Meet Desiree
Imagining a world designed with empathy, care, and collective wisdom at the center
I’m an East Coast Italian, born into a traditional first-generation American family where roles were clearly defined, especially for daughters. There was a blueprint I was expected to follow it.
I didn’t.
From the very beginning, I was curious, headstrong, and deeply allergic to unquestioned assumptions. I’ve always been equal parts intense, driven, reflective, and quite funny. I cared deeply about doing well, not just for myself, but because I was painfully aware that the women in my family didn’t have the opportunities I did. I carried that awareness with me everywhere. I was determined to prove my worth, my capability, and my right to take up space.
That determination found me zig-zagging across the U.S. in pursuit of my education, fueled by a love of history, travel, and the arts. Studying history gave me context for how power is built and maintained. Travel showed me how culture, creativity, and community look different everywhere you go. And the arts reminded me, again and again, that humans are meant to create and connect, not just produce.
As my professional career began to unfold, I learned to navigate corporate American and focused most on my time in healthcare, one of the most complex and rigid systems we have. I spent years in senior leadership roles, I served as a DEI Champion, pushed for culture changes from inside systems that don’t love being questioned, and navigated the political waters of several large organizations. I know how systems work because I’ve lived deep inside them.
And still, something never sat right.
The seeds for Qualified AF were planted years ago, at a very young age, perhaps when I first read The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. My mind was split wide open.
Here was the truth I felt in my bones, laid out and clearly articulated but had never been taught to name: women are positioned as “the other” to men. Not accidentally. Not naturally. By design. That realization didn’t make me bitter.
It gave me hope.
Because if the world was constructed, it could be deconstructed. And if it could be deconstructed, it could be rebuilt.
That idea stayed with me as I watched brilliant, capable women get passed over, ignored, laid off, and quietly erased after giving organizations everything they had. I myself had participated in hustle culture, working full-time as an executive, raising my daughter solo, and running an online art business on nights and weekends. I watched the hamster wheel speed up while promising fulfillment that never came.
Eventually, I had enough.
Qualified AF is where all of that comes together.
This is my space to question the systems we’ve been told are “just the way things are.” To connect personal experience to historical and cultural design. To name what isn’t working and imagine what could.
From me, you can expect essays, reflections, cultural analysis, and storytelling that is honest, thoughtful, sometimes sharp, sometimes tender, and always rooted in lived experience.
Most importantly, you can expect truth.
My most important role, above all of this, is being mom to my spunky, almost-adult daughter. Everything I question, write, and build is shaped by a desire to leave her and others a world that is more humane, more equitable, and more honest about how it operates.
Qualified AF isn’t about fixing women. It’s about questioning the systems we inherited and imagining what they could become if they were rebuilt with empathy, compassion, equality, and care for all.
I’m really glad you’re here and am excited to hear your thoughts!
