“I don’t live a life where breathing comes easy.” The summer before my last year of high school, I sat down to write my personal statement for my college applications. The prompt read, “Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure.” I didn’t mean for my response to be scary, like I knew my parents and teachers would think it was, I meant to be honest. 

I was admitted to college at 16, graduated from high school at the top of my class at 17 and graduated from UNC-CH on the Dean’s List at 19. I ran my first political campaign before I could vote, celebrated my 20th birthday as a full-time member of the UNC School of Law staff, and have marked major life accomplishments before I could even legally drink. But I have done it all breathlessly, with three clinical diagnoses weighing on my chest—general anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Finally, after years of wanting help, I was able to receive therapy and prescribed medication and cleared the fog that my OCD and anxiety cast over my life. Once I finally began to feel “better”, though, it was not lost on me that so many of my peers were in the same fight. Whether because they didn’t have the right resources or support systems, or because they didn’t know how to ask for help from the ones they did, so many of their journeys did not end in healing, but in celebrations of life instead. I was terrified, frustrated, and inspired. What kind of peer, or person, would I be if I let healing stop at myself?

Called to an old passion and a new career, I applied to graduate school to become a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor at Wake Forest University and moved to Wilmington, NC. Although I now lovingly call Wrightsville my new hometown, I was raised beneath the hot summer sun in Southwest Florida. Between spending mornings marking turtle nests down the beach and evenings on the end of the pier with a line in the water, every lesson worth learning, I learned there. The water has always been an essential part of my identity and has been absolutely critical for my own healing, as it has been for many, making it the perfect backdrop for this next step in my career. Now, a Behavioral Health Technician at a pediatric behavioral health hospital and a future therapist, being able to take part in the healing of so many patients has been the honor of a lifetime. And yet, something was missing.

Care should not begin and end at crisis. As a direct support professional in the community, I know there is more to healing than the hospital. There are resources needed to connect clinical care and continued healing. Kinder Sea is the gulf in between.

Jade Neptune

Jade Neptune is a local Behavioral Health and Psychiatric Technician. Jade graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2022 and looks forward to beginning her graduate program in Clinical Mental Health Counseling in May 2024 to become a licensed therapist.

What do we do?