Personal Essay: Clarisa Gailey's Early College Career

How would you feel if you were the mother to seventeen children, fourteen of which were your natural born children and three of which you were fostering? How would you feel if there were special needs, emotional problems, and heavy demands in their care? The noise, the mess, the needs, and the attention demands of them could be enough to drown out the “self” in many people today. “You could lose yourself in that,” Clarisa Gailey recounts as we sit in her living room. According to Clarisa, it certainly would have done so for her, and her life would be rewritten today had it not been for what she experienced in her early college career.
“I was a Family Studies major at the University of Arizona,” Clarisa begins, “I wanted to help people work out their problems and be a happy family” So, she went to work, both in class and out of class. Her temperament and desires made her easy to talk to and to trust by her colleagues. Shortly after Clarisa began her studies, people began asking her for help with their personal problems. Whenever they would …show more content…
Then, one day it happened. A friend she knew wanted to talk about the struggle he was experiencing. “I listened to him for over an hour”, she recalls. “He was in a lot of emotional pain and wanted advice and help through all of his problems. After listening and talking to him, I realised I couldn’t help him.” It was in that moment that she seemed to see clearly for the first time. Her efforts to help him and others had actually been hurting them ... and her. She understood the need for fully trained professionals to help with situations such as these. She understood the value of her education and her limitations as she stood at her present level. “I came to realize that the best thing I could do for my friend is to refer him to a professional counselor, and the next best thing I could do was to go to school. I needed to know when it was right to say