Jessica Bish

I can't imagine doing anything else. I cannot, I would rather be poor and broke and eating peanut butter and jelly than work in any other field. I would much rather come home to my kids, and they know that I'm out there doing something to make a difference, to make the world better for them, than me just going and getting some desk job making $100,000 a year filing papers. I've seen a lot of people that have struggled with addictions, so the genetics are there, and I've got 4 beautiful, amazing kids, and I want to teach them everything, so that if they make that choice to drink or experiment with something, they know all the risks. They knew everything as much as I could possibly teach them, and hopefully make the world just a little bit better for them.

I had a mentor at one point, and he told me about something called Gold Coin Moments. When we get out of our own way, and we don't allow the negatives of the world and life to kind of fog our vision and our mind, we get these amazing special moments that we can take in our brain, put a gold coin next to it, and remember that was an amazing moment. That was a special moment, that had I been not paying attention, or for people struggling with addiction issues, if they had been deep down in their addiction, they would have missed out on these special moments, like kids graduating from high school and getting married and having babies and big gold coin moments in our loved ones' lives and in our own lives too. It's so important to remember that as a professional in this field, I cannot solve all the problems, I'm never gonna fix the whole system, but I can make a difference one moment at a time, but I also need to take care of myself and not miss out on my gold coin moments. When he retired and moved away, he gave me a gold coin, and I keep it in my safe, and when I have special moments that I know I'm going to, or maybe I'm having a tough time or something, I pull it out, I put it in my pocket, and then I kind of have it there as something I can hold in my pocket.

We don't have enough people. There's not enough people, not enough money, not enough resources. The people that are working in this field are burning out very quickly. The salaries, a lot of these organizations are non-profits, so you're not going to be making a lot of money working in these jobs. Not everybody can go get their master's or their doctorate and be a professor or open their own clinic and things like that. Some of us just don't have those kind of educational opportunities, but we still want to make a difference, and we're able to get into the field, but it's tough. It's emotionally and mentally and physically exhausting. You have to have really good boundaries to not bring work home with you, but that's really hard, especially for people like me, that really, like, this is my heart and soul, but I have 4 kids at home. So I work really, really hard to make sure that whatever it is that happened in that day or that's on my mind, I leave it in my car and I don't bring it inside with me. I think having good supervisors, good managers, good supports at these organizations make a huge difference in the burnout rate and making sure that people stay in this field. But definitely there's not enough resources, there's not enough of us, and we don't make enough money. There's very, very few places specialized for our youth that are struggling dealing with addiction. They've really got nowhere to go, parents are exhausted, there's just not a lot of resources out there.

I just want to see people sober and happy. Everybody deserves to be sober and free of violence and be supported and have a good community around them. Everybody deserves that. Anybody can be sober. It's there for the taking, and there's tons of people to support and root you on. Same goes for anybody that's a domestic violence survivor or people struggling with chronic homelessness and stuff like that. It's a tough road to walk, but there are those of us out there in the trenches really trying to help. Advocating is always gonna be my first go-to. It's all about talking. We must open our mouths and have these hard conversations. These things need to be talked about, and unfortunately, people shy away a lot of talking about these quote-unquote dark, uncomfortable things. When I worked for Hartley House, none of my family wanted to hear about my day. No one wants to talk about domestic violence, when really it's not just talking about the violence itself or how a person ended up being an addict and things like that, but talking about how do we get them to the other side of this, how do we get them back to the light, so to speak, and give them a better place.