The degree reads Cognitive Science with an emphasis in Neuroscience — but what Occidental College actually produced was something more dangerous: a woman who understood why people do what they do, and refused to pretend she didn't. The program was interdepartmental by design, requiring coursework across philosophy, psychology, biology, and artificial intelligence. It trained her to hold contradictions with precision. She wrote two dissertations — one in cognitive neuroscience, one in diplomacy and world affairs — both examining the same quiet revolution: how neuro-linguistic programming reshapes outcomes in business and international conflict alike. She then took that academic architecture out of the classroom and into the field, consulting for behavioral psychology groups in Los Angeles where theory met consequence in real time. Since then, her education has continued its own restless expansion — into quantum physics, hypnotherapy, and the vast, underestimated territory of the subconscious mind. She does not consider this body of knowledge complete. She considers it alive.

After declining the well-hayed stall society had prepared for her — the x-MBA, the grad school applications, the surgical career that would have made everyone else very comfortable — Amanda chose something rarer: fresh air every morning as a non-negotiable. She has lived in Argentina, Egypt, and dozens of addresses in between. She currently resides in Bali, Indonesia, which suits her. The island understands that fire and water are not opposites — they are a conversation. Amanda's life operates on this same principle: the drive to grow, learn, expand, and teach running in counterpoint with the equally sacred practice of swimming in a lake, running through the woods, and spending long sabbaticals with family in Texas. Freedom is the goal. Not the applause that arrives instead of it.

Amanda believes she was put on this earth to rattle cages — not unkindly, but insistently. To interrupt the comfortable slumber of simply acquiescing to the life handed to you. She could have spent a lifetime serving other people's visions of who she should become. She tried that road briefly enough to know where it ended. Her greatest gift to herself — and, she believes, to the world — has been the long, non-linear work of becoming a woman she respects, doing work that honors both the divine and the human condition. She does not lead by instruction. She leads by example. She is not here to tell you to love your neighbor. She is here to embody love. She is not here to tell you to quit your job. She is here as a living, breathing record of someone who has quit things, reinvented herself without apology, and built a life that is joyous, juicy, and wildly worth having.

A Sacred Heart Catholic education gave Amanda something that no curriculum can fully account for: the cellular conviction that service is not optional. For eight years, every Wednesday morning belonged not to her, but to someone else — homeless shelters, hospitals, hospice patients. The understanding that we are here to give our gifts away never left her, only evolved. During the isolation of COVID, she spent one day each week delivering food to people who could no longer leave their homes. In Bali, she has taught orphaned children sales skills — not because commerce is sacred, but because capability is. She volunteers because she believes, with the quiet certainty of someone who has tested the theory, that we are one whole soul. That serving others is not altruism so much as it is recognition — of the universe, turned in on itself, finally paying attention.

She is a Metal Horse in the Chinese zodiac and a Scorpio by the stars, which, in retrospect, explains everything. She has never been containable. From the time she was a girl, she asked questions the adults around her weren't quite prepared to answer, and she did things her own way — not out of rebellion for its own sake, but because her way usually made more sense to her. The refinements of all-girls school and finishing school took root where they could: she knows where to rest her fork on the plate. She knows when to be still. But underneath the manners lives the same wild creature who has always understood, instinctively, that it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. She does not acquiesce to injustice. She bends toward justice — sometimes loudly, always deliberately, and never with an apology prepared in advance.

DITË is short for Aphrodite — the goddess of beauty — and beauty, properly understood, is not decoration. It is symmetry. Mathematical precision. The place where diversity and proportion meet and produce something that stops you in the doorway. The DITË Society is Amanda's answer to a world that keeps asking women to choose: be beautiful orferocious, wise or warm, serious or fun. The Society's answer is: no. Women get to be everything. The DITË Society is a gathering of women who share values and refuse compromises — who are on this collective journey toward a world that is more beautiful and more just, not only for themselves, but for every living thing inside it. It is still forming. Like all the best things, it is becoming before it is named.