Quality of life decision
Emmy award- winning producer and editorial supervisor, Lauren Fein has found her calling : listening and taking care of the children who are her clients at Santa Cruz County’s Health Services Agency.
TV PRODUCER FINDS HER CALLING
SANTA CRUZ — From the cheap seats, it sure looks like Lauren Fein had a pretty sweet gig. For years, she worked as a television producer, mostly for VH- 1, but for other places as well. She hooked on with NBC to work the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and has worked every Olympics since.
She lived in New York and traveled the world, creating stories that potentially millions of people would see, with all the requisite perks we tend to bestow on people who work in the highest echelons of TV.
On the other hand, Lauren would regularly have stress dreams. The deadlines, the workload, the endless internal pressures.
Today, Lauren, 36, doesn’t have stress dreams. She lives in Santa Cruz and works for Santa Cruz County’s Health Services Agency as a counselor for children and adolescents looking for support in dealing with emotional or behavioral issues.
“I wanted to feel good about myself,” Lauren said of the decision to chuck a career many people would covet. “The reality- TV ethic was really taking over. I was more and more involved in these pointless shows. The budgets were getting smaller in a very fear- based industry. It’s a cliché, but I wanted to live a life that was more about enriching others.”
Lauren had barely heard of Santa Cruz when she first came here in 2007 for a documentary she was working on about counterculture guru Timothy Leary. It was only much later, after she’d moved west, that she looked back at an old journal she kept and found what she had written as the primary criteria for the place she wanted to start her new life.
“I had this list,” she said. “I wanted to be close to a university, near the water, near an airport.” Santa Cruz checked all those boxes for her.
When she saw in a movie a portrayal of a therapist who used art in treatment, she began to envision a vocation for herself. From there, she earned a master’s degree in psychology, and for three years now, she’s found contentment in helping young people wrestle with the anxieties of growing up.
“The way I look at mental illness and mental health is that it’s all on a spectrum. Everybody goes through anxiety at some point in their lives. The question is: Does it interfere with the way you live your life? That’s when you need a little help.