Being Myself: meet my new intern, Desiree.

Hello all, my name is Desiree, and I'm Dillan's new intern for the fall semester.

Dillan has asked me to write on his blog and give a brief introduction as to who I am. I met Dillan at Lesley University. Dillan came to a class I was in called Application to Holistic Healing. The class was an intro to other holistic practices and the professor organized many guest speakers whose businesses are using holistic models.

Immediately, I was drawn to Dillan's humor and the way he promoted health in a non preachy, nonjudgmental way.

When he shared with the class his recent transition in life, to come out and begin his gender transition...I began to see how similar Dillan and I really were, despite our different journeys.

A snap-shot into mine:

I was raised in a single parent home and brought up in a christian family. I considered myself, as did others, a “born again”. I married a christian guy and we were significant leaders in our church. My mother was proud of me and my two younger siblings looked up to me. I lived among the Christian teachings for 25 years.

Then things began to change.

It wasn’t one event that led me away from the theology, it was a number of life events that made me rethink who I wanted to be. Making this change was not an easy adjustment, and once I did it my life didn’t suddenly turn into “boom, now I’m happy".

Everything unraveled right before I got divorced. I lost friends, lost family support, broke my foot then, lost my job, started an unhealthy relationship, stopped eating...

drank a lot of wine, and more wine.

I fought back every tear that wanted to be cried out because I was still performing for everyone else.

I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. They shaped me into who I am today, and I think I’m pretty cool! (It’s taken a lot of introspective work to be able to say that and mean it).

I wanted to do my internship with Dillan because I could relate to his personal story. Even though our transitions in life have been so different, we have more in common than not. We both have been through some life changing events that have shaped us into the people we are today.

But, if you really think about it, who hasn’t been through a transition in life that changed us forever? 

After I graduate, I’m interested in doing the same kind of work as Dillan. I look forward to learning from him. I respect his approach and how he communicates with his audience. His message is clear, that we can make an impact on the world by simply accepting ourselves for who we are.