Creative Ambition in Transit

The Story Behind the Work I Do

I have been a writer my entire life.

I penned my first novella at just eight years old. It was called Anna’s Journal, and it was a little different than you might expect.

Instead of a make-believe tale about unicorns or princesses, Anna’s Journal was an epistolary novel about a little girl who had been abducted, who was lost, who had recorded all of her deepest, darkest feelings in the journal you were reading. It was heavy.

And if anyone had read Anna’s Journal, it would have revealed to them an eight-year-old author who felt deeply misunderstood, emotionally bruised, and who was learning to cope by becoming self-destructive—who had strange and disturbing thoughts about self-harm, about life and death, about what it meant to feel shame.

This was because I grew up deeply enmeshed in the mental healthcare system. From a genetic standpoint, addiction of all kinds run deep in my blood, and with that came a lot of emotional and psychological trauma and neglect. Combine that with an intimate relationship with foster care, and my family was entrenched in the system.

As is the case in most stories like mine, the effects of my childhood came out in truly violent ways once I was a teen—violence towards myself and others, and the only place I found real respite was in the pages of my journal. At sixteen, I was institutionalized for self-harm, and by seventeen I struck out on my own.

Fast forward.

I’m twenty-one years old, and it’s the first day of my career at a residential treatment facility for teen girls, all of whom are survivors of trauma, neglect, and abuse. It’s near bedtime, I’m still trying to orient myself to this strange and overwhelming new job, trying to learn from the staff, when suddenly we all hear the loud crack of shattered glass.

I rushed to the room it came from, following behind two seasoned staff members, to find a sixteen-year-old girl named Bri standing on top of her dresser, her face twisted in pain, soaked with tears, and her hands full of glass. She’d kicked out the window behind her.

At first, I froze, and I watched as the staff pulled on latex gloves with the sort of calm that comes from procedural repetition, and then they started directing commands at Bri, which only escalated her.  

It was then when Bri began to squeeze the glass harder, began to make dangerous threats, I saw something else…

I saw myself.

I saw that confused and lonely young girl—the one who felt so deeply misunderstood, who just wanted to escape, even if only in her journal.

I quietly walked past the staff and up to Bri, making myself completely vulnerable. I held out my hand out to her, and I said, “I see you,” and helped her down from the dresser.

Over the next decade, I poured myself into a broken system, into the daily chaos of mental health facilities in both Pittsburgh and Chicago. I was honored to get to intimately know these kids—many of whom were cycled in and out of institutions many times over. And no matter how hard we worked, no matter how much emotional capital the staff invested in these girls, one thing was consistently and abundantly clear: the institutions weren’t listening.

Life-changing decisions were being directed by insurance companies, not treatment teams, and our units lacked resources while CEOs and psychiatrists drove Mercedes.

We needed change. Desperately.

I turned to what I knew best in my heart: storytelling.

I began weekly storytelling groups where the girls gathered together and put pen to paper, writing about the things they’d been through, exploring the dark places inside—just like I did in Anna’s Journal.

I taught them some basic concepts—which I still teach in company trainings today—like how to take a step outside of their story, view themselves as a character, and get an aerial view of their experiences; I taught them about story structure, about the hero’s journey, about channeling all of their pain and anguish into art.

And what happened changed everything.

I watched as these girls began communicating—began talking about the dark things eating them up inside. They started talking to each other, they started listening to each other, relating to each other, and then they started really participating in their treatment and talking to their therapists. We’d created a capsule of psychological safety inside which they began to heal.

While listening to them—watching deeper, truer, authentic versions of themselves bloom in front of me—I felt deep empathy for my younger self; for that girl in pain, in confusion, in chaos. I couldn’t help but envision her writing and finally sharing Anna’s Journal; I couldn’t help but envision her inside my mind, cozying into these sessions, too, and finally feeling heard.

This was the beginning of what I’ve come to call Empathetic Innovation.

This specific mode of storytelling group was something only I could’ve instituted and facilitated because it was purely authentic to me—it was born of my own lived experience—and it made a life-or-death impact. It came from that little girl inside me who was still screaming to be seen and validated.

The kids in my groups began singing, creating, facilitating their own groups, healing, and so—naturally—I asked corporate for resources and support.

This would be the official beginning of my work with corporate teams and asking them to not only acknowledge the inherent value of their employees but to resource it.

I came up against the big bureaucratic red tape you’d expect—they appreciated what I was doing but they just couldn’t allocate any budget to it.

So, I quit.

My very first business as an entrepreneur was born, called Parity Health Services. Parity was a wrap-around mental healthcare service that brought art therapy to at-risk youth and their families. The need for this service was so great the business grew faster than I could keep up, so I scaled it into a full-blown publishing press that uniquely served youth and underrepresented voices. And in the past twelve years since, I’ve had the privilege of supporting youth and artists across the world.

But just imagine the impact—the monumental benefit to the organization I worked for—had they been able to value my ingenuity.

And I see this every day in offices across the country, in companies big and small—the corporate wheel keeps spinning and team members are mere spokes, keeping a monotonous mission alive. But what if we trained our leaders to recognize innovation, to value the whole person of each team member, to allow for creativity and passion and new ideas to arise to the surface by digging more deeply into who they are—how much could our companies grow in meaningful, purposeful, and authentic ways?

So, my mission has become two-fold:

1.      To empower individuals to do the internal work it takes to channel those dark places and transmute them into your superpower; to identify your true, authentic passions so you can do your greatest work. And

2.      To teach companies how to appropriately resource their team members by allowing for creativity and innovation—helping them capitalize on their organization’s inherent value; the growth capital that is already sitting right in front of them.

This is practical leadership. This is proactive wellness in action. This is building an inclusive culture where everyone feels like part of the company mission and purpose.

Wellness in the workplace is about so much more than the occasional retreat or check-in. It’s about incorporating every team member and their gifts into the company mission. It’s about empowering them to contribute in a fulfilling way so the organization can reach its greatest potential. It’s about leading with empathy and with curiosity, so as to inspire innovation.

It’s about honoring your own story as the foundation for improving other people’s lives. It’s about your authenticity, because authenticity is wellness.