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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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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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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…
