Category Archives: Hope

AFSP Out of the Darkness Manhattan walk 2018

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This year, the turnout for the AFSP Out of the Darkness Manhattan walk was the largest yet. The organization even changed its location for the walk from Battery Park to Pier 16 at South Street Seaport. This marks my fifth year fundraising for suicide prevention, and five years since I lost Ed. For whatever reason, it also felt the most emotional. Maybe it’s because this year, I was asked to be a part of the honor bead ceremony where the organization publicly recognizes its top fundraisers and lets the audience know how and why we participate in this walk. Each person who participates in the bead ceremony, with the color of the beads she holds, indicates what their connection is to the walk. White indicates you lost a child. Red indicates you lost a spouse/partner. Orange indicates you lost a sibling. Purple means you lost a friend or relative. Green means you personally struggled or struggle today. Teal means you are a friend or family member of someone who struggles.

I have orange beads for Ed. Being a part of the bead ceremony is a non-speaking role, but one of the chairs speaks for you and explains, in your words, why you walk. This was my description that I wrote:

For the fifth year in a row, Yvonne walks and fundraises in honor of her big brother Ed, who she lost to suicide five years ago after he battled a decades-long struggle with clinical depression and mental illness. Since then, she has been actively sharing her brother’s story in hopes that being open and honest about this tragedy will encourage others to be more aware and empathetic to the potential struggles that others face.

I was grouped with two siblings who lost their brother to suicide this year, so this was very fresh and raw for the two of them. They are part of a big family where they have siblings in Minnesota, their home state, as well as in California, and all their other siblings are also participating in the walk in their respective cities and raising money. Their team is Team Morgan, and they even gathered other friends and family locally to join in the walk and were the top fundraising team for Manhattan this year. When the brother and sister joined me on the stage and Max, the AFSP walk co-chair, read out their story of why they walk, the sister immediately started crying. It was a trigger for me, and I immediately started tearing up and embraced her. The three of us talked during the ceremony rehearsal. It was just so obvious to me that this was all just too new to them and that they were still in deep pain. When I told them I had lost Ed five years ago, they looked at me as though I was some saint….their eyes looked incredulous. It still hurts, but time definitely does help. You never think so in the moment or in the months after you lost. I still cannot believe it’s been five years since Ed was with us.

I’m happy to see the cause get bigger, to see more supporters and more people fundraising and walking. I hope the stigma around suicide gets lesser and lesser. We’d all be better humans if we could be more in touch with our emotions, more open to hearing what is most painful and revealing. It would help another person. It would gradually help the world. It’s insane to think that when this walk began several decades ago that there were detractors who said no one would ever walk for suicide, that it was just too scary and provocative of a thought, that other causes for diseases like cancer or HIV/AIDS were bigger or more important. Here in Manhattan, we collectively raised over $300,000 for this walk this year, and that doesn’t even count all of the donations we will continue to receive through the end of the year, including a number of corporate matches that are still pending for my individual fundraiser. This gives me hope for a better world. On this day every year, I always wonder if Ed is somewhere out there, looking down on me and wanting to give me a hug.

This is one of the days of the year that I miss him so much. I wish the world could have been better to him, kinder to him. But we can’t get him back. This is all I can do now.

Vacationing with parents

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I was having an earl grey latte tonight with a friend in town for a conference, and she was telling me about her next work “conference” she needed to attend, which happens to be in Shanghai. Unless I’m listening to someone tell me that they are traveling internationally on business for a specific customer or pitch, or to train some new hires/open a new office, I generally hear “international work travel” and immediately think it’s bullshit. I have a friend who started a new job earlier this year, and immediately he was asked to travel “for work reasons” to Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. When he came back, I point blank asked him how much “real” work or training he did given that this trip was less than a month into his new role. He sheepishly admitted that it was a vacation disguised as a work trip, but no one internally wanted to admit it.

Well, all power to these people. They get to travel on their company’s dime and enjoy themselves. If they have the opportunity, why not? But the conversation immediately went a little sour (or at least, in my head, it did) when she said that her mother was also coming along, too, and that they’d be spending a week traveling in China together. I physically felt dread in my limbs, and this wasn’t even me traveling with my own parents.

To add to this, a colleague I’m friendly with just got back from a six-day trip to London with her mother, and she said that she felt like coming back to work was actually a vacation because it meant she didn’t have to listen to her mother complain about all the food and how expensive everything was, nor did she have to pose at each tourist site and take 20-plus different photos of her mom.

Chris says I just attract “mama-whipped” people in my life. “What is wrong with you — you just like spending time with people who take their mothers on vacations, don’t enjoy themselves, then come back and complain to you about it all!” he claims.

Well, I don’t really look at it that way. Maybe I just attract people who want to create the ideal “mother-daughter” relationship with their moms, but it never ends up turning how they’d like it to be? Don’t we all aspire to some better state of being?

The way that I look at taking family vacations with your parents as an adult is — in an ideal world, it’s time spent enjoying a different place in the world as adults in a family. If the child is paying for it, it’s a way of saying, “Hey, Mom! I’m doing well enough so that I can not only afford to take myself on a vacation, but I can take you on a vacation, too! Now, you can be proud of me!”

…..

Okay. I just re-read that statement, and I realize it’s almost like the child is trying to prove herself. Or potentially give bragging rights to her parents so that the parents can come back from vacation and brag to friends and relatives about it… which we all know is definitely going to happen. I guess at the end of the day, deep down, no matter what background you come from, no matter what your relationship is like with your parents, every child wants her parents to be proud and happy for her. That is what this is really about.

 

 

My supportive love

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After sending out a reminder email last night to previous donors and friends from my Gmail list who have not yet donated this year and also sending out a very public message via our Team Slack channel, my inbox has received over a dozen new donation notifications in the last 24 hours. Chris has been closely tracking the progress of my fundraising drive as he does every year, and him being him, he is very competitive and has a lot of commentary about the other people who are “competing” against me for the top fundraiser spots in this year’s Manhattan Out of the Darkness walk. He’s unhappy about the fact that every year I’ve participated, all the people who are usually ahead of me in fundraising are a part of a team, which means that they have more power in numbers in terms of raising funds. So, with that logic, there should be a differentiation between “team” rankings vs. “individual” (that’s me) fundraising rankings, and they should not be grouped together and ranked. I kind of get this rationale, but at the same time, each team member of a team has his/her own page, and therefore they are responsible for their own numbers.

A real message of annoyance from my husband today:

“Bottom line …no. 1 isn’t a real individual fundraiser, …no. 2 as defined as 2 ppl, no. 3 is suspicious, and no. 5, I have said a lot already plus works for AFSP  … and all of them are teams. You win!!!”

I love my baby even when he’s being super cute and excessively competitive. My general response to all this is that at the end of the day, we’re all just trying to raise money for an important cause that often gets overlooked, so the rankings or the teams versus individuals don’t really mean that much to me. But my heart warms when he says combative things like this because he is always the most supportive and thus always wants me to win. I have the most supportive and loving spouse. Ed would be proud and grateful.

Donation reminders

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According to the AFSP website, sometimes it takes as many as five reminders to get people to donate to your chosen cause, so it encourages those who are fundraising not to be shy about sending reminder emails and messages. I always feel like they are a bit of a nuisance; if someone wanted to donate, then they would have just donated the first time around, right? But hey, people get caught into their everyday life, so maybe one or two reminders wouldn’t be a terrible thing.

And in my own personal experience, this advice is definitely accurate. The reminders do work: with my email outreach during the first round, I received 19 donations. With my second reminder email to those who did not already donate, I received 15 donations. And with my third (and final) reminder email I sent just tonight, I received one very generous donation (that was only 20 minutes ago). Maybe the reminders aren’t so terrible or annoying after all. Maybe we all could use a little nudge here and there.

The everyday things that will never happen

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I dreamt last night that Ed came to visit at this apartment. We strolled through Central Park and the streets of the Upper West Side together. He explored the apartment building, asked me random Ed-like questions he’d normally ask if he were around, and marveled at all our new appliances and how modern our apartment looks. It was like a real life event, except it wasn’t real life at all. It was a potentially normal, expected event.

There wasn’t anything unusual or momentous about this dream. Nothing dramatic happened, nothing out of the ordinary or tear-jerking was observed. The most depressing thing about this is that it will never happen in real life. I thought about this as I woke up this morning. Those everyday events that you get to share with people you love — introducing them to your home, your neighborhood, the city you live in — those experiences will never be shared between Ed and me because he just isn’t here anymore. That’s what made this dream so sad.

Dumpling Galaxy

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My work friend has been in town visiting family from Amsterdam, so I agreed to meet her for dinner at Dumpling Galaxy in Flushing tonight. I’d had this on my Yelp bookmarks list forever and had been dying to come for a long time, but I was never able to make it work until today. Dumpling Galaxy is pretty much any dumpling lover’s dream: the biggest variety of dumplings you could possibly think of, all on a single menu. And if for whatever reason you don’t want dumplings, they have a pretty extensive Chinese menu that is supposed to be delicious outside of the dumpling section. This place certainly met expectations; my favorites were the lamb and green squash dumplings and the cod and fish roe dumplings.

I make a lot of judgments about people when it comes to food. One of the potentially worst ones is that there’s a high correlation between extremely picky eaters and people who are racist. Some of the other ones are… if you’re not willing to try new foods, you’re probably just a really boring human being. If you hate all Asian food, you must be a horrible (and racist) person. If you repel any and all spice… well, I just don’t want to hang out with you. If you don’t eat sweets, you must not be a very sweet person. But another one I want to add to the list is… if you don’t like dumplings, you probably cannot be trusted. Who doesn’t like some incredibly flavorful filling stuffed into a little dough, then boiled, steamed, or fried?

The New York Times food critic who came to Dumpling Galaxy said that a single bite of a dumpling from this place had more flavor than a large percentage of full meals in his entire life. That — that is how life changing a single dumpling can be.

Aging and painful body

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Chris left for San Francisco for Dreamforce rehearsals early this morning, so I have the weekend to myself. I began what was supposed to be a productive Saturday by hitting the gym. While doing tabata exercises with my Aaptiv app, I was doing hinged rows when suddenly I stood up and immediately felt a twinge in my lower back. A sharp pain ensued any time I moved.

You’ve got to be kidding me, I was thinking in my head. My hamstring literally just got to 100 percent last week, and I started running again after nearly two months… and now my lower back is in pain?! 

I laid on the mat for a few minutes, contemplating my aging body and why all these injuries are happening to me one after another. How bad is this going to be, anyway?

Well, it wasn’t good. I went downtown to meet a friend for lunch, and every time I stood up or sat down, I experienced what felt like a stabbing pain in my lower back. I had to buy groceries, but there was no way I was going to carry them back on my own. So my friend graciously carried my shopping basket around and carried all my groceries home for me. It’s a good thing he lives so close to me.

All the signs of age are just staring me in the face. When I was lying on the mat in the gym this morning, I wondered if Ed ever experienced issues like this while at karate and just never told me. He always hid things from me because he didn’t want me to worry.

And to think that next year, I will turn 33, the same age Ed was when he died. How the hell can we possibly be the same age? This is just so wrong.

 

 

the generosity of colleagues

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This is the fifth year that I’m fundraising for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness walks. Each year I do this again and again, I start it feeling cynical. Does anyone really care what I’m doing, or what my story is and how it’s evolved? Is it just a one stop donation, and then people forget about it in their everyday lives? What is actionable from this other than giving money to someone’s fundraising drive whose story you found touching?

I struggled with writing a story this year. I would start, stop, edit, delete, start again, stop, get annoyed, then delete everything. I wondered who would donate again. I wondered of the colleagues I’ve met in the last year, or gotten closer to, if they would donate. I wondered what they were thinking when they read my message.

I actually received quite a number of very touching, heartfelt messages from colleagues this year in the last couple days about my story and my fundraising drive. I’ve also received a lot of extremely generous contributions. I’ve been responding to each of them one by one, but the one I was definitely not expecting was from our CEO. He shared with me that he has compartmentalized his own family experience with suicide from over 45 years ago, and still doesn’t talk about it, but that he admired my ability to be so open about it to help others. He said he’s only shared this with four other people in his entire life. He also donated $1,000 to my fundraising drive today to support me. I was speechless. No one has ever donated that much to my fundraising drive, ever. And he barely even knows me.

Statistics show that people are more likely to donate to a fundraiser if they know the person who is leading the fundraiser. They’re more likely to donate more if they are closer to the person. This level of generosity was not part of these statistics.

I ended today feeling hopeful. People really do care more than I give them credit for. My cynicism is slowly shaking.

Helping nonprofit customers

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I work at a company that wants to democratize decision making via “digital experience optimization.” In other words, we’ve created a technology that allows businesses to do online testing and use data to drive their decision making. As we’ve grown and seek to become viewed as a more enterprise-focused business, what unfortunately also happens is that customers who are smaller and, well, pay us less money, tend to fall to the wayside in terms of love and attention they get. Sadly, this has affected customers in our nonprofit sector, who by definition are time and resource-strapped, but they really need someone to guide them in the right direction.

So I got tapped by our nonprofit/charitable giving lead to see if I could help some of these customers by reaching out to see what stage of testing maturity they are at, and what assistance we could provide them to be successful. The hardest thing with working with these customers is figuring out if they even want to be helped; as with any person, people can only be helped if they want to be helped. We cannot force things upon them. Now, what does that sound like?

It’s really annoying when customer frustrations remind you of the frustrations you have in your personal life with your own family.

Racism justified then, racism justified now.

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Today, we started our holiday weekend in North Carolina by having a Southern biscuit sandwich breakfast and driving out to Greensboro, North Carolina, to visit the International Civil Rights Museum. Although the Little Rock Nine at Little Rock Central High School tends to be more well known and covered in American history courses around the country, the “A and T Four,” also known as the Greensboro Four, the four black activist students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical University, is also a notable group: In February 1960, they protested segregation in the form of sitting at the “Whites Only” lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s, which ended up sparking a movement across the entire south that emulated this sit-in against “separate but equal” in the thousands. The museum provides a fully guided tour, and it is built where the old Woolworth’s with the lunch counter actually was. They preserved the lunch counter/diner just as it was back in 1960 when these sit-ins occurred. It reminded me of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis that was preserved where MLK was assassinated by building it into the Lorraine Motel where he was shot and killed on his balcony in 1968.

Our guide, Dillon, did an incredible job recounting endless facts of the atrocities that happened during this period in our history and the Civil Rights Movement in general, and you could tell by the way he talked that he truly cared and was emotionally invested in social progress for all. He became the most choked up recounting the lynching of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy who came from Chicago (non-segregated) down to Mississippi (obviously segregated) in 1955 to visit relatives and was kidnapped, mutilated, shot and killed, and then dumped with weights attached to him into a local river. All of this happened to him simply because he had a debated interaction with a white woman, who ended up accusing him of touching and flirting with her. This led to her husband and his half-brother kidnapping him and brutally murdering him. They said that Emmett didn’t understand the social and racial ‘caste’ system of the South.

Emmett’s name is memorable because he came up many times during history courses, and his sad, gruesome story is at every major civil rights museum and monument across this country, including the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, the Brown vs. Board of Education historic site, the Rosa Parks Museum, among others, that we’ve visited. His mother, so enraged and distraught at the injustices her young son faced, chose to have an open-casket ceremony so that the world could see with their own eyes what the white racist South had done to her poor son. This is not something anyone would wish on anyone, even those they hated.

Not only did those two white men get away with the lynching, they publicly said while being recorded that they did not think they did anything wrong. They were fully acquitted. Nothing ever happened to the white female accuser, even though she very recently admitted (because she’s still alive) that she actually lied during her testimony and what she said Emmett did never actually happened. Even though I’d heard and read about the story before, Dillon gave a far more detailed account of what happened, and it disgusted me when it suddenly hit me: I realized how similar this was to the false accusations that white people have today against black people that cause the police to accost, arrest, and even shoot and kill black people. These stories have become more and more reoccurring in the news in the last several years. A black owner of a popular hipster lemonade shop in San Francisco almost got arrested while opening the doors of his own business one morning because a white person called the police, saying that it looked like some black man was breaking and entering into the shop. A white man prank called 911 to lie and say that a black man was pointing a rifle at people while walking through Walmart in Ohio; the police showed up and shot innocent John Crawford, simply because he was a black man. Crawford is now dead, and his family is trying to get justice and is failing to get the peace that they deserve. And there’s also the case that seemed the most senseless to me in Philadelphia when a white female worker calls 911 because of two black men in the store who haven’t bought anything. These two men got arrested for “trespassing,” and Starbucks in the end had to mutually agree to let that white female worker go, and publicly apologize to the world for how stupid and short-sighted they had been in this occurrence.

All of these stories are the modern day 2018 versions of the Emmett Till lynching. When I hear these stories, I think it’s just the more “acceptable” and “nuanced” way to be racist and discriminate now. No one wants to acknowledge it, especially our Republican and white supremacist “friends.” But funnily enough, when I did a Google search for “Emmett Till” after we left Greensboro, this July 2018 Huffington Post article entitled, “The Word of a White Woman Can Still Get Black People Killed,” is one of the first results that shows up, which hits the nail on the head of all the feelings I had leaving the museum.

These echos, these parallels, these evolved iterations of discrimination, these are just one of a myriad of reasons that history is so important. You’re supposed to understand the past to learn what’s worked, what hasn’t, and not to repeat the horrors of the people before us. If you want to ignore the past, you will just be more narrow-minded for it in disregarding the atrocities of the past, and instead, you will continue these atrocities into the future and blindly believe we live in a new, different world. The world is certainly getting better, but that’s because of the people who are actively working to create progress and social justice for all, not the ones who are just sitting around denying anything is wrong to begin with.

But you know what also made me sad visiting a museum like this? In the same way with really well written, balanced pieces of everything our country debates about, from gun control to healthcare to gender and race-based discrimination to immigration, the people who would truly benefit from learning all of this will likely never come. Ever. And that is really depressing to me.