THE PIPELINE
2022-2024

The story of seven years of professional and personal growth told through a pamphlet.

Before Me

2022 - These Colors Are All Wrong

Is this supposed to be like this?

As I was preparing the ice cream graphic for this issue as a surprise for my boss Sherry Jenkins Tucker, who loved ice cream almost as much as she loved cake, I had the B-52's "Summer of Love" track going through my head. I was actually 0n the phone with her as I did it--she was giving final comments on this edition before it went to print. We spent over six hours on the phone that day, including most of my drive from Atlanta to Augusta, where I was making a site visit for her first thing Monday morning. I never imagined I would receive a text message at 6am the next day saying simply "Call Randy [her husband]. Sherry's dead."

It was meant to be a celebratory edition of The Pipeline, which were rare enough, to be sure. But to know that most everyone receiving it would know or at least suspect the truth--that orange popsicles and lemonade were now the furthest things from our thoughts--made this issue difficult for me to look at for some time. Sherry wasn't just my boss she was my dear friend.

I can look at it now and remember that Sunday with her and be grateful for the time (and snacks) we shared over the years. The colors, and their tireless cheerfulness are not, looking back, all that cheerful. They are like the colors 0f a memory of ice cream, of joy, but not the things themselves. If colors can be said to be nostalgic, these are. At least for me. And likely will be for some time to come.

2022 - The Show Must Go On

The first issue of The Pipeline after Sherry's death had to accomplish a lot—not least of which was tactfully letting people, most of them self-identifying as people living with mental health concerns—know she was dead. She was a superstar in Georgia's mental health arena, and internationally in peer support, but outside those worlds she was no more known than my mail carrier. Her death was not news outside those circles.

But within that world there were people who had known her for 30 odd years who would be learning of her death through this newsletter (many of GMHCN's members are averse to social media--over half don't use Facebook at all).

The leadership team and I tossed around lots of ideas, but in the end, since I had been named Interim Executive Director in the days after Sherry's death, and the Board of Directors was in no great hurry to hire her replacement, we realized that unless I appointed someone else (there was no one else), I would be both publisher and editor of The Pipeline.

Balancing the need to mourn with the need to carry on the business of the Network was nowhere so laden with potential missteps as here, since I would not be there to explain or defend myself when this volume appeared in mailboxes across the state and the country. Whatever the reaction was, it would simply be.

In addition to her obituary, I included a final "Note from Sherry" in which I acknowledged ghost-writing the column for her since it began with my first issue. The front page, though—that was future-focused, solution-centered, and a bold declaration of a new era.

There were many who were shocked not to see Sherry's picture on the cover, but instead this woman they didn't know, smiling, looking happy—of all things.

When they read the article, they learned that she was someone who knew Sherry in life, and who had been negotiating with Sherry to come on board as Chief Financial Officer prior to Sherry's death.

We hired her, and put her on the cover of The Pipeline (with a rousing endorsement from the sitting Commissioner) to help reassure our distant and less-connected members that at least for the short term, things would carry on as Sherry would have wanted at the Network.

It was a lie, of course. It was absolute chaos during those first 90 days.

The color-washed version at the bottom could not be produced by our printer at all, so I backed out the color and instead used butterflies, a motif from Sherry's memorial at The Carter Center. "I am the evidence" is a phrase in common usage in the mental health recovery movement. It is meant to counter the evidence-based data so much of life is determined by for people with mental health (or any health) challenges. It can also suggest that each of us is (or can be) the subject matter expert on our own lives.

But that did not make it into The Pipeline, which had served many purposes over the years, but now served a new one: Stabilizer. With a newly-invigorated Board of Directors eager to stretch its wings, a staff largely dissatisfied with stagnant wages and few opportunities for advancement or promotion, an entirely new finance office staff (at least five hours each week was dedicated to locating and/or changing passwords), and an Interim Executive Director (me) who had very limited experience managing people and none leading an organization of any size, many people (including me and my leadership team, privately) began to question if GMHCN would survive at all.

Hardly any of those people believed I should dedicate any time to The Pipeline, which many saw as a vanity project,

a luxury, or a labor of love. I believed differently. I believed and continue to believe that GMHCN exists because of The Pipeline and will die—at least as those of us who worked avec Sherry knew it—when The Pipeline dies.

That is not to say that it shouldn't die. Many fine and noble publications withered or got uprooted, displaced, diseased, or decayed in the great information delivery realignment of the 21st Century. It can hardly be said to be of more value than countless other efforts.

Few of those, however, were as laden with memory and meaning as this one, whose place is fixed in the hearts and minds of the community it informs and is informed by. It is certainly fixed in mine.