I am a mom of two. I have a 19-year-old and a twelve-year-old, and I have recently been working with a non-profit organization called Balance in Mind. I and two other women started this organization three years ago due to seeing the mental health struggles of our teams, including my daughter, including my other two cohorts who started the organization, their kids. They saw struggles, and my daughter lost a best friend suicide the year we started this.

I too have dealt with severe depression a lot of my life. So I firsthand have felt what it’s like to struggle.

With Balance In Mind, we started slowly trying to just get our name out there, then COVID hit. So now we’ve been doing everything online. We have a Facebook page that we do all our webinars on, and those usually happen every other week on different topics around things that are happening in our community, around mental health, anything that really ties in with the parent’s mental health and the kids mental health.

This work sometimes gets me through the day to be honest with you, because it helps me focus, but it also helps me feel like I’m doing something, you know, because we don’t hear that we’re necessarily helping people but we hope we’re helping people. I think that’s why I chose teaching.

Being active working with other humans is so rewarding, but it definitely helps my mental stability. At the same time, sometimes when we’re having a rough time in our community, that can definitely be challenging.

And I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a few tears this year with some of the stuff that’s been going on. But generally, my kids have been pretty happy this year, surprisingly. So I feel really grateful, but, you know, it’s kind of like it depends on the minute. It depends on the hours. It depends on the day. So I just try and take it as it goes.