We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maria Miranda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maria below.
Maria, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
My resilience is rooted in my experience as a youth and young adult caregiver to my late grandparents.
From the ages of 9 to 15, I helped my Grandmother and Mother care for my dementia-stricken Grandfather. I performed a wide range of responsibilities from assisting with toileting and transferring to providing emotional support and companionship. After a 6 year fight, my Grandfather passed away in his sleep on April 15th, 2003, 3 days before my 15th birthday.
Following a year and a half pause, I became a caregiver again in 2005, at 17 years old, when my Grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. For the next 7 years thereafter, my Mother and I supported my Grandmother through the peaks and valleys of her illness journey, from cancer to advanced heart disease. I performed the same responsibilities as I had done for my Grandfather, in a more extensive capacity with an additional focus in ensuring that my Grandmother’s wishes were represented in her care plan.
Developing and maintaining resilience throughout my caregiver journey and life post-caregiving was a challenge, to say the least, especially at my young age. I wholeheartedly prioritized caring for my grandparents out of love, but unfortunate struggles arose from that choice: I struggled with the pain of watching them suffer and die, I struggled with developing my own identity, I struggled in keeping up with developmental milestones and I struggled to form relationships with my peers. With the absence of support programs to address my care situation, I had nowhere to turn to for help and I spent much of my late teens and twenties suffering from depression, anxiety and an eating disorder.
Nevertheless, I never stopped finding my way out of the darkness and into a path of healing and progression. I’ve always had a hope and belief that everything that took place in my life was for a purpose: to be part of changing the way our world perceives and cares for the needs of older adults, the chronically ill and disabled and the family members who provide for their care.
And just as important, I have a responsibility to continue the legacy of resilience and progression laid out before me by my grandparents.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a New York State licensed Social Worker; I am fairly new to the field, having graduated with a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Fordham University in May of 2022.
For the past 16 months, I’ve been working out of a government funded department of an aging-focused non-for-profit organization, providing case management services for homebound older adults residing in the Southeast Bronx. My goal has been to provide support and secure services such as home care and home delivered meals so that older adult clients can remain independent within their homes and communities.
By the time this story is posted, I will have transitioned into a new role as an Outpatient Oncology Social Worker at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, providing more intensive support and services to cancer patients and their family caregivers. It is here where I look forward to gaining the experience, knowledge and supervision required to elevate to the advanced social work designation of Licensed Clinical Social Worker.
I am a committed supporter in elevating the Social Work profession – I am a member of the Latino Social Work Coalition, an organization that strives to support young Latinos in their Social Work journeys.
Outside of the Social Work profession, I am a developing advocate for Aging, Disabled and Chronically Ill individuals and their Family Caregivers, with a focus on Youth Caregivers (children ages 8-18).
At the start of this year, I’ve become a partner with the American Association of Caregiving Youth, being appointed to their National Advisory Council to assist in the development and execution of national initiatives to further develop recognition and drive support for Caregiving Youth.
Additionally, I collaborate in advocacy with the National Alliance for Caregiving to drive action on Family Caregiver policies and initiatives. In October of 2023, I had the opportunity to advocate with a team of fellow New Yorkers on Capitol Hill, meeting with legislative aides to drive action on the implementation of the National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers.
My most recent partnership is with the New York Caring Majority to drive action on the growing home care crisis in New York State and to propose solutions to be added in this year’s state budget, namely to cancel the Governor’s proposed $1 billion cuts to home care programs and to invest in the Home Care Savings & Reinvestment Act and Fair Pay For Home Care, programs that will provide aide to care recipients and their family caregivers.
What I find so special in my professional and advocacy work is that is one hundred percent informed by my personal experience as a caregiver and that I am acting on the purpose that has given me hope and inspiration to pull myself out of darkness and despair.
It is an added excitement as well to have found a supportive and spirited community that I can connect and relate to as that is something that I’ve mentioned was a struggle to find and it is an added personal bonus to have an extensive support system.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
First is empathy, which was one of the first skills that I developed as a caregiver. When I started providing care for my Grandfather and began to witness the progressive losses of the qualities and functions that made him who he was, I easily felt pain together with him, from different standpoints of course, but my response was to provide comfort because I loved him and also I thought how awful it must be to experience that and be alone…I never wanted my Grandfather to be alone. My sense of empathy deepened further along in my caregiver journey as I provided care for my Grandmother, and presently it is a foundational skill that I draw upon in my work with clients.
Second, is curiosity. I’ve always had a love of learning since early childhood. This curiosity naturally transitioned into my caregiving role – when it was first said to me that my Grandfather had dementia, I went to the public library to find books on it. I was 9 years old, it was a fruitless endeavor to understand a single word in those books, but I tried anyway, because I wanted to learn how to best help my family through this situation. Throughout my caregiver journey, I went the extra mile to ask questions to the medical team, checked in with my Grandparents consistently, and read any relevant journals and articles- this is how I developed into an informative caregiver, and to be one step ahead in anticipating possible scenarios that may play out in the caregiving situation. Curiosity continues to play an important role in developing into a well-rounded social worker and advocate.
Lastly, is a continuous sense of hope. As I mentioned previously, through the darkest of times, I continued on because I believed that I had a purpose and that my caregiver experience was not a random event, but a catalyst for what I now do today.
With any quality, skill, or area of knowledge that someone is striving to develop and improve upon early in their journeys, my advice is to first identify your unique strengths and apply them to whatever you are working on, seek resources to fill in the gaps of what your strengths miss, and throughout, have a sense of hope and positivity that things will work out.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
A long-standing challenge that I continue to face is practicing self-compassion, particularly when it comes to honoring where I am presently in my life.
It’s difficult for me to look back and realize the growth that I’ve achieved, especially in the last 7 years, in being employed, recovering from an eating disorder/improving my mental health, advancing my education and forming connections, because I believe it’s not the entirety of what I should have at this point.
On frequent occasions, I hear myself list all the things that I don’t have or have not done: having a large circle of friends, living outside of my hometown, learning how to drive and have a car, non-work related travel, finding hobbies and finding a partner to marry and have children.
And when I find myself completely overwhelmed because that’s a hefty list of tasks that each have multiple steps to their completion, I slow down and ask myself the following questions:
1.) What if some of these list points are on the horizon and I just need to stay patient and continue my path until I reach that respective destination?
2.) What if some of these list points are genuinely not for me and my anxious feelings are a product of societal messages that paint a picture of how my life should play out?
That second question strikes me most especially; as a youth caregiver, I struggled with loneliness and isolation because I could not relate and fit in with individuals of my age group. This is where I have to remind myself that the consistent drive to fit in and mold myself into society’s definition of a young adult does a disservice and is nothing more than a trauma response that I have to continue to work through in therapy.
I am on the path that I need to be – and it is my own unique path.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maria_m_lmsw/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maria-miranda-lmsw/ (handle: @maria_m_lmsw)
- Other: Organizations that I work with to learn more about Family Caregivers and Youth Caregivers:
American Association of Caregiving Youth – https://aacy.org/
National Alliance For Caregiving – https://www.caregiving.org/
