About

AJ Koontz, PhD
Sociologist, writer, and thinking partner

I am a sociologist with a PhD, a professor, a researcher, and a writer/creative trying to figure out how to make the work that I care so much about reach the people in search of it, even if they can't quite put their finger on it (yet). I have spent my career studying identity, culture, and the ways that systems shape what we believe about ourselves. I thought, for a long time, that understanding those systems from an outside and more strictly scientific approach would help create a turning point.

Not so much.

At some point—after years of achieving the things I had set out to achieve and the accumulated evidence of a career going more or less according to plan—I got stuck. Not dramatically (at least from the outside, perhaps?), yet I was going through the strange experience of being interested in everything and absorbed by nothing; inspired by my work and simultaneously trapped by it. I had, it felt, read every book that was supposed to help. I knew all the frameworks and still something felt unfinished in a way I couldn't quite name.

A late diagnosis of ADHD and clinical depression helped explain some of what I was experiencing and helped to significantly shift how I understood my own history (the story of who I "am"). Even so, it didn't resolve the larger question, which was less clinical than existential: what do you do when you've arrived somewhere and it feels like the wrong place, even though you chose and dedicated yourself to it?

"I went looking for answers in self-help—first as research, then, quietly, for myself. What I found was more complicated than either tradition had prepared me for." (Me feeling like Alice in Wonderland)

I went down a long rabbit hole of self-help culture—initially as a sociologist studying it, eventually acknowledging that I was focusing more on it from the personal side. I had life coaching that took me to unexpected places, some helpful and others more...disconcerting (although I'm grateful for that left turn as it came full-circle to offer broader insight to my own stances, personally and sociologically). I became certified to teach yoga at a traditional ashram in 2023, after twenty years of practice, and found something I had not expected: a set of connections between spirituality and sociology that I had spent years keeping carefully separate. Teaching yoga did not resolve my questions, but it reconnected me with things that I had lost touch with, including a relationship to the body, to slowness, to the kind of knowledge that does not fit in a footnote. It shifted something in how I teach, how I show up in a room, and how I coach (and the fortitude to even put myself out there).

Books did some of that work too—specifically the ones that feel like a hand on your shoulder with breadcrumbs of advice, whether fictional, self-help, or academic. The ones that make you feel less alone in what you are carrying. bell hooks' All About Love was one of them. It changed how I think about what writing is for, much less my teaching and mentoring approaches. The move from critique to love felt both intellectually honest and personally necessary—the form of live that is not naïve, nor love that ignores structural harm—but love as an orienting practice.

The Living Draft is a landing place for all of this. This is a collective attempt to write across & through the lines I have spent my career drawing—between the academic and the personal, the structural and the spiritual, the critical and the generative, creative and scientific, and beyond. I wanted a unique and distinct space where I could worth through the lived "truths" about what I have learned, including the parts that complicate my own past arguments and approaches. I chose this type of space to open it up for others who may be living in a related tension, so that I can help accelerate the "unstuckedness" and to help you feel a little less alone in it. I am based in Florida, where I teach (goat) yoga, read books that make me feel less alone, and am probably thinking about authenticity.

WHAT I BELIEVE

Critique and care belong together. You may see clearly what is wrong with a system and still find 'real' value within it. Ambivalence is not weakness—it is honesty.

The personal is consistently structural: your exhaustion, your anxiety, your sense of not-enough. These are not private failures; they are shaped by systems that can be named and questioned. To feel trapped may be a moral failure by the system, rather than something being "wrong" with you, as a human.

Love is a legitimate intellectual posture. bell hooks intricately offers the beautiful insight that orienting towards what is possible, rather than only what is wrong, is not naïve. It is necessary—for healthy romantic & interpersonal relations, creative expression, and resilience for a joyous existence, much less to persist towards greater social justice (in our own ways).

I offer that identity can be authored; identity, like purpose, may not be something that is not exclusively "out there" to be "discovered" on some timeline. The self is not only a fixed thing waiting to be uncovered. It is made through relationships, practices, and the ongoing work of living deliberately. I say this to build on approaches that bolster your beliefs and empower your authorship, which can take an amazing number of shapes & forms.

I'm Here For You

I coach individuals who are navigating life transitions and the particular pressures of high-achieving professional life, particularly through exploring meanings around identity and multiple forms of authorship (personal, creative, and career work). My background in qualitative sociology shapes how I listen, as I personally look to connect our lived issues with broader systems, language, and the stories we tell about ourselves (and why). If something here resonates and you're curious about working together, I'd love to hear from you.

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Wanting to take some concrete action, but not sure where to start anymore? A free discovery call is the easiest first step with no commitment - just a conversation. Book a discovery call (or whatever is calling you):

https://tidycal.com/draftinglifetogether/discoverycall

Or reach out directly with questions, suggestions for essay topics, etc: draftinglifetogether@gmail.com