Courtnay Veazey

My new hope is that as a counselor I will look at my clients with the eyes of an artist. I’m an avid people watcher, and while sitting in a coffee shop earlier this week, I observed an interaction that touched my heart. It's a short story, so this blog post will be short. But, the story is poignant.

I’ve been experiencing a personal and professional limbo this summer. Limbo is always that awkward time where I feel like I’m trudging along through life without really embracing it. I’ve been doing a lot of positive self-talk the past two months and through this personal discourse I’ve learned that limbo isn’t all bad.

My husband, Kyle, and I spent yesterday in Smithville, MS, which was announced today as being the third city in the United States to be hit by an EF5 tornado since the scale was revised in 2007. Kyle is a reporter for Mississippi’s The Clarion-Ledger, so he went to Smithville for an assignment. I tagged along with him because I knew his media credentials would let me into the disaster site. I wanted to go because one of the classes I took this past semester was Crisis Intervention Counseling. I theoretically learned about and discussed how to handle a variety of crisis situations, so I wanted to experience a real scenario.

One of my classes this semester is Cultural Foundations of Counseling. Our first assignment was to write our cultural autobiography. My initial reaction to the assignment was confusion because of my limited definition of culture. In my mind, culture reflected race, and I personally did not see much culture in the white race. As my definition of culture expanded to include ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, education, age, and spirituality, I realized that I am indeed a cultural being, and my cultural identity affects my interactions with and perceptions of others.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote in their song “Strawberry Fields” that “living is easy with eyes closed.” I heard this lyric while driving from Oxford, MS to Starkville, MS. My husband lives in Oxford, and I live in Starkville. There is a lot of driving between the two small Mississippi towns, which breeds wonderful moments for reflection.