We were lucky to catch up with Drea Garcia recently and have shared our conversation below.
Drea, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I was the little girl who was always told I was too much, too emotional, too caring. This, I realized later in life was a gift I had to learn to navigate – because I found that I was often giving the love and compassion that I too was desperate to receive. My upbringing has its good memories, but it was a myriad of abuses and neglect that led to my first attempt to end my life when I was 13. I needed what felt like the internal death of my self, to end. Several more attempts would follow, and I often found myself curled up on a floor begging God to take me away from this world. Each new day though, here I was, still breathing despite my pleas. Because I truly didn’t believe I’d be alive, I hadn’t made any plans or set any real goals for myself. When my 23rd birthday came along I was incredibly emotional. And it was in this state that I came to recognize a profound desire to help other people find their way through life’s hardships in some capacity. It wasn’t until the trauma I thought I’d simply moved on from caught up with me that I felt the prompt to figure it all out, however.
A series of events unfolded that triggered a painful season of physical and cognitive disability, and after more than a year of tests and evaluations, I was diagnosed with trauma induced functional neurological disorder. Surprisingly I began to find genuine healing through a period of an inability to walk. I was able to tap into the creativity I’d always loved but had left behind years before with all of life’s ‘busy’. It was then that started a small business called Love & Mending – selling my hand embroidered ‘hug heart’ Christmas ornaments and various designs for embroidering, sharing my landscape photography, and polymer clay jewelry.
A short time later a friend had developed a spiritual visualization method that I was able to help her test, and was blown away by the journey I’d begun. Journaling came with doodles and the doodles became sketches of a place for healing and creativity. It was in those early stages of my own healing journey that I realized that God was revealing purpose through my pain and that my testimony had been birthed out of the many tests and trials I’d overcome. These last few years have come with a renewed perspective and an ability to find joy in the journey, even through grief and hardship. Although I never found the place of safety and respite I longed for when I needed it; I am so grateful to be on a trajectory in which I get to help provide that space for others in The Mending Place.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I live in a city that is rich in the arts, community care and entrepreneurship. We also have many within the mental health field that are devoted to tackling the mental health crisis that our area (and so many others) has been experiencing so I’m very excited to be finishing up my degree in Social and Behavioral Science for the purpose of social innovation.
In completing an entrepreneurial program last year with the guidance of established business owners and mentors at SpringGR, I was given tools and direction that I needed to get my footing in opening The Mending Place – a community center for mental wellness. While I’ve been working on finding a suitable and accessible space to open the doors, the intention weaves creativity and mental health together through the collaboration of local artists, small businesses and mental health professionals. We get to help our community thrive by cultivating authentic engagement, and provide an array of creative outlets and services in a peer supported atmosphere. I absolutely love that we get to help ease the overwhelm of finding a good fit in therapy with a mental health resource database based on peoples individual needs as well.
We’re simply creating space to be, because we all have lived experiences and the need for a sense of belonging that deserves to be honored and valued.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think recognizing that the characteristics and traits I carried as a child were essentially a blueprint for my future endeavors is encouraging. Understanding now that my childlike spirit still exists and that I get to hone her gifts to serve others is incredibly rewarding. My love for people and desire to meet them right where they’re at with reckless abandon is something I really value.
That said, peeling back the insidious layers of our history to gain a better understanding in how generational trauma has affected the state of our mental health in the present has also been deeply impactful and motivating. In a broken system, it’s vitally important to me that space is held for voices to be heard, particularly for marginalized groups.
While strides have been made in recent years, I recognize that mental health is still very stigmatized in many ways – and it subsequently hinders our ability to heal and thrive when we feel like we have to mask our pain. I’m neurodivergent so I’ve always felt like I didn’t really fit anywhere. In fact, one of the things I constantly wrote about in my journals as a teenager was the belief that I wasn’t supposed to feel like I was doing life alone. We’re not meant to do life alone – and it’s ok not to be okay and to say it out loud. One of the greatest rewards that I have received in my healing journey is experiencing resilience as a gift rather than a constant means of survival, and in getting to do life with others who embrace that we all have a story.
My advice would be to do the hard thing. Oftentimes when we’re setting out on (or considering) a new adventure, we can get in our own way and inadvertently block opportunities to accomplish our hopes and goals. As children were typically uninhibited to the ‘what-if’s’, – we just go for it. We fall, make mistakes, pivot and learn along the way. I encourage everyone to tap into their inner child and take the leap! Stepping out of your comfort zone could be the recipe for your eventual success.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I am absolutely looking to collaborate with creatives, artists and mental health professionals! The larger our resource database, the better we’re able to serve our communities. With The Mending Place being in it’s beginning stages were understandably going to be somewhat limited to our immediate area in Grand Rapids, Michigan; but with an aim to host workshops, speaker events, classes and raise funding to get out doors open, our arms are open wide to everyone willing to be a part of the journey.
The best way to connect is to email me: [email protected]
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mendingplacegr.com/welcome
- Instagram: @themendingplacegr or @loveandmending
- Facebook: The Mending Place GR or Love & Mending
- Linkedin: Drea Garcia
- Other: *Note – Love and Mending is the handmade goods business and where I began connecting, while the Mending Place will be the physical space to create and do life with one another.
