When you hear the words "mental health", what comes to mind? Growing up, the phrase carried negative connotations. It was whispered about, avoided, or used to label someone as “crazy.” If I had been asked as a child to draw a picture of mental illness, I probably would have sketched a stereotype—someone homeless, someone struggling with addiction, someone talking to themselves. As an innocent child, I had no idea how incomplete, unfair, and painfully shallow that understanding was. Years later, as a mother, I learned just how wrong I had been. My daughter began middle school as a bright, joyful, smiley little girl. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and a grin that lit up every room, I often called her my sunshine. She was curious, creative, and full of life. But somewhere in the middle of those years, something shifted. It wasn’t sudden or dramatic. It was subtle at first-small changes in mood, in eating habits, in the way she talked about herself. I didn’t recognize them for what they were. I assumed it was normal growing up, stress, hormones, the usual turbulence of adolescence. The words mental illness never crossed my mind. By the time she was fourteen, we were facing our first hospitalization and our first diagnosis: anorexia nervosa. That moment marked the beginning of a journey I never asked for but had no choice but to walk. There were long, exhausting battles around meals, constant monitoring, and the painful realization that the child I loved was fighting something far bigger than either of us understood. When she was finally declared “better” at sixteen, I felt relief—but it was short‑lived. My little girl had changed, and that battle with anorexia was only the beginning. In the years that followed, she faced depression, PTSD, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, repeated crises, and attempts to take her own life. Each challenge brought its own fear, heartbreak, and steep learning curve. I found myself navigating a maze of therapists, psychiatrists, treatment programs, safety plans, and emergency interventions. I learned new vocabulary I never wanted to know. I learned how to stay calm while my insides were shaking. I learned how to advocate fiercely in rooms where decisions about my child’s safety were being made. I learned about skin checks, and I learned how to thoroughly search her room without leaving any evidence I'd been there as I looked for hidden blades and pills that she might be saving for her next attempt. I learned how to distinguish between a surface cut and one that required a trip to the ER for stitches. I learned how lonely it feels to drive home alone after leaving your child in a facility because it was the safest option available. I learned how to cry in secret so the rest of my children wouldn't see how close I myself was to drowning. But most of all, I learned how deeply misunderstood mental health truly is. The world often sees the behaviors but not the pain. It sees the symptoms but not the suffering. It sees the diagnosis but not the child behind it. I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about mental illness and replace it with compassion, patience, and a willingness to sit with that discomfort. I had to learn that mental health struggles don’t look like the stereotypes I grew up with. They look like straight‑A students. They look like kids with loving families. They look like the friend who always makes you laugh. They look like my daughter—my sunshine—who was fighting battles no one could see. Raising a child with complex mental health needs reshaped me. It taught me resilience I didn’t know I had. It taught me that love sometimes means staying up all night, sometimes means asking hard questions, and sometimes means making decisions your child may not understand in the moment. It taught me that healing is not linear and that progress can be measured in the smallest victories: a meal finished, a moment of honesty, a day without crisis. It taught me to celebrate each new day as the last. It also taught me that mental health is not a character flaw or a personal failure. It is health—no less real than a diagnosis of diabetes or asthma or a broken bone. And yet, the stigma persists. I felt it in the silence of people who didn’t know what to say. I felt it in the judgment of those who believed they understood. I felt it in the isolation that comes from carrying a burden most people never see. But I also discovered community—other parents, families, and survivors—who understood without explanation. People who knew the language of fear and hope intertwined. People who reminded me that we were not alone. Today, when I hear the words "mental health", I no longer think of the stereotypes from my childhood. I think of my daughter. I think of her courage, her vulnerability, and her strength. I think of the countless families walking similar paths, often quietly and invisibly. I think of the importance of compassion, education, and breaking the silence that keeps so many people suffering in the dark. Mental health is no longer a distant concept. It is woven into the fabric of my life. It has challenged me, changed me, and taught me more about love than anything else ever could. And while the journey is ongoing, one truth remains constant: my daughter is still my sunshine. Even on the hardest days, her light is there—sometimes dimmed, sometimes flickering, but always present. And I will keep walking beside her, learning, supporting, and loving her through every step of her healing. As a future occupational therapist, I will have the privilege of addressing my clients in a holistic way—one that considers more than just their physical health. While I would give anything to take away the pain my daughter has faced, I am grateful for the lessons she has taught me and continues to teach me every day.

When I first finished high school, I didn’t even know what occupational therapy was. Instead, I was set on studying early childhood education with plans to run my own in-home daycare one day. I had always loved kids, and had been babysitting since I turned 10. I completed school and started working in a local daycare, which allowed me to bring my daughter for free. I was doing what I’d always wanted and loving it! One day we were rear-ended while returning home, and everything changed. It was then that I met the woman who would change my life, my OT! She got me back to work, she got me back to being a mom, she got me back to my life! A few years later, I returned to school to become an occupational therapy assistant. I really had enjoyed working in daycare, but I had no idea how much more I could enjoy my job until I got my first job as a certified-occupational-therapy-assistant. It has been an amazing 13 years since I completed the occupational therapy assistant program. I have worked in skilled nursing, short-term rehabilitation, and specialized schools. When I switched from rehab to schools in an attempt to have better work/life balance, I was introduced to the Autism spectrum. It was here I found my true love and passion, and that has remained my passion for the last ten years. I’ve seen so many unique skills and passions from my students over the years. I have seen so many amazing accomplishments from the students that I work with. I have watched them grow over the years, and I love each and every one of them as if they were my own. I’ve problem-solved challenges with their families and celebrated milestones too. Besides, how many people get to say they get to play for a living? I love designing obstacle courses, projects, and games that address my students' fine motor/visual motor and sensory processing needs. I know that we’re working on skills, but they just know that we’re having fun together! My future aspirations include still working with autistic children, but on a much grander scale. Part of my catalyst for returning to school to progress my career after all these years is a desire to gain more certifications in Autism and sensory processing. I hope to one day open my own outpatient clinic specializing in sensory integration and autism. In addition to skilled occupational therapy sessions, I want to offer playgroups to help facilitate social and communication skills. I plan to also offer “open gym” hours where my clients can come and get all their various sensory needs met as I’ve had many parents over the years always looking for a “safe space” for their children to explore. I plan to offer discounts on pricing for clients who are not insured or are under-insured as well as pro-bono clinic hours each month. I hope that my clinic will be a resource for so many families navigating the sometimes crazy, but wonderful world of autism. Additionally, I'd like to complete research and participate in designing an assessment tool that focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses of children on the autism spectrum. There’s nothing more heart-breaking than a parent’s face hearing that their fourth grader tested as having the fine motor skills of a toddler. Current standardized tests put autistic children at a disadvantage due to the heavy language component. It is my hope to bridge this gap between standardized testing and true demonstration of skills with a test that eliminates or at least decreases the language component.

Imagine someone is about to run into you. You open your mouth to tell them to be careful, but nothing comes out. Imagine how scared you might feel. How frustrated would you be by not being able to communicate for self-preservation? Imagine you woke up one day, and your arms and legs didn't work as they always had before. What would you do? When I think about working with a child who has a rare disorder like Rebecca, I put myself in their place. I imagine how I would feel if I couldn't do something physically that I enjoyed or communicate in a way that everybody would understand. I currently work in school-based occupational therapy with kids on the Autism spectrum, and this is how I approach my therapy sessions with them. Many of them are non-verbal, so I try to pick up on small cues such as eye-gaze or a smile to determine what their interests are. I watch their body language closely and just try to be in the moment with them. Before you can effectively teach any child, you must reach that child. I would pay close attention to facial expressions, eye-gazes, and any attempts to reach for something. A child's greatest method of learning is play. This is especially true in my work as an occupational therapy assistant because one of a child's primary occupations is in fact, play! I would play with the child, incorporating anything they showed interest in, so that we could pair. Once we'd sufficiently paired and a level of trust had been built, I would start to incorporate similar play activities that addressed functional deficits into our play. One of the things I like most about the school where I work is our collaborative team approach. Our educational teams consist of a teacher, paraprofessionals, a speech therapist, a physical therapist, a behavioral analyst, and most-importantly, the student's parents. I feel like a child's family plays a very important role in the education and progress of their child with a disability. For one thing, human beings are social creatures who need socialization to thrive. A child's family is an integral part of their context, and context is what differentiates a task from an occupation. A child's family has significantly more time to work on skills outside of our therapy sessions, and generally has a great drive to do so. A child's family isn't just with this child for a 30 minute weekly therapy session; they are with them essentially 24/7. As a mom with children who have their own medical challenges, I know that it is a full-time job. They never get to take a breath. It's a constant balancing act walking the thin line between creating dependence and fostering independence. One cannot have a truly successful therapeutic relationship with a child without including the family. Children who have families that work with them on the skills learned in therapy tend to have better outcomes because it not only provides increased practice, but it also promotes the skill to be generalized across different people and environments. As invested as a therapist may be in a child's progress, their family is almost always going to be more invested than that! I have eight semesters of school left until I will obtain my master's degree in occupational therapy. I am eager to learn all I can to help those kids that I currently work with, as well as other kids, like Rebecca, in the future. First, I'll reach them, then I'll teach them, and then we can all watch together as they move mountains.

There's nothing quite like having your own little human when you're studying human development! When my daughter was born, I was in the process of completing my early childhood education degree. Sleepless nights and midnight feeds were followed by early morning classes. Late-night cramming while rocking her bassinet with my foot became a near-nightly occurrence. Because I was a mom, and she was counting on me, I worked harder than I ever had in school to give us a better life. I graduated and secured my first “adult” job as an infant/toddler teacher at a local daycare. They allowed me to bring her to work, and everything seemed perfect—until we were in a car accident on the way home one day. Suddenly, I couldn’t work. I had a lifting restriction, which meant I couldn’t even pick her up. The only thing I had ever wanted to be, for as long as I could remember, was a mom—and it felt like that had been taken away from me. That’s when I met my occupational therapist, and she changed my life. Not only did she help me get back to the job and life I loved, but she also introduced me to the career I didn’t realize I was missing. When my oldest daughter was five and my younger daughter was three, I returned to school again to become a certified occupational therapy assistant. Every morning, we woke up quietly so as not to wake my husband, who had just gotten home from his night shift at the prison. I would get my girls ready, and we’d head to my before-and-after-school nannying job. There, I’d get three other kids ready before starting the school drop-off routine. After all the kids had been dropped off, I’d head to school myself. As soon as my last class let out, I’d rush to my minivan and begin after-school pickups. Once their mother returned, I’d pick up my own two girls, and we’d return to our empty house, where I’d heat up dinner, do baths, tell stories, and give goodnight kisses. Then, I’d settle in to complete my own homework—before practically passing out from exhaustion, just long enough to wake up and do it all again. Despite how exhausting this schedule was, I still loved life as a mom. My newfound career excited me, and I loved everything I was learning. People say, "sometimes you accomplish things because failure simply isn’t an option." That’s how it felt for me, and those two years flew by. Before I knew it, my girls were five and seven, and I was graduating Summa Cum Laude. I’ve now been a COTA for almost 13 years. My husband and I were surprised with a little boy when his sisters were ten and eight. That life change prompted a need for a job change, and it was then that I found school-based therapy. But it wasn’t just a new setting—it was a new population, autism, which I quickly fell head over heels in love with. Now, I’ve decided to advance my degree so I can better serve this population. My little girls are now young adults, but in many ways, life hasn’t changed. My son was offered his first lead role in a musical at the same time that I was accepted into OT school. I couldn't ask my son to give up his dream. I found a way to do both. While he rehearses, I attend classes via zoom from my car parked outside the theater—because while OT is my passion, my kids are still my life.