Pivot

I do hate that word. It has wormed its way into work-speak and we now pivot everything, from lunch plans to strategies to careers. The thing is, its actually a pretty evocative and accurate description of a thing many of us are doing right about now. Including me.

I’ve loved public health since I went on a bender reading books like The Hot Zone and The Coming Plague and thought there was nothing more exciting, nothing more noble, than fighting death and disease. I didn’t become a disease detective, as I had planned, but I have spent the last 30 years happily in the public health trenches.

At some point in the last 10 years, though, I went from fighting maternal and infant death to fighting bureaucracy. Instead of thinking about why women gave birth without a birth attendant, or why fathers didn’t find insecticide treated nets valuable, I spent my days thinking about why my spreadsheets and memos didn’t have the expected results. Bureaucracy is necessary, but inside it I lost my way.

I hope I have found it again. This winter I started retraining as an Academic Language Therapist, specializing in dyslexia remediation. I’ve finished my first classwork and am now an intern, practicing under the close oversight of a master therapist. There are a few reasons for this particular choice. I wanted to work one-on-one with people, without a bureaucracy and ocean in between. I wanted to start at the beginning, and become an utter novice again. And I wanted to work close to home, and there is nothing closer to home for me than dyslexia.

Because I will always be that teenager who fell in love with public health, my choice of path isn’t haphazard. The fate of dyslexics in the US is a terrible public policy failure. Children who cannot read at the level of their peers by third grade are more likely to drop out of school, more likely to be imprisoned, and are less likely to go to college. Third grade, and their future has already dimmed. Reading success also intersects with racism, poverty, and educational policy. Illiteracy itself is deeply harmful to health and wellbeing, but when it intersects with those other determinants it can be devastating.

My choice of intervention isn’t haphazard, either. I’ve chosen one that is evidence and theory based with rigorous oversight and insistence on fidelity. If you are interested, it is called Sounds in Syllables and it is one of the programs that meets the standards for the highest-level intervention by the Academic Language Therapy Association.

So off I go. You can find me on LinkedIn, here on this blog, and on my website, www.inventionreading.com. I’m pivoting. Not away from public health, but back toward it again.