: About Me

Writing found me the year my mother died. I was 11 years old in 1978 and up until that time I was a backward comically repressed child who made up fantastical tales about ancient beings and little known multiple universes that I only knew how to come and go through at will. I was so good early on that at the age of four I once convinced my neighbor's son that my dog was a cat wearing a dog costume who was so scared she hid from the neighbor on the other side of us because that neighbor liked to put wayward cats in her garage to show them just who's who in her yard.

Yes, I was a very persuasive being.

My experiences were also colored by having been born to older parents, Mom was 38 and Dad was 45 when I came along and having been around grownups more than kids my age for pretty much my entire childhood I got into Walter Cronkite and Mary Tyler Moore. The nightly news was bits of Vietnam mixed with Richard Nixon. I cheered Nadia at the '76 Olympics. I wanted to become Tracy Austin.

Even before losing my mother I was very much enouraged to continue these trends into the imaginative by my father, this is where my creative story began. We made up songs about Barney Rubble in Spanish and would watch M*A*S*H and All in The Family together. We had a ceremony when I lost a tooth involving aztec gods and the immediate universe of our backyard. Yet at five I could describe what happens when a baby is born in explicitly clinical detail (thanks PBS).

Once in awhile someone will ask me how I ended up the world's poorest Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor from these etched-together beginnings, and I always have to start with how the writing found me first.

Writing started with an Acrostic poetry assignment in the 6th grade. I had terrible penmanship (some may make an argument it has not improved all that much but I will leave that alone for the moment, grin) but like most kids with overactive imaginations I associated big with grand and grand with getting the most bang for my perverbial buck. In school I would buy Charles Dickens paperbacks through the monthly Scholastic book club because I figure they would last longer having so many more pages than other classics, but turned out they were read just as fast as any other story. Year after year my father worked harder and longer for less money, and I learned to make the use out of my library card every chance I got. We went from middle class to marginal class to pretty much at the bottom of the poverty level. Times changed and it got harder to adjust to them.

As the years passed, I was encouraged to try other things, like picking a line of work to pay the bills because the message drilled in my head was, I wrote clever pretty things, but that would not help me support myself on my own when the time came.

At 17 I went to night school to learn to be a Certified Nurse's Assistant but failed the mid term exam and thought it was the most devastating moment of my limited existance. I thought my life was over. I walked three miles home in pouring rain that night with no jacket on, oblivious to everything around me. Then there was my attempt to go to trade school to be an Administrative Health Assistant when I was 18, but by the time I got through my externship month at the end of the course it was very clear I would have been the world's worst medical office clerk. I busted two thermometers (remember the glass ones?) could not talk loud enough over the phone for patients to hear me, and of course nobody could read the notes I wrote about patient vitals. On the last day of my assignment the doctor and his staff took me to lunch and broke the news to me gently about my less than average performance but I already knew in my heart it was not the career for me. I worked a succession of labor jobs, from sorting clothes to sorting packages, from tagging shoes to packing jackets that came right off the boat from Korea and Singapore before deciding to make the return to school as a jaded and overly lived 27 year old adult.

Before I get too carried away here, there are two points I wanted to make to those who would like to give my articles a read: Everyone has a starting point when it comes to the writing work, and sometimes, the writing chooses you first. It takes some people longer to figure that out than others, in my case I have a love-hate relationship with writing. But like an old friend you cussed out three months ago and then find a slip of paper in the pocket of your winter coat with your friend's phone number and a scribble of a face with its tongue sticking out at you daring you to give a call back, writing can pull you right back into the thick of it like you never had a fight in the first place; the other point is, don't think just because you failed at a job the first time out that you will never find a career or life's work. It can take a long time to figure out what you want to be. There is a lot more to my story of how I went from girl writer to a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor, and a lot more to how I took a lifetime of creative experience and turned it into how I help others figure out where they want to go next. But I better stop and actually put down the professional portion of this blurb before this gets out of hand.

With my professional experience (also known as my day job) I am a Certified Rehabilitation Counselor who has worked with persons with disabilities since 2002, and my specialty is to assist people with returning to work through conducting work evaluations and vocational assessments. I also assist people with Job Placement services in the community. My expertise is helping other people figure out which direction to take and to plan out the way to get there in the most reasonable way. And I have a knack for finding information in a pinch.

My educational background is I have my GED; I also earned an Associate of Arts Degree in Liberal Arts; a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Creative Writing, and a Master's In Rehabilitation Counseling.

The first 14 articles here in my Helium space are attempts to feel around and get used to being here, and I tried to make a little money at the same time. I hope to be more of an active participant and continue to learn. Most of my published work has been from my undergrad days, mostly poetry. As they say, am jumping in and finding the water to be quite comfy.

My passion is ...

Making spiritual jewelry

I know too much about ...

Where to find information

My parents always told me ...

Honest work is honorable work

My childhood ambition ...

To run a Fortune 500 company

My favorite memory ...

My father dedicating my first lost tooth to an Aztec God in the sky

Why I write ...

writing has always been a part of who I am, when I don't write I get off balance

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

I listen to NPR at work, watch CNN online

My first job ...

Selling shirts and blankets at a truck stop at age 15 while being a bodyguard for a prostitute

My best moment ...

Helping a person get the job they want

My inspiration ...

The Universe in its infinite wisdom always lights my way

Health & Fitness > Alternative Health (Other) How to find release and peace through inner healing

20 of 23

This is the tale of how one woman found her way back from a state of mental chaos and inner turmoil with the assistance of a nine dollar push mower. She works a full time job for a company that any day now is apt to lay her off. The mortgage is a month overdue and the calls are starting up again from the bill collectors. She spent all last weekend curled up in a fetal position sleeping fourteen hour days on her sofa that faces the open window of her front yard with its growing jungle of six to eight inches of ryegrass and the growing stares of uneasiness from her neighbors who are outside ...

More..

Writing:

• 2Marketplace Articles Sold
• Marketplace Approved Writer
• Helium Charter Member