Tag: writing

Why I’m not Upset About Revamping US Education

by Meredith Ann, MSW, posted in Blog Post

With consideration to the Education System being the highest form of colonialism we have remaining; it’s no wonder the academics are losing their minds over its potential exposure. Let’s be real about one thing to start with – any person currently residing in the U.S.A. under “legal” status is actively benefiting over the pillaging of a nation on the backs of others. This is non-negotiable and we are each benefiting at least as much as the next. What “made America great” at one point was the legacy of being able to provide a better life for your offspring by means of opportunity through hard work. That and the idea that if you weren’t surrounded by “your people” you could go and find them somewhere. The preservation of free thought accompanied more innovation than the world had previously known. There was this intended ability to move freely in trade and in being amongst this space of shared overall security. What made America not so great was the idea that it was not safe for every person to venture everywhere – frequently on the basis of external appearance and is unfortunately still that way. And the idea that anyone could ever own another person is absurd. However, one could argue we have the assumption of ownership to our youth currently, but messing with that idea might put others responsible for their livelihood so we better leave that one alone for now, I suppose.

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It was reading another’s blog post years back that I first read the suggested idea that the education system has been the longest run experiment on children without being validated. I have argued since that we have enough data to have, in fact, proved it to be invalid. In my research of the application of the education system, it definitely organized through the North Eastern territories first – focused on male learning. As a fourth-generation Midwestern higher educated individual, I have witnessed a deterioration to the Enlightened portion of becoming educated. Much of this can unfortunately be attributed to affirmative action. Instead of investing in the disenfranchised through early education and the availing of opportunities for expansive mind development through enriched cultural experiences, we just changed the acceptance rates – not enlightening. This is just one of the many band-aid policies gone bad through a government that doesn’t relate to its citizens. I come from a Libertarian community with a longstanding heritage for continued investment by its own members. This included through the education system for the longest time. I feel mostly grateful for my early education experiences there, these were that which gathered the final resources which had been availed to my generation X siblings. It was just after one of their graduations that my father saw a need. He approached the principal – who was the same as his own decades prior. He pitched the idea of having every senior in the school take a class called “life” where they should have professional members of the community come in and teach about vital aspects such as taxes, banking, and other required information to be successful in adulthood. He thought this would be a great way to make connections in the community as well. Due to the increasing standardization he was shut down.

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Consider the self-esteem of any person in the graduating class of 2001 or after. In many cases, even those who’ve been successful but are without a college level education remain feeling as though they have fallen short. This can be seen alongside “No Child Left Behind” which cast the seventy-five percent of Americans who fall into the classification of lower than a Bachelor’s level education to think they had failed. It has, not to mention failed to adequately prepare that same group for the requirements it will face to complete this learning. In this way we have seen the U.S. education system be gradually tailored to the needs of the Elite above the rest. This can be seen, in part, through the dismissing of arts programs and other extracurriculars. For how many generations have we seen our youth being challenged by curriculum that far surpassed the complexity by which their parents had learned? In considering the idea posed by Gabor Mate – play being the biological opposite of trauma. I would argue the disintegration of the arts programs through the public school system is linked directly to our societal decline in mental health. People should be learning languages, instruments, and other forms of artistic expression as a creative outlet to experience the world as well as process their life happenings. As it is these extracurriculars are mostly available in the spare time for those same Elite families the entire education has been geared towards. No wonder many who are in the teaching and leadership spaces where decisions are being made are so out of touch with what options lay people have. This is not to mention their assumption that the quality behind any education matched what they themselves had received. As an elder millennial of the rural population I can tell you – we did not. Top that off with them designing our economic system to favour their positions in the world. It is painful to observe people driven by the amount of money they can earn rather than how excellent they may perform.

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“Were the women in your family not pushed to achieve?” This was the question brought to my attention by my coworker towards the close of the 2016 election. It left me in a beyond a deer in the headlights position of reflection for quite some period after hearing it. It occurred after a bout of my bragging of how accomplished my brothers both were. I have always admired them so much. One is a Lawyer, CPA, and Judge, another is a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit Doctor. After hearing this question it did come to mind that I never heard the same tagline for them at the encouragement that they could be whatever they wanted. Which was to remember to find a rich spouse. As a child, my early standardized test scores were better than that of my elder siblings. This is a fact I remember asking my dad to stop airing prior to attending graduate school a few years ago. I told him how embarrassing it was to hear that information with consideration to the comparison of our lives and how pitifully mine had turned out. At that point I had earned my BS in Psychology knowing there’s not a damn thing you can really do with that without a Master’s degree. So, there I was in my $15 /hour substance use intake program, unable to make any student loan payments and in need of furthering my education and a better paying job. For the longest period I was known to say that I never minded being overqualified for a position. As it relates to doing the work – I still don’t. It became a problem when people with more impressive letters than mine spoke to me with such condescension I knew they had never experienced humility. This was directly linked to an astonishingly disappointing level of thought able to be dialogued in my master’s program all while being taught to act from a point of arrogance.

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It was while my husband was listening to a Tim Pool podcast that I picked up on his critique that the United States is not currently producing anything for the rest of the world. This set with me for a period as I was working through my MSW. It was watching the series Madam Secretary where I would put it all together. This was the idea that, in many cases, our nation’s leaders are being educated right alongside the siblings of other world leaders children. This got me reflecting back to the number of international students who I went to school with. Most of whom were intended to return home with the knowledge they’d acquired from the renowned United States higher education system. All of the sudden, poof – we are educating the world, that is what we are producing. This led to my solution for the current student loan conflict in the U.S. through the Tariff of all Tariffs – we need to apply an astronomical level tariff to the tuition of international students – the parents who are paying can afford it and will and then when this surplus becomes more than the student debt owed by current U.S. citizens, they can be forgiven. This would also help us to pay attention to the subjects which foreign nations revere as worth investing knowledge in – I can tell you, I don’t recall meeting a single international student seeking their undergraduate of psychology nor their advanced social work degree along my side.

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The thing about theory is that it is a great way to discuss what has already happened. It is not, however, a practical way of navigating what is going on in real time. As someone with ample life experience compared with my typical undergraduate and graduate level classmate, I had an edge going into both of my programs. This was in part to know how valuable having direct access to these professors was and to be more grateful for the opportunity to be there at all. What I have observed repeatedly at this point in my career has been that longitudinally intuitive, or lived experience does match that of what theory has found and brought to light. The first thing I want to point out is that this is fantastic news. The conflict which has gradually risen and become more pronounced through standardization and the current educational/licensing processes is that all too often those with access to the theoretical knowledge are not the same as those with lived applicable experience. And it takes the latter to connect with the client. Without connection, treatment will fail. At this point in time, we have a massive deficit of qualified providers which has been met with the diluting of material in order to pass individuals through. As I informed the leaders of my MSW program – this is only muddying the waters between actual qualified providers. What I can tell you now, as someone whose high school principal recommendation was to drop out stating “school’s not for everyone”, after all that I’ve accomplished is – he was right. After experiencing a major health emergency that derailed my thoughts for the direction of my career, what I know now is that I never needed nor wanted a higher education. The only thing I ever wanted was to have babies and be a good mom. It was in obtaining these educations that I have failed to achieve my earliest goal. As I am developing a business plan that should be linked to many fulfilling job opportunities to those who’ve felt they were left in the shadows, all I want to ensure I that each person feel dignified in the ability to make a choice about what they do want for their own future without such societal pressures.

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#alternativeswithcare #melodramaticmeredith #dearmelodramaticmeredith #holisticcounselor #holisticcounseling #alternativemedicine #mindbody #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #suicideprevention

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I am an Unapologetic Rural American

by Meredith Ann, MSW, posted in Blog Post

Early on in my Master of Social Work program the question was posed “Is there anything good about White Privilege?” I am so thankful to my fellow life experienced classmate and strong woman of color stated “Yes, when it is used to uplift others”. The question was only brought to the attention of the class after the professor and I had a rich after class discussion on my thoughts surrounding her presenting herself on day one as “An Unapologetic Black Woman” and asking what my response to this was supposed to be. As a white, middle-class, rural American who comes from a place of higher means than the average Buckeye, I had been finding myself lost for direction. You see, I am from a state still being referred to by trend casters as one of “the fly over states”. I am the daughter, granddaughter, sister and more to the good White men who wouldn’t dream of standing up for themselves – but I will. When the highest suicide rate by far is middle aged white men and we can’t even say that out loud for fear of triggering someone who hates that same group, we have got to believe we are approaching this ALL wrong.

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I am a Midwest mut who knows where my roots come from. In one of the D.E.I. trainings I went through I expressed my ongoing distaste over my life for the term ‘Caucasian’ as I feel it has taken away from my heritage in my knowledge of the specific countries my ancestors come from. These are of England, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, and some potential not yet verified drops of Cherokee. The leader laughed at this idea proclaiming, “they will never do that!” This combined with the statement anticipating black and brown people to be on track to become the majority made it very clear that this was not in fact about diversity and inclusion but in a turning of the tables so to speak. The leader also spoke on the differences she has lived with coming from a small community with a population of 85,000. When I brought up my upbringing as being from the much smaller community of 15,000, she laughed in judgment rather than to ponder our unique differences. It was made clear repeatedly that this PhD of Education did not believe she had room to learn from the likes of me.

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The collectivist community in which I was raised was one which allowed space for both my top 1% Patriarchal family and my bottom 1% Matriarchal family to provide opportunity to their families through hard work, ingenuity, and a commitment to faith, family, and community. At the same time, as a primarily white farming community in origin, they have not been allowed to embrace their collectivist nature at the same rate of as any minority group. Even in this primarily industrial and agriculture town with railway roots who has embraced migrant workers from our southern border since the early 1990’s and on. This brings another conflict I attempted to bring to the D.E.I. providers attention – the diverse culture of all countries south of our location which are diluted to one term despite their unique and dynamic differences. Recent attention to the Latinx community has really disparaged the majority Latino community which is unfortunate. One group I had hoped to bring light to at a larger corporation with a D.E.I representative who saw me for my true servant’s heart and also knew I was against an insurmountable battle. That was to be a voice for the neurodivergent population – one of the largest and most over-stigmatized and underrepresented populations there is. I had evidence of facing discrimination from my colleagues up to my own manager and did not want conflict but to educate. This woman of color had of course built up this large network’s D.E.I. program, only to have a man of color hired over her – in true Booker T. Washington fashion. They then went on to do this large presentation which everyone doted over yet on my ask of what they were doing to support rural diversity as half the counties they claim to serve fall into that range. I received an email suggesting we scheduled follow up which got forwarded to some scheduling assistant and then put off indefinitely.

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Recently, I came across my original journal plans for this business which I had put into chicken scratch in August of 2016. Later that week the grandmother who had loved me like only a mother could died of a stroke. I journaled then of my need to suppress my emotions surrounding her death in pursuit of this longterm goal which involves restoring a community that had supported her family as migrant farm workers in the 1930’s, coming from a cotton sharecropping farm in Missouri – more of that Caucasian diversity. The 2016 election had been the first time I voted Democrat. This was the first time I learned the DNC thinks it knows better than it’s voters. I was a big Bernie fan as a fresh BS holder. I thought he and a Republican Congress could make real things happen in the terms of mediation and change for the masses. Then Bernie won Indiana, the state I live, but through the use of Superdelegates Hillary received more votes – again the DNC wants you to think you have a say when they know better and just fix the vote. I still voted for Hillary – I held my breath, but I did it. As I told my staunch Republican grandfather who asked what I thought of President Trump once he was in office, I am so disappointed in the Republican party which left him floored. I told him I did not think that in 2016 you could have the rhetoric about woman that he had and be elected President of the United States of America. Then all of these strong conservative men who I had respected my whole life bit their tongue – for the sake of pushing their agenda. Paul Ryan truly broke my heart. About a week before the end of 2017, I stopped following all major media sources. I did this after becoming consumed with negativity about things that weren’t affecting my day to day life. I did not vote in the following presidential election. Due to the state of the economy, I didn’t see a matter where Donald Trump was not re-elected. At the same time I could not vote for President Biden as what they were doing was elder abuse – again for the sake of pushing an agenda. In this past election, I could see that Donald Trump was likely going to win. While I was not happy about this, I could see it as a means to support my business plan in an effort to pull us back to the center.

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What I will say of Donald Trump is that my primary problem with him was his rhetoric about women – he’s not doing that anymore. As someone who truly believes in systemic injustice, I see someone really shaking up the system and think – how can I take advantage of that? I grew up under parents who did the real work of colorblindeness. This was to become enlightened and to return to their home community to teach this and work towards natural integration. The majority of their classmates fell to colorblindeness the noun – this was to take their Enlightenment to the suburbs to be together and casting judgment to those they’ve left behind. Over time we have seen this animosity of the low income urban and low income rural pitted against one another polictically, each staring to the hills in resentment towards those on the other side. As a political purple, I waited three years in that MSW program for my rural population to be acknowledged. It came up in the in-person classes one time – this was by the one openly transgender of the cohort and it was to say “farm communities are really weird” and everyone agreed in unison. What an oppressing and judgmental statement to make about an entire subgroup of humans. Another person who had been assigned to my hometown complained how awful it was – social work in an area without resources certainly is not as easy as the telehealth and hands off approach promoted by COVID. Many people in the program came from the coasts and even more left the state following their draining of resources from a primary state university in a seventy percent rural state. It was in an online course that I did get the attention of a rural engagement group. They came to do a round table in my home community and when I left I can tell you – I did not feel comfortable sending those students in to work with the people I came from as it was. I reached out to these guys in my business plans with a hope to partner with them. It was five minutes before our scheduled meeting during the month after the election that I emailed them my business plans and they cancelled the meeting. I still have hope they will encounter the humility they need to be passing on to the students they are teaching. As a member of the final graduating class of IUPUI prior to its dissolution, I can testify so much likely causal link to the lack of teamwork from each school. As it is, the psychology department I came from maintains interest in a partnership – point Purdue.

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My final thoughts on the pulling of D.E.I. initiatives is that a primary law they were attempting to bring light to – the 1990 Disability Rights Act – has not gone anywhere. As someone who participated in the flawed programs, it’s not a bad idea to refine it before we cause much more harm than the good that should be intended by this. I will refer to one more experience from the first, smaller organization training I participated in. This was two powerpoint slides after learning about implicit bias when the leader attempted to attack people using the term “mansplaining”. Now I know what she meant by this, she meant when a superior over explains something in a condescending way. I asked, “do you think they could come up with another term for this considering we just learned about the impact of implicit bias. Perhaps we should consider what we are saying explicitly about the group with the number one suicide rate in the nation”. Her response was to laugh, and declare they are working on that on the coasts. Isn’t that just it? These coastal driven policies for resources we don’t have in the middle and then judgment when we aren’t able to apply it correctly. As a multi-generation Midwesterner, I am sick of my homesteading heritage being attacked. I grew up knowing I was hated everywhere I went, just for being who I was. And I still only ever wanted to help people. I won’t apologize for that.

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#alternativeswithcare #melodramaticmeredith #dearmelodramaticmeredith #holisticcounselor #holisticcounseling #alternativemedicine #mindbody #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #suicideprevention

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#msw #socialwork #psychology #selfcare #selflove #communitycare #communitylove #mutualaid #neurodivergent #recovery #equality #equity #inclusivity #antioppressive #hope #supportsmallbusiness

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The Great Insurance Scam on My Life

by Meredith Ann, MSW, posted in Uncategorized

I was sixteen years old when I was inappropriately given a severe mental illness diagnosis. I remember my mother’s response to the diagnosis being far more dramatic than I had felt necessary at the time. She approached me in a state of minor hysteria, proclaiming, “Your father and I will always make sure you have insurance!” At the time, the severity of the grim future that was assumed to likely attach itself to this diagnosis rose to the surface like rapid fire. It was as though the world around me was expanding in size, just bigger and bigger. All the while, I sat in that doctor’s chair shrinking to an almost invisible level, the air unable to continue to be consumed by my lungs. As someone who grew up in a family whose economic status never had to consider insurance and medical care costs once I was around, I was in shock at the idea she believed I would be unable to provide care for myself. As a stubbornly headstrong and independent young woman at the time, I was terrified at the notion of remaining permanently attached to my parents from the perspective of dependency. It was at that time I began to become aware of the extreme uphill pathway I had stumbled upon by means of my entanglement in psychiatric care. This induced a sort of panic state, igniting my desperation to be self-sufficient. What I know now, is that my mother was terrified of my suffering her same experiences. This was to be economically unstable enough early in her marriage where they did not have insurance. Their first child was born while uninsured causing my mother to delay going to the hospital while in labor to the point she almost had a home delivery by accident! For me, it has caused every single decision I have ever made in my entire adult life to surround insurance and the maintenance of it.

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I began to work full-time the Monday after I graduated from high school. This was after a year and a half of tortuous psychiatric overmedication had caused me to almost fail out of high school altogether. Even with my gradually declining grades, my parents had offered a two-week European vacation that I refused. At the time, I was so disgusted with myself and what had become of me that I could not have appreciated that gift. My early high school career was revealing to my potential that at the beginning of my senior year I was accepted to Purdue University. It was sometime during the Spring, while literally barely making it to the finish line of a high school diploma, I had decided to put off going to college. This surrounded the fact that I knew, due to the condition I was in, there was no way I would be successful in my endeavors at that time. Even after making this choice myself, Purdue doubled down through the rescinding of their initial offer of acceptance – done through the usual means of cowardly avoidance that these entities tend to choose: the US postal system. Honestly, I could have done without that punch to the gut, solidifying I was not worthy. Still, I pressed forward, optimistic in my role as a dietary aid at a nursing home, a role I loved. There were times I entertained attempting to pursue the leadership there – sometimes I still wish I had. This position was not one that allowed me to fulfill the expectations of the collegial driven family I was raised and left me feeling like I needed to achieve more.

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From here, I became lost in the balance of needing to have insurance and wanting to have freedom and to pursue goals. After being raised in a small town whose roots run back four generations on both sides, I have always felt this pull within me to be on the go. I was forever held back by that nasty need to be insured. To be honest, I didn’t even know why I needed it really. It was just embedded in me that this was something one could not live without and I desperately wanted to be on my own without assistance. I attempted a brief move to a small nearby metropolitan where I would be able to find work and attend an off-chute location of a larger university. My work scheduled called for me to work late hours making attention to my studies impossible enough that I dropped out – but I kept that insurance, though. From this point, I went to work for my father who was able to provide me insurance though the coverage was lacking as it has tended to for those working for small business owners such as he. During this time, I attempted to go back to school multiple times having to drop out each time. I jumped into an impulse marriage and became pregnant within 6 months of that – all the while maintaining numero uno, you guessed it, insurance! During my time bearing child, I went to weekly therapy without medication, getting to the start of the roots of my neurodivergence and severe maternal relational trauma. It would be a post-partum event in 2010 involving the complete subjective removal of my civil rights that would cause me to a.) double down on my conviction and b). realize how small I would have to become to prove myself once and for all. It was during my pregnancy I became aware that an insurance company is unable to consider a past diagnosis as active if one does not receive treatment for that diagnosis in seven years. For the record and others sake – I do not know if this is wholly accurate, it was just something I read and latched ahold of and as I have said, give someone with OCD traits something to hold onto with a passion and forget it!

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It was after this point, without medication and with a strong will to make something of all I’ve been through, that I was finally able to return to school successfully. After four years of year-round schooling as an adult commuter student with a full-time job with benefits, it came time to for graduation. Of course, I spent my senior year pregnant and expecting to have my second child the week before finals of my last semester. It was not looking like I was going to be able to continue to hold my family’s benefits, luckily in time for the Affordable Care Act to be rolled out. So, I gave it a shot. To say this was the worst experience I have had with insurance amongst the horror stories would be an understatement. The initial application process wasn’t difficult, there really just weren’t anything but high-deductible plans that were fairly expensive to choose between. While that was the sole year of my participation in this product, I have not heard a difference in the results since then for what is available. The worst of what I would experience wouldn’t happen until the actual birth of my daughter – a qualifying life-change event for any insurance carrier to be able to make insurance changes. Usually this means a call to member services and the providing of the facts. Unless, of course, that provider received their original information through the government—then the change has to be made through the government. Well, let me tell you how disastrously they handled the onslaught of applications received which had exceeded any lawmakers planned expectations. They handled their overload by simply deleting the excess of applications they presumed they would not need to hold on to. After the early May delivery of my beautiful baby, I spent countless hours through the very last week in December attempting to get my daughter added to my policy. Of all the things I know myself to be, connected is one of them. Now, this has not gotten me much social fulfillment overall, however it has allowed me access to knowledge and professionals outside of the reach to the typical person. Because of this, my then insurance agent enlisted the support of a local Senator who reached out to Ben Shapiro who was willing to hear out our situation if I would bring my infant on the show with me. I couldn’t let myself do this as our arguments were not the same. His, a stereotypical outrage against government healthcare. Mine, a disagreement with lawmakers ability to make and enforce policy without having to present a plan on how to get there. My opinion on healthcare – no one should face bankruptcy due to a health issue. No one should fear going to obtain care due to the financial predicament it will put them in. No one should make every life decision based on whether or not they have insurance. I ended that year with an evening phone call from the White House to add my daughter successfully to the policy. Of course, it was never applied appropriately, and this cost my family thousands of dollars out-of-pocket that we did not have to spend.

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After this year, I returned to full-time work and the maintenance of my family’s benefits. This is the position I have remained bound to for nearly a decade. It was during a health emergency that I felt forced to leave my corporate position. This crisis was really the final straw in a months long string of events and so I had already taken the steps to understand what my exit could look like. This included first priority of course that my husband felt up to the responsibility of holding our family’s insurance for the first time in our 16-year marriage. He had touched base with his HR to find out the process. I had reached out to understand the outlines of my tuition reimbursement contract. My plan had been to drop to a PRN level position and slowly phase out in the hospital that had kept me miserable. Instead, I was strung along in the full time BS position I was overqualified to start and now with an MSW and no more pay. It was in the middle of a one in a million near-death reaction to the flu shot that I would be unable to care about much more than ridding myself the corporate affiliation which had plagued my life. It was smack in the middle of this I realized the significance this need to hold insurance had really held for me. This was that it kept me reeled in to the point of preventing my wild side from taking me off the deep end. The actual care it availed and costs associated with it were null and void as it would happen.

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#alternativeswithcare #melodramaticmeredith #dearmelodramaticmeredith #holisticcounselor #holisticcounseling #alternativemedicine #mindbody #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #suicideprevention

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#msw #socialwork #psychology #selfcare #selflove #communitycare #communitylove #mutualaid #neurodivergent #recovery #equality #equity #inclusivity #antioppressive #hope #supportsmallbusiness

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Dear Melodramatic Meredith..

by Meredith Ann, MSW, posted in Blog Post

Dear Melodramatic Meredith,

                My son is neurodivergent. When we are around other kids he just. does. not. fit. in. We walked into a birthday party last week – one of those “everyone in the class has to be invited” gigs. I could feel the tension as we entered and the mothers sneaking bothered glances at one another did not go unnoticed! By the middle of the party, he was sitting there eating cake at a table all by himself. I could not take it anymore, I was mortified. I grabbed our stuff and we were out of there! I know you have said that you felt like you were “too much” as a child, is there anything I can do to help make him more aware?

Signed, An emotionally exhausted momma.

Dear Emotionally Exhausted Momma,

                Soooooo…. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s anything you can do to rush self-awareness. That’s something that comes in it’s own time for us all. Because of this I can’t really provide perspective on this from a personal level – after all, I was unaware at the time! I can speak to it as a mother. In moments similar to these what I have found comfort in was not focusing on the other kids but on my own. I tuned in to the fact that by not being aware, it actually wasn’t bothering them. I focused on the confidence which with they played in active use of their imagination. By focusing on the positives they experience, it stopped being about me. I hope you take comfort in knowing you are not alone and keep searching for your people. How lucky this kiddo is to have a mother that loves him in the way you do!

Take Care,

Meredith Ann