“Normal” is overrated. And every child deserves to see how amazing they are.
Amanda D’Ambra
Senior Director of Marketing, Brightline
On my first day of high school, the coolest guy in the grade, who sat in front of me in Spanish class, turned around and un-ironically asked, “So where’s this book you wrote?”
I was taken aback, and felt my cheeks burning. I laughed it off, but had to bite my lip to hold back the tears. How could I tell him what I really had been doing for the past ten weeks, when I had disappeared, when I hadn’t seen any of my friends?
My first day of high school was a month later than for everyone else. While they were decorating lockers and making new friends from across town, I was in treatment for an eating disorder.
“Why can’t I just be normal,” I kept saying. I remember the shame, the frustration, the ache of feeling that I was different than my classmates, than my friends. As I write this, I can still remember what that pain felt like. Vividly. I believed so strongly then, at my core, that something was wrong with me. That I’d never be “normal.”
At that point, barely 14 and entirely overwhelmed, I was already well on my way through what felt like a never-ending trip through the behavioral health care system. So many therapists’ offices. So many hospital outpatient visits. So many clinics. It’s overwhelming to think about it now, and it felt impossible back then, when my parents, my sisters, and I were going through it.
I remember it in snapshots. The mahogany-stained bookcase with intimidating psychology textbooks in the office of the first therapist I saw for obsessive-compulsive disorder. The yellow legal pad she scribbled on as I insisted, as self-assuredly as I could muster being 12 years old and indignant, that no, no, I did not want to try medication first.
I remember the panic I felt two years later when a nurse brought me into a clinic exam room, without my mom — who was equally as uncertain and worried, I just didn’t know it then — pricked me for bloodwork and started throwing around words like anorexia and warning, however well-intentioned, “you’ll end up in a hospital bed upstairs if you keep going like this.”
I remember, on the night before I then started the partial hospitalization program at 14, screaming at my parents, so angry and distraught that they were making me go to a program that I could not see that I needed. I remember sitting in the waiting room the next day, refusing to talk to them.
I remember that they seemed scared, too.
I remember the legos in a basket in the corner of another room, with another therapist, arms crossed, angry, thinking why should I talk to you? You don’t know me! I remember wondering how I was supposed to talk about what I was dealing with at 16 when there were little kids’ toys and crayon drawings on the walls.
I remember feeling, again, like I was never going to be “normal.”
But I remember, too, the day that Donna, a social worker at the partial hospitalization program, sat down next to me under a tree in the garden. I remember her asking me, “Can we talk?” I remember her listening. I remember her writing in my journal, “Everything that you think you cannot do, that you cannot overcome, you can. You can get through all of this. You will get through all of this.”
She was right.
Reflections
When I look back, I see so much good in what my parents and I went through. I see how the providers I worked with cared so much about me. But I also see that we still have so much to do to make behavioral health care feel normalized, supportive, unthreatening, and positive for kids — because they should never feel that they aren’t “normal.”
When I look back, I see how hard my parents fought on my behalf. The binders full of treatment plans, the worksheets, the many books — they’re still on my parents’ shelves today. They encapsulate the memories of every single time that my parents advocated for me and every challenge, every moment of desperation they faced in getting me the help that I so needed. And every moment of strength that they had in getting that help for me. For us.
I see the moment when I read my parents a piece I wrote in my final journalism class during my senior year of college about what we had gone through together. I remember their faces when I told them that they had helped me to be free, they had helped me to be me, by getting me help.
I see how every single therapist, doctor, and nurse that I saw was there to help me. To do their best. I see, too, all the challenges they were up against. The access problems, the limitations, the long hours and lack of support for them.
I see such an incredible opportunity for us to reinvent what behavioral health care looks like for children and families. To give them a fighting chance. To help them see a brighter future ahead.
I see, too, how hard I fought. I know that it can get better, because I’ve been there, and it is better now. And I want to fight for kids today to see that it gets better for them, too.
I joined this team because, from my very first conversations with them, I saw their compassion and resolve to band together and build care that will help every child to be their amazing selves. That will help every parent to never question again, like my parents did, “can’t anyone help us?” Because we can.
I joined this team because they remind me of people like Donna, and of my parents, who will do anything so that no kid ever feels “not normal” again, and every kid has the chance to thrive.
I am so proud to be a part of this team, and so excited for what we will soon bring to children and families. As my wonderful, brave mother still reminds me today, “normal is overrated.” So let’s go build something abnormally amazing together.
