#IAMNUCISSPACE: Gerald Burris, Volunteer Turned Employee

Meet our newest employee, Gerald Burris! Gerald recently became a member of our CSS Staff after a few months of volunteering here. We are so excited to work with Gerald and share his Nuçi’s Story with you. Please enjoy! If you’re interested in sharing your Nuçi’s Story with us, please contact space@nuci.org.

Gerald’s Story:

Few things give me more joy on a day-to-day basis than music — listening to music, going to live shows, playing guitar, writing and talking about bands I love, even just looking at instruments other people are playing or that are sitting on a stage. Nothing is more deeply, viscerally important to me than mental health — suicide prevention, erasing the stigma of therapy and psychiatric medication, and just generally advancing mental health both as a general cause and a practice, especially in my own life. To be able to combine those two things into one job — to spend my days mostly doing the former while knowing that all of it goes to advance the mission of the latter — would be a dream job for me no matter who it was with or where. To be able to do it for an organization that has been so important and instrumental in my own development and recovery as Nuçi's Space is indescribable.

Nuçi's has only really known me for the last few months as a volunteer, but I've known the organization for a long time, since I first walked in back in 2007 seeking counseling services and met Linda. No one who didn't know me back then could possibly imagine how desperate I was at the time; I know they couldn't, because it hardly seems real myself, and I lived it. And no one who knew me then but hasn't seen me since would believe how well I'm doing now. No need to get into detail. It's like Pusha said: if you know, you know.

Everything about my life is just so wildly different now than it used to be.

When I think about why until recently I hadn't spent much time at the Space, having loved the organization for so long, I think it's because my recovery and turnaround was so dramatic that it's given me the luxury of not having to think about how much I really struggled. I've just sort of been living a relatively normal life to the point that happiness isn't novel anymore but just how it's supposed to be, and so I don't notice it or think about how and why that came to be. 

But I don't think it's a stretch to say that I probably wouldn't be where I am if not for Nuçi's, for Linda and Lesley and Bob and Dr. Orr and Family Counseling Services (and medication), for that seamlessness and lack of friction that made it so easy to get the care I needed. Over the past couple of months, coming back as a volunteer has sort of felt like what Bob Dylan said, "I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so I'm on my way home."

Today is my first day as an actual employee, and I sincerely hope and genuinely believe it's the last first day as a new employee that I'll ever have. I'm so happy to be here that I can't imagine ever not wanting to be.