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Tag: vulnerability

  • The Gift of Being Alive: A Q&A with Rhonda Magee

    The Gift of Being Alive: A Q&A with Rhonda Magee

    We need the wisdom of cool heads and open hearts more than ever, and part of how we get to that wisdom is by (counterintuitively) allowing the fullness of our human experience, including our anger. Here we revisit a Q&A with Rhonda Magee as she explores the complexity, frustration, and intimate beauty of learning to make and be peace in the world.

    Stephanie Domet: In your book The Inner Work of Racial Justice, you detail the steps you took to help one of your students process his attitudes and biases. What kind of energy does that work require?

    Rhonda Magee: It requires a certain kind of commitment, a certain willingness to turn toward that which we could so easily deflect, turn away from, deny, minimize, avoid. For me it’s really important that when these opportunities present themselves for us to look into what’s arising around this, we turn in to that opportunity as opposed to away from it. I also think it takes a kind of grounding in a certain kind of love—kindness, loving-kindness— for me it takes some feeling of the value, of the possibility of connecting across lots of difference and the importance and value of trying to do it, again and again, even when it’s difficult. 

    SD: Why is it worth it to you to do this work?

    RM: In my view, absolutely everything is connected, and that means all of us are connected, and so it seems to me that when we have these opportunities to expand the sense of our common ground, and we don’t take advantage of them and we don’t do what we can to heal and repair and transform the world, then it seems to me we are in effect contributing to barriers and obstacles to deep well-being. And so for me it’s worth it because it’s about practice. It arises out of deep practice for me—it arises out of the deep ethical ground of my practice.

    SD: Who does that work serve? Is it for yourself, for the other person, the greater good of society? To honor the practice?

    RM: It serves life. The gift of literally being alive. To me that’s not about any one of us, actually. To be alive is a great gift, and therefore the only real response to such a gift is gratitude. And a way to show gratitude is to try to minimize harm wherever it arises, as best we can. Recognizing we’re not perfect, that we’re not always able to see clearly how what we’re doing contributes to harm, we’re all vulnerable and misguided in our own ways, so it’s with a lot of humility that I say this. But ultimately, I think this question of who does it benefit, it benefits life.

    SD: For a racialized person, a racialized woman, there are microaggressions everywhere. How do you take care of yourself to ensure you can do this work you want to do and feel called to do?

    RM: It has come out of a sense of my own agency and what I often call personal justice. This idea that justice starts with us, how we treat ourselves. Taking care of myself feels like the first approximation of whatever it is I’m trying to offer in the world. There’s a reason I live in San Francisco as opposed to North Carolina or Virginia, where I was born and raised. The environment in San Francisco seems a bit more conducive to this way of accepting people, working across cultures, multiculturally, working with people who have different ways of expressing themselves, whether it be about race, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status. I specifically talk about the environment first and then the practices. We tend to think that from the practices we can overcome just about everything and that’s a good way to think, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity to name the relevance of our embeddedness in the world, and what’s possible is, in some measure, aided and abetted and shaped by the circumstances, the environments, the structures and systems that we find ourselves bathing in all the time. I live in a community that provides a certain amount of buffer against some of the worst kinds of disrespect that a person like me might find out in the world. From this place of relative protectedness, then I actually am able to give even more. We have to keep fighting for opportunities for people who today are suffering from a new set of oppressive systems.

    SD: I wonder about your take on callout culture, or cancel culture. Is there a value in that approach, too? Your approach is one on one, which feels righteous, but slow. But what about other big-impact approaches? Do they also move the ball down the field?

    RM: In the social justice arenas we may have overamplified some of the sharper ways of dealing with this. That’s not to say there aren’t times when we really need to take a strong, sharp stand. It takes a certain skill to act firmly and clearly and do so in a way that can minimize rather than exacerbate patterns of disconnect and separation. For me it’s never about just changing places with the people or processes that have been causing harm. It’s really about bringing around a new way of being with each other. There’s a certain urgency to figuring out how to work for some notion of justice and how to end oppression, but how to do that in a way that opens the heart, and that expands the capacity of all of us to be agents of a kind of public love that can help us sustain human life. Because the universe is going to go on in whatever way, but human life is vulnerable right now because of our failure to figure out how to live more gently and effectively together on this planet and to appreciate this brief opportunity we have between the birth and the death date to make a positive impact on this world.

    “There is a way that even in the darkest times—intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this—there’s a way to love.”

    SD: Do you ever lose your cool?

    RM: I often lose my cool intentionally, as a tool for my own healing. If I’m feeling agitation and despair or some sudden rage at something I hear that seems completely nuts, my own practice journey at the moment is allowing those feelings to be expressed and as much as possible doing that regularly enough that they’re not creating a boiler that is going to explode out there. So if I’m here, at home, where it’s safe, it’s part of my practice to let the anger and the rage that I feel about injustice come right out. There are so many things happening that if you are willing to look at these difficult issues—I mean, my heart is breaking all day every day. I hum, I sing more nowadays, I hum and sing with others more nowadays. Singing, holding hands, humming, those are ways that human beings have across times and cultures managed to get through difficult times together. I sometimes forget just how many generations of human beings before recorded human history—for hundreds of thousands of years we don’t know the numbers of battles, rages, the despair, the inhumanity to each other, and yet we survived, and yet we didn’t burn down the planet, and yet we figured out how to keep getting up every day and feeding the children. There’s a planet’s worth of wisdom about how to get through difficult times and about the holistic nature of what that takes, so that’s what I’m about these days.

    SD: I thought losing your cool would look more like—I don’t know—do you ever want to swipe all those books off the bookcase behind you?

    RM: I mean, sometimes! When I hear this I’m tempted to think of those who say: We just need to start all over again. Blow it up and start all over. I don’t have kids, I’m not physically a mother, but I kind of feel like most moms and most of us in these communities that have suffered a lot over time, you know, we’re here. We’re usually not the ones who say let’s burn it all down. Because our children are in that. The things we have lovingly protected from the worst, as best we could through generations, whether through slavery or whatever our cultures and heritages have suffered through, we suffered through so we could live another day and find the sources of hope and regeneration. That mothering instinct, I believe it’s in all of us on some level, that instinct that would protect, that would go into the fire and pull out what we can and start again, mindfulness of that, cultivation of that is what I feel called to help support and that comes at least in part from my own particular lineage as the granddaughter of the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people. There is a way that even in the darkest times, intergenerationally dark times where there’s no reason to think your children will ever get out of this, there’s a way to love, to help bring about places where joy and healing can happen, and my goodness, if people could do it during much darker times, the holocausts of our history, the enslavement periods of our history—if it could be done then, then we can do it now. I have some love and compassion for those who feel so beleaguered that the call is just to burn it down. And I say, before you light that match, look into the eyes of a child, hold the hand of a friend, realize that these very human gestures matter, and look for that will, that capacity to live another day in love.

    SD: When I look at what’s happening in the world today, the level of unrest and aggression, hate and burning, I see a lot of “men in the room.” What do you think about the role of women in helping bring about this “new way of being with each other”?

    RM: I sometimes think of this in the conventional terms of identity—it seems obvious that we need more women in power! But I also think that more fundamentally and importantly, we need to see more empowered feminine energy in the world: that energy which lives in all of us—to greater or lesser degrees—the energy that nurtures, that cares, that sees the imprint of the future and the past in everyone and in everything we do. Any one of us can do this. And every one of us should.

    Educating by Being Aware of Others’ Experiences 

    https://vimeo.com/350988714 Whether we’re a teacher, whether we’re a director, whether we’re an administrative assistant, whatever we are because who we are and what our upbringing has been and what our life experiences have been is intricately a part of our authentic being. Unless we have taken time to look at… Read More 

    • Barb Catbagan
    • August 21, 2019
    12 Powerful Women of the Mindfulness Movement 

    There’s a balancing of gender power happening across the professional world—including the mindfulness world. Twelve leaders in the field share how they claim their power and bring the diversity of their experiences in the mindfulness movement to bear in their work. Read More 

    • Stephanie Domet
    • January 15, 2019

    About The Author

    Stephanie Domet

    Stephanie Domet

    Stephanie Domet is the author of two novels and a nonfiction book for middle grade readers. She’s the cofounder of the AfterWords Literary Festival and a contributing editor for Mindful. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, where she is, indeed, grateful to be alive, in the best way.



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  • How I Stopped Terrorizing Myself

    How I Stopped Terrorizing Myself

    I’m standing on stage in front of 150 people, the spotlight bright in my eyes, the microphone solid in my hand. Their faces stare up at me, expectantly. I’m there to tell them a story. For a lot of people, being on stage in this way is a nightmare. Stage fright can make your heart pound, your mouth go dry, your limbs quake. But not me. I’m comfortable here. My worst nightmare awaits me later, at home. It’s also what I’m on stage to talk about.

    “For decades—my whole life, practically—I’ve lived with a persistent, debilitating fear of being murdered in my bed,” I tell the audience. They laugh uproariously. They’re not being insensitive—I’m telling it funny. That’s how I always tell it. I run through the list of ghosts that haunt my overactive imagination: Sasquatch, vampires, Adolf Hitler, the Loch Ness Monster, Jesus—that crown of thorns, all that blood—those phantoms of my childhood. Then the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac Killer—the true-crime menaces of my late-night adolescent reading. Fear has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.

    It’s not totally surprising. I was a girl in the 1970s and ’80s in southern Ontario. I read the newspaper every day from the age of nine or ten, and my mother’s magazines—Family Circle, Women’s Day—and they were all always cover-to-cover, it seemed, with violence against girls and women. Kids my age disappearing from the hallways of their apartment buildings, or last seen on the subway heading downtown to a movie with friends. Women like my mother followed through parking lots, pulled into vans, when out for a walk, flagged down
    to help someone in need, and then never heard from again. I learned to walk with my keys threaded through my fingers. I read conflicting advice on whether to fight or submit. When my hair was long, I learned to keep it tucked into my coat so it couldn’t be used to apprehend me from behind.

    Fear has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.

    Some of that fear was caution, and self-preservation, I guess. It was the water I was swimming in—misogyny and men’s violence against women was baked into the society in which I grew up, from the news headlines, to the murder mysteries my mother read, to the movies and television shows we all watched. But that fear also flicked a switch in me that was hard to switch off. I became hyper-alert.

    ’Fraidy Cat

    Looking back now, I can see I was living with anxiety from the time I was small. We didn’t call it that, then. We called it oh don’t be such a baby, and she’s afraid of her own shadow, and don’t be ridiculous. And to be fair, a lot of what I was afraid of was utterly ridiculous. Parked cars (they could become moving cars at any moment!), our furnace room (likely last known location of Sasquatch), a picture of a marble bust in a book (I can feel that statue watching me). As a lifelong writer, my imagination was my best friend. It was also, it seemed, bent on terrorizing me. And I was helpless before its infinite power.

    I knew how to make it funny, though. And I did that, in the daylight hours. The story of my fear became one of my funniest set pieces, one I returned to again and again, especially once I learned, later than is comfortable to admit, that not everyone is paralyzed by fear at night. When I realized that this fear was unusual, I went to town, pulling out every formative experience that solidified my terror. I’d gotten up to pee one night when I was seven or eight, and, half-asleep, collided with my father who was making the rounds of us kids, ensuring we were safe and sound before he and my mother turned in. Scared the daylights out of me.

    The night I’d stayed up, home alone at the age of 17, reading about the Zodiac Killer, too scared to go to sleep till I got through the story, and utterly uncomforted by the inconclusive ending—the Zodiac Killer was still out there! What if he was in Mississauga, Ontario, in my boring, quiet neighborhood? What if he was outside my very house right now! Is that the sound of the front door easing open? Footsteps on the staircase? (Never mind the contortions of logic, the self-centering acrobatics involved in the dark fantasy that this infamous murderer would target little old me.) I lay in my bed and shook. A figure at my bedroom door, barely visible in the first streaks of dawn. I opened an eye. My father, again. He and my mom and my younger siblings had been on a road trip and decided to drive all night for home.

    Here, I feel I should say a word about my father: He was gentle and smart, stubborn and fair, capable and wise. I loved him and he loved me. I was never afraid of him. But he did have a way of being in the wrong place at the right time.

    On stage, the crowd loved these stories, laughing and gasping at all the right moments. But lately, I’d had the sense that maybe this fear of mine wasn’t hilarious. I’d been telling two friends about it, in my jokey way, and they looked concerned. “It’s OK!” I said. “It’s hilarious!” But their reaction stayed with me. Maybe it wasn’t hilarious—or at least, maybe that’s not all it was.

    After the show, women found me outside the venue to tell me how much my story resonated. They, too, were afraid of being murdered in their beds, and they were so glad to know they weren’t alone. It was worth it, I thought, and I floated home on the wave of praise and belonging. I had my best night of sleep in a long time, no fear, even though my spouse was out of town and I was alone in our three-bedroom house.

    The next night, though. Wow.

    Fear Itself

    It started early, before darkness had even truly fallen. I worked from home, alone, with no fear during the day. I taught creative writing to my students as the sun set. The parents of one of my students had been in the audience the night before, and the dad made a weird comment at pickup time. The switch in my mind flicked to High Alert. When the students and parents cleared out of my living room I noticed the little twinkle lights I keep along the mantel in winter were switched on—and I hadn’t done it.

    If this were a television drama, the violins would be layering in tension. The Fear had me and it wasn’t going to let up.

    In bed that night I reminded myself I’d checked the doors and they were locked. My mind imagined a patient murderer, lying in wait for me. I lay in bed, solid with fear. I held my breath. Every sound magnified. The absence of sound untrustworthy—surely the calm before the violins returned.

    I’d doze, then wake, heart pounding, was that a sound? What was that sound? The front door easing open? The back? Someone coming in the kitchen window? Is there someone in this room? My eyes strained to tease out the strands of darkness that surrounded me.

    This was a familiar routine. It was my nightly opera. I tried to talk myself out of my fear: Don’t be ridiculous.

    What would that even look like, a life without this persistent, pervasive fear?

    This is the most egotistical fantasy ever. You think you’re such a good catch for a murderer that he’d wait till you’re tired of watching Netflix, done puttering around the kitchen, finished reading your book? It’s absurd. Illogical. Most people do not get murdered in their beds. Go to sleep.

    Surprisingly, my stern litany of self-talk did not result in restful sleep. Most nights, I would eventually fall into uneasy slumber. But this night was different. This night, the terror wouldn’t let me go. And I did what I had never done before.

    I clicked the light on. Heart pounding with fear and shame, I pushed a heavy piece of furniture across our bedroom door and I got back in bed.

    I read my phone. I read a book. Nothing worked, and I felt terrible, like I had failed. And I was still sleepless, and terrified.

    Later, I told a friend, who happens to be a therapist, about the experience— about telling the story on stage, and the frightening night that ensued. She nodded. “If you ever want to put that down,” she told me, “I know someone who would be a great match for you.” Put it down, I thought. Is that an option? I could just—put it down? What would that even look like, a life without this persistent, pervasive fear? I had only ever thought of The Fear as something to suffer. The idea that I could talk to a therapist about it and be free of it felt as outlandish
    as the idea that an evil version of the Count from Sesame Street was behind the door of the bathroom of my childhood home.

    Finding Comfort

    I tried not to treat Debbie’s office like the stage at the Seahorse Tavern, but my tales of night terror have been so often told I can’t help falling into funny-storytelling mode. “I’m pretty sure it’s sound coming from my own face, every time,” I told her. “Snoring, grinding my teeth. I wake myself up and wait for the sound to reoccur, but because the sound originated with me, it never does, and then I’m just anxious and alert.”

    “I also wear corrective lenses,” I told her, and so I can’t see much at night.

    “So, you’re vulnerable,” she said. I agreed.

    “I don’t know how to solve for that,” I told her.

    “It’s not something you solve,” she said.

    Oh.

    Then she said: “Tell me about the murder.” And I said: “Oh, the murder doesn’t matter.”

    My therapist is a cool customer. She nodded. “Then what are you afraid of?”

    I thought about all the possible answers to that question. “Terror. I’m afraid of being terrorized.”

    She nodded again, and she looked at me, her face soft and expectant.

    “Oh,” I said. The edge of an idea began to reveal itself. “It’s me.”

    For so long, I had been so afraid of terror that when the realization finally dawned it felt like a new day breaking. “I am terrorizing myself,” I said. “I am doing it to myself.”

    Debbie’s prescription was that I find a comfort object, something I could reach for in the night when The Fear started to prickle up my back. Again, I was struck by the novel idea that com- fort was an option. “What have you been reaching for?” Debbie asked.

    “Mostly logic,” I told her, “and stern self-talk.”

    “And how’s that been going?” “Here I am,” I said.

    Vulnerability and Me

    That afternoon, my spouse left for a two-week tour. I was once again home alone, with all my vulnerability, which I was trying to think of as a feature, rather than a bug. (Most people don’t get murdered in their beds, I’d told Debbie. But some do, she had replied, in a way that was oddly comforting and affirming, allowing me to acknowledge my fear and the role it had played in trying to keep me safe, instead of trying to shame me out of feeling it.) When I returned home from running errands, I instinctually said aloud, as I came in the front door, “Ah, my cozy home.” This allowed me to feel comfortable, rather than to immediately begin worrying that there might be a murderer lurking in the basement. And later, when I went up to bed, I pulled back the blankets and murmured, “Ah, my cozy bed.”

    But sometime after sleep came, I was awake again, startled by a close sound. Probably my teeth clicking against each other, I thought, though I already felt the creeping fingers of fear prickling up my back. I knew what would come next—the lid would fly off my imagination and I’d be in for it. So I took a deep breath. I paused. You have a choice, here, I told myself. You can choose terror, or you can choose something else. I breathed again, curled over onto my side, and patted my own heart with my hand. Out loud, I said, “You deserve to
    have a peaceful sleep, and pleasant dreams.” And then I closed my eyes and had both.

    When I tell this story now, I still tell it funny—it’s my preferred mode. But I tell it, too, with a sense of wonder at the power of self-compassion, and how it has replaced fear as my nighttime companion.

    The addition of self-compassion to my nighttime routine has occasioned a spillover into the daytime part of my life, too. Though stern and logical self-talk is still my first go-to, being kind to myself in the grip of night terror has allowed me to take another look at how I address myself during the day. And while the day-side shift is slower, when I remember to give myself the choice, I choose self-kindness every time—and that makes for better days, along with easier nights.

    Befriending Fear: Working with Worry and Anxiety 

    The fear-response is a powerful emotional and physiological reaction that can be triggered by more than just an imminent physical threat. In this excerpt from his book The Mindfulness Solution,  Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, explores the human response to fear, and shows us how mindfulness can help manage it.
    Read More 

    • Ronald D. Siegel
    • March 3, 2011

    What Are You Afraid Of? 

    Public speaking is one of the most common fears people experience. Explore this mindfulness practice for conquering those butterflies in your stomach—without picturing the audience in their underwear. [Podcast]
    Read More 

    • Dacher Keltner
    • July 3, 2018



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  • Student Perspective: My lessons in vulnerability

    Student Perspective: My lessons in vulnerability


    Home / News / Student Perspective: My lessons in vulnerability
    Tina Purnat in 1991
    Tina Purnat in 1991. / Photo: Courtesy of Tina Purnat

    In July 1991, I found myself sitting in the back seat of our family car, heart pounding with a mix of excitement and apprehension.

    The 10-day war for Slovenian independence from Yugoslavia had just ended, and while the armed conflict was officially over, the atmosphere was still thick with uncertainty. The weeks prior had been marked by listening to press conferences of the national war cabinet and evacuating hurriedly to bomb shelters. I remember the fear that gripped me as both my parents left for work each day—my mother to care for patients at the regional hospital, and my father, a first responder, on site to protect a key factory from potential bombings that could lead to deadly chemical spills.

    It was against this backdrop that my parents were now driving me to Villach, Austria, where I was to attend a four-week immersive German language course. This was something I had been looking forward to all year—a chance to brush up on my German before entering my freshman year of secondary school where I’d study it as the second foreign language.

    But as we crossed the border, the thrill of the upcoming adventure was tinged with a new, deeper sense of fear.

    When we arrived in Villach, my parents helped me settle in, and then it was time for them to leave. As we stood outside the small dormitory where I would be staying, my mother turned to me with a seriousness I hadn’t seen in her before. “If the war breaks out again,” she said, her voice steady but her eyes betraying a deep worry, “don’t try to come back to Slovenia. Stay here in Austria and find a way to your uncle in Sweden.” I nodded, the gravity of her words sinking in. Suddenly, the world seemed much larger, and far less certain, than it had just moments before. Despite the bombing scares and evacuations I had endured during the brief war, it was in that moment, hearing my mother’s words, that I felt the most afraid. I realized that if conflict erupted again, I would be on my own as a 14-year-old girl in a foreign country.

    For the next four weeks, I was surrounded by other teenagers from Slovenia and various other parts of Europe. We spent our days conjugating verbs, practicing vocabulary, swimming, hiking and navigating the cultural quirks of our peers. But in the back of my mind, my mother’s words lingered. What would happen if the conflict reignited? How would I make my way to Sweden on my own? How would I even find my uncle there? The thought of being stranded in a foreign country, unable to return home, was terrifying. It was my first real encounter with the vulnerability that so many people around the world experience daily—the fear of being uprooted, of losing the safety of home.

    Thankfully, the weeks passed without incident. No more armed conflict erupted in Slovenia, and my parents returned to pick me up as planned. But I was not the same person who had arrived in Villach just four weeks earlier. The experience had left an indelible mark on me, a heightened awareness of the fragility of safety and the ever-present possibility of displacement.

    Tina Purnat
    Tina Purnat today / Photo: Courtesy of Tina Purnat

    Back in Slovenia, I couldn’t shake the thoughts of what might have been. I imagined what it would be like to be forced to flee my home, to live in a place where I didn’t speak the language, surrounded by people who didn’t understand my culture. These thoughts only grew stronger in the following weeks and months as the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina intensified. Refugees were fleeing their homes, seeking safety wherever they could find it, and often first in Slovenia before moving on to other countries. Many of them were children, just like me, whose lives had been upended overnight.

    Later on, I decided to volunteer as a companion and homework tutor for kids my own age at the refugee center. It wasn’t just about helping them with English homework and math; it was about being there for them, offering some semblance of normalcy in their otherwise chaotic lives.

    I remember a brother and sister, both in their early teens, who never left each other’s side. I remember thinking: we grew up in the same federation of Yugoslavia, just in different parts of it, and just because of where we were born, I had a home but they lost it. Despite their reserved demeanor, I made it my goal to connect with them. I would bring bubble gum and comic books to our meetups, hoping to break the ice. At first, our interactions were limited to simple exchanges—sharing a piece of gum, pointing out a favorite comic strip. But over time, these small gestures began to build a bond between us.

    We never talked about the war or their experiences—those topics remained unspoken, heavy in the background. But through our shared love of comic books and the simple pleasure of chewing gum, we found a way to connect. They would smile, sometimes even laugh, and in those moments, I knew I was making a difference, however small. We communicated in the language of teen friendship, where words were less important than the shared experiences that brought us a bit of lightheartedness in a difficult time.

    Then, one day, they were gone—moved on to Germany for asylum. I never got to say goodbye, but I like to think that our time together left a positive mark on their lives, just as it did on mine. I often wonder where they ended up—Canada? The U.S.? New Zealand? Sweden? Maybe they ended up settling in Germany? Wherever they are, I hope they remember those afternoons spent laughing over comic books and enjoying the small pleasures of pink bubble gum.

    These experiences shaped my understanding of vulnerability in profound ways. They led me to the profession of public health because public health, at its core, prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable and at-risk populations. It emphasizes the values I learned from my parents and wider family—the importance of empathy, service, and resilience. My time with those refugee kids taught me that vulnerability is not just about addressing immediate needs but also about the layers of crises people experience and endure, often silently. Public health approaches cannot solve all their problems, but working in this field gives me a tangible way to address some of the critical needs of people who, like those refugee kids, experience and navigate multiple crises. It’s about creating systems, structures and solutions that support their resilience, help them find stability, and, ultimately, help them to rebuild their lives and thrive.

    Thirty-five years later, I’ve built a career in public health. The responsibility to serve and protect the most vulnerable remains at the forefront of everything I do. Whether I’m working with health information and evidence, implementing digital health solutions, combating health misinformation, pointing out deceptive marketing of vapes to youth, or responding to outbreaks, it’s never just about the policy, tools, data or the technology. It’s always about the people—the children, the families, the communities—who need health systems and public health efforts to better serve them and meet their needs.

    Returning to that summer in Villach, I realize now that it was a turning point in my life. The uncertainty I faced then is minute compared to the struggles of those who live in conflict zones or walk thousands of miles in search of a safer home, but it gave me a window into their experience. It taught me that the safety and stability I had always taken for granted could be lost in an instant, and that those who are forced to flee their homes or are displaced within their own country or even within their own city need more than just shelter and services—they need understanding, compassion, and a sense of belonging.

    As I continue my work in public health, I carry these lessons with me. My mother’s words, spoken with such quiet urgency, have stayed with me, reminding me of the responsibility we all share to protect the vulnerable.

    And every time I meet someone who has been displaced, I think back to that 14-year-old girl in Villach, standing alone in a foreign country, and I know that I am doing what I am meant to be doing—helping to build a world where no one has to face that kind of uncertainty alone.

    —Tina Purnat is a DrPH student and Prajna Leadership Fellow.

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