We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Anna Sarao. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Anna below.

Anna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Is there a heartwarming story from your career that you look back on?

It’s always crazy for me, to look back on my journey and reflect on who I am now. We have this idea that we are supposed to find ourselves after we graduate college …or after we find what we’re good at. But at 24, 32, and even 42 – I admit that I still felt lost. If it wasn’t for this memory of one of my students, I don’t know what I would be doing with myself now.

So about a million years ago – I was a dancer and taught hip hop dance. Dance was everything to me – I lived, breathed and shit dance for much of my young life. Even though it gave me life, it caused death to the relationship with my parents. My parents would always discourage me from dance and say that it would never amount to anything … that I needed to focus on a career and to stop dancing. But I wasn’t trying to hear that because dancing was the only thing that made me feel normal / a sense of belonging.

So one day I remember getting into it super bad with my parents and still having to show up to teach for work. I was feeling their words heavy and thinking of quitting the Y (MCA). I was on my way to quit my class when to my surprise – I walked in on Ryan.

He was just a kid but he was pretending to be the teacher and acting like he was teaching a class. I watched him copy all the things I would say and the dances I had taught. And he was so good that it made me cry. Here my parents had finished telling me I was nobody and was wasting my time …and to see this little kid literally practicing to be “me” – hit me so emotionally. I did make a difference. Dance WAS valuable. And I didn’t quit that day. I ended up teaching dance for 8 more years.

Fast forward to my 30’s, I had even become an Artistic Director for a Nonprofit Dance Team called Culture Shock. Well I got a call from Ryan’s mom one day. She explained that since her divorce, things had been rough for him and he ended up in Juvenile Hall. To my surprise, she begged me to pick him up because I had been the ONLY person he ever listened to growing up. And with some hesitation, knowing I had no clue what I would say to him, I said okay.

For the next few months, I brought Ryan to dance class and really everywhere with me; he was like my nephew. He came with me to every dance class and sometimes he would go with me to church. During this time, I watched him dance, freestyle AND …he sang too! This kid was so talented! I remember we would talk about his dream of being a singer and that sometimes he felt like it would never come true. So I just encouraged him to pursue it anyway…learning from how my parents made me feel.

We became like family over the years. I watched him join our youth dance team and perform. He even performed with the Jabbawockeez when they first started dancing. And then suddenly, he moved away again. I never got to tell him how much he helped me to see myself as a mentor and what that did for me.

And then last year, I heard a song on the radio from him. It was perfect timing because at 45, the Pandemic had hit me hard. I was traumatized from a home invasion and became severely depressed. I found myself thinking similar thoughts of worthlessness from my 20’s when his voice came on the radio. Hearing Ryan singing on the radio…about God being like a Father to us…realizing his dream, spoke to me in that moment. I found myself moved and shocked. I would hear this song over and over and it felt like it was saving my life. In a time when the world felt so chaotic and I felt so alone – again, this kid reminded me that there was hope and I was not alone. I was so proud of Ryan – realizing he had become a professional singer. But even more, he had reminded me in song, – that I mattered.

Anna, 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 have a Master’s in Family Therapy. I’m now a registered Associate Family Therapist. I currently counsel middle school through high school students. And I realize that it is my calling. Everything I did to heal when I was younger, I now teach my students. Whether its movement or making art (I paint watercolor and acrylic) – I use my self to connect to my clients and help them regulate difficult emotions or process traumatic events.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Omg being resilient is all I have been doing since the Pandemic. I had an attempted home invasion, a car accident where I was run into an embankment, and then my therapist died of COVID. Read that again. Can you imagine WTF was going through my head? I’m sitting here trying to paint a pretty bow of what happened to me and my resilience but truth is – I hate that I am “resilient”. I have been through so much trauma – even before the ones I wrote in the beginning of this paragraph!!! Resilient means to me that you get back up after shit happens to you. And yes a lot of shit is going to happen to you.

It was soooo hard. I would hear noises or talking at night and I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I keep weapons under my pillow and now live with a roommate. I became a painting artist!!! Just so the suicidal thoughts in my head would shut the eff up. And I forced myself to get into a car and drive again, …even when all I could do was drive 60 mph in the slow lane because I was scared that something bad would happen again. I coach myself still. I tell myself ‘It’s ok’ or ‘Stop!’ when my brain starts to imagine the worst accident while I’m driving on the freeway nowadays. I listen to motivational podcasts and even Joel Osteen. Just because those are the only voices that can quiet my negative ones. And probably the best advice I got about getting through this time in my life was from my friend Chris, who told me, “Just keep chugging along until one day something changes”. And that is literally what happened. I want to write something prettier but that is the realest way for me to express my journey of resilience.

And as I shared before, one day Ryan’s song came on the radio and when it did, I knew that it was going to be ok. And now I am a counselor.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn that God was going to only allow good things in my life, and never the bad. One day while driving to work, I was kind of venting or praying? There’s a verse in the Bible that states everything is supposed to work out for the good. And so I was like questioning God – how did all that happened to me really turn into good? Because to me it didn’t feel that way at all and even thought I survived…I didn’t feel that my life was “good”. So I just asked God to take in what I said and then went to work. Then maybe close to my lunchtime, a teacher stopped by my office and asked to speak to me that day. She began to thank me for the work I was doing with her students. She said the changes she’d seen were amazing and she needed for me to know that I was doing a good job. She said that she’d seen such a change in one, one’s grades turned around dramatically, and that another was just way happier in general. She even told me she’d been thinking about putting her own kids into therapy with me and then asked if she could give me a hug?! I was shocked and didn’t know how to take it?! “Thank you” I kind of mumbled. And then when she left I had some time to reflect. In therapy – its called parallel process. I had been teaching my students that life would bring both good and bad, but that they had it within themselves to figure it out, get back up and make it out ok. I could only say that – because of what I had been through. And although its not something I would have chosen, I now see the good that has come out of it.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @Annasara0
• Facebook: Anna Sarao
• Youtube: ANNASARAO