Coffee Chat #29 with Amy Reyes

Fifty Cups of Coffee #29: Amy Reyes
Date: November 15, 2024
Location: Zoom

How we know each other

Amy and I went to Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts together. We are Sigma Pi Theta sorority sisters, and after college, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where we continue to be good friends.

What Amy is doing now

Amy lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband Mark. She works as a behavioral health program manager for children, youth, and families in the portland metro area for Care Oregon, a health plan that specializes in medicaid and medicare.

Three questions

During these Fifty Cups of Coffee chats, I ask each person the same three questions. The reasoning behind each is as follows:

Question 1 – Social media makes it easy for other people to think that they know us, when truthfully, we all only see a small sliver of someone’s life and who they really are. This is the interviewee’s chance to share something that is important to them that, for whatever reason, other people may not know.

Question 2 – We all have fears, no matter who are are or where we are in life. This helps connect us and show we are all more alike than we are different.

Question 3 – I believe the answer to this question helps show each person’s true values, passions, and their why in life.

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these. I’m including each person’s answers in first person. Their answers have been edited from my notes for length and clarity, but these are their words.

What is one thing you wish more people knew about you?

“I do not think I am a very big mystery. I will talk about anything; I am not very reserved necessarily. I am definitely coming into my own of knowing who I am, and feeling confident in who I am. I think aging is such a gift. My mom and grandma would not tell anyone their age; my mom was 36 for 8 years! My grandmother would get livid if people asked her how old she was. And I rebel against that; I love my birthday! I am so happy to grow old, and with that, I know my worth. I say that not in an entitled or stuck up fashion – I am a deeply flawed person who is constantly learning. I’m an experiential person: I learn from doing, and I feel comfortable making mistakes because it’s all a learning process. I hope I am always changing and growing; I hope I’m not the same person I was at 18 and I hope I won’t be the same person at 80.”

What is your deepest fear?

“I think I have the same fears most people who are aging have around health and wellness of myself and family and friends. It’s ridiculous how much I think about that, but generally I am a really healthy person. I hardly get sick. I don’t know what I’m worried about. But my family has weird cancers – mom passed away at 44. It was weird for me to turn 44 let alone 45. But for my siblings it was the same thing; I think it’s a normal thing to experience when you lose a parent that young.”

“On a deeper level, I worry about people. I worry about their sense of connection and community. With all of the great things that computers have brought us and social media, there’s so much positive that has come from this evolution of communication – but there’s also a lot of negatives. I just see how that impacts people and where that creates fear and that fear creates decisions and that worries me, that people aren’t coming together in person as much as they used to. We’ve lost some empathy as a community and that worries me deeply because I see the effects of that in mental health on youth families and adults. I see the repercussions of what happens when you don’t have a support system.”

“During Covid, our neighborhood made a pod. We were outside, socializing, we spent the holidays together, and we were so lucky to have this mish-mosh group of people with different ages and experiences to come together. If you have that support system, that’s really nice. You have to find your family sometimes and I feel really fortunate to have those neighbors in my life.”

If you had unlimited funds, what would you do with your life?

“I would love to use that to travel but honestly I would be very philanthropic. I would work on food insecurity. It makes me cry that people are hungry. There’s no reason for that in this country. It bothers me so, so much! No one – NO ONE – should be hungry. I would invest in free and equitable public education. I’d make sure schools had everything they needed regardless of socio economic status. Neighborhood schools should have their own culture and identity but they shouldn’t have different resources just because the economics are different. I would invest in more teachers to have manageable classrooms where kids could each have time for individualized attention and teachers aren’t overwhelmed. And I would make sure there was a full-time nurse at every single school and enough counselors and other social supports. Schools are a hub and we should be doing so much more for our schools. More before- and after-school care, so it’s one less stressor for families. I would hardcore be investing in children and families, and support individualized families… I’d put it all into the community and do it smartly so when I died, it still kept going.”

“I would really invest in all of my soapboxes. These are only a few of my soapboxes.”

What I’ve Learned

Here are some of the things I’ve learned and some takeaways from our coffee chat.

Amy has a lot of soapboxes. Ha! I’m joking, but it’s one of the things I love most about Amy. She cares deeply and she does the work to help others in community. I’m so grateful there are people like Amy doing the work that she does.
Loss of connection and community is concerning. I agree with Amy about her fear of our loss of connection and community, and what that means for us as a collective society. I think Covid played a big part in that, but in general, I feel like people have definitely been detaching themselves from others more and more.
Make your own community. I LOVE how Amy and her neighbors created a close community during Covid — and how they continue to be there to support one another.

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