I enrolled in college quickly after moving. I knew I wanted to help people, but I was unsure of what path to take. I felt so strongly that people didn’t need to suffer, and they deserved to have someone to sit with them as they worked through grief, trauma, insecurities, or just life - without having a bunch of prescriptions thrown at them.

That ‘Why’ - the thing that has driven me forward ever since - came in the form of deep loss. I lost one of my first North Dakota friends to suicide. I thought I had dealt with chaos, trauma, and grief before, knowing what I grew up around. Experiencing this kind of traumatic loss felt like entering a totally different world. Between school, internships, and the frenetic pace involved in every part of being a college student - and in the midst of still processing the death of my friend - I realized how this event brought up my past unresolved grief and internal struggles of self-doubt.

I finished school and moved with my husband to a new duty station in Texas, where I completed my graduate degree, but never forgot how the grief felt in the midst of the chaos. While in my internship for graduate school, I was assigned to work with two individuals dealing with loss due to suicide. There it was again, the self-doubt, the grief, and the fear of facing my own losses all over again. These experiences have shaped so much of who I am, and my career. I will always be grateful for the experience of loss because it has taught me not to fear what it means to face loss while also holding space for it.

It is one of my biggest joys to help people who help others, because I know you are the ones who always put yourselves last. You deserve to have a place to have the hard conversations, to be comforted while you grieve, and to celebrate with you as you achieve, while being led by someone who understands the responsibilities of working in occupational medicine and the military.