

It was time to go to college.

My parents, out of love for me, had always said college was the way to be successful. My school reinforced the same idea.

And somewhere along the way, I developed a very specific picture of success:

Go to college.

Choose a degree that would justify the time and debt.

Get a stable job.

Make good money.

Build a comfortable life and finally be able to give back to the people around you.

Enjoy your weekends, your vacations, and whatever time is left outside of work.

So at seventeen, someone who struggled to choose almost anything suddenly had to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

I chose physics, even though my passion was in the arts.

It became pretty clear by my second semester that I was horrible at it.

And rather than giving me the answers to the universe, physics led me to Dan.

He made the mistake of thinking I looked smart enough to help him in that class.

Unfortunately for him, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Neither did he.

I didn’t know it then, but he would become a brother to me.

Shortly after meeting him, I switched my degree to Computer Engineering, and we went through practically every class together.

Then he introduced me to my now-fiancé, Angel.

We immediately hit it off.

And Angel’s existence challenged a lot of what I believed about success.

Angel was smart, doing well for himself, and driven to make something of his life.

But he was also completely comfortable with the belief that you didn’t need college or a degree to build a successful life.

More importantly, he lived that.

When I started my first corporate job, I was scared.

I had spent years working toward this goal, and suddenly I was looking at the future I had worked so hard to reach.

There was nothing inherently wrong with it.

But I started to realize how much I valued the parts of myself that existed outside of work.

I wanted time with the people I cared about.

I wanted to draw.

I wanted to write.

I wanted to stay curious.

I wanted enough energy at the end of the day to still feel like myself.

And I wanted to be excited about something I was building—not just spend my life looking forward to the next weekend or vacation.

Somewhere along the way, I had become so focused on following the path I thought would lead to success that I had lost sight of why I wanted that success in the first place:

To support the people I loved and do something meaningful with my life.

I started thinking differently about what success meant to me.

I realized that the life I had always been taught to pursue was just one possible version of it, and there were more ways to build a meaningful life than I had thought.

Early in our relationship, Angel had mentioned Toxic Society.

At the time, it didn’t have the meaning it has now, but I immediately had an opinion about it.

The name carries emotion before you know anything else about it.

In 2025, we decided to see what we could actually make of it.

By then, the idea had changed. So had we.

It was up to us to decide what that name would represent, and we chose not to make it something cynical.

To me, Toxic Society is about thinking critically about the world around you while being willing to reflect on your own life too.

It isn’t about telling people how to live.

If anything, I want it to do the opposite.

I want people to listen to that little voice in their head that may be pulling them toward something they never thought they could actually do.

I want people to feel represented.

I want them to support one another.

And I want what we build to eventually give something back to the communities around us.

To me, Toxic Society isn’t about looking at the world cynically.

It’s about questioning it while holding onto the same optimism I had as a child—the belief that I can make a difference in my own life and, hopefully, in the lives of others.

Building Toxic Society has become one of the most defining ongoing experiences in my life because, in a lot of ways, it has brought back parts of myself I thought I had lost.

It has reminded me that it isn’t too late to change direction, try something new, or build a life around more of what I love.

I’ve learned new ways to challenge myself creatively, and I’ve seen more of what I am capable of in a year than I had in the four before it.

I get to draw again.

I get to create.

I get to take an idea we talk about and give it a face.

And I’ve learned that changing direction doesn’t mean everything that came before it was a mistake.

My education wasn’t a mistake.

My career wasn’t a mistake.

They helped get me here.

The difference is that I no longer feel like the path I started down has to be the path I stay on forever simply because I already invested time into it.

Toxic Society is just a name.

The people behind it and what we choose to do with it give that name meaning.

I don’t know where this will take us.

For most of my life, the fear of not knowing would have stopped me before I began.

Now I’m excited by it.

I’m blessed enough to have this opportunity to help the people I love, create something meaningful, meet people I would have never known otherwise, and hopefully leave whatever part of this world I can reach a little better than when I found it.

When I look back, that feels strangely connected to the person I’ve always been.

The little girl who changed her mind every few years about what she wanted to become.

The eleven-year-old walking through Boston wishing she could do more.

The teenager who thought she needed to have the rest of her life figured out.

And the adult who finally realized that not knowing what comes next doesn’t mean you’re lost.

For once, I don’t need to know exactly where the path ends to know that I want to follow it.

And there is no one else I would rather do that with than my family—Angel and Dan.

I started keeping a little notebook full of impossible gadgets. I drew each one like a schematic, labeled every part, and told my family that one day I would invent all of them. One was a handheld material inspector: you would put in a sample of any material, and it would tell you where it came from and where you could get more.

Very scientific, I know.

Looking back, that notebook was probably the first sign of how my mind works. I like problems that feel like puzzles—the kind you can turn over and study from every angle until you understand how they work.

The one person missing from much of that time was my mom.

She was working in St. Croix and sending money home so we could have what we needed. Every visit she made home was something I looked forward to for weeks.

When we moved to St. Croix to be with her, my dad was no longer part of my life. He passed away in 2013, and I still don’t think I completely understand what I lost.

But in St. Croix, I finally got to be with my mom every day.

She had come from the Dominican Republic with nothing, and she built a restaurant from scratch right off the docks where the cruise ships came in. That restaurant is also where I learned something she never actually had to say out loud.

People in need would sometimes come by asking for food. My mom would bring it outside so the customers wouldn’t be disturbed.

But she always gave it.

As a kid, I remember wondering why there were people with no homes and why they couldn’t have food and a place to live like I did. I still don’t have a simple answer. But the need to help someone when you can has stayed with me ever since.

Then we moved to New Hampshire, and a lot changed.

Money got tight. We relied on SNAP and government-subsidized housing, and we moved from rental to rental. My mom raised us basically on her own, working construction and bartending jobs—the kind of work that would wear anyone down.

And every single day, I watched her walk out the door and do what she had to do.
No complaints. No buts. Nothing.

Even when we didn’t have much, I never went without a necessity. The newest games? Not always. The clothes I needed and food on the table? Always.

Living through that shaped the way I see people who are struggling because, for a while, we were the ones struggling.

Those years also turned me into a pretty solitary kid. I never stayed anywhere long enough to build friendships outside my family, and by high school I spent most of my time alone, playing video games or reading random math books and trying to derive the formulas from scratch.

I never really fit into any group.

Too nerdy for the cool kids. Not Hispanic enough for the Hispanic kids. Not outcast enough for the outcasts.

I wasn’t willing to hide who I was just to make friends, and that came with a cost. I became overly critical of people, slow to trust anyone, and very comfortable living inside my own head.

The one person who somehow managed to get through to me was Angel.

When I met him in sixth grade, I honestly wanted nothing to do with him. He was one of those annoying troublemaker kids. Thankfully, he mellowed out.

A couple of years later, we started talking, and somehow he could read me like a book. I had been a die-hard PlayStation kid my entire childhood, but I switched to Xbox so we could play together—which, back then, felt a lot more serious than it sounds now.

We developed an unofficial rule that wherever one of us worked, the other had to find their way there too. Then we both ended up at UMass Lowell.

We were inseparable.

Getting to college, and deciding what to study once I was there, was something I mostly had to figure out on my own. I became the first person in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree, and later a master’s. My mom wanted the best for me, but she couldn’t guide me through a system she had never been part of.

Not because she didn’t care.

Because she didn’t know.

I asked myself a pretty simple question: what path has enough math in it that I can also make money? The answer was Computer Engineering.

That practical path is also how I met Aparna, in a physics class. I was still pretty guarded with people, but she was determined to become my friend whether I made it easy for her or not.

Eventually, she wore me down.

I introduced her to Angel, and before long the three of us became incredibly close. Long before Toxic Society existed, the people who would eventually build it had already found one another.

For four years, I poured almost everything I had into that degree because I believed it would be my salvation.

Then, in 2019, during my sophomore year, my mom passed away.

It was sudden and completely unexpected. My whole world fell apart, and I felt more alone than I ever had.

It felt like the last person in the world who loved me unconditionally was gone.

Growing up, my mom had always been adamant that we learn how to live on our own and never take anything for granted. After she passed, I understood why. She had been preparing us to live in a world she would no longer be part of.

So I learned. How to be mature. How to budget. How to keep working, studying, and holding everything together without her.

It made me stronger, and it made me who I am. It also taught me to always choose what was safe—and once that kind of thinking has protected you, it is hard to let go of. I’m still working on that every day.

Eventually, I graduated and reached the professional stability I had spent years working toward. In a lot of ways, I had accomplished exactly what I set out to do.

But a career, by itself, was never going to answer every question I had about what made a life meaningful. I caught myself always looking ahead to the weekend, the summer, or whatever came next instead of appreciating where I already was.

Somewhere in that reflection, I realized something I still believe:

Your every day should not consist of waiting for something else to come.

I started volunteering through work, especially with high school students who might have grown up the way I did—kids who could use someone to help them understand the options in front of them.

Not because their parents don’t care.

Because sometimes their parents don’t know.

Around that same time, Toxic Society started becoming real.

When Angel first brought it up, I honestly thought it was just another one of his fringe ideas. It was a name and a statement. Nothing more.

Now it means something to me.

I don’t think the answer is simply pointing at everything wrong with the world.
I think you have to decide what you can actually do about it.

My role in Toxic Society is primarily outreach and community relations, alongside the technical side of the company, and that role is personal to me. I know firsthand that the right support, given at the right time, can change the direction of someone’s life.

So when we say we want to turn awareness into action, it means showing up. It means helping young people see paths they might not have known were available to them. It means listening before assuming you understand someone’s circumstances.

Somewhere along the way, my definition of success changed too.

It used to be a degree and a paycheck. Now I picture a beautiful, peaceful life with my girlfriend, Ruby—ideally on a farm somewhere with guinea pigs, bunnies, and probably more animals than we originally planned for.

I want peace. I want connection. I want time with the people I love, and I want the work I do to leave something positive behind.

That is my version of success. It doesn’t have to be anyone else’s—and to me, that is part of the point.

I haven’t figured everything out. I’m still learning how to balance the part of me that wants security with the part that knows a meaningful life sometimes requires stepping into something uncertain.

But I know why I’m here, and I know exactly who I’m grateful for.

Angel and Aparna, I love you both. Thank you for bringing me into this and, long before Toxic Society existed, for becoming my family.

And Ruby, thank you for the future we’re building together.

When I think about what I want my role in all of this to become, I keep coming back to the kid I used to be—the one moving from place to place, living inside his own head, trying to figure everything out without always knowing who to ask.

I can’t go back and guide him.

But I can show up for the ones who feel like him now.