Guardian angels visit many of us at our most vulnerable

By Kim Palchikoff

Sunday, Sept. 18, 2016 | 2 a.m.

I’ve written a lot about the importance of friends, family and doctors for someone like me with a mental illness. I depend on these people — my advocates — to make sure I get through this thing called life.

Then there are my guardian angels. They get special mention.

Like actor John Travolta, who plays an angel on earth in the movie “Michael,” my angels are people I’ve never met, who, for no reason I can think of other than compassion and kindness, go out of their way to help a damsel in distress when I really need it.

I met one recently who helped me greatly with finding an internship for my college social work program. Who would have thought it would be so hard to find a nonprofit organization that would welcome 450 hours of free labor? Apparently it’s not that easy.

Here’s the angel backstory: As part of my program at UNR, I have to spend my senior year volunteering two full days a week. My department is supposed to set me up with interviews with three internship prospects.

There were four or five students competing for each internship spot; in the end, all but me were offered positions. I didn’t know this until the week before my classes started. By the start of the school year, I was stuck. As my department told me, no internship meant no graduation. Suddenly, I was on my own. I had to find my own internship. Fast.

So I had a big problem on my hands, because I hate surprises, last-minute anythings and stress. I like to think about things for a long time, and discuss and re-discuss life’s options with my loved ones over big cups of tea. I am the world’s slowest writer.

Overnight, my mental health went south. I couldn’t sleep. I was suddenly more stressed out than I had been in years. I worked the phones like a campaign volunteer. I called the university’s disability center. I called vocational rehabilitation, a disability organization that is paying for my schooling, and asked them to tell my department I was not on the 2018 graduation plan.

Then I called some state politicians, thinking that maybe someone needed an assistant with knowledge of social work policy. I called my mentor of 30 years who was visiting Belgium, hoping he had ideas. I called every social worker my mother, herself a social worker, knew. I called local schools, medical centers and psychiatric clinics and emailed two dozen more.

I had more than a dozen people on my emergency internship search committee, people sending me emails late into the night. I posted my desperation on Facebook. I tweeted it.

In the midst of it all, my angel appeared. He was not a friend or a friend’s friend. He had no connection to my social work department. He was not my professor or a distant relative, and certainly finding a social work internship for a distraught student was not in his job description. He had heard of my calamity through the university grapevine and sent me an email offering assistance.

His name was Marcelo, the associate dean of students charged with helping students graduate in four years (a goal reached by only 21 percent of UNR students). When he heard of my distress and sorrow, he went on the warpath, ensuring that I would be graduating come May.

He emailed me daily, sending updates of his efforts trying to contact every person on campus he knew who could be in need of 450 hours of free labor. We met in his office-turned-situation room to discuss options, his invisible angel wings flapping hard. Our joint mission was clear: I would be graduating next spring, no matter what. Nevada, a state with a growing percentage of Latinos and a high rate of mental illness, teenage pregnancy, opiate addiction and geriatric suicide — and severely short on Spanish-speaking social workers — would not be short one more. I eventually found an internship off campus on my own, but I credit Marcelo’s one-man-band cheering section for promising that he wouldn’t give up and that together we’d make it happen. I needed to hear that.

In my life, there are three kinds of people. Those I can count on, those who believe in me and everybody else. My guardian angels fall in the first two categories.

I hope you find your guardian angel when you need one. Or better still, that you can be someone’s guardian angel.

Kim Palchikoff, a Nevada Humanities grant recipient, writes about mental health. Her Facebook page is NVMindsMatter.