Why choose the Feather Foundation?

Who I am is not what anyone would likely ever call “normal”. Whatever that is, aside from a setting on the washing machine, it sounds very boring. The ultimate combination of my life experiences, my educational background, the things that truly bring me the greatest joy in this world, look a lot different from a “representative sample” of individuals from any of those particular areas. Like most of us are socialized, I was taught from my earliest memories to achieve at the highest level, in academia, professionally, personally through marriage and knowing the “right people”. My overall “worth” as a human was determined by some complex algorithm that included my GPA’s from kindergarten up to the completion of either a medical or philosophical doctorate, my net worth, my pants’ size and weight, which were to result in attracting a “proper mate” that would serve to enhance my own genetic material thus creating “better versions of myself” that I would push as relentlessly as I had been…because that was surely what added up to happiness. 

Actually, that adds up to a variety of psychological and stress-related, physical issues. Arguably, even substituting “success” for “happiness” leads me personally to ask: if I am genuinely miserable, terrified of not being “perfect” anymore let alone experiencing failures which would be THE WORST POSSIBLE THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN (except, that is when I learned the most) and have spent the first part of my life striving to achieve something someone told me is the only standard of measurement by which to determine your worth as human (and thus whether or not you may or may not need to apologize to everyone after you walk out of a room on the likely chance that you consumed more than your fair share of oxygen and while you are at it:  your entire existence on the planet) and then spend the remainder of your life in terror of losing what you have achieved…because someone is always going to best you at something at some point. I would not classify that as “success”. Blind adherence to authority and society without questioning what or if any of this matters to you personally is how I would define that. 

I sure was that person, for forty-four years. And I was one miserable person during that time. I was striving for the non-existent concept of perfection, I never questioned if it was important, or what I wanted. I just did it. Until one day, I didn’t. I started asking myself those questions, and answering them honestly, and looking inside myself for the answers, because no one else could answer them for me (despite what some individuals may have and possibly still do believe, which that’s fine, I don’t know, nor do I care). It took a while, but I grasped change with both hands as if it were a trapeze, and I let myself fly. I ultimately realized that it wasn’t about a particular achievement, or destination, I was an a very different journey – learning who I actually was. Which was equally accepting that the majority of who I thought I was, or was attempting to be, was in many ways, the exact opposite of what I had first learned to believe. Based solely off of what the standards I was raised to believe were measures of “success”, I am a complete failure. I own absolutely nothing of material value, I have never been married, I have no human children. I don’t even have an MD, DVM of PhD after my name. Yet I am the healthiest, and most contended with who I am and what I have achieved than I have ever been. This foundation was not created from the formation of any specific goal aside from my own desire to understand something that I personally found very concerning in society. 

In the physical, material sense of what makes me unique: the answer is LITERALLY  nothing. However, when something is basically heated for a long time at extremely high temperatures: only the most basic, purified components remain. In my case, you get integrity, determination, a strong desire for global change, and a willingness to unashamedly, unapologetically, and unflinchingly lead by example by being the change that I want to see in the world. Again, I am not fixated on obtaining anything in terms of notoriety, or fortune, if I help one person, then that’s one person and it’s all been worth it. I am sharing my experiences and what I was able to take away from them in the hopes that someone else won’t have to do things the absolute hardest way possible. That is why I am unique. That is why I am a force in my own small way (don’t let the name fool you). As an advocate, as an ally, and as someone who enjoys solving complex problems with enough self-awareness to freely admit “I don’t know”; but I have faith in my  ability to figure out as much about that as humanly possible.