CLEVELAND — Here's a question - Are you doing what you want to be doing in your life right now? Do you feel like you need a reset or are in the middle of one that, perhaps, you didn't choose for yourself?
3News's "The Reset" series is all about bringing you candid conversations with people brave enough to have them.
This week, 3News anchor Christi Paul sat down with Dr. Lori Stevic-Rust. She's a clinical health psychologist who admits, that in one pivotal moment, fear almost detoured her whole career.
It was 1988 and the first day of Dr. Lori Stevic-Rust's internship at Henry Ford hospital in Detroit, Michigan.
"I woke up that morning to get ready, and I could hear all these voices in my head, the voices of all my professors during my clinical experiences saying how women are supposed to be psychologists," she recalled. "It was important that I wore sensible shoes...sensible colors....I don't know if the men ever got these kind of messages, but crying as a psychologist was really frowned upon."
The late eighties was a different era in so many ways. Dr. Lori told Christi that her very first case was with a man in room three...who, she says, wasn’t a priority for some medical professionals at that time.
"I knew from reading the chart that this was somebody who had aids, and he was gay. And so of course, at the time, if somebody who was gay had aids, you could feel them writing them off on the floor.," she said. "I enter the room, and what I saw was a young man with his eyes, so crystal blue, but sunken deep inside of his head...I could feel the level of shame in that room."
On the young man's nightstand was a plain wooden picture frame, and a photo of two smiling young men on a bicycle.
"There were no get well cards, there were no balloons. There was nothing in that room. And as he caught me glance past it, he said to me, 'yes, that used to be me'."
And suddenly, Dr. Lori felt her eyes stinging. She couldn’t stop herself from doing what she wasn’t supposed to do. Cry.
"Any woman who's watching this knows the duality of our messages. We should be this and this. And I didn't know what to do. And so as I started to cry, I could see my supervisor kind of roll his eyes, and I thought, this is not a profession for me. I can't help this young man. I'm not equipped or prepared. I left the room and I started to cry in the hallway," she reflected. "All of these voices are floating in my head, and I thought I could, I have a choice to make. I can leave the profession. I can leave the floor and then make a decision about what to do with the rest of my life. Or I can go back in there and I can go back in there as Lori, not as this person that I'm expected to be."
This was her reset….her moment of clarity.
"I took a deep breath, and I went back in that room, and I pulled up a chair, and I sat next to his bed. His name was Nelson. Nobody called him Nelson. They called him room three. And for an hour, I listened to Nelson's stories about his life and about how his family had disowned him because he was gay, how there was nobody in the waiting room, how life didn't have any more meaning for him, how he wanted to die, and wanted the permission to do that.
Dr. Lori visited Nelson for the next four days, sitting with him, talking and learning about his life.
"And at the end of that time, he gave me the gift of what I carry with me today," she recalled. "He looked at me and he thanked me for being real, for showing up really as a person," she recalled. "And in that moment, I realized I'll never go back to being an imposter. I'll never go back to being inauthentic. I will be the psychologist who can wear high heels and be smart. I will be the psychologist who can laugh and be serious. I'll be the psychologist who can cry and still be taken seriously. And that changed everything for me."
But this particular "reset" doesn't mean Dr. Lori has never had to encounter those doubts again.
"I don't want to give a false sense of what happened here. You were fearful. You went in, you made this decision. My assumption is, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's not as though you were never fearful again?" Christi asked Dr. Lori.
"Oh, no, no. Fearful all the time," she confirmed. "And the way that I, with my strengths and my weaknesses and my flaws and my gifts all wrapped into one, I'm going to show up in a room with all of that. And sometimes it's not always easy, but every time I do it, I think this is what we're here for."
You can watch Christi Paul's entire conversation with Dr. Lori Stevic-Rust below.