Most health information tells you what to do.
It rarely tells you who shaped the story or why.
Decode The Story is a newsletter about who gets counted in health data, who gets left out, and what public health could look like if it centered care instead of institutions.
I disaggregate health research and write about community, power, and what it means to show up when systems fall short.
This is public health through a different lens: not just policy, but mutual aid, community care, and lived experience.
Each week: essays on data disaggregation, mutual aid, and the gap between the stories we're told and the ones we're living.
Who's counted. Who's missing.
The tally starts quietly.
Years of believing things that weren’t true, or weren’t the whole story, begin to add up. At first, it feels abstract, a gap here, a simplification there. The kind of half-understandings you inherit without question because they make the world feel orderly and manageable.
But over time, the abstraction thins.
Those gaps begin to take shape in the real world, in who gets care and who doesn’t, in which suffering is named and which is ignored. They show up in the stories we tell about responsibility, who has it, who deserves help, who is expected to endure. What once felt harmless starts to harden. The tally becomes harder to look at, not just because of what we didn’t know, but because of what we accepted, repeated, and helped build.
That’s where regret enters, not as guilt for its own sake, but as recognition. A reckoning with the distance between what we believed and what those beliefs cost.
And if public health means anything at all, it has to begin there.
