Laura Zera

Talking About Mental Health in the Workplace

Imagine a world where you could share about your mental health challenges with your boss and coworkers, and not worry about side glances, or worse, workplace discrimination, afterward. Where sharing led to compassion and support and brought your team closer together. Where the words “career-limiting move” never crossed your mind. Where you could safely be you.

We live in a culture that has engrained some pretty whack-ass notions of what emotional strength, fragility and success look like. Even when it doesn’t serve us, it often feels less risky to pretend everything is fine, hide what’s hurting us and push through. Mental health is an awkward subject in the workplace.

An organization called The Stability Network is shifting the narrative. It sends out speakers who live with mental health conditions to tell their stories in workplaces around the world, and to demonstrate that it’s possible to have an episode, recover and continue to thrive in all manners and ways. TSN’s tag line says it all: Changing the way we talk about mental health, one story at a time.

Twenty years ago, I took a five-week medical leave from my job because of depression. My immediate teammates were amazingly supportive, but I remember feeling anxious about what the rest of the office thought about my absence, and whether I would retain the respect of my peers when I returned.

On my first day back, I heard many kind greetings, but the reason for my absence was carefully avoided. You know how when someone returns after a surgery or a heart attack, everyone has a similar story to tell? Either theirs, or someone they know? No one had a story to share with me. Stories of mental illness recovery just weren’t the kind of thing people talked about.

Unsurprisingly, I felt shame around my illness. For the next 15 years, I played my mental health cards close to my chest, until I understood that greater power came from speaking the truth. Changes in perception don’t come from statistics and reports, they come from seeing, knowing and hearing from people with lived experience. Discomfort is dispelled when the people with the lived experience make it okay to talk about it. Silence begets more silence.

I’m grateful to The Stability Network for its commitment to creating a space for mental health stories in the workplace, and in partnership with them, I’ve committed to telling mine. As a speaker for TSN, I hope to stand in front of audiences large and small and show that any dodgy vibe from me is completely attributable to the fact that I’m a Pacific Northwesterner who likes neither sushi nor salmon—utter heresy—and not because I live with Complex PTSD and depression.

If you would like to help us create a world where workplaces are supportive of people experiencing mental health challenges by inviting a speaker to yours, you can let me know, or you can click here.

Ten Things I Learned in West Africa, 2019 Version

By Laura Zera 19 Comments

I spent January out tripping in West Africa. More specifically, over 30 days, I backpacked 3,800 km from Morocco to Senegal, using buses, minivans, mopeds, sept-place cars (seven-seater Peugeots), a horse-drawn cart, one ferry, a couple of quatre-quatre (4×4 Toyota trucks), and a brutal iron-ore train that, coincidentally, at two-and-a-half kilometers, ranks as the longest train in the world.

Aside from one five-hour stretch of vomiting (on which I blame Senegalese box wine) and a few rough transit days, it was exactly the trip I needed to help me get up and dust myself off from a couple of soul-crushing events in December. I plan to write about the adventure in some shape or form; for now, here are a few observations.

Being 50, with a newly shorn head and an androgynous travel wardrobe, will not prevent African men from propositioning you.

People maintain a beautiful commitment to family, rest time and community. But having a close-knit family doesn’t negate the stress of a lack of a reliable income and opportunities to earn money. Their governments have failed them in this regard, and hence they migrate. I met a trio of Gambian migrants—a married couple and another woman—in the immigration office at Mauritania’s northern frontier. They’d traveled 1,200 km before being caught. They later rode in my mini-bus, with a police escort, to the jail in Nouadhibou, where they would be processed and eventually deported. The wife was six months pregnant, and could only watch out the window as their steps were erased, the scenery she thought they’d left behind flying by once again. When I told the other woman that I liked her scarf, she offered to give it to me.

Morocco is the ninth-largest world producer of Mandarin oranges, and exports them regionally. Mandarins are abundant. I ate them the whole time.

Kids are kids are kids. Bright eyed. Precocious. Full of possibility and potential. And yet still annoying when they call me “toubab” and ask for money.

My T-Mobile partner cell service is considerably better on a one-lane highway in sparsely populated Western Sahara, with no towns for miles, than it is in Bellevue, Washington, two miles from T-Mobile headquarters.

China has a heavy presence in much of Africa, as it has for two decades. Its expats and companies are grudgingly tolerated in Mauritania. They build infrastructure in exchange for export contracts and access to natural resources, such as exclusive fishing zones off the Mauritanian coast. One byproduct of Chinese capital is that the Bay of Nouadhibou’s infamous ship graveyard is disappearing. It once held up to 300 corpses. Now there are about five left, the others having been cut up for scrap metal.

Sex tourism isn’t only in Thailand. Some fifty-plus-year-old French people hook up with young locals in Senegal. It even happened at my European-run auberge.

The restaurant doesn’t have to be fancy for the food to be really damn fine. Example: Chez N’Tifi in Dakhla, Western Sahara. Also, I love that Dakhla has a fast-food joint called Bivouac Express.

There will be a lot of police checkpoints, and at many, they will ask for your passport and spend 10 minutes writing down the relevant data. In Mauritania, you can get ahead of the game by creating a “fiche” with all of the needed information. Once you find the only shop for miles that makes photocopies, run about 20, then hand one over to the checkpoint officer before he even has a chance to finish his sentence. As the only foreigner in the vehicle, watch your popularity increase among the other passengers when your rad prep skills spare them the extra-long stop.

It’s disheartening to see my share value drop in everyone’s eyes as soon as I tell them I don’t have children, and they almost recoil if I include that it’s because I don’t want children. It’s disturbing and heartbreaking to hear stories of ongoing female genital mutilation and child marriage. I pray for a day when girls and women around the world have full agency and equality.

Atar to Nouakchott: A Mauritanian Minibus Odyssey

By Laura Zera 17 Comments

I was in Mauritania last week, part of my Marrakech-to-Dakar backpacking route (current location: Saint-Louis, Senegal). Public transport in Mauritania was never all that great (I’m being generous), but two journeys were particularly special. Here, I do an anatomy of one of those trips, which took me from the town of Atar, in the Adrar region, to the capital city of Nouakchott.

The distance between the two points is 438 kilometers, which is 1,314 in Africa-travel kilometers. Following is a breakdown of how I passed eight hours in transit.

Window that doesn’t open? Check. Temperature? About 88 degrees F.

Window that doesn’t close? Check. Unfortunately, it was in the back, and I was told to move and sit with the women in the row behind the driver so as to not mix with the dudes.

Tail light that gets pulled off at one of about eight police checkpoints? Check. Just shove that sucker under the seat. Maybe one day it will get put back on.

Cracked windshield? Check. Apparently they can’t get windshields in Mauritania, they have to go to Senegal. True story. I didn’t see a windshield in any vehicle that wasn’t cracked.

Shit ton of sand and dust? Check. The inside of my nose was black at the end.

Le petit-déjeuner under the driver’s seat? Check.

Sunroof? Check. Actually, it’s the sliding door. It sort of closed? Not really. It also rattled a lot.

Engine block directly under the lump to the left of my legroom? Throwing 95-degree heat? Check and check.

Health app on iPhone completely fucked up by the bumpiness of the ride? Check. I climbed just one flight of stairs that day.

Old woman with rock? Check. I offered her a hand down at the end of our journey and she refused, taking a man’s hand instead. She did not approve of the removal of my layers down to my t-shirt.

Front tire blown at 70 mph, 90 minutes into the trip? Check. The funny thing is that I took a photo of the bald tire before we left, and predicted a blow-out. I even checked the other nearby mini-buses to see if any of them had better tires, which was a nyet.

Spare tire as smooth as a baby’s butt? Check. I reiterated this to the driver several times. Thankfully, he stopped at the one town on the route and got a better used tire. Apparently they don’t have new tires in Mauritania, either.

Worth the trip out to the desert in the first place? Check. It was all to see Chinguetti, a Berber town founded in the 13th century as the center of trans-Saharan trade routes,

The wise and funny curator at the ancient library in Chinguetti. It holds some incredibly old books of math, literature, science and astrology, as Chinguetti was also a place of Islamic scholarship. Sadly, a thief broke in about three years ago and stole the oldest book in the collection, which was the Koran.

When the Trauma You Thought Was Resolved Isn’t

By Laura Zera 14 Comments

In December, I turn 50. Along with the ravages that only gravity can inflict comes an acknowledgment: even at the half-century mark, I’m not finished doing the work to emotionally integrate the trauma that happened in my life when I was a kid.

I’m not completely surprised. After my essay was published in the New York Times in June (and I promise you, this is the first and last time I’m going to use that line), in addition to the hundreds of online comments, I received about as many reader emails (I’m waving at y’all who signed up to my list after that). What I heard, over and over again, was that those who had traumatic childhoods are still working on their stuff, still figuring it out, in their 60s, and 70s, and 80s.

For those of you in your 20s, 30s and 40s, please don’t let this bum you out, although it may. I was a bit overwhelmed initially by my realization. There’s a relief in knowing, though, because then you can do something about it. In so many ways, when we’re dealing with trauma, the knowing is half the battle.

For example, I went to therapy regularly from 1985 to 2002. It wasn’t until 10 years ago, however, when I was at couples therapy with the hubster, that I heard the word “trauma” applied to my childhood experience. “That must have been traumatic for you,” the therapist said, in response to an anecdote I provided. A jolt went through my body. No truer words had been spoken, and my body recognized that.

When I think back to what I talked about in those other 17 years with five or so therapists, it was mostly about how to keeping myself functioning, because sometimes, I wasn’t. I’m not sure I ever told the stories of *exactly* what happened when I was a kid. I talked about “crazy mom” and “she yelled a lot” and, later, “she’s mentally ill,” but I never got into the details. I’m not saying that details must be shared in therapy in order to access healing and integration, but when they aren’t shared, I’m wondering if it’s because there’s a “glossing over” that’s happening. A minimization.

I believe that a lot of trauma survivors unconsciously minimize what happened to them. It may be because of dissociation, or shame, or as a coping mechanism for pain. The end result, though, is that our bodies know what happened, and that it was some serious shit, even if our minds are all like, “yeah, so, then Mom stalked me for two years, but whatever, it didn’t stop me from doing anything I wanted to do.” Our bodies will respond in myriad ways. I’ve had back pain for three years that no well-trained and highly paid professional has been able to figure out. How’s your body doing?

While annoying, my back pain is actually the lesser of my concern. I’ve also still got fight-flight-freeze responses to even teeny-tiny things, and that kind of ongoing stress-hormone release is just not good, especially when it’s been repeating for 50 YEARS. (Frig, how did that happen?) The stress response wears down the immune system, and has the potential to cause big problems. Something tells me I’m not the only trauma survivor in this catamaran.

So happy birthday to me, I’m back in therapy, and I might soon be booking a little holiday to EMDR land, because I’ve heard firsthand from friends and peers that it’s an effective therapy for PTSD and complex PTSD. And survivors of horrible childhoods, if you’ve never heard of complex PTSD before, please click this Wiki link. Again, I was late to the party in learning about what it is and how it differs from PTSD, but holy smokes, it really fits the bill.

I’m also reading Bessel van der Kolk’s groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score. I’d used a couple of chapters in it as part of my research for a piece I wrote on neurofeedback a couple of years ago, but this time I’m going cover to cover. I highly recommend this book. It’s like a best friend that totally gets you. I could almost hug it. Maybe I will tomorrow.

Have you had any a-ha moments about trauma, how to integrate it, and why for fill-in-the-blank years you’ve downplayed the trauma of your childhood experience as less than Cleaver-like but not fully Carrie-ish?

We Have “Awareness” Months Because We Need Them

By Laura Zera 6 Comments

It’s one sleep since the end of Mental Health Awareness Month and the beginning of Pride Month. As we transition between these two important markers, I’m remembering all the times I’ve heard comments from people to the effect of, “I don’t care what they have/what they are. I just don’t need to know about it.”

It’s okay, this “do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home” approach. It’s miles better than the “lynch anyone who is different” approach. But it’s a viewpoint that comes from a place of never having had to fight against exclusion or discrimination. And my quick response has become this: put yourself in our shoes. Imagine what it’s like to have to hide who you are, every day, everywhere, because you’ll be punished by some sector of society if you don’t. That’s why we talk about mental health in May and LGBTQ rights in June every year. We’re not oversharing and being show-boaty. We’re fighting for our lives. That’s not a dramatic overstatement.

A few spin-off thoughts and somewhat-related notes.

My nephew alerted me to the fact that one day, we may be going on a magic mushroom trip to cure depression, a treatment I’m more than willing to be a study participant for, in case anyone is looking for guinea pigs.

I’m coming out soon about having depression and fronting as a high-functioning adult in a very big publication that will possibly be read by every potential future employer of mine, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ll share it on June 22.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to help children who are in vulnerable situations – troubled families with dysfunctional parents. If we don’t help the kids, they become adults who, best case, develop resilience (after a ton of work), or, worst case, major health issues (and never live their best lives), or sometimes both. The Hart family murders has been a trigger for me, because it was preventable. I don’t have the answers, but I’d like to hear ideas and anecdotes from anyone who has experience in the space of working with children from troubled families, and how to help them without necessarily removing them from their family.

How ‘bout that gene testing? Is 23andMe setting itself up to be a next-wave health diagnosis and treatment tool? It’s certainly been a discovery process for me, once I uploaded the raw data from their site into a couple of third-party sites. This is where it gets parsed into readable reports with much more info than what you get in the canned 23andMe reports. And this is where I discovered I have a double mutation of the MTHFR gene, something that’s linked to — drumroll, please – anxiety and depression. My learning from that, including treatment protocols, will be part of a future blog post.

My final thought. We’re in fraught times in parts of the world. Lead with love. Even when you want to punch someone. I bought slippers to remind myself.

Your thoughts? I don’t like to have the last word.

To Kibbutzniks from Eilot to Misgav-Am, Thank You

By Laura Zera 24 Comments

This post is a message of gratitude to the thousands of kibbutzniks in the State of Israel, written by a former kibbutz volunteer.

When you began welcoming volunteers to your bucolic kibbutzim in the 1960s, you thought you’d kugeled two birds with one stone. First, you could introduce Israel to Jews from the Diaspora communities, especially given the sudden uptick in interest after the Six-Day War. You’d also found a source of cheap labor to pick your fruit, tend to your babies/cows/turkeys, prep your food in the community dining halls, and spend eight hours at a whack rescuing tiny cans of orange juice when they tipped over on the juice factory assembly line.

But after a few years, the demographic of the volunteers shifted, and along with it, the driving motivation behind them coming to your community collectives. Non-Jewish visitors weren’t interested in studying Hebrew and supporting the kibbutzim model. No. The goyim wanted to party.

This created friction. Kibbutzniks disliked when the volunteers’ living quarters turned into fraternity houses. You weren’t happy when bonfires burned too high and noise levels peaked at one a.m. (On my kibbutz, neither were the turkeys: many of them had heart attacks.) You did not enjoy having to resuscitate alcohol-poisoned youth, and cringed if your own children became entangled with volunteers. You worried that inevitably, one of those foreign jackasses would start a fire and burn down a building from cooking toast on space heaters in their rooms.

Rightly so.

On behalf of a moderate percentage of the roughly 400,000 young people who have volunteered on kibbutzim over the past half century, I’d like to offer an apology. And, perhaps, a bit of an explanation.

Using the volunteer section of my own kibbutz as a representative sample, I can tell you this: we came to Israel to seek adventure, and often, to run away from something else. Splintered families. Dead-end job prospects. Uncertainty over career paths. Boredom. Heartbreak. Adulthood.

Imagine our delight when we arrived at a kibbutz, met the other volunteers, and realized we’d just joined our own special kind of mixed-breed tribe. There was safety in our cohort. We could speak up, act out and fuck off, and in at least two dozen languages. We spent our stipends on chocolate, cigarettes and alcohol, and when the latter’s supply in the kibbutz shop ran out (or was tactically suspended), we made covert connections with Yemeni laborers in a nearby village and took our business there. We worked all day, and at night, blew off enough steam to run power-plant turbines. We erased memories, and struggled to form new ones, given our inebriated states.

There were other things going on, too. Sharing of cultures and perspectives. Learning how to navigate a new country. Trying new things (I changed my first diaper on a kibbutz). Making friendships. Growing up. It was messy at times, but it happened.

This is where the gratitude comes in, because it was you, dear kibbutzniks, who created this opportunity. You gave us (shitty single) beds, fed us delicious (high-fat) food and washed our (crusty) clothes. You riskily invited us to your family-friendly celebrations. You organized trips around the country for us, to places like Masada and the Sea of Galilee. You dispensed medicine, and sometimes, advice. You taught us how to milk cows, drive tractors, raise children and chop cucumbers into very thin slices.

We couldn’t have had all of that at home. We couldn’t have had all of that anywhere else.

The impact of the things we absorbed during our volunteer tenures was less tangible and visible than what you saw on a day-to-day basis, so I can understand your skepticism. It only just snapped into clear view for me last September in London, when I gathered with a group of eleven volunteers from my former kibbutz, Givat Haim Ihud.

Givat Haim Ihud volunteer reunion – 2017

We came together from Canada and the U.S., England and Scotland, Denmark and the Netherlands. It had been 30 years since we last woke to the persistent call of Boker Tov, the volunteer tasked with getting our drunk asses up for work battling a constant game of musical rooms.

Good news: we’ve evolved into stand-up human beings! Informed by our kibbutz experiences, we went on to figure out our families, find our vocational calling (or at least something legal that pays the bills), and feed our hearts. We’re a beautiful lot, and I dare say, we wouldn’t have turned out this great if it weren’t for having stumbled down a few dusty paths together during our time in your country.

Our reunion comprised a whirlwind of a weekend where we tried to catch up on everything and had to say le’hitra’ot too soon. We went through reams of photos and stories from the old days, laughing over the absurdity of our antics. We were so comfortable together, because, after 30 years of trying to explain our kibbutz time to others who just couldn’t get it, we were finally among people who did.

So, thank you, kibbutzniks. All of you. Thank you for tolerating us. We’re sorry for puking in the flower beds. We love what you gave to us, and we’ll never forget it.

Travel: Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin, Oh My!

By Laura Zera 8 Comments

If you go to Europe, you need to see all the attractions that a place is famous for. I don’t disagree with doing “the tourist thing.” But then there are the other things. The daily minutiae that makes a place real. In August, I tried to document some of that in Warsaw, Krakow and Berlin. I took a few pics of their famous, pretty things, too. (Note: the photo layout in this WordPress theme sucks rocks. Sorry.) A special thanks goes to writer Chris James and his better half, Bożena: they made our time in Warsaw extra special. Also, Francis and I did visit Auschwitz and Birkenau when we were in Poland. I’m still processing. It’s not something I can easily put into words or photos, but I hope to try, if only because we must never forget.

Warsaw — There’s nothing else to do but drink in the case of Brexit.

Does he know he matches his plastic bag?

We stayed with our friends Chris and Bozena but we didn’t take any photos of them. This is their hamster.

Potsdam. This is how you do an entrance to a subway.

Alexanderplatz, Berlin. The light was perfect.

The apartment lobby, when you have six flights of stairs and no elevator.

Our Berlin AirBnb host’s mother, who was a wonderful and spontaneous tour guide and became a friend.

One Person’s Mediocrity is Another’s Happy Place

By Laura Zera 10 Comments

I found a really compelling post from Danielle LaPorte in my inbox yesterday called “The Courageous Minority.” It talks about why settling for mediocrity over fulfillment is poison for your soul. I totally agree. Totally. Love love love Danielle LaPorte. I’m also LaPorte’s target audience. And as a person with a mood disorder who survived a traumatic childhood, I want to take a moment and do a few add-ons to what she says about mediocrity, and to consider the non-linear association between “safe” and “mediocre.”

Danielle’s post opens with this:

Most people will proceed as planned. They’ll stay quiet, suppress their doubts with rationality. They’ll make the choice to save money, save face, not rock the boat. Don’t want to disappoint people. There’s a lot on the line. I said I would, so I should.

Safe. The road to mediocre is always really…safe.

And in terms of fulfillment, ‘safe’ is really, really dangerous.

The vital rallying cry here is that if you feel like you’re not living your best life, then pay attention to that feeling and do something about it. Don’t play safe. Life’s too short to play safe. But, and, however!!! There are also times when you need to play safe, and so don’t beat yourself up about that, either. I say this as a person who is highly ambitious with a perfectionist drive, rooted in the message of “you’re not enough.” I have been through phases where I shat on myself for not being more courageous, even when I was as courageous as I could emotionally manage at the time. Yuck. As Tom Petty says, “don’t do me like that.”

One thing that strikes me as a large factor in courageous-move-making is TIMING. Sometimes it takes a while – three months, three years – to plan a big change. Sometimes you can only juggle one change at a time, and so other things get backburnered while you replant your feet and get steady (or steadier) again. The key is to keep what you want (to risk or change) on your radar. Don’t backburner it on your neighbor’s stove so that you lose sight of it, and start taking small steps toward it, even if you’re not ready to swing the whole deal.

Another thing is SUPPORT. Before you launch into change or risk-taking, line up your support structure, whether that be cash savings, or a back-up place to live, or engaging your posse of friends and family. Courageous people are rarely courageous all by themselves. I was reading how Mark Zuckerberg was recently awarded a Harvard degree, because as a student, he dropped out to run his new project, Facebook. It’s true that few groundbreaking things happen without big risks. It’s also easier to take big risks when you have a big support system. Obviously not everyone is going to have the resources Zuckerberg had when he opted to quit Harvard and roll the dice, but that doesn’t mean groundbreakers have to come from a place of privilege. Don’t forget about the side doors. Go around the gatekeepers. And if you don’t have obvious resources, be resourceful to find your resources. Ahhhhh. Gotcha.

Finally, whatever you decide to do, or not do, when it comes to risk-taking and change, BE TRUE TO YOU. Some people fly on the safe side, and will always do so, and if your feelings are telling you it’s all good, then it’s all good. I remember going through a DISC personality test about 22 years ago, where there are four types identified: Dominant (Active Task-Oriented), Influential (Active People-Oriented), Steady (Passive People-Oriented) and Conscientious (Passive Task-Oriented). None of those types are bad “ratings,” and people in the “conscientious” group may always be happiest in their safe zone. If that’s you, honor yourself. That’s not mediocrity! And think of this: if everyone was a “D” or an “I,” we’d be in a world of chaos! That said, if you are an “S” or “C” and your happy place starts to chafe, please don’t wait until you have a festering blister to explore what that chafing is about.

Finally, I’ll say that the one thing I don’t fully adore from Danielle’s post is the title. I don’t believe courageous people are in the minority. I think that a lot of things we do every day take immense courage and add to our fulfillment. Standing up to a bully. Trusting a stranger. Caring for an ailing child or parent. Parallel parking on a hill. Allowing someone into your heart. Big acts of courage are more obvious than small ones, but give yourself credit for both.

Danielle and I are both Canadian, so it’s only fitting that I leave you with one of Canada’s national treasures: The Tragically Hip, singing their song “Courage.”

Images via Creative Commons license, with “Courage” artwork by Wendy at the Create to Heal blog.