I like who I am. I don’t have major issues of character or personality problems. I’m guilty of no great transgressions, emotional assaults, nor profound negative behavior towards anyone in my life. Certainly nothing consciously deliberate. I think I am a pretty damn decent good person.
The enduring struggles and areas in my life that could use improvement are things I clearly recognize and don’t like about myself, nor my trajectory to date. Being introspective from adolescence, its always been tough absorbing my own levels of self generated personal critique, Still, to survive with any sense of emotional stability, and to avoid damaging depression, I’ve had to forgive myself as I move along life’s timeline. I really have no choice if I want to maintain purposeful self esteem going forward.
I try to space out these type of posts as follows below. There are more than enough of self help lectures out there for all of us, but this particular offering speaks to me right now..
If you’re struggling with anything, or many things, and find yourself slipping into guilt, lack of self worth, or repressing important feelings due to fear of judgement, or rejection from others, try reading the content that follows written by Sarah Steckler, who I randomly discovered recently.
From her pics and limited background info, Sarah seems remarkably young to have the insight she presents here. So much so, that I actually consider/ed her being a marketing prop to pull traffic and business from the target demographic she represents. Is this far fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. Nothing is beyond online dishonesty these days. Nothing. So why not this?
But, here’s the thing. what’s written here, whether by Sarah, or someone else behind her, is good stuff. Its valuable. That matters. If you need something, someone, to help you feel okay about yourself, try reading.
Post below copied from Mindful Productivity Blog
Why I no longer focus on gratitude lists or being more “positive”
Oh the controversy!
Gratitude lists are everything right now.
Feeling blue?
Write down 3 things you’re grateful for
Really upset about something?
Focus on the positive and everything you DO have
Research studies like this one have even proved that we can rewire our brains by thinking more positive thoughts.
So why on earth am I writing a blog post / rant about something that’s been scientifically PROVEN to be beneficial to us?
Like most people I’ve been through a slew of ups and downs, horrible experiences, terrible times, really low lows, and some really high highs, but I’ve noticed something about the way others treat me through all of these – and how we react to others when they aren’t being positive, grateful, and “spreading love and light” all over social media.
We seem to have this visceral reaction to negative things.
So much so that websites and even news organizations have devoted themselves to “good” and “positive” only stories.
This isn’t a bad thing especially when mainstream media and news can tend to err on the side of doomsday stories.
We all need a little reminder that the humanity side of things still exists and that not everything is going completely wrong.
The issue is that we’ve taken a full swing into a dangerous territory. There’s a sense of safety and comfort in only listening to the good, focusing on the positive, and quite frankly, avoiding the negative, and sometimes even avoiding the reality of things.
And chances are that you’ve experienced this or been a part of the problem (don’t worry, I have, too).
Post anything positive and inline with what “mainstream happiness” might look or feel like and the likes will POUR in.
Get real with something, express frustration, and people get uncomfortable.
In fact, we get so uncomfortable with other people’s “negativity” that we start shaming them in indirect ways.
We say things like:
“Look at the bright side”
“This won’t matter in 5 years so don’t worry about it now”
“You should be more positive”
“You really have nothing to complain about”
“Be grateful for what you have”
All of these comments tend to come from a good place. But for a moment let’s examine the root of where they exist.
They are ego driven. Meaning we typically want other people to feel better not because of their situation but more often because their negativity, or the ways in which they are sharing their personal experience is uncomfortable to us.
I lost my Dad when I was 23 and for the 8 or so months following his death I went on a positivity rampage. I pushed all of my pain, anger, and fear aside and decided to make it my mission to show anyone and everyone that death doesn’t have to mean sadness.
I lost 50lbs, I went out with friends non-stop, I posted endless Pinterest quotes and told everyone that everyday they have a choice to feel happy.
And for a while it worked…. kind of.
The trouble began when I realized that I was suppressing certain emotions, I was “dealing” with my grief instead of experiencing it and allowing it.
I broke out in hives anytime I was alone from the stress and grief alone and quickly took benadryl and returned to Pinterest land to make them go away.
I endured extreme stomach pains and had a hard time eating for months after his death and instead of really diving deep into the pain, I told myself to be stronger and drank bottles of Pepto.
Here’s the thing about human emotions, they exist and one isn’t any better than the other.
Also, all of them are fleeting so saying things like “happiness is a choice” is silly in a lot of ways because that choice often results in the denial of other emotions that are present.
It’s a lot like saying “holding your breath is a choice” – you can hold your breath right now, anytime really. When you’re sad when you hear something you don’t like, when you stub your toe, when someone dies. It’s always your choice to do so but you’re also cutting off your oxygen supply and you can’t do it forever.
There are some great ways to reframe things and gratitude plays an important role in creating more sustainable happiness in our lives but if it’s done in a way that excludes all of the other endless human emotions and experiences, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
It’s really hard to run while holding your breath and it’s really hard to move through grieve, adapt to change, and work through frustration if you try to sugarcoat it with striving to choose happiness over giving yourself permission to feel various emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
My husband and I move a great deal. I’ve moved over 17 times in the past 10 years. Every time we experience change, remove someone from our lives, and someone new, try something new, start a new job, move to a new part of the country, or out of the country for that matter, our mind, body, and soul needs time to adjust.
Heck even if you never move, life will present situations and circumstances that put you outside of your comfort zone.
And when those things happen and all you hear is “be more positive” or “keep your newsfeed clear or negative things” it becomes increasingly isolating and depressing to try and navigate.
I see this happen often. The people that post the good things and never share the bad. Not just on their Facebook account but in real life. We think that people will only value our existence or welcome our presence if we’re always positive, if we never complain, if we always have something good to share and bring to the conversation.
True happiness isn’t the act of choosing to be happy, it’s the art and allowance of accepting human emotions, observing them, and being okay with them being a part of our lives.
Emotions are beautiful signs and signals from our bodies and minds. They let us know when boundaries are being pushed that we didn’t know existed. They alert us to pain that still needs to be taken care of, soothed, and mended. They remind us that suffering and sadness are just as much a part of existing as joy, compassion, and love.
Which brings me to some major myths and assumptions we make all the damn time:
Myth #1: If you have something good, you can’t have something bad
Just because you have things to be grateful for doesn’t mean you can’t have things that feel off, upsetting, uncomfortable, or not aligned with what you truly want.
Myth #2: If you have something that someone else doesn’t, you should never complain
After losing my Dad I had people apologize to me when they’d complain or mention their alcoholic father, or the lack of relationship with their Dad. They’d say things like “shit I’m sorry, here I am complaining about my Dad and he’s still alive.
I would say “just because your Dad is still alive doesn’t mean you can’t experience grief from your relationship with him, and it also doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t valid.”
Myth #3: The best way to feel better is to focus on the positive
While there are solid and scientifically founded ways of creating neural pathways in your brain that habitually lean toward the positive, the only way out of things is through them.
Your broken leg won’t heal by merely wishing it to do so (although maybe a bit faster – who knows). Incorporating the positive can definitely boost your experience, but focusing on the positive and ignoring the rest takes away the experience of learning how to cope, adapt, and improve on handling difficult emotions and circumstances.
Myth #4: If you’re not happy, something is wrong with you
There’s such a big push for happiness these days. Endless books on how to be happier, how to be a certain % happier, how to be happier in different locations. And while I won’t discredit the merit within those books and that many of those things do in fact help and improve life, it can start to make you feel like there’s something wrong with you if you’re not happy.
How often do you hear yourself saying “I just feel so off, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”
Hint: Nothing is wrong with you. You’re a human being who is human being, feeling, and experiencing.
I’m guilty of this too, though. We assume that feeling upset, irritable, aggravated, or less than stellar means we’re doing something wrong. I have so much to be grateful for, how in the world could I ever feel anything but happy?!
Yet we don’t ask ourselves the same question for other emotions.
:: I’m not angry today! What is wrong with me?
:: I’m not crying right now, what did I do?!
Happiness is an emotion NOT a destination.
Striving for endless happiness will in fact, make you more unhappy. Being in denial that other emotions and human experiences exist will make you endlessly miserable.
Myth #5: If you’re not happy, you’re choosing it
I really don’t know if there’s a sentiment I hate more than “choose happiness” – it sounds so easy, so fluffy, and so naive.
I’m sure people will disagree with me.
I know there are ways to “manifest” abundance and happiness.
But if you think for one moment that if you’re not happy, it’s your choice, you’re forgetting about the fact that the world also does happen TO you.
And yes I’m pushing back on this. I’ve read endless books about how the universe is always happening “for” us. Shifting your perspective can make a huge difference and I truly believe I’ve manifested many things in my life.
However, a lot of people take this to another extreme where they think that if anything bad happens it’s their fault. Or that they “attracted” it.
Self-fulfilling prophecy is a hell of a lot different than tragedy, psychopaths, and circumstances that flat out suck. In other words, thinking you can’t do something and then not trying is a way of “attracting” a result or lack of one whereas someone being an asshole or hitting your car is a circumstance and an event.
This could be a whole other blog post. My point is that we cannot choose our emotions. They happen, what we can choose is how we react to them. So in a nutshell, you cannot choose happiness, but you can choose how you react to emotions that lead to a more fulfilling life.
It’s a matter of prolonging a state of mind when we feel good and observing, resolving, and letting go of things when they don’t serve us.
Myth #6: If it won’t matter 5 years from now, it shouldn’t matter now
I’ve started saying this more lately and then realized how shitty it can sound on the other end. There are definitely things that don’t need to be complained about. Small things, things you CAN choose to let go of that don’t involve ignoring signals from your psyche. Like some jerk cutting in front of you in line.
But then there are things that in the present moment really DO suck and that require time to process, that sometimes mean sharing that experience, and that become a lot more difficult when others tell us we shouldn’t be feeling it or expressing it.
This act by the way, of people telling others to “be more positive” or “think about how they attracted something” or my all time favorite “I’m so sorry for your loss but they are in a better place now” is called Light Washing or whitewashing negative thoughts. It’s a pretty shitty way of victim blaming especially when people are going through heavy emotions, tragic events, or need time to process.
I bring this up not because I think everyone who says these cliche statements is an A-hole (I’ve said them, too) but because we need to raise awareness that there’s a collective fear of the negative when really it’s just the human experience and it’s not all that bad.
I’ve said things before like “fear doesn’t serve us” when really it actually…DOES. So does guilt, anger, resentment, and so forth. The key is knowing HOW to observe them, how long to stay with them, and learning how to navigate them instead of letting them take over the steering wheel.
So what do I do instead of endless gratitude lists?
For the record I do still write down things I’m grateful for and I do still reframe “negative” things.
But instead of sugar coating them with positivity or ignoring the difficult things, I get real with the reality of all of them.
Here’s my process: (something I’ve been doing since I was 10 years old, seriously, although I didn’t call it a *$&% it list” back then)
1 Write a “Fuck it” list
Sometimes these lists get REALLY long. I list out things that really bother me, things I can’t seem to get un-angry about, things I wish would change, things I don’t like about my current situation, new place of residence, or how I’m being treated. I go WILD, no apologies, no worry over feeling guilty about being so “negative” – I just let it ALL out.
2 Cross off things I can immediately let go of after acknowledging them
After going through this process I feel lighter, more at ease, and after a few minutes of huffing and puffing I have a solid awareness of what I can really let go of and what really doesn’t matter. In other words, things I don’t have to give a fuck about or give any more mental energy to.
3 Highlight the things that REALLY still bug me
Some things aren’t so easy to let go of. I highlight these.
4 Make a sub list of what I can do about the things that stick
From here I take the top 3 things that are really pissing me off (that I still GAF about) and write down ways I can feel better or things I can do to take ACTION toward improving them.
This does a few things:
It puts me back into a state of empowerment
It gives me the power of choice and decisiveness which reduces overwhelm
It shows me what’s possible and takes away most feelings of defeat or helplessness
Mainstream news media is routinely attacked as an unreliable source for deeper truths, let alone, in-depth reporting.
That may be true in all too many cases, but, media provides public platforms for opinion writers.
Read enough of them, across the spectrum, and you’ll come away with valuable perspective.
Get enough of that, and truth is easier to find.
Herewith…
The language portraying second jobs as liberating or glamorous masks the reality of the insecure working lives of many Americans.
Via NYTimes, By Alissa Quart
Ms. Quart is the author of “Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.”
Ride-sharing cars have become ubiquitous in New York. Uber tries to attract drivers by promoting the job as a “side hustle.”Credit: Chad Batka for The New York Times
An attractive woman behind the wheel of a gray car says to the camera, “These days anyone can have a side hustle.” She then whisks off to the gym, for her other job as a personal trainer, beaming as she goes from one gig to another. This ad for the ride-share company Uber seeks to entice new drivers to join their ranks by using the “side hustle” come-on. The company isn’t alone.
Similarly laborious “side hustles” are celebrated in popular media and advertising, from self-help articles and other web content that exhort us to, say, work for a design studio part-time or sell CBD oil (great as a side hustle for moms, supposedly). Even pastors can use a side hustle, according to one evangelical blogger.
During tax season, you will also find filing suggestions for side hustlers. (Report all of your income! Deduct expenses!)
The truth is, working multiple gigs creates complications when you do your taxes. Compared with those with salaried jobs, who pay their taxes seamlessly through withholding, for side hustlers “the process will be a lot messier,” according to Steven Dean, the faculty director of the Graduate Tax Program at New York University Law School. You have to estimate and pay taxes on your own, he notes, and your expenses may not be reimbursed by your employer. In other words, paying quarterly tax estimates gives workers with side hustles yet another side hustle — being their own accountant, although this gig doesn’t even pay.
Nevertheless, this nouveau moonlighting continues to be exalted as cool, empowering or freeing. This mantra is false: Side hustles are not simply a new version of working as a “wage slave” so that we can do what we love in our off hours. Instead, far more often, people take on second or third side hustles because of wage stagnation or low pay at their full-time jobs.
Over the past few years, I have interviewed dozens of people who work a full-time job or close to it — teachers, professors, administrators and nurses, among others — and supplement their incomes by driving for Lyft or serving as a barista. They are not doing it for the glamour. They need these second jobs because their first jobs don’t cover astronomically rising rents, record health care costs or swelling college tuition. A full 30 percent of Americans do something else for pay in addition to their full-time jobs, according to an NPR/Marist survey last year.
Yet this sales pitch for the “side hustle” takes what we once called, more drably, another job and gives it a gloss, with a tiny shot of Superfly, disguising unstable working hours and a lack of bargaining power as liberation. You can see the twisted alchemy of what Reddit’s founder Alexis Ohanian has called “hustle porn.”
Commercial websites like Side Hustle Nation extol the joy of the new unstable labor, although its payoff actually arrives for only a few. As Nick Loper, the site’s “chief side hustler” writes, “My escape route was a side hustle business I built in my spare time — and you can do it too.” Medium has a whole Side Hustle publication. It bears the legend “You’re more than your day job.”
This language tries to make the dreary carousel of contemporary life sound more fun. “The phrase the ‘side hustle’ has gained a strange kind of prestige from downwardly mobile, college-educated tech workers,” said John Patrick Leary, the author of “Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism,” a sharp recent book on this troubling new lingo. Its glitz and energy derives from “a hip-hop genealogy,” although the side hustles name-checked in that genre are perhaps not the same as those imagined by Uber.
The “side hustle” is one of a growing roster of trendy corporatized idioms, like ordinary household appliances that are now “smart” or plain vanilla businessmen and women remade into the more exotic “entrepreneurs.” Our jobs are now “flexible,” although we are the ones contorting ourselves to work at all hours, or we are professionally “nimble” because we are trying to survive on freelance gigs.
Ultimately, like so much of this lexicon, the “side hustle” describes the overworked outsiders to privilege, who are forced into informal vocations by the absence of a legitimate economy. They are then told that suffering is valiant and also groovy. In a recent viral BuzzFeed piece describing millennials as the “burnout generation,” side hustles are listed as one of the main culprits.
There are some surprising benefits to side hustles. The 2017 tax reform introduced the qualified business income deduction, which provides side hustling workers with a rate reduction. But some people may not understand it, and this small benefit doesn’t make up for an uncertain work life.
So what can we do? For starters, anyone writing about work, whether as a journalist or as a social media exhibitionist, should stop glorifying long hours at work or juggling multiple workplace identities. Instead, we could be more open about what all these “side hustles” are really doing to our minds and bodies.
As workers, we might acknowledge that “side hustle” is an insidious term and resolve never to use it again. More broadly, we must fight other forms of this falsifying new jargon and seek out more truthful language. We could follow Raymond Williams, the cultural theorist, who once wrote that we should interrogate the language of contemporary society and “change as we find it necessary to change it, as we go on making our own language and history.” Most important, we can agitate to raise wages. If we do that, we won’t need cute euphemisms to cloak the chaotic truth of working life in today’s America.
As I am apt to do, I think about big picture life in quiet moments. Especially when I am in a pleasant environment around nature. I thought about what I wanted life to be, wished it would be, hoped it was underneath all of the overlays of existence. Its overwhelming to digest. Most people don’t do it. At least not until they feel the sand in the hourglass running out. My father was like that in his later years. He would talk to me differently than he had when I was a boy. He would mention words of wonder about the world, the power of religion in positive ways for troubled souls.
Dad wasn’t religious, but he became religious, as in a devotion to the wholeness in which he started viewing the world. I knew what he was going through, but as a teenager troubled by my own growing pains, I didn’t appreciate it. He died soon after my eighteenth birthday, and that is precisely when I started to first open my eyes to what he was seeing, how he felt. I thought about him and about that time, when I wrote the words below on a sloping green hillside under the sun. <MB
To live honestly, is to spend quiet time with ourselves doing nothing but thinking about life, and what we feel about it. Deeply, honestly,
I don’t mean some few random minutes of thumbnail introspection, whilst in the throes of passion, perhaps during a conflict or interaction about our strongest beliefs, followed by making a grand statement or two, spoken aloud, or to ourselves, as we putter around the house, doing laundry, or feeding house pets. Anybody can do that.
I mean really devoting specifically directed block of time, of thirty or more minutes, in quiet isolation, on a regular basis, alone with ourselves, free of interruption and distraction, thinking about what we really feel deep inside about who we are, what we want, need, and believe to be most important to help us feel balanced with, and reasonably adjusted to, the complexities, and challenges of life.
It is most important that when spending this time alone to think about who we are, we do so with no pretense, or illusion, on realistic expectations, circumstances beyond our control, or a denial of who we are, innately, instinctively, without apology, guilt, conflict, or hesitancy.
For better or worse, given the benefit or consequences, to face all of this without fear, is the only way to live honestly within oneself. It will help us be who we really are, and it will allow us to live honestly with others.
It is the only way to live.
There is so much good in this article. So much that can help people not be in conflict, and distant from each other. This is just one article, of so many others of this type, that are out there to help all of us overcome roadblocks to peace and understanding in our relationships. Sadly, the bigger roadblock to benefiting from this wisdom is the ego itself that keeps someone from reading it in the first place, or taking it as an instructive moment with a sense of humility about one’s own issues. An ego that leaves no door open to question itself, is an ego with no room for anyone else’s. With that, I ask anyone visiting here to please try and read this post, no matter how much you think you don’t need to. Just try.
Did you ever have a fight that you really didn’t want? It doesn’t have to happen ever again. It may take some practice, but it will work. And, by the way, it will help you with any kind of negotiation or conflict resolution in any place, almost without exception. I’ll even tell you about the few exceptions.
The cause of arguments and fights is lack of mutual, empathic understanding. When empathy is not engaged, then people revert to a self-protective mode and become judgmental. The result is bad feeling on both sides and no happy ending.
Here is how empathy so commonly gets bypassed. We all tend to want to get to the “bottom line,” the solution that will resolve the conflict. That’s exactly the wrong thing to focus on, yet. Imagine that you are feeling short-changed. You dare to say something about it: “I don’t think you are paying your fair share.” Partner is immediately on the defensive and begins to present a case for why he/she did nothing wrong. You don’t agree, but Partner isn’t even listening to the counter-argument. From then on, things escalate unless someone decides to break it off. Either way, nothing is decided.
If that that was a business negotiation. It might result in a compromise, but it wouldn’t leave either party feeling good. What is missing is an understanding of the others’ motivations, likes and dislikes. Why have each of you taken the position you have? This isn’t unfamiliar. We all want to be understood. When you really feel that you understand the other person and they understand you, then it is completely natural to be willing to give and take. In fact, the bottom line becomes easy rather than hard. A happy compromise becomes quite obvious.
So here’s the rule: You are not allowed to say a word about any possible solution until you have a thorough understanding of the other person’s feelings and feel equally understood by them. Until then, you have to keep working towards that understanding.
Of course that is a tough rule, but if you can’t achieve understanding, then you may not have a good outcome. So here’s how to get there.
Understanding feelings is quite unnatural for many of us, especially men. Humans are often not used to understanding their own feelings and would rather fix (can you see the premature bottom line coming?) a problem than understand feelings. They may even have principles against delving into feelings, so it may require some teaching or even convincing at the outset that understanding each other is really the best way to arrive at a win-win. solution. After all, winning is about feeling. It means feeling good about the outcome, and that only happens when you understand and feel understood.
How to do it is to “interview” the other person about his or her feelings, and when you have a thorough understanding, then ask if the other person would like to hear about your point of view.
How to Interview for Feelings
Rule 1: Follow your natural curiosity about why. Why is that important to you? Why is it sooo important? I wonder what makes you feel that way?
Rule 2: Recognize an incomplete answer and keep asking. “Because.” Or “I just feel that way” are not good enough. Those are off-putting non-answers. “Maybe you haven’t thought about it, but I really want to understand how important this is to you and why.”
Rule 3: Be aware of what you still don’t know. “It’s just how I am.” And you respond, “Yes, I hear that, but I’m curious about how you got that way, because it does seem to be a big deal for you.” When I really ‘get it,’ then I’m sure I’ll feel more ready to value your point of view and even make a compromise.”
Rule 4: Wait till you understand before you ask if your partner would like to understand you. They will be feeling better, so they will usually say, “Yes.”
“You know, I think it’s because I am constantly worrying about money. I worry that we’ll run out, even though I know it’s not realistic. And I worry that you aren’t as careful as I am. I always try to limit what I spend, partly to have some left and partly to set an example. I’ve been resenting your spending for a while, but didn’t dare say anything about it. I didn’t understand why you felt that was a good way to use what we’ve earned. Now I do get where you are coming from.”
This is beginning to sound like someone ready to compromise. It took a lot of work to get there, but ending the conversation short of that level of understanding would surely have left underground resentments seething and an unhappy ending.
What are the exceptions? Some people are really dedicated to not knowing their own true feelings. Narcissistic people have trouble admitting to being less than perfect. People whose feelings are too fragile may not be able to cope with full honesty. Young people who are not yet ready to grow to the next level may not be able to look at themselves honestly without judgment. They may need help in getting to the point where they are happier owning the truth than hiding from it. Everyone else will benefit right away from your having the patience to hold back and keep asking till you get to a full, empathic understanding of your partner’s feelings.
Washington state social worker Alan Naiman, photographed in 2013, left most of his $11 million estate to children’s charities.
Friends remember Washington state social worker Alan Naiman as being frugal. He wore old shoes held together with duct tape, bought his apparel at the grocery store, drove jalopies and ate at cheap restaurants. But when he died of cancer in January 2018, at age 63, the people around him learned that he had quietly saved millions for a higher cause.
Naiman left most of his $11 million estate to organizations serving abandoned, impoverished, sick and disabled children.
“He left it all to charities — mostly to kids, the section of society that couldn’t really help themselves,” his friend Shashi Karan told NPR.
Naiman had no spouse or biological children. But his elder brother, who was disabled and died in 2013, “kind of colored the way he looked at things,” his friend Susan Madsen told The Associated Press.
Before spending two decades at Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services, where he reportedly earned about $67,200 a year, Naiman was a banker.
“He made a career change into social services probably around the time he was fostering,” Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families spokeswoman Debra Johnson told NPR. A dedicated and valued employee, he shared fond memories of the children he fostered, she said.
Despite living a modest life, he amassed a great deal of wealth by saving his work wages, taking on side jobs and inheriting millions from his parents.
Before he was diagnosed with cancer, Naiman thought about taking more road trips or moving to a house with a view, Karan said. But those dreams receded after the diagnosis. Instead, he spent his time researching charities.
He would joke that he was doing “work at the foundation,” alluding to Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, Karan said.
Naiman was buoyed by the knowledge that he was leaving the organizations his money. Karan recalled to CNN that Naiman said, ” ‘My gift is going to be bigger than their annual budget. It’s going to blow them away.’
He was right.
Naiman gave a reported $2.5 million to a Washington state charity that helps newborns who were exposed to opiates, cocaine and other drugs.
“We first became aware of Alan’s generosity last fall when we received a $10,000 donation from him online,” the Pediatric Interim Care Center said. “Thinking that large amount might be a mistake, we called him to make sure he had entered the right number of zeroes! Yes, he told us, the donation was right, and there would be more to come in the future.”
Naiman then wrote a letter to staff that explained why: One frantic night in the early days of his career at the Department of Social and Health Services, he was trying to find a home for a fragile baby. The center’s founder came to his office to take the child.
The organization announced that it would use the funds to pay off the mortgage on its building.
Naiman also surprised a foster care group called Treehouse, Chief Development Officer Jessica Ross told NPR. He made a first-time donation of $5,000 in the months before he died — a lot of money to the organization. “Then, shortly after his passing, we learned he would be donating an additional $900,000. The donation is completely unexpected,” she said.
He told staff that he brought his foster children on shopping sprees at Treehouse’s free clothing store.
The money will help fund a planned expansion of a graduation support program as well as career services for fostered youth, Ross said.
Other children’s charities that made Naiman’s cut included Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center, which provides therapeutic horseback riding for people with disabilities, and WestSide Baby, which distributes new and used items to low-income families.
Naiman also gave money to his parents’ Catholic church and to Disabled American Veterans, according to Karan.
“For someone to live their life the way Alan did — and then leave a legacy like this to so many worthy organizations — is an inspiration,” Ross said. “We’re so thankful to be a part of this. What a generous, loving man.”
