If you’ve kept up with my personal blog, you’ve witnessed my journey searching for peace and calm and ownership over my own happiness and my desire to spread love everywhere.

The problem, for an overly emotional lady in love with love, is the quandary of: What can I fall in love with, right now, that’s going to fulfill this addiction in a positive way? The result of my actual searching is a list: Dozens of half-written anecdotes about fictional experiences and imaginative places. Unfinished projects. Nights spent in incurable states of insomnia. If I’ve learned one thing in the past couple of years, it’s that love comes when you least expect it. Love comes in the form of conversation, simple actions and in the feeling you get when you hear a song and feel electricity pulsing through every inch of your skin.

I know what I love the most. More than anything, besides human interaction, I love being able to sit behind a computer, in front of a notebook or hovering over a napkin saying, “hang on a second,” to a friend as I interrupt a night to write down a phrase that entered my head in a rush of creative inspiration. But what I’ve missed in all of this passion for writing is the need for experience. A writer can’t write without experiencing love in a deeper form. Deeper than my love for the art, deeper than my love for being a hopeless romantic and deeper than my love for knowledge. Experience. In all forms of the word. Experience creates love.

Love hit me hard and fast this summer. It came in a form I wasn’t expecting, a form I wasn’t looking for. And it embraced me when I landed my first job as a Mental Health Therapist.

The beautiful thing about the love I feel for my job is that I never searched for it. I never sought out a job where I would fall in love with the kids I worked with because the feeling of doing something you’ve desired since you were 13 years old, it’s pretty much automatic that you’re going to love it. I was looking for a way to change the world and help empower the youth of this world, but never did I intend to love it this much!!!

So when I got a job working with adolescents, I gave myself “the talk.” In school they teach you about the human mind and behavior, but what they fail to show you is how to separate your heart from the job. I went into this field because my greatest passion in life is loving others and I longed to empower our children and help teach them how to become their own heroes.

The talk came from an experience that I had when I was 22 years old and unable to separate my emotions from the desire that I had to love these kids.

I told myself that I could love these children but I couldn’t go home at night and allow it to affect my life. I told myself that I could get close to them, earn their trust, show them that not all adults, or just people in general are going to hurt them but I couldn’t let it cross over into my personal life and in no way could I fall in love with this job the way I was at 22 years old because I had to set boundaries. I had to separate Jacque the human from Jacque the therapist.

I was wrong.

I don’t know at what point I realized I was falling madly in love with this job. Maybe I felt it when I spent late nights with like-minded colleagues sipping on mimosas and talking, without violating any privileged information, about our young ones. Maybe it was when I started actually seeing patients and seeing patient X light up for the first time, or hearing patient Z laugh for the first time. Perhaps it was when a parent sat in my office, crying while telling me that I was making a difference.

Maybe it was the 7 year old who never really opened up to anyone until he started seeing me, who still ran and clung to me every time he came in to my office. Or his 9 year old sister, who painted hearts and flowers on my legs with magic markers and told me how much she loved talking to me.

But there’s also the 11 year old boy who tells everyone that we are best friends. The one who could tell me stories about everyone else because he thinks once we “solve his problems” he won’t be able to see me again. Maybe it was the way it felt to be genuinely interested in the tales a sixteen year old and how he has to tell me about his girlfriend and every Inderman he has ever killed in Minecraft. Even the child who made a chant about me being a hippie, living in a mini van with my fictional boyfriend Claude and just as imaginary no-named race horse…even they make sure before they leave my office that they are going to see me again.

Maybe it was the boy who told me I was his homie and reminded me countless times that I was the best adult he’s ever known. Or the kid who tells me I’m too short to really be an adult. Maybe it is the girl who hugs me every time I see her and took the time to ask me what my favorite color was, or my favorite food, or animal.

Working as a Mental Health Therapist has changed my life and redefined the word love for me.

At 11 years old or 33, love doesn’t have to be some chick flick boy-girl romance or corny Nicholas Sparks novel. I am in love with those kids, my job, these colleagues and the fact that I have the opportunity to do something so incomparably rewarding with my life.

I’ve always been the girl with the permanent smile who rarely loses her patience and is habitually voted Miss Congeniality. I may not be the one that everyone wants on their softball teams but these kids would pick me in a heartbeat. I adore them, and there are some refining moments throughout my day with them that reassure me they undoubtedly adore me, too and more importantly, I am making a difference.

I learn so much about myself every day. I’ve learned that I can love them and pour my whole heart into helping them as long as I am able to maintain a healthy balance of helping them and helping myself, too. They have helped me fall in love with my life even more than before. I went in to this field hoping to change the world, one kid at a time, but it was my life that has changed forever. I am in love with everything and everyone on a deeper level than I ever imagined.

JMS