Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Michaia Walker. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Michaia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?
My second job after graduate school was in a school for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH), students. My very first semester I was assigned to work with a 9th grade student who was labeled the “bad Black boy” . I was told he would never finish high school and that my role with him was to “keep him out of trouble”. I use quotes because these are thing that were said to me by my supervisor. As a Black person, this enraged me, but I kept my anger to myself and used it to focus my energy on being a positive influence in this student’s life. He didn’t have many educational staff members on his side but there were a few of us. We pushed him and encouraged him and something clicked in 11th grade. He started getting better grades, attendance went up, he became more involved in the school social scene and at the end of senior he danced across that stage with all the pride and joy he deserved! I chose this story because it always makes my heart smile to have seen what others failed to see and help him see it within himself. He was so proud of himself on graduation night because he had also been aware that people were betting on him to fail and he had proved them all wrong. That was one of the most meaningful and memorable student/counselor relationships I ever developed. It also showed many people how wrong they can be about someone just from looking and judging.
Michaia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in NY and I am also licensed in MA (LICSW) as a mental health provider. I have been working in NY for 10 years in the field of mental health as a victims advocate in the District Attorney’s Office. I also did some work with an agency in child welfare that worked with families who had recently immigrated from African countries. My longest position was as a counselor/behavioral specialist in a school for Deaf and Hard of Hearing students ages 3-21. I always knew that I wanted to work with people, more specifically children. And as I went through school and internships I found myself drawn to special needs/disability populations. I started learning American Sign Language (ASL) around the age of 9 after a brief encounter with a Deaf man. My little brain was fascinated with languages and music and ASL was like a combination of both. After undergrad, a professor told me they would personally write me a letter of rec for any graduate school I wanted to attend, but that I had to go to graduate school so I could make a real difference. I got accepted into UPenn and successfully completed my MSW there. My final internship was at a school for the Deaf in that area and my signing improved a lot but not enough to feel confident in doing real mental health work the same way I could in spoken and written English. I think one of the things that sets me apart in my line of work is that I did everything I could to stay connected to the community as a hearing person, even though my connections were not obvious. I’m not a CODA (child of Deaf adults), or a sibling of a Deaf child, there are no immediate members of my family who are Deaf and I never wanted to learn the language to become an interpreter. I just wanted to learn so I could communicate and help people get what they need. Support.
Tenacity is the probably the best word for how I got where I am. I don’t take “no” very well or especially “you can’t”. Even if sometimes those voices come from inside me. I was given harsh critiques and feedback along the way and I was hurt but I can admit that I am NOT an expert on Deaf culture/ASL/Community and would never pretend to be. Admitting these things out loud, helped me to arrive at a place where I feel stable in my abilities to help and not harm this very underserved but rich and beautiful community. I am most proud of the fact that I don’t quit. I never set out to be a clinician with a private practice. That always felt “too hard” or “too unrealistic”, but I’ve been doing it part time since 2017 and full time since the beginning of 2023. I am very niche in the work that I do with the poly/kink/queer/BIPOC/disability/trauma survivors… etc communities. Mostly because of my overlapping identities that feed my lived experience, and how my background and training have provided me the skills so effectively serve these populations. The entire reason I started my private practice was so that I could provide accessible mental health support to friend of a friend in the Black community and it just grew from there. He was my instigating factor.
Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?
Honestly, the way my practice has grown has been significantly via word of mouth referrals. I do have a very solid online presence at this point, which has helped maintain my practice, but initially, most of my referrals were from satisfied clients who knew other people looking for support.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
To expand upon something I mentioned in a previous question about tenacity, I wanted to share the following story. My last internship experience in graduate school was traumatic to the point where my advisor pulled me out of the internship a month early. I had a very unsupportive on-site supervisor who would ask me to do impossible tasks and then berate me for not doing well or meeting her standards. As I previously stated, I received a lot of harsh feedback and some of it was in relation to my fluency in ASL (as it should have been!). However, the way the feedback was given was cruel and intended to dissuade me from future pursuits in supporting the Deaf community. Not too shortly after that, in my first job at the school postgraduate school, my signing was again strongly critiqued. I do not believe the intention this time to be cruel but it was triggering. I chose to not take it as personally as I could have (or that it was meant to be), and used that as a way to say “Don’t get comfortable. You can always be doing just a little more or be getting a little better.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.manhattanalternative.com/team/michaia-walker/
- Instagram: @michaiawalkerlcsw
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaia-walker-lcsw-licsw-11a62b29/details/experience/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaia_walker?lang=en
- Other: https://headway.co/providers/michaia-walker