Sarah
Hello and welcome to the new episode of STEMterview series. Today we have Ashley with us. She’s working at Meta. Most of us have probably heard of them and I’m so excited to talk to her today, and maybe you can just start by talking about what your work at Meta is. What are you doing?

Ashley
I work in Reality Labs at Meta, so basically it was Oculus and then Facebook about Oculus and then Facebook turned into Meta, and we’re now Meta Reality Labs, and so Reality Labs is divided up into a product side that works on the products that you’re probably familiar with like the Quest, the Quest 2 and the Quest Pro. And I work in the R&D side of Reality Labs, so I’m working on technology that’s probably still five to ten years out from actually being a product that you can buy in stores. So really early stages of research. And I do a lot of work, so I’m a user experience or UX researcher, but I work a lot with designers or engineers who are actually in some cases doing really basic science to develop different aspects of the technology that we’re developing. I work with designers who are kind of doing more of the software side of things or just trying to figure out how the product should look and feel, and then as a UX researcher, I’m taking these early stage prototypes and trying to test them with people to figure out is this product something that’s really easy to use, is it something that people actually want and a lot of the work I’m doing right now is on augmented reality glasses.

A lot of companies are working on these right now, so it’s basically there’ll be glasses that have a display screen and other kinds of new technology like eye tracking or GPS tracking, and so we’re trying to figure out some materials. That’s what the engineers and the designers are working on that are going to go to these glasses and then also just what people might actually watch in a pair of AR glasses, what would they want them to do, how they want them to, how would you want to integrate with them and operate them. So those are the kinds of questions that I’m working on, and again this tech is still like at least five years out from being something that you could buy, but it’s pretty cool. My work’s pretty varied. That’s kind of like the general overview of what I do.

Sarah
That’s a good overview, thank you. So I saw that you have a PhD in Developmental Psychology. How does that help you in your day-to-day life and your day-to-day work?

Ashley
So my PhD’s, like you said, is in Developmental Psychology and I was in academic research for about 10 years, and studied how infant emotion perception and emotional development, how young humans learn how to perceive and understand other people’s emotions. So on that level it’s very, very different than what I’m doing now in tech, but on some level it is pretty similar. So I do have an experimental and research degree and so with that sense, user research is a social science research and so all of the research skills that I’ve developed in terms of how do you design a really rigorous research study, how do you carry it out, how do you write up results and analyze results, and present findings are all the marketable skills that I had through my PhD that I was able to transfer over into this new topic area.

So there are some methods that I use now that are very different than what I used when I was studying infants, when I was studying [inaudible]. I was using a lot of eye tracking or other kinds of looking time studies, and now I don’t work with kids anymore; I work with adults and it’s a lot more interviews and observations, which I obviously didn’t do with babies because they can’t talk, so I can’t, you can’t ask a baby what it likes or what it thinks about something. So in that case, the methods are different, but the research and the research process itself is very, very similar. So a lot of the skills transferred pretty easily from my Developmental Psych PhD to UX, and the content is just very different

Sarah
You already talked about the difference between working with kids and development, and what you do now. So what kind of approaches, technologies are you using now or what is research like? What does it look for you now in the real world, and not in academia?

Ashley
Some of the methods are different obviously because with infants, all the methods that you use, you’re using them with babies who can’t talk or with little kids who can’t talk. That skill that’s verbally talking so all you have to become pretty creative with how do you get information out of these little humans who don’t speak, and so the methods are different in that regard.

I think the other the big differences otherwise are more like the time scale of research. So if doing work with infants is really, really slow because you get a lot of babies that come into the lab and the data you get maybe isn’t great or they didn’t sleep all the night before and they like or they might just cry through your whole study. So depending on your method, like if you’re doing something like EEG where you actually put a cap on a baby, you could lose half of your participants and then it’s also just a really slow process to get kids into the lab. So you could spend months or years just collecting data for a project and then even longer like years after that like writing up the paper and trying to get it published and dealing with journal rejections and all of that, so I don’t know if I had any project that took less than a few years. I have an initial idea now the paper is published and it’s ended and I can move on, but here in my current job at Meta, it’s on a much faster time scale. So it’s on a scale of a few months and I was at another UX company beforehand and there were some projects that we did in a week, start to finish, where we only needed five or seven participants and you just wanted to test a new feature on a website for example and you really just needed a handful of people to figure out what are the main problems with this particular website design that you have. So the time scale is much, much faster than academic research and also part of the reason is because our final reports are slide decks like PowerPoint presentations and the point isn’t to get like P is less than 0.05; that doesn’t really matter, you’re just trying to get enough information to make a decision about what you should do next, so you don’t have to deal with like rounds and rounds of peer reviews and journal rejections and all of that. It’s much faster.

The other big difference for me is it’s just a lot more collaborative. So when I was a grad student, I was the only person in my lab for most of the time I was in grad school like no lab manager, no other grad students, no postdocs. So it was pretty isolating and then I did most of my post doctorate in COVID, so it was also very isolating and I feel like when you’re in academia, you feel like “I’m the only person who cares about this topic and like no one else really cares” or maybe there’s a handful of people who care, but generally are not like you. You are the person who’s most interested in your research and working at Meta, I never feel really siloed like that. It always feels like there’s multiple people. We’re all working together towards the same goal and it’s just a lot more collaborative that way and I think I prefer that. I still have a lot of autonomy over and control over research questions because designers and engineers will come to me and be like “well you’re the UX researcher, how do you think we should do this? What questions do you think we should ask or what variables should we do?” So I actually have a lot of input and autonomy, but I’m not choosing the exact research question that we ask in controlling every little thing. It’s a much more collaborative process and I’m happy to give up some of that control because I think it can also be a little bit stressful and isolated when you’re like everything is on my shoulders and here it feels like I can actually delegate a bit more to other people.

Sarah
I guess that also makes up for the timeliness of the projects; the more people work on a project, the faster you can get a result, right? Because everybody’s getting their expertise. You’re just like “okay, if you take that over and you’re done quicker”, no?

Ashley
Yeah, it depends. I think for me, I work really, really quickly. I work more quickly than most people so I think there could definitely be some slowness when you’re waiting on other people to do things or if it is kind of a more collaborative effort you’re trying to figure out like what research question are we even going to ask because there’s just so many things that you could do. So I think the part of it is something that I’m working on is trying to figure out how to be a bit more forceful and decide and figure out like “okay, this is the question that I think we should ask” and “here’s an idea for a research, what do you think?” and really being the person to drive projects, but that’s something pretty new to me because I’ve just started working at Meta like in the end of September, so I’m pretty new, and it’s obviously been like a bit of a weird time because there were a bunch of layoffs in November and still like figuring out my footing a little bit but I think I am getting to the point where I’m gonna start trying to push projects along a little bit more.

Sarah
And what made you leave academia and why did you decide to go that big, basically such a big company?

Ashley
There are a lot of reasons. So when I was finishing my PhD, I actually just finished my PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle and I was in my fourth year and I sat on a faculty search committee, so I saw the process from the other side and up until this point I was very much like I’m going to be a 10-year track R1 research. University didn’t really consider any other career options, but then actually seeing the process from the other side and seeing how we had 120 people apply for one job and seeing how it was kind of whittled down to the three people we were going to buy off to interviews, I saw people getting cut who had CVs that were much better than mine and the reasons that seemed like a little arbitrary to me, and I just came away thinking there’s no way I’m ever going to get a faculty job, and also at that point I really wanted to stay in Seattle. I had a lot of friends there, really loved Seattle and when you’re looking for a faculty job, you really don’t have much of any choice over where you live. You kind of just have to go wherever you get a job. And so, I actually started looking into UX then since Seattle is like a pretty big tech hub and I had kind of like soft offers from Google and Microsoft for contract positions. I just wasn’t convinced that UX is I was gonna enjoy it. I thought there’s nothing I would probably enjoy other than studying babies, and saying the one thing that I had been studying for eight years at that point. And so I applied for one postdoctoral fellowship and thought there’s no way I’m gonna get it, but then I did and it was in Madison Wisconsin. I decided that in three years of funding, I’m just gonna keep writing it out like let’s see what happens and that was at the end of 2019.

So then six months later COVID shut down my entire university and all my research went out the window, job market was decimated and then all of a sudden it was the end of 2021. I’d started my third year of my postdoc and applied for a few faculty jobs. Nothing happened, and I was just faced with this choice of “am I going to be a postdoc for a fourth year or maybe a fifth year” or “am I going to just do something else”. And I just decided I was done and I didn’t want to be a postdoc anymore. I just wanted to do something else and it wasn’t worth it anymore to keep trying. So I applied to a bunch of different jobs, and the first job I got wasn’t at Meta, but it was a UX job at a company called Bold Insight. It’s based in Chicago and I was there for about three months and it was a true entry level position and then I got a little bit bored, and then really wanted a job where I had more ownership of the projects and could actually be more of a product leader and a project manager, and at that point I wasn’t living in Seattle. I was living in North Carolina and I really wanted to move back to Seattle. So I actually applied to this position at Meta kind of on a whim and then I got it, and then I was like “okay”.

So I think during my first job, I realized that I really liked working on hardware and I really liked working in tech because you can do UX in a bunch of different things, and I realized that working on websites wasn’t really super interesting to me or working on apps like working on more digital products. I really like working on things that you can hold and interact with, and I really liked working in tech. I had done some work with medical devices, which was interesting but tech was really interesting.

So now I work on hardware and tech, which is I think in the UX sphere the thing that I’m most interested in, but everyone has to figure out what they’re interested in. So that’s how I ended up at Meta. If you had told me in grad school that I was going to end up working at Meta, I don’t think I would have believed. But I really like my job. It’s kind of all the things I liked about academia, but the things that I didn’t like.

Sarah
What made you become so fascinated about user experience because it’s still not really psychology-based, but not that close, I guess?

Ashley
Yeah. Like I said, when I was initially applying for jobs outside of academia, UX was a popular path for psych PhDs and especially, I was aware of it because I had done my PhD in Seattle, and the people I knew who had left academia, a lot of them had gone into UX because they wanted to stay in Seattle. So they were at Google and Microsoft and all these places. So I knew about that, but I applied to a bunch of different jobs, all research positions because I knew from when I first started doing research as an undergrad that I really, really liked research and didn’t really like teaching that much. But even so, everyone was like “well, you can just go and be a faculty at an R1 and buy out of all your teaching requirements and not actually have to teach”. But teaching and curriculum development was never super interesting to me. I always really wanted to do research. So I applied to other research scientist positions: behavioral scientists, people scientists. So, I had like all research positions, but just different content areas and I ended up in UX because it was the first job offer I had, which isn’t like a great reason, but I was just like that’s how much I wanted to leave my post-doc. I was just like I’m gonna take the first job offer I have, I don’t really care. It’s a research position, it pays twice as much money as I’m making now. It’s fine. And then once I started doing it, I really, like I said, liked the pace of it. I really like how fast it is and I think I just kind of realized part of it that a job is a job.

I never wanted work to be my entire life. The thing that makes me happy the most isn’t work, it’s hanging out with and spending time with other people and my friends and doing things outside of work. So I think I’m happy to have a job that can be very much contained in a 9 to 5 and that gives me enough money to actually go and do the things outside of my job that really make me happy. Not that I hate my job, I actually like my job, but I don’t want it to be my entire life in the way that academia was.

Sarah
Makes sense, totally makes sense. Okay nice, that’s a real review of the whole transition from academia to your current job, but I’m still very interested about your academic research that you did because you studied emotional perception in infants. Can you talk a bit about this? What did you learn about emotions, emotional perception during your research?

Ashley
I kind of just fell into this area a bit when I really wanted to be a therapist. That’s what originally drew me to psychology. I knew I wanted a PhD so I knew I needed research experience. And I ended up working in an infant and language development Lab at Duke University where I did my undergrad. It was my first research experience and I just became really fascinated with babies. Babies learn so much so quickly the first two years of life. You go from this pretty helpless blob into this walking talking human of a personality, and there’s maybe like no other period in your life where you learn so much so quickly and develop so quickly. And it really fascinates me, especially how quickly we learn language. So that’s how I initially got started in research.

And then towards the end of my undergrad, I really wanted to do an honors thesis. And my undergraduate advisor, whose background is infant language development, had started talking to another faculty member at Duke who was kind of more in the social neuroscience area. He was studying emotions and he really wanted to know how babies learned labels for emotions and how babies learned about emotions. So he didn’t have any developmental background. My advisor had no background in emotions. They were like “well we want to do this project. So why don’t you do it?” and so they gave this to me. So I kind of became this bridge between the more social, emotional side of psychology and the developmental side of psychology. And then through that process, I realized that there just really wasn’t that much work in this area at all because working with babies is really, really hard and also working with emotions is also really hard. So then you put them together and it’s just incredibly difficult. No wonder no one’s doing this, but I really liked how challenging that was.
So I was doing this project and I just got really, really into this topic and then I just started having these set of questions I really wanted to explore. And then that’s what I was looking for, specifically when I was looking for PhD programs and how I ended up in Seattle. I found probably one of the only faculty members in the whole country that was doing anything remotely related to this topic. And then I ended up in Seattle and it was really nice because I actually had a lot of autonomy to explore the questions that I wanted to explore. Overall, the big question is how do babies learn about other people’s emotions, and so I started off trying to figure out at 10 months, 14 months, 18 months what do babies understand about other people’s emotion cues. So what do babies understand about a smile or a frown or these facial configurations as adults that we associate with emotions like a scrunched face and disgust or like lowered eyebrows and anger, like what does a 10 month old make of any of that? Do they attach any meaning to it? It seems like they do a little bit at 10 months, but it’s something that really starts to, maybe really starts making more meaning out of it in the second year of life, sort of between 14 and 18 months is when they start to attach meaning to these facial cues. So yeah that was like the overall question that I was looking at for most of grad school and then in my postdoc I was really intending and this didn’t really happen because of COVID but I was really wanting to look at some of these questions and slightly older kids who had a history of maltreatment and physical abuse for example because these kids are raised in families where there’s a high degree of negative emotions displayed by their parents and we do have some evidence that fundamentally changes what a child understands about emotions. You can imagine if you’re being raised by someone who is expressing anger towards you over every little thing, you’re going to learn that anything could trigger someone to be angry, for example, in a very different way that a kid reared and is typically in a developing family would learn about anger.

So the very last paper I wrote before I transitioned out of academia was kind of like my big take on the hypothesis about how babies are ultimately learning about emotions. And I think it’s in a very similar way to how babies learn about language. So hopefully if anyone out there is interested in picking up my work and continuing it, I think I’ve laid out some pretty clear questions moving forward. I’m just not going to be the one to explore these questions but I do feel I’ve moved the needle a little bit, at least in this niche research area and so someone else can take up my body of work and continue on with it. If you’re interested, email me. I have ideas but I’m just not gonna do it.

Sarah
That’s a great feeling. It’s kind of what one wishes sometimes about being a researcher, always being at the edge of human knowledge, just repeating what everybody else is saying already. Well, you were the someone who came up with new stuff nobody else knew about. It’s amazing.

Ashley
Yeah, I know. It’s definitely, it’s really fun I think. The thing that was hard for me is that it’s such a slow process and it’s hard to see that you’re actually having any kind of real world impact other than “oh I’m just personally interested in this thing so I’m going to study it”. But then yeah like I said before it’s like does anyone really care? Is this even helping anyone or did you do anything and…

Sarah
…will anyone ever pick up that paper and work on this again?

Ashley
Yeah in that sense and I’m like “well, if no one is actually going to pick up this stuff that I was doing, then is it even that important to begin with?” Just all these pretty existential questions where I think a lot of academics have these thoughts.

Sarah
Oh for sure. When it comes to PhD thesis, all these 400 pages and you know of two people on this planet that actually read this book, thanks for nothing, right?

Ashley
Oh yeah. One of my committee members didn’t even read my dissertation. I found this out the day of my defense. My advisor was like “just so you know” he was like he didn’t read it. I’m like that’s fine. I don’t whatever.

Sarah
Well all right. Then tell me what is your hypothesis on emotions and how kids learn about emotions. What’s your big hypothesis?

Ashley
So if you think about language development, one of the big theories out there has to do with statistical learning. So it’s this idea that there are enough languages somewhat structured or structured enough to where babies just from listening to other people talk, can kind of start to pick up what labels tend to co-occur with different objects for example. So they hear cup for example and they start to learn whenever I hear the word “cup”, there seems to be this object in the room. So they start forming these associations between the labels and the objects and then they start to learn different kind of grammatical structures and that depends on the language that’s being spoken to them, the ways that nouns and verbs are structured in sentences or you know just the way that past tense is used in language and things like that. It’s all from what language researchers and some of them tend to hypothesize is that there maybe isn’t, I mean there’s all these debates about is there some core knowledge or core language, some universal grammar that babies are born with? For me, I think it’s much more about babies are born having these pretty advanced statistical learning systems and they’re just able to really rapidly pick up on statistical regularities in their world. And so I think emotions are learned in a pretty similar way to where there’s not a precise like one-to-one mapping between you know an emotional cue and an internal state. So we don’t always smile when we feel happy and when we feel happy we don’t always smile, but there is some regularity that babies are able to pick up on and so that’s ultimately what babies are learning. They’re learning okay when my caregiver is making this expression, it tends to elicit this kind of response from my body or is tending to be expressed in these kinds of situations and they’re forming these. They’re making predictions basically and they’re forming probabilistic predictions based on when a smile is happening or when a frown is happening or when a scowl is happening and also not just faces, but voices as well. So my parents talk in this really bubbly tone of voice. This is what tends to happen and when it’s a really sharp tone of voice, this is what tends to happen and so. So it’s a lot of environmental input and just really trying to make meaning and predictions out of this input.
So I think they ultimately learn in the same way and I think for a really long time people had really taken Paul Ekman’s work to heart. He was the one who argued that there’s a set of five or six universal emotions that come with distinct facial expressions: happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. And that babies are born with some understanding of all of these universal emotions, very like evolutionary perspective and I don’t believe that is true. I’m not much of a core knowledge person and I know there’s a lot of developmental psychologists who really believe that babies are born with some sort of core knowledge about biology or physics or theory of mind and things like that, but I’m much more on the babies are really, really good at learning and they’re born with these really sophisticated learning systems. But they are having to make meaning from all of this input, and they can just do that really fast where it seems like maybe there’s some core knowledge, but it’s really just babies learning really quickly.

Sarah
Okay, that’s yeah, it’s super interesting, especially when it comes to language and how to perceive everything. So because you said you’re missing kind of real world application, the first thing that comes to mind is how can parents help their kids or their infants better learn emotions or how can they help them develop a better emotional perception or emotional intelligence? What do you think?

Ashley
That’s a really good question. I think it’s hard to consciously modulate your own emotions. I think part of it is like if you are a parent who is really, really quick to anger or if you’re a parent who doesn’t really display a lot of emotions, that is going to impact what your child learns about other people’s emotions, so to the extent that you’re able to have some awareness of what your own emotional cues are. That’s really important, but I think another thing that all parents can do is just talk about emotions more and I’ve seen this in a study I did where we had like a wordless picture book that we gave to parents and had them go through it with their one to two-year-olds and just to see how. These were like really salient emotional pictures of kids smiling and frowning that were mapped to when we validated the pictures I mapped of anger, fear, sadness, disgust and some parents would go through the whole book and not use a single emotion label to describe any of the pictures. They would just be like “oh look at her nose” or “oh look that’s blue” and really not using emotional language at all. Some parents were saying “well, my child is 12 months. What could they possibly do? They’re not learning these words, they’re not understanding these words. Why would I use them?” So I think to the extent that parents could really start to label their own emotions and also explain why or label your child’s emotions and explain why like “oh you seem really sad that I took this toy away from you.” That’s the kind of information that’s ultimately going to allow kids to learn how to label their feelings and understand their feelings, which is in that kind of emotional intelligence. And awareness is something that a lot of adults don’t have or that they really struggle with. A lot of adults really struggle to identify their emotions and communicate about them and explain why they feel that way, such to the extent that that is modeled in really early childhood and that kids have a really wide emotional vocabulary that is predictive of so many things like emotion regulation but also academic achievement and the ability to make friends and keep friendships to the extent that parents can really model this kind of emotion labeling and emotional intelligence. That’s huge. That’s one of the big things that parents can do for sure.

Sarah
How did you make sense and again for me there’s a comparison to language learning for kids, no? So the parents also always repeat what the kids said or rephrased it or used the object or the actual whatever to describe what they talk about so that the kid can learn like connecting the word with the object or connect the emotion with the word in that case?

Ashley
Yeah exactly and I think the thing about emotions is that they are like mental states. So it’s very different than pointing to a ball or pointing to a cat and being like that’s a ball and that’s a cat. You can’t really see an emotion, very much a word like think or want. They’re not words, they’re mental state terms and you can’t really see them necessarily. So I think that’s why parents don’t necessarily use them early on because it’s much easier to do body parts or colors instead of mental states. And kids aren’t actually producing labels for things like happy until they’re closer to do for example. But I think that’s part of its why and theory of mind development is happening between years one and two as well. So I understand why parents aren’t necessarily using these words so often because it’s much easier to just focus on the things you can see. But it is something that ultimately helps kids and we do have evidence that it’s predictive of a variety of really positive developmental outcomes. So it is something that’s worth doing with your kids even if you’re not sure that they actually understand. But also kids understand words much sooner than they’re actually speaking them so even if your kid isn’t saying the word happy just by repeating it over and over again, kids will start to pick up on what it is and what it means.

Sarah
Nice, very interesting topic. At the end of our interviews, we always have like a couple of random questions that don’t have too much to do with your research but kind of do. Are you game for those?

Ashley
Yeah

Sarah
Okay, first one. If you were to write a book, what would it be about?

Ashley
Someone asked this the other day. I would love to write a book. I don’t know, it is a weird topic. I always thought an autobiography would be fun. I never thought my life was particularly interesting but then I think I’ve kind of appreciated more after just this past year and I think being more kind of tweeting and posting on LinkedIn about just my life and my career transition. I haven’t been on social media in a while but I have like 25 000 followers on Twitter and like another 20 on LinkedIn and so people clearly like they get somewhat interesting but I think writing an autobiography would be fun and maybe someone would read it. I think a few people had asked me to do it and I never. That’s something I never considered doing before but it’s something I consider doing more and more as time has gone.

Sarah
Nice, okay. Why is communicating science or research important to you?

Ashley
I think you can see this during COVID. I think science education has not been amazing and you can see this with COVID and just like vaccine hesitancy and especially in the early days of COVID where I think scientists didn’t really understand the virus, recommendations were changing and I think a lot of people were like “well the scientists have no idea what they’re doing” but it’s just kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is and not like science changes its mind because we learn more. So I think to the extent that we can really communicate about science and educate people on the scientific process and things like that. That’s ultimately going to be helpful for things like getting everyone vaccinated from COVID and other things like that. I think there’s just a lot of science denial unfortunately and just mistrust of science in general. So I think that’s why science communication is really important and also science education as well.

Sarah
What do you wish you really understood?

Ashley
I think for a while I would have said myself but I think I would love to…I think I really like history. I wish I really had a better…I think I would just have to sit down and read a lot of books because it’s just like so much history in the world. But I think I’d really like to have a better understanding of history and historical events. I think that’s really…I don’t remember the exact quote but if you don’t understand history, it’s doomed to repeat itself like that kind of thing. So I wish I really understood that. I think also just someone who has struggled with a lot of social anxiety, I guess the other thing I wish I understood was just how to talk to people, how to make friends in a way. That’s something I’ve struggled with as well. It’s like how do you talk to other people, how do you make friends and that’s something that I’ve slowly been figuring out. I think I have a better idea on it now.

Sarah
Okay, next question is can you use social media without thinking about which emotions a post is supposed to trigger in you?

Ashley
Prior to a year ago, I really was just working on those social media and then the Twitter following that I accumulated was really shocking to me. I definitely have found myself kind of like obsessing over “if I write this, what kind of response is it going to get” and sometimes I’ve written posts and they’ve completely blown up in ways that I’ve never predicted and not in a good way or saying something really banal and then people are like “you’re so awful” and like “you didn’t consider my point of view” and I’m just like “I literally had no idea this was going to happen”. So I think in the future I guess that I’ve taken…I was traveling in South America for a few weeks and then I got back a couple weeks ago. I think I’m still recalibrating and trying to figure out how I want to use social media but I think it’s something that’s really hard for me to not take personally like criticism from complete strangers. So yeah, I haven’t quite figured out how to just post something and then detach myself from it and then be like if people are going to react and make assumptions about what I’m saying or what my intentions are, then that’s on them and not on me, but something I really struggled with for sure.

Sarah
Okay. And with whom do you like talking about your own emotions preferably?

Ashley
I have some really close friends who I like talking about my emotions with and who are pretty empathetic and receptive. My close friends and other people who I feel the most comfortable talking about my emotions too, but I’m also a pretty vulnerable person and I don’t really view any…there are very, very few questions that I would view as being off limits to someone who asked me them, kind of like anybody, but the people who I trust aren’t going to respond really negatively are the people who I would prefer to talk about my feelings with.

Sarah
Those can trigger those little things. They make me think as much as I hate them right now but this is what I need.

Thank you very much Ashley. This has been very. very interesting.

Ashley
Thanks for having me.

Sarah
Thank you for your time. For everyone who wants to follow Ashley on social media, the links are below the interview. And yes thanks again.

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