Could I ask for what I wanted?

"A clumsy, fat, left-handed, stuttering kid". Yes, I remember mentally reviewing that list of knocks I had given myself, while still in grade school. As concise as that list was, you would think that as a grade school "teacher's pet", I could find some concise answers to that list. Clumsy? Work on your coordination and strength. Fat? LOSE WEIG....sorry, lose weight; I tended to hear that solution from others at a loud level. Left-handed? Either have your hand dominance changed for you, or develop ambidexterity. Stuttering (another loud admonition)?? STOP STUTTERING!!

But life needed to go on. Life, food and learning needed nurturing. The food was especially captivating. Fried foods: so good. Fried chicken, fried oysters,  hamburgers, roast beef, roast pork, pork chops, shrimp, meat loaf, pizza, and spaghetti were among the more popular proteins. Corn, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes, rice and GRAVY, roasted potatoes, onion and celery, beans, peas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, fried okra, lettuce and cucumbers were among the more traditional vegetables. But that omits any details of the snack calories available to me and my siblings: potato chips, cookies, crackers, candy, popcorn, gum, soft drinks (with peanuts poured inside), and fruit. In the final analysis, not that much different than the diet of most 1950's - 1960's kids, aspiring to be middle class. No one held a gun to my head during those years and said, "Eat that NOW", but I more often displayed my hearty gratitude for all that was served. All but spaghetti, because in grade school - I had been told by a sibling that spaghetti had worms in it.

There was garden produce harvested each year from our back yard, but not by me, if I could feign polio or some other low incidence malady. It was the act of growing up and being given a number of 'come to Jesus' talks, about learning how to cook and bake; learning how good it felt to contribute to the meal by picking, "snapping", cooking, serving, eating all those good morsels of vitamins, minerals, fiber and flavorful goodness - often accentuated by being cooked with butter and salt; but that was what was used for cooking at the time. Hindsight bias makes you feel so very smart, but it doesn't give you means to deny your history. "I got better", as the character in a noted "Monty Python" film noted. It took bare subsistence through my college career, and a few good friends who coached me through - when I moved to the Midwest US - selecting and preparing more fresh food. That trend would continue through transition to my non-single life.

I learned to ask for fresh, sustainable, lower-fat, lower-carbohydrate, properly-portioned food for my meals. One popular admonition about one's diet is as follows: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Thanks to journalist Michael Pollan and others - there were rules for healthy eating I could use.

Would I ever have reached a point where I could imagine being non-single, if I did not confront my fluency disorder? It started in the summer term between junior and senior undergraduate years, when I was enrolled in a general speech class for teacher training. My first speech completed, I was told to have an evaluation at the University speech clinic or - a teacher education track was not in my future. In that summer semester, with my first formal speech therapy program underway (there were no programs for SLP in my Mississippi district, during my school years), I grew up a lot. On a collision course with my growth as a fluent speaker, there were the Watergate hearings. There was my application to graduate school, soon to segue from a master's program in English to one in communicative disorders. And then, there was my trying out for a part in the Ionesco play "The Bald Soprano" as part of my treatment.

In each of these tracks of my impending adulthood, could I ask for what I wanted? We shall see.  

Be a Conscience

It's such a foreboding concept, conscience. Foreboding because we give the idea so much weighted respect. Conscience, after all, is one of our higher functions that make us truly human. It is one of the attributes of humanness that our moral mentors hold up through human history, as a "thou shalt" skill to acquire. Conscience is so much more than consciousness.  Where consciousness pertains to the baseline self-awareness of your internal state, conscience gives legs, voice and vision to your internal state. If consciousness is the voice of "I am", then conscience is the voice of  "Here I am, and - OMG! What did I just do?" Conscience may cause the ground under your professional life to go shaky, but with experience and good humor, you may keep your self-awareness balanced and have the best possible day in the workplace.

The profession needs consciences - individual clinicians, academics and advocates that actively bring their legs, voice and vision to keep their work focused, vital and memorable. When the work is focused, the clinician respects the work processes that have been proven optimal. Processes that do not allow the integration of the professional's skill, the needs of the person served, and the goals of the institution that sponsors the clinician - they get re-tuned to resonate with the vitality or life force of the clinician.  When you are prepared for the work day by being grounded with your own vitality, you can complete work tasks that can stand on their quality, and can be applied as memorable across patients and impairments.

As you become grounded in how your conscience, properly applied, can bring the most to your clinical or research activities, - also think about how the world external to your workplace can be guided by conscience. Does your person served, live in an environment that could contribute to their impairments? Is the support structure for the person the best that could be imagined? How do the person's communities, in concentric circles about this person's world, bring positive or negative energy to the person's quality of life? The clinician - researcher who exercises her/his conscience in the wider world; it is work that can be most rewarding - but perhaps not of the monetary variety.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted as saying "There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right".