I’m Ben Lambert (he/any). I moved to Harrisonburg, VA to teach at James Madison University. I was an actor, director, and arts educator for 25 years. Recently, I decided to change careers. I’m in my first year of an M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Eastern Mennonite University. My practicum work next spring is at Arbor House, an in-patient center for crisis stabilization.

For a long time, my office hours with students, talking with them about their lives, had become my favorite part of the job. I have always felt most at home in the messy and generative world of the heart. Then, in 2023, I lost a very good friend to suicide. His father said “it’s a disease” and I suppose that’s true. He tried inpatient and outpatient, therapy and psychiatry, but the questions they asked and the things they said were so trite and disconnected from who he was as a person, eventually he just gave up. I’m not naïve. He had real problems. Judd Hirsch wasn’t going to come along and fix everything like in Ordinary People. But could he have been happier? Could he have found a better job? Could he have fallen in love? If you played out 100 versions of his life, does he really kill himself in every one? His death was not the only reason, or even the primary reason, I decided to become a counselor. Nonetheless, his memory reminds me of the importance of our work and reinforces my desire to join with people trying to heal old wounds, establish new roles and identities, and make the most of what the poet Mary Oliver has called our “one wild and precious life.” In the future, I hope to work with diverse (gender, sexual, racial) populations in clinical & community health settings, and because of my experience with friends and family, I find myself particularly drawn to concerns of anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicidality.