Finding Meaning through My Fight for Mental Health
The summer after fourth grade, clinical depression hit me like a heavyweight boxer. My normally vivacious, inquisitive self was knocked out, leaving little Sarah entirely hollow. Anxiety filled the void, a possessive coach whose constant companionship provided nothing but loneliness. After a season of spending recess alone inside and emotionally crashing after school every day, I learned skills to fight my mental illness back. However, over the years, I witnessed gaps in our school system—school was built to teach me math, grammar, and classroom performance, not mindfulness, growth mindset, or self-compassion. As a resident of Utah, a state within America’s “suicide belt,” I knew I wasn’t the only one suffering from the gap.
My emotional boxing career, while initially debilitating, pushed me to empathize with others. I saw myself in those who were depressed or discouraged, and I chose to study sociology to investigate issues of unwellness holistically. During my freshman year, I heard of the Ballard Center for Social Impact during an international development class. My interest was piqued, so I enrolled in Social Innovation Projects—a hands-on internship class where I partnered with peers and Ashoka to explore methods parents can use to help children develop into empowered, confident changemakers. This course showed me there were ways I could help kids thrive without becoming a clinical psychologist, and I became deeply motivated to find a new way to help youth grow.
Through the remainder of college, I seized various opportunities to experiment with innovative positive education techniques, from prototyping a mental health first aid app for students to evaluating the effectiveness of an educational intervention that empowered impoverished Malawian farmers to keep their children healthy. These experiences gave me insights into how to use education to help people flourish, but I was continually searching for a panacea that could fix the problems I saw.
It wasn’t until an epiphanic moment in the Ballard Center’s famous Do Good Better class that I saw my role in social impact in a new light. Todd Manwaring shared an insight that struck me to the core: “Don’t fall in love with the solution, fall in love with the problem.” In this moment, I realized I had been searching for a shortcut solution instead of engaging in the more difficult, ambiguous work of understanding the problem. While a one-size-fits-all solution to youth mental illness would be convenient, reality shows the barriers that keep youth from flourishing are varied and evolving. Just as I had to learn and relearn how to fight my mental illness into submission, helping others do the same requires empathy and intellectual humility. Devoting myself to understanding these problems throughout my career, although it requires more effort, empowers me to incorporate new research into innovative solutions that help youth best. As I launch into a master’s in education to research wellbeing interventions in the classroom, I look forward to taking this critical Ballard Center lesson into the ring with me.