Not so typical, Resume of me xo

From the corporate speedway to compassionate corners



In a time and place long ago, I stepped into my career, it was 1990.

I was officially a Registered, Licensed Dietitian, launching into a bigger world of choices beyond my childhood home, juggling the lightness of hope and with heaviness of fear and doubt.

I planned this part of my professional life to be untold, but today I had to ask myself why? Why extinguish potentially the most relatable parts of the story, never to be told? Now it makes no sense to hide the dark spaces of the journey, leaving just the highlights of dates and generic milestones that are already turning to dusty memories for me. Instead, maybe sharing authentic parts of my path will provide comfort, understanding, a connection, maybe hope, even healing and change in our broken world.

That’s it…. healing, my purpose from day one. Followed by thousands of clocked hospital hours that felt like mundane labor sprinkled with moments of connection that evaporated my boredom and kept me going.
My love of nature & science go far back to memories including fascination in the way I could add water and mold soft earth into a cake, decorated with fall leaves & dark hued juniper berries or the hilarious movement of my pet hamster, sugar bear, maneuvering through the green grass when I constructed a little outdoor playpen for him. I immersed myself into the study of nutrition, its culinary and cellular application to the human body with a delicious consumption of the scientific method and satisfaction of applying in it patient care.
Staff meetings and peer debates were filled with exhaustive questioning of the science until all evidence led to the very best protocol to prevent or heal illness.

This is year 35 of my life as an RD. The first 15 years were sprinting the hospital hallways, long shifts in high heels and starched lab coats, because that was expected. Do all the heavy kitchen labor and clinical care from patient room to room just like the men in comfy shoes, but do it in pointy heels, make 20% less of a salary, be the last one locking the door at night, remember to be grateful at least you looked good in action and have a job. I swallowed those moments of reality hard like many, took a deep grounding breath, shifted in my heels and entered the something hundredth, dark cool patient room. Quietly waking the person to match a face with a name on my long list, “Hello, my name is Jean... I’m your dietitian. I’d like to ask you how you’re doing and what you’d like for dinner” my heart sank into my gut, nausea swept over me every time. The early imprinted, chaotic messages from a loving, yet raging mother flooded back in a flash. “Worthless, invisible, look at me, look at them, you’ll never be …., why bother?” I pushed the familiar demon back and touched the edge of the crosshatched, bleached white hospital blanket to pull me back to my present adult life. In a gentle voice I asked like a recording "Do mashed potatoes or pasta sound good for dinner?” My thoughts raced. “Oh god.. is this really my life?? I’m a waitress for dying people with a very scientific degree, what’s happening ?!”

But then in an instant their fragile response drew me in like a magnetic warmth. “Oh do you think the mashed potatoes could have a little cream or butter? My grandmother made them that way years ago. She’s been gone so long. It would just feel like she’s here with me a bit.” Their winces of discomfort and fear melt into a gentle smile.

I held on to every warm glimmer like this, daily. The spiritual connections between food memories and healing are powerful. Food & creative memories of my own, grounded me back to loving moments with my own mom where all was forgiven.

Those magic encounters fueled me to keep going through the long days of meetings, patient quotas, and endless charting. My true purpose, a comforter and healer, has never changed but it was muddled in the early years of professional expectations. I 'should' move up the corporate ladder, fatten the paycheck, prove one parent wrong about my potential and make the other proud, was a narrative I had to escape!
Conforming to the expectations began to feel like a thick, toxic energy that was making me sick with a fog of doubt.

I remember going to my first and only conference specifically for Registered Dietitians. I was 2 years into my career and I felt unstoppable networking, learning, and flying high through the vendor exhibits like a kid in a candy store. The pharmaceutical companies were the heavy hitters back then too, wining and dining us, the green and impressionable that would be on the front lines of patient care to prescribe their latest medical nutrition product before the competition arrived with their version of the same shining object for sale. Direct ship to your office with a smile, sweet high fructose corn syrup included!

It was a mental tug of war. I’m here to comfort and heal but the corporate world pressed in to make sure I maximized profits and turned beds with good patient outcomes. What the hell was going on?

My father was a dedicated entry level accountant that worked his way up to the rungs of achievement to some executive heaven or hell. I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be the first woman in the family to “arrive”, leave a noticeable mark of industry accomplishment. I should want that right?

He was a gentle man of integrity in his work and at home. He said there were checks and balances in the financial world to keep financial reports clean and prosecute dirty accounting. He would often show me how this was true in his work life and cautioned me for corrupt warning signs. He retired and then the financial scandals in the news hit hard, he was shocked, disgusted and humbled that he had not lost the all financial security, like so many colleagues he knew at that time.

The sharp economic shift everywhere from ethics to blind greed reminds me of that singular RD conference attendance. I recall sitting in a break out room for the drowsy after lunch talk on the nutrient value of eggs. Brought to you by…. The National Egg Council. I was intrigued. My love for unbiased research bound to scientific method was distracted by a conflicting or scrambled message about eggs! Those that sell mass quantities of eggs to make stockholders happy are going to tell the nutritionists all about eggs? Really? hum? Ok giving benefit of doubt, I listened to a woman in a white dress suit and jet black helmet of a hairdo talk for 45 minutes about their research proving that the nutritional value of all eggs are the same. An egg is an egg, they are good, feed them to your patients.

I was so uncomfortable with the message I could feel warmth in my face turning my cheeks into hot flames blistering my forehead. I battled with my internal narrative. “You don’t do this, your the quiet middle child, don’t speak up, don’t rock the boat, conform, suck it up, everyone here is smarter than you, you’ll sound like a fool.”

The white suited speaker barely finished her invitation for questions before I shot up out of my chair. Oh god, there must be 120 people in this cramped hot room dozing off from lunch, don’t do this. “Ma’am are you really presenting unbiased research that PROVES eggs of mass production, from stressed birds never exposed to sunlight, have the same cellular make up and nutritional value as a free range, pasture raised eggs??”
I couldn’t breathe, but I did it, I knew it was pure incongruence, manipulation and I finally voiced it. She quipped “Absolutely no difference, I just presented the data. Next question.”
I sat for a moment, feeling the thick energy in the room, the mutually agreeing bodies around me twisting in their chairs, nodding to my effort, smirking but not saying a word like slaves to the corporate message.
I stood up and shuffled my way out of the crowded room and vowed to never pay for or attend another conference sponsored by this organization again.
I have never regretted that choice. I would never attend a political convention so why would I attend sponsored presentations from lobbyists for corporate food and pharmaceutical companies that put profit over people? I’m a healer not a financial or political player.

Each year of hospital work I was more fueled with inspiration by every human connection that showed humility and courage in the face of suffering and death.

I cannot eat a peach to this day without thinking of a well published author, fading away from lung cancer. He asked for me to get his meal selections daily but he really wanted to tell me about his fading memories as a ghost writer. No one visited him, I was his sounding board, his spirit connection to hold his hand until the thin veil was before him with his last labored breath. One day he told me of a recent dream so real he could taste a sweet, deeply hued peach, so ripe the vibrant juice was running down his arm as he ate it. It was his reality in that moment yet he had not eaten solid foods in weeks. Uncharacteristically, he begged me to go to the store and find the ripe peach. I raced to the store returning within the hour with the ripest peach I could find. His room was dark, sheet pulled over his entire fragile body, he was gone. I left the brown paper sack under his grey hand “Enjoy your eternal peach my friend, suffer no more, with love.”

I learned when departure from this life is near, a soul craves that last sensory body pleasure of their favorite food. Never deny this parting gift.

The worldly career expectations continued to tarnish, running a daily gauntlet, quietly defending ethical care over egos and greed.
I watched caring young executives in khakis, shape shift into arrogant egos in double breasted suits. I passed them in hospital hallways and made eye contact with the cold stare of power hungry greed. They had zero connection to the suffering behind the patient room doors they swiftly passed on their way to conference room meetings, that occupied them all day long.

I freed myself of the false expectation that I should “arrive” and began to settled in to my place in the spirit world of comfort and healing. Every soul that lit up with healing energy or passed with peace on my path restored my faith and protected my soul. I arrived to my real life’s journey because of them.

This freedom gave me the courage to open my private practice 22 years ago. I’ll save that next chapter for another time, about how I became an eating disorder RD and again turned on heel from the greed and harm within the field that they now call “an industry with outcomes.”
I’ll stay true to my intention of authenticity and save that story for another day. ...or, I think I will simply focus on what holistic recovery and healing IS rather than recount all the traumatic scenarios of what is not a safe space to heal in managed healthcare.
There is a daily job hazard of getting weighed down by the chaos of “for profit” healthcare (sick care) today.
I constantly remind myself I am here to apply my extensive clinical knowledge, to never stop learning and above all …be a channel of comfort for healing. And so now my career path is light as I let go and let love be the healing.