Awake

Who I am

 

More than a quarter century of working with people as a clinical social worker has taken me across the country.  I am fortunate enough to have worked with people with mental disabilities, chronic mental illness and addiction.  It is in both my work and the people I meet in my work, that I found how much more common it feels to be lost and alone,  specially when one is always surrounded by people.  My humble work in the behavioral health field began in 1991 with the Williamsburg County Department of Social Services in Kingstree, South Carolina.  I watched foster children move from one home to another, with their belongings packed in plastic garbage bags.  Watching how children can feel so disposable prompted me to write the first grant I have ever written, to simply obtain bags for them.  I have worked with severely emotionally disturbed children and adolescents when I joined the South Carolina Governor's Office of Continuum of Care and saw how few resources are available for them. When I became a lead clinical staff at Willowglen Academy South Carolina, and worked with children and adolescents with severe emotional disturbance and mental disabilities, I began to understand what "Meaningful Life" meant, through the eyes of those I've served.  It has since guided my practice as I have seen the suffering of young adults in Hawaii battling with meth, the adults in the North Country of New York as they deal with addiction in a uniquely rural area that may have been part of the state of New York, but did not have the resources for the opiate and heroin epidemic, and in California, the difficulties that young people experience as they try to find themselves in the world and found themselves not immune to addiction and mental illness.  My involvement in the community to name a few, includes:

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Driving Community Solutions for the Opioid Crisis

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NPR on Prescription Drug Addiction

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Expanding access to addiction services in NY

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Family Dynamics in Addiction Treatment

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Medical Homebound Instruction in SC

 

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Why I do this

 

I often wonder what separates people from each other, we are more the same than not.  Pain and happiness bind us together, it is in how we respond, that we become who we are.  With each loss that we experience is the knowledge that it is the experience, and not the loss that mattered.

 

What I can do for you

 

I hope to share with you through my writing and books the peace I found in my awareness, that we are never alone, we have each other.  My self-esteem came from years of self-doubt; feeling that I am never good enough.  I still remember the day, when I finally saw myself.  I was shopping at Macy’s and as I was looking at the glass case of jewelries, I saw a glimpsed of a woman in the mirror. I looked up and saw myself, that day, for the first time in my life, I thought, “I’m beautiful.”  I like the person looking back at the mirror. I like myself. I hope to be able to share with you how the journey could take  you from the state of awareness to being awake to experience life around you.