Krista P I’m probably the first person in my family to have a therapist.
Meet Krista.
Oh my gosh. Thank you for validating my experience right now!
I wear a lot of hats. I think the most important hat is being a mom. I have a three-and-a-half-year-old son and I’m also six months pregnant.
I [felt] tapped out. Oftentimes I push myself past my boundaries, but knowing that I was pregnant really made me reevaluate: Okay. You’re taking care of you. You have a toddler. You have a partner. You have five different hats and now you’re pregnant. You have to draw the line somewhere. So I was like, yep, my family deserves me to be present. I deserve me to be present.
“I’m probably the first person in my family to have a therapist.”
I want to be able to process things in my life. Sometimes it’s heavy. My therapist was a really great place for me to bounce off things that I was going through and help identify them. They were like, “It sounds like you have compassion fatigue,” and I’m like, “Oh my gosh. Thank you for validating my experience right now!”
I’m not playing around with this anymore and plus, you have to practice what you preach.
Sometimes a person will say something and we perceive it through our lens when really they’re coming from a totally different point of view. So being able to hear what they’ve been through to lead them to that conclusion or that statement is really enlightening. It’s really eye-opening — oh, okay, I never experienced that. That’s not a part of my lens.
It’s been really great having that as a resource. Even if it’s just a place where you have someone that you can talk to. Because I know my friends are going through so much; they can’t necessarily carry our friendship at the moment.
Checking out those resources during this time has, for me, been a life saver to help me feel like I’m in community when I’m at home.
What I’m really hoping for is that we carry the adaptability, the flexibility, and the grace that we’ve hopefully learned during this time. And that we carry some of the healthy habits and patterns that we’ve established during this time. That doesn’t even have to be something huge. It can be something like, taking 20 minutes for myself.
I hope that people continue to be reflective on the most vulnerable individuals within our communities and how we can serve our communities through an equitable lens. I hope that we can continue to move that work forward.
