Jamie C. Amelio - Stayed Bothered: Find Your Passion, Commit to Action, Change the World

STAYING BOTHERED

Find Your Passion, Commit to Action, Change the World

JAMIE C. AMELIO
WITH ADAM SNYDER

Published by
Hybrid Global Publishing
301 E 57th Street, 4th fl
New York, NY 10022

Copyright 2019 by Jamie C. Amelio

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by in any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

Manufactured in the United States of America, or in the United Kingdom when distributed elsewhere.

Amelio, Jamie C.

Staying Bothered: Find Your Passion, Commit to Action, Change the World

LCCN: 2019940071

ISBN: 978-1-948181-59-4 (hardcover)

978-1-948181-64-8 (softcover)

978-1-948181-60-0 (e-book)

Cover design by: Joe Potter
Interior design: Claudia Volkman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because of the support I have been given, through days of pain, betrayal, hope, and humor, I believe I am the luckiest lady alive, with the best job on the planet.

My deepest thanks to each of the thousands of volunteers who have given their heart and soul to Caring for Cambodia.

To my family, and that includes friends who are really family, I am so grateful. Writing a book is hard. Having people you trust with your life is a gift. Adam and Pat Snyder have been exactly that.

To my children. They are the inspiration that pushes me every day to Stay Bothered. May you never give up, and follow your dreams even when the clouds roll in and the sun is far off.

And of course to Bill, my husband, my rock. Thank you for supporting me every day with my projects and commitments that keep me bothered, and for loving and understanding me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TO THE READER

Ive been bothered most of my life. I dont mean bothered about everyday annoyances, like getting cut off in traffic, washing your new white shirt with your equally new blue jeans, getting the wrong order at Starbucks, or having your teenage daughter leave a half-eaten slice of pizza on her nightstand for two weeksagain. Im talking about Big Thingsthe fact that science has yet to find a cure for cancer, or that 1,600 children die each day from diseases directly linked to unsafe drinking water.

Ive long believed that being bothered is a good thingas long as youre able to identify what bothers you, do something about it, and stay bothered. Success comes to those who try. And try. And keep trying.

These ideas were driven home to me sixteen years ago when my family and I were living in Singapore and I visited Cambodia for the first time. I saw children who had to pay to go to school but couldnt afford it because their parents made less money in a day than Americans pay for a cup of coffee. Many of those who did attend school often arrived hungry. We changed this paradigm for thousands of Cambodian children. With the help of an equal number of volunteers from all over the world, Caring for Cambodia (CFC) today feeds and educates 6,700 students each year, from preschool to high school, in twenty-one new buildings. We were able to do it because collectively we found what bothered us, did something about it, and stayed bothered.

I described the genesis and growth of CFC in Graced with Orange: How Caring for Cambodia Changed Lives, Including My Own, published in 2012. What began as a promise to a little girl to visit her school grew into a larger promise to provide a world-class education to the children of Siem Reap. Our model schools and our teacher training program have revolutionized an entire countrys education system.

This book, Staying Bothered: Find Your Passion, Commit to Action, Change the World, is written with the goal of sharing what Ive learned about finding a personal cause and sticking to it. It is a personal memoir, but I hope its also a call to action. Based on the growing population of our website, stayingbothered.com, I believe it can become a movement.

Discovering what really bothers you is a magical experience, but staying bothered leads to growth and changefor you and the rest of the world. Being bothered is easy; staying bothered is hard but life-changing. Im not suggesting that you wallow in negativity by focusing exclusively on the atrocities that occur all over the world every day. You have a life. But I am hoping you can make the difficult choice to pay attention to your bothers, particularly those staring you in the face.

A bother is always personal; thats why you feel it so strongly. When it hits close to home, its passion is intensified. Thats what happened to me when my sixteen-year-old needed help overcoming depression and anxiety. Just like that, teen mental health became my new bother. Ill talk about this in the final chapter.

All of us face personal and professional challenges. The common thread is how we use perseverance, mixed with gratitude and a dash of serendipity, to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. By staying bothered, we can learn a lot about ourselves and our place in the universe.

This book is about finding what bothers you the most, facing it head-on, and being reinvigorated rather than dismayed by the challenges and obstacles that inevitably occurnot if they come your way, but when. In those moments, let go of the failure. Your job during the tough times is to find something, anything, that is good. Build on that; focus on it every day. Find something in your life you can own: a feeling, a workout, a certain path. Take it and own it, because you control it.

PROLOGUE

AN ACCIDENT
(OR WAS IT A BLESSING?)

For thirty-seven years, I innocently referred to it as the accident.

One late afternoon in August 1981, I was driving too fast on FM Road 1518, a bucolic two-lane road in my hometown of Schertz, Texas, twenty-two miles northeast of San Antonio. I was behind the wheel of the 1979 Plymouth Road Runner my dad had bought me a few months earlier. For a sixteen-year-old, the car was nearly perfectlight blue and full of muscle and poweruntil I drove it, head-on, into one of the many sprawling oak trees that lined the road. Inside the car, the collision sounded like a clap of thunder. My body slammed against the steering wheel, the impact crushing my ribs and piercing my liver and spleen.

I should have died that day. I managed to open the door and crawl to the edge of the road, where a man found me and called an ambulance. I was in surgery for six hours. I can clearly recall the overhead lights in the operating room, the sound of my parents crying, and the dozens of staples the doctors used to hold my body together.

Ive always called it the accident, but that word fails to capture the impact it had on my life. When you look up antonyms for accident in a thesaurus, one of the first words you come across is blessing