My Story from Borrow My Angel Nov 2025

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the Borrow My Angel Rise to Break Stigma event. Borrow My Angel is an incredible organization working to overcome stigma attached to mental health so that more people will seek the help they need to improve their lives and their mental health. In that aim, I wanted to share what I spoke. If you were there, I definitely took the direction of my good friend and mentor Lori Robertson and spoke without reading so it did not include all of this. But this is the gist of it....

If you or a loved one need resources, please use this link to Mental Health 417 to find them in the Springfield, MO area.

Mental health. We hear these two words frequently. We hear that we are suffering from it, there is an epidemic of mental illness. We continue to hear about our mental health crisis, and there is a lot of attention on the topic but not many clear and concise answers. The World Health Organization defines mental health as “a state of well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn and work well, and contribute to their community. It has intrinsic and instrumental value and is a basic human right.” 

In our community, we have been talking about mental health for almost a decade now as it rose to be identified as one of our top community health issues. Progress has been made toward improvements and some great strides have realized improvements that afford us more access to services, and have decreased some of the stigma. We can do more. Today is one of those ways we can seek to improve…so thank you for being here, for determining that this morning your time is best spent engaging in an effort that is leading the way to continue to push for more improvement. 

In preparing for today, I struggled with what to talk about. As the Director of Health at the SGCHD, data and numbers are the primary way we make decisions and create action to address public health priorities. We look for themes in the stories in the data that tell us a collective story. And yet, the data, as impactful as it is, hasn't changed much since nearly a decade when we began talking about mental health as a priority issue. The thing about mental health is that it is an issue of the human condition. Humanity is complex and difficult and never the same experience from one person to another. One of the ways that we learn and evolve as humans is through stories and sharing our individual experiences. The power of story is that it connects us, elicits emotions and feelings that foster empathy and connection that numbers and data just can’t emulate. So as I thought about today, I decided that the most impactful way to connect today would be to share a story, a personal story. 

Borrow My Angel is dedicated to telling powerful stories to overcome the stigma attached with mental illness. Chuck Dow has been leading the way by pursuing this aim for years as a way to help improve our mental health, to let people know they are loved and cared for and that help is near. You will see that again today here in a few moments when my friend David courageously shares his powerful story. These stories, when we pause and really listen, are the playbook that help us connect with ourselves and each other and inspire us to find paths toward improvement. They are guiding lights of letting us in on the secret that none of us want to know…that we all struggle, and actually the struggle is a holy and productive part of life and must be endured when we truly decide to improve our mental wellbeing. Culturally we still struggle with being uncomfortable. But, I hope today you will allow yourself the chance to be uncomfortable and know that there is purpose in these stories. While you listen, I encourage you to be aware of how you respond…the feelings you have. That is the human experience and we all have it.There might be nothing more important for our collective health than sharing these stories that unite us and open us toward understanding ourselves, each other and create better ways of meeting each other in our need, improving systems that will move us toward being more mentally well…coping well with life, realizing our abilities, learning and working well, and contributing positively to our communities. 

Everyone here probably knows that I became the director of the health department during the middle of the COVID pandemic. That was some of the most difficult work I have ever done and likely ever will do in my lifetime. In many moments during that time, I was often defeated, exhausted, unregulated and merely surviving. Soon after the pandemic began to wind down, I also learned I had also been surviving a relationship that had turned toxic and had become abusive. This was not the first time I had come to this realization unfortunately. It is not comfortable to stand here in front of you and tell you this story but it is important. This realization and the struggle I finally had to deal with forced me to look this issue dead in the eye. It’s embarrassing, humiliating. I am an educated woman. I am capable of taking care of myself and leading people. I know how to work hard, to figure things out. In my career, I have always been able to learn quickly, to adjust and use my intuition and knowledge, and education to succeed. But for some reason, I was not so successful on the personal side.  Abuse does not always show up as bumps and bruises. It is silent and cryptic and mysterious, manipulative and controlling and coercive. How was this my life? How did I let this happen to me…again? In finally dealing with this issue and deciding to figure it out…how I had gotten to this place, I began my journey of recovering from my own bad habits of allowing this to happen to me. And this is where my mental health finally began to improve. I had to learn the hard way that my problems of repeating this pattern was not going to get better if I just figured it all out or controlled everything around me. And I did.

I don’t tell you this story for sympathy or shame or anything of that nature. I tell you because it had to happen to me. It is not okay. Let me be clear. No form of abuse or bullying or anything else controlling is acceptable. I tell you my story because my realizations and my path through these struggles are what gave me the perspective on myself that I needed to learn, so that I could evolve, and find new ways to deal with myself and the mental illness, the anxiety that was gripping my life. At first, I had no idea what to do. I sought help and took part in a lot of therapy so I could understand how I had gotten there. I learned a lot. And part of what I learned is that it was not something people want to talk about. Culturally, we tend to look away, endure, allow, permit, and ignore this kind of behavior thinking that it will go away and we hope it gets better. That had been me. Unfortunately, it does not get better unless you decide to get better. I share this today because I know that I am not alone and I want others to know, you are not alone. Abuse is a key component of this mental health crisis we’re in. I am here today to share with you it is possible to walk through your hardest moments, your worst nightmares and come out the other side better, stronger. My recovery was messy…full of sorrow and anger and depression. But there is something in me that just refuses to let people win in their ability to control me. I will have the last word about my life. And so, I used it. That is why I share this with you today. And I encourage you to share your story. We are all connected. 

I received treatment for anxiety. Anxiety for me felt like a constant reel of thoughts running through my head filling it with to-do lists, plans, paranoia, fears that told me if I could just figure all this stuff in my head out, that I would be loved and have peace and that my life would be normal. I was trying to control life by overprocessing information, anticipating every threat, and working hard to figure out how to avoid the pain of it all. I was overfunctioning, overthinking, overcompensating. I was alienating and neglecting myself thinking that if I could just learn how to perform, please, make things okay for those around me, that eventually it would all calm down and be under control. Unfortunately, I was attracting people that were needing me to do just that. I was really good at it. I gave them what they needed and more. Meanwhile, I had no idea how to listen to what my anxiety was really saying to me, which was, stop doing that and listen to yourself, love yourself, take care of you. Anxiety I have found is your soul whispering, talking, sometimes screaming at you to stop in the name of loving yourself. I couldn’t stop because deep down I had neglected myself for so long that I had no idea how to love the girl inside me that grew up subscribing to some really maladaptive ways of navigating life mistakenly thinking I was controlling it. When all my glass broke and I could not help but deal with cleaning it all up, I learned so much. I could go on for far more time than I am allotted with the lessons that came from this realization. But after I learned to start saying it out loud and tell my story, I also learned a couple of other key lessons I want to share. You can’t change what has happened…and I know I alone won’t be able to change the systems that support us staying unwell. But, you can change your own individual mental health by using your past to shape your future. And telling our stories is sharing our lessons and using them to help others through their own learning. As you can see, the first lesson I have learned is to tell your story. And listen to those telling theirs. This is the handbook to life…our stories.

As the COVID pandemic was winding down, I gave commencement to an audience of graduates and their family, friends and loved ones on a cool spring day at MSUs Great Southern Bank Arena. I had a few months to prepare and almost immediately I knew that the topic I wanted to speak on was love. Since that commencement speech where I spoke to the crowd about how love lifts us, and surrounds us and encourages us in those dark moments, I know my mindset at the time was centered around what I perceived to be the “good” love…the kind that feels good, that kind we would fill our lives with if we had the chance. What I have come to be certain of after mucking through the pain of truth that showed me lessons I did not want to learn, was that had I not been subject to these terrible experiences, I would never have been uncomfortable enough to find a reason to need to change. I would still be using my same old strategies for coping with life the best that I knew how which was to overschedule myself, over think, over exercise, over spend, exhaust myself for others gain, never to feel like I was making any progress on the never ending list of things I must do to finally feel at peace. I was powering through with a high level of anxiety that I was using as the gasoline to keep my engine running so I could accomplish the high level of achievement I expected from myself. The anxiety was keeping me believing that one day I would get there…if I could just control it all. We don’t get to control life. We are not that powerful. The illusion that we can is making us sick and even killing us at times. This was a classic recipe for disaster and when I hit rock bottom and then began to recover from these traumatic events in my journey, I learned and grew in ways that would have never been possible without that pain. I have found ways through grief that have given me strength and I have developed tools that released the grip of anxiety, and gave me the freedom to simply be. I am more accepting of my own messy self. I am creating my own peace and happiness. I am good, better than I have felt maybe ever in my life. I have built an understanding of my capabilities and I trust them now. I have found security and safety because I have created belonging in myself. When I find myself feeling anxiety, I know to stop and listen to the reasons it is there. It is guidance, intuition. This is the lesson I learned: in addition to all that good stuff I spoke about in commencement, love is a force and it is good but it is also tough, really tough. It doesn’t leave us alone. It sees our potential and it pushes us inward and asks us to really and truly find peace inside. But that process can be painful. Don’t look away or overschedule your way out of it. Stop. Listen. And learn to love your soul. 

We need each other. We need ourselves. It’s both, and. So much of our world tells us it’s one way or another, it’s black and white, us or them, this or that. My word of the year is AND. Along my journey growing up, I think the learning I used to deal with my trauma (we all have trauma and we all learn how to cope…many of our strategies for coping are maladaptive but we can relearn new strategies) was to overfunction, to perform, to please. And I have gravitated toward people that have the maladaptive coping strategy of using what I will give and more while refusing to connect. This pattern was dictating so much of my state of mental health, mental illness. The problem was, I couldn’t see it…until I did. It was painful and awful and there are so many better ways of relating to each other but it was in the breaking of my patterns that I was able to seek out new ways of coping with life and all it hands us…the good and the bad. I was able to move in the direction of creating a better way for myself, most importantly for my children that I love so much and want to give better. It wasn’t because things always went my way like I wanted them to, it was because of some really hard stuff that I found myself in the middle of. There is purpose in all of it, the struggle especially. Abuse, bullying is never okay but what you decide to do with it, but the time we live in, it's all around and what is more important is how you use it to make you stronger, better. It was because I decided I wasn’t going to let someone else have the last word about my life path. But most importantly it was because all of this was shaped by people…the good and the bad characters in my life. All of it is important. I have learned from it all. Now that I know, I choose better, choose people that support me and use the tools I have found that support my peace, my mental health and well being, and pass those lessons along in how I love and care for myself and how I love and care for others. But this I know, we need each other. We are all connected. And when we find it in ourselves to accept what is, the good and the bad, we can also choose to step over the pride, the ego, the need to be right and find ways to keep making our world better…together. 

As your Director of Health, I want to thank you for listening, for allowing me the chance to serve in my role. I am so grateful. And I hope today you will remember to share your story, that love is good but also tough, and that we need each other.