
Journeys Through Change- Inspiration for Women to Create a Life they Love
Journeys Through Change inspires women to step into change with ease and grace. Your host, Noelle Van, an empowerment and change management coach who spent years coaching innovators and leaders at Apple and Sony, brings a fun and engaging perspective on how to navigate change along with inspiring and provocative conversations with women who have taken a leap into the unknown to create a life of greater joy, fulfillment and success.
Whether you’re contemplating a change in your career, relationship, health, lifestyle or anything in between, nothing is off the table. If you think you’re ready for change but need that extra little nudge to make it happen, this will motivate you to let go of the excuses and say yes to possibility in all areas of your life.
Journeys Through Change- Inspiration for Women to Create a Life they Love
Meg Kissinger: The Power of Writing in Breaking the Silence of Mental Health and Addiction
Content Warning: While this episode does not contain explicit details, it has a heavy focus on mental health and mentions of suicide.
When we think about our childhood, we often remember both the joys and the silent struggles that shaped us. But what happens when generations of silence around pain, mental illness and addiction surface?
This week on Journeys Through Change, my guest Meg Kissinger, Pulitzer Prize finalist, nationally acclaimed journalist, and author, shares the courageous journey of how her family’s experience with mental illness and loss ultimately led her to write her groundbreaking memoir, While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence.
Meg Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author, will help you see and think about people with mental illness in a new light. Her best-selling memoir, “While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence,” has been praised for its incisive reporting, boundless compassion and surprising humor. It was named as an Outstanding Work of Literature winner and an editors’ choice by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, Goodreads and Independent Booksellers Association. Audible chose it as the Best of the Year.
Meg spent more than two decades traveling across the country for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to report on our nation’s failed mental health system, winning more than a dozen national honors, including two George Polk Awards and the Robert F. Kennedy National Journalism Award. She taught investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and is a trainer for the school’s Dart Center on Trauma and Journalism.
In this episode, Meg and I discuss:
- How Meg’s journalist instincts helped her both explore and process the family trauma of losing two siblings to suicide, and why she ultimately decided to turn that investigation into a memoir.
- The overwhelming challenge of unearthing family secrets and gathering records while honoring everyone’s unique perspective and place in the grieving process.
- Why giving readers “permission” to talk about mental health and family pain is so vital, and the profound stories readers have shared about how Meg’s book helped them finally break their own silence.
- The importance of acknowledging both the light and dark in family history, and how compassion deepens when we see our parents and ourselves as fully human.
Meg’s story is a testament to the resilience of family, the power of truth-telling, and the healing that happens when we let go of silence and step into the light.
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LINKS MENTIONED:
The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith
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