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2022 PLV Scholarship Winner: Natalie Salvatierra on OCD, Anxiety & Striving to Make an Impact
Our second PLV Scholarship winner this year is Natalie Salvatierra, a recent graduate of Foothill High School in Tustin. My mother Patricia — in whose loving memory this scholarship program was founded — graduated from Foothill in 1970. There’s another parallel, too, connecting our paths: as individuals with lived experience of anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), both Natalie and I have a keen interest not only in mental health, but in spreading hope and awareness to those who struggle. Having just returned from the International OCD Foundation’s (IOCDF’s) annual in-person conference in Denver, I was delighted to meet Natalie for coffee one sunny afternoon in mid-July. IOCDF conferences are unique…
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2020 PLV Scholarship of Orange County Winner: Alexis Votran’s Interview
Now for Alexis’s interview questions, which range from bullying to LGBTQIA+ issues to the aesthetics of feminine beauty. You can read more about her remarkable character and thoughts on everyday activism in Part One of this two-part winner’s series. The following questions were posed to Alexis last summer. Her responses were so complex and insightful, I decided to feature them in their own separate post. In addition, Alexis is a talented photographer, and her portraits have been featured on this page. What are some of the ways high school students can take a stand against bullying at school? What advice would you give to someone who is being targeted by…
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2020 PLV Scholarship of Orange County Winner: Alexis Votran on Everyday Activism
I could not be happier or prouder to introduce Alexis Votran of Costa Mesa as this year’s recipient of the PLV Scholarship of Orange County. Her application essay embodies the spirit of this scholarship program — it was raw, honest, and painfully jarring in places, but filled in equal parts with hard-earned resilience, mature insight, and a commitment to transform her own experiences into vehicles for positive change. Alexis emerged as a deeply compassionate young woman who feels called to impact her community and the broader world for the better, always pressing onward with bold and brave steps. Since Alexis’s own words express her story more powerfully than I could,…
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BLM Interview: Deija Brantley on Early Childhood Education
Black Lives Matter is trendy right now. It’s a time for tearing down statues, renaming public spaces, and engaging in virtue signaling on social media platforms. But Deija Brantley, an early childhood educator at a predominantly Black school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania feels that to truly combat the forces of systemic racism, much more than performative anti-racism is needed to build lasting change in communities of color. Change is best built from the bottom up, beginning with the children of today who will inherit whatever world we create for them. I had the pleasure of meeting Deija in my Multicultural Counseling class for my master’s program in clinical psychology. In this…
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Reflections on Black Lives Matter in 2020
2020 is certainly shaping up to be an interesting year. And we’re only halfway through. When I got married last fall, the stuff of 2020 would have sounded like science fiction meets the Book of Exodus meets the ramblings of conspiracy theorists: video footage of UFOs was confirmed by the Pentagon last April; parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are facing a near-biblical plague of locusts; an almost 4,000-mile dust storm has migrated from the Saharan Desert to the southeastern United States; and the pandemic that has brought the world to its knees continues to rage. Not every unfortunate happening of this new decade, however, appears quite so…
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Curb the Curve: COVID-19 Safety Tips
Please note that this article has not been updated since April 6, 2020. For more up-to-date information, please consult other sources. For once the doomsdayers were right: we are in the midst of a pandemic, a defining historic moment that may create a “new normal” with its indelible social, economic, and political reverberations. Its cost is measured in human lives lost to the virus. Governments around the world are struggling to stave off a worst-case scenario in which too many people get sick at the same time, leading to a shortage of medical supplies and the unnecessary and preventable loss of life. My best friend (who, might I add, has…
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PLV Scholarship Winner: Rosiana Falzon on Mental Wellness
A couple of years ago, I attended a presentation on the health and well-being of children in my home community of Orange County, California. The event was hosted by my local chapter of Junior League, JLOCC, and organized by the Orange County Children’s Partnership (OCCP). Each year, OCCP releases a report that summarizes community progress on matters related to health, safety, and education. I was heartened to see positive 10-year trends in several key areas (as also reflected in last year’s more recent report): OC kids are healthier than they were a decade ago, with greater access to healthcare, higher rates of immunizations, fewer teen births, and lower preterm and…
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Words of Advice for Coping with Grief and Loss
To be human is to confront mortality, yet death is a profoundly unsettling prospect that few people accept with total peace. Some losses seem unfathomable — such as the death of a parent, child, or best friend — but it is beyond our control who Death takes; we can only allow ourselves the time and self-compassion to grieve as we are constantly propelled forward in time, into a future without the deceased. Bereavement is a topic that hits especially close to home for me. About a year after I graduated from university, when I was 23 years old, my mother suddenly and unexpectedly passed away from an acute health condition…
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Entering Auschwitz: Reflections on My Visit to a Nazi Concentration Camp
Please note: The following post contains detailed descriptions of torture, genocide, and other violent and heinous acts committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. It was an emotionally taxing yet rewarding piece for me to compose, and some readers may find it disturbing. I would urge visitors to continue reading at their own discretion. Please also note that most of the factual information contained here was sourced from my two Auschwitz-Birkenau tour guides, informational plaques at the camps, and the official Auschwitz-Birkenau website. I’ll admit, it may seem a bit macabre to kick off the travel section of my blog with personal impressions of my visit to Auschwitz. But for…
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The MBTI: Tips and Tricks for Typing Others
Princess Diana, Shakespeare, and Anne of Green Gables were INFPs. Jesus and Gandhi were INFJs, and so is J.K. Rowling. Barack Obama is probably an ENFJ, and Donald Trump is unmistakably an ESTP (in the company of Britney Spears and Madonna, might I add). So what do these four-letter acronyms represent, and why is everyone so eager to share them on dating sites, through social media, in the workplace, and — as I have done — on their blog’s “About Me”? These letters refer to a system of personality typing known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), one of the most widely used personality inventories popularized by laypeople and mental…
