Who I Am, Now
I’m Amy Kathleen Lee.
I’m a mental health speaker, suicide prevention specialist, and clinical social work graduate student who believes that the most important work we can do begins beneath the surface.
For more than a decade, I’ve worked in crisis intervention, youth mental health, and trauma-informed education. But my work did not begin in classrooms or on stages. It began much earlier, shaped by lived experience, long-term recovery, and a deep understanding of how pain hides behind performance, achievement, and silence.
I’ve spent my life learning what happens when we fail to look beneath the surface—and what becomes possible when we do. Today, I bring that understanding into schools, communities, and systems that are ready to move beyond awareness and toward real connection, healing, and action.
1) What Shaped Me
Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer. I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer, raised in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen abruptly closed that chapter, it wasn’t just the loss of dance that followed. It was the unraveling of an identity built on performance and control. That rupture became the doorway into an eighteen-year battle with bulimia and the long, non-linear work of recovery that would follow. During treatment in the early 2000s, I was asked to draw what was happening beneath my surface. What emerged was a ballerina suspended from the ceiling, bound by chains I didn’t yet have language for. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain what those chains represented. Years later, I would understand them as trauma, silence, expectation, and the pressure to appear “fine” while slowly disappearing inside. Recovery did not pull me away from dance. It transformed my relationship to it. I went on to found Dancing with ED, a nonprofit serving the dance community, where advocacy, prevention, and recovery became central to my work. One of those projects, Pointing to Recovery, gathered pointe shoes from dancers across the country who had battled eating disorders. Each pair was signed and sent in as a testament to survival. Those shoes remain a reminder that healing is rarely solitary, and that stories carry power when they are shared. Living with mental illness, trauma, and recovery has never been a footnote in my work. It has shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight. Long before I had clinical language for it, I was learning that what we see on the surface is almost never the full story.
2) What Shaped Me
Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer.
I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen ended that path, it opened the door to an eighteen-year battle with an eating disorder and the long, non-linear work of recovery that followed.
Those experiences shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight.
For the full story Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer. I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer, raised in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen abruptly closed that chapter, it wasn’t just the loss of dance that followed. It was the unraveling of an identity built on performance and control. That rupture became the doorway into an eighteen-year battle with bulimia and the long, non-linear work of recovery that would follow. During treatment in the early 2000s, I was asked to draw what was happening beneath my surface. What emerged was a ballerina suspended from the ceiling, bound by chains I didn’t yet have language for. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain what those chains represented. Years later, I would understand them as trauma, silence, expectation, and the pressure to appear “fine” while slowly disappearing inside. Recovery did not pull me away from dance. It transformed my relationship to it. I went on to found Dancing with ED, a nonprofit serving the dance community, where advocacy, prevention, and recovery became central to my work. One of those projects, Pointing to Recovery, gathered pointe shoes from dancers across the country who had battled eating disorders. Each pair was signed and sent in as a testament to survival. Those shoes remain a reminder that healing is rarely solitary, and that stories carry power when they are shared. Living with mental illness, trauma, and recovery has never been a footnote in my work. It has shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight. Long before I had clinical language for it, I was learning that what we see on the surface is almost never the full story. That understanding became the foundation for everything that came next.
3) What Shaped Me
Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer.
I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen ended that path, it opened the door to an eighteen-year battle with an eating disorder and the long, non-linear work of recovery that followed.
Those experiences shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight.
For the full story Before I ever stood on a stage or stepped into a clinical setting, I was a dancer. I trained as a pre-professional classical ballet dancer, raised in a world that rewarded discipline, perfection, and silence. When a career-ending spinal injury at seventeen abruptly closed that chapter, it wasn’t just the loss of dance that followed. It was the unraveling of an identity built on performance and control. That rupture became the doorway into an eighteen-year battle with bulimia and the long, non-linear work of recovery that would follow. During treatment in the early 2000s, I was asked to draw what was happening beneath my surface. What emerged was a ballerina suspended from the ceiling, bound by chains I didn’t yet have language for. At the time, I couldn’t fully explain what those chains represented. Years later, I would understand them as trauma, silence, expectation, and the pressure to appear “fine” while slowly disappearing inside. Recovery did not pull me away from dance. It transformed my relationship to it. I went on to found Dancing with ED, a nonprofit serving the dance community, where advocacy, prevention, and recovery became central to my work. One of those projects, Pointing to Recovery, gathered pointe shoes from dancers across the country who had battled eating disorders. Each pair was signed and sent in as a testament to survival. Those shoes remain a reminder that healing is rarely solitary, and that stories carry power when they are shared. Living with mental illness, trauma, and recovery has never been a footnote in my work. It has shaped how I listen, how I lead, and how I understand pain that hides in plain sight. Long before I had clinical language for it, I was learning that what we see on the surface is almost never the full story. That understanding became the foundation for everything that came next.