In the past five weeks, I have had a trip to NYC and two trips to DC. I'm now on a steering committee at Columbia University for the development of three years of journalism workshops on education. I am the lone mental health voice in the room with an interesting cast of characters surrounding me: Danny Glover, the actor; Bob Moses, the civil rights leader and MacArthur genius; and my counterpart at the Kaiser Family Foundation Fellowships. The scene shifts as I fly to DC for a meeting with screenwriters and television producers with the goal to improve coverage of suicide on TV. I'm finding myself being the voice that emphasizes the importance of culture -- so often forgotten. One of our interns has been doing research in this vein and found that over 450 different languages are spoken in U.S. classrooms and within a generation Spanish will be spoken as much as English!! In the world of mental health and how the illnesses are viewed -- the spectrum appears to be just as great.
Thankfully, my second trip to DC was for pleasure -- I haven't done that since I was 12. We visited our friends Kim and Doonie (host and hostess extraordinaire! Thank you!!) and did all the touristy things: the Spy Museum, WWII Memorial (Photo to the right),
Lincoln Monument, the roof of Hotel Washington overlooking the White House, dinner with a DC friend, and the Vietnam Memorial (Photo below left). At the Vietnam, I found myself engaged in deep conversation w/ a volunteer vet. (I am teased about taking conversations to the third degree -- thankfully my friends were with me so I can shed some of the blame!) We discussed the 30+ years since the war and how he coped with his experiences during that time and since. He is highly ambitious and talked openly about not sharing a single war experience with his kids, how he poured himself into his career to cope, and then the failure of his marriage. We discussed what happened in his life that began to crack open the dark memories and heal the past. He flies one Sunday a month from Chicago to work at the wall as a volunteer. He retired at 53 y/o and after 25 min of conversation, he revealed that he was the former President of Sears Roebuck & Co. A truly amazing man and a conversation I will not soon forget!
As I write this, I realize these stories are all just experiences, plane trips, moments, etc. and I find myself knowing that despite all the activity in my life, if I sit still, I know change is inevitable and I have to prepare for it. Change or die -- that is the reality of life and the title of a Fast Company article that grabbed my attention. Read it here http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/open_change-or-die.html
I resist change with everything in my life. In a lot of ways, I know I can't stay in this fabricated Utopia forever, and some meetings/conversations this week began to burst that bubble and force me to think about it. I know the time to get off the ride is at the peak and not on the downswing -- but where some changes in choices will take me, I don't know.
I do know that I check in at 9 a.m. Monday morning for an injection at Piedmont Hospital, and then another on Tuesday morning, and then testing on Friday. All this, because someone lost my bloodwork from the testing in January and results are not definitive. Now counting 14 months since Dr. R. observed a "problem" in my blood. Patience. Life will do as it will, and I have to trust that the changes will inevitably unfold before me as I let go.
