Friends,

In my heart of hearts, I am an existentialist New Englander first, and a developing Midwestern humanist second.  And yet, I find myself percolating over the creation and emergence of a humanistically-oriented association, a placement for our most human parts to come through, aimed specifically at my adopted region, a place I always planned to exit. A recent horoscope posed a question, “What would it take for you to stop living like you’re about to leave?” I think this is it. If I allow these truths to be coexisting - a home land and a current land, geographically or philosophically, interplaying and at tension with one another - something like wisdom starts to take shape: to be existentially located is to allow yourself to be findable.

On paper, my counseling story began at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I feel fortunate to have landed in an educational space shaped by professors and researchers heavily influenced by constructivism, existentialism, and feminist theories, despite a fairly heavy influence of the medical model and love for evidence-based practices in the region. In reality, my story began much earlier than that. In English and history classrooms in the dingy basement of my high school, at the writing center in college, in sales roles, in nonprofits. The story of me as a counselor stretches back to the sort of strange little girl who couldn’t name, and certainly couldn’t work out why, she felt this aloneness while feeling so tethered to the world. 

Throughout different points in my development and career I have sought out contexts and experiences to help me feel placed in this work, to find a sense of home; I’ve joined groups, taken trainings, flown out of state with the hope of finding myself reflected somewhere. To varying degrees, it worked, and then it didn’t. Finally it dawned on me: if I want to experience myself, my ways of being with myself and this work, reflected back to me, I have to place myself in this work.  I must be finable. 

I hope this community builds far beyond me. The purpose is place. MWHCA exists, in whatever shape it takes, to serve as a landing space for the most human aspects of yourself, in this work. I hope you find yourself here, and allow yourself findable.

With love, and hope,

Kathryn