Jocelyn Winn: Protecting the child within
This article contains remarks and a discussion about suicide.
During Black History Month and Women's History Month, the Black Collegians and Adelante Center at Santa Monica College (SMC) would get calls looking for Black representations. While this happens every year, Jocelyn Winn, who works with Black Collegians, understands deeply that our world needs this.
Jocelyn Winn, age 46, has been the Student Service Specialist for the Black Collegians at SMC since 2010. She supports Black and brown students and connects them to resources to guide them through their educational journey at SMC.
For Winn, the job has been very rewarding. At times, the volume of students that come through the office is taxing. It can be emotionally draining, especially for someone like Winn, who is empathetic. But when she sees the progress that the students make, the best part of her job, it all feels worth it.
She said, “To see students walk across the stage, or when the students come to me and say I got accepted to this school or that school for transfer, or this is my last semester, as much as I will miss seeing that student... I really want them to be successful.”
Most importantly, Winn wants students to find their own voices to advocate for themselves, an invaluable tool that can help them in life. She wishes someone had taught her the importance of speaking up earlier in her life.
Winn struggled most of her life, doubting herself when people said she wasn’t good enough. She grew up in Vallejo, a small town north of San Francisco. Her father was a pastor of a church in a predominantly white neighborhood. He had very traditional beliefs that Black people, especially women, had specific roles and boundaries governed by rigid rules. He would not have allowed Winn to join groups like the Black Collegians because he considered any Black identity group to be radicals and separatists.
For Winn’s father, Black identity wasn’t something you celebrated but something you hid. Winn doesn’t fault her parents. “My parents did the best job that they could,” said Winn, based on the climate of their time and their personal experiences of being raised by parents from the South who “feared so many things.”
As a form of self-preservation and protection, her parents grew up believing that being safe meant not drawing attention to yourself. There were “loitering” laws at their time that police used to discourage hanging out in public with more than one Black person. She said, ”It was almost like in order to survive, you had to give up your Black identity or your sense of community.”
As a little girl, Winn was timid and shy, and would hide in window curtains whenever a siren went by. She learned to not question authority at a very young age.
Growing up in Vallejo, being one of the few Black people at her school, Winn was often treated differently. She often felt dismissed or cast aside in class. As a little kid, Winn didn’t think much about these inequalities until later in life, when these memories surfaced.
Winn’s educational path took many turns. But at each juncture, Winn was lucky enough to meet a pivotal person who inspired her.
In the 1990s, Winn’s family moved to Southern California, where she enrolled at SMC. Not knowing what to study, she spent years taking classes and exploring until she met Cassandra Patillo, who was a counselor at Black Collegians. She encouraged Winn to finish college and helped her transfer to a four-year college.
Winn learned from Patillo how to approach students like herself. Her path came full circle and she ended up at Black Collegians, helping others who felt as lost as she was.
Even though Winn feels fulfilled now, she reflected on that time when everything felt so difficult and tiring. She thought her life would be just easier to put a “period” there. “I didn’t want to feel pain anymore,” said Winn.
Winn was dressed in yellow during the interview, smiling and cheerful throughout. Immediately, a sunny disposition would come to one’s mind.
Sasha Shelton, an SMC psychology major who works with Winn at Black Collegians, described her as someone who “radiates warmth and approachability.”
“Working with her is a joy because she fosters an environment where we can freely express ourselves,” said Shelton.
Winn said, “you don’t know when someone is suicidal.” She reminded people that someone who might look happy would often surprise others that the person needed help.
Depression has no face.
Winn cautioned that the strongest person in the room is probably the one who is carrying a lot inside and the one we need to check on.
At the low point in her depression, Winn had gone through ways in her mind to kill herself. She was living with her sister at the time, her closest family member and best friend. What stopped her from carrying out the suicide was that she could not think of a way that wouldn’t bring trouble to her sister.
One night, the compulsion to act on it was so strong that she refused to leave the house, fearing that she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. She had to confront her sister about her suicidal thoughts. At her sister’s urging, she decided to seek therapy, which greatly helped.
After years of therapy, though, one day Winn realized she was no longer learning new things from her sessions. She came to a resolution that “my life is my life, and I’m responsible for my life, and I can make decisions in my life to have the things that I want.”
She ended her journey with her therapist and thanked her that out of seven people she called, she was the only one who took her in as a patient.
Not until the end of her healing path did her doctor finally reveal that the only reason she called Winn back was that Winn was suicidal, and her own son, a medical doctor, had killed himself. Depression and suicide can happen to anyone, even those with a therapist as a mother. What saved Winn was that she was not alone.
Winn eventually wrote a memoir, titled “One of Nine: A Memoir: A Collection of True Stories that Prompted Suicidal Thoughts and Began A Remarkable Journey to Find a Reason to Live.” Despite having a degree in English from California State University, Northridge, Winn never planned to be a writer. Her college professor had told her that Black characters in writings were not marketable.
Winn found that her most heartfelt writing was about herself, and she didn’t want her writings to be criticized. She would often write down vivid memories in tiny stories and stuff them into a box for years, with little thought about them.
Winn didn't think these writings would amount to anything until one day when she took a class at SMC. It was a memoir writing course taught by Monona Wali, a writing instructor in SMC Community Education.
After reading a traumatic memory Winn wrote as an exercise, her instructor urged her to continue writing and to compile a body of work. Encouragement from someone who was an accomplished writer made Winn, for the first time, feel like she could be a writer.
The most difficult part about the memoir was exposing her family in her writing. She worried about her parents’ reaction. However, Winn also wanted to live in the truth.
She couldn’t decide how to balance the desire to tell the truth and her duty to protect her family. It was during COVID-19 that, after losing relatives to the disease and seeing people struggling with depression, she felt compelled to write the book.
Winn knew her experience was not unique. She thought the book could be helpful to those who had similar experiences. She wanted to protect that little girl within her. “I always felt like I was the weakest person in the room... by writing the memoir, I think I was speaking for all the people who felt like the weakest people in the room,” said Winn.
Winn said, “I felt like no one had told me that they had been depressed… or they were suicidal at one point in their life, and they were able to make it through it. (If they had told me) then I might have been okay or at least think ‘I’m not the only person going through it’, because the first lie that you believe in that state of mind, is that no one understands…”
“If I could help a couple of my students… or help my nieces and nephews… I wanted them to know that their aunt went through this deep depression, and I did not want it to be a secret,” said Winn.
Winn still wrestles with all the heavy things, like her racial identity and the compassion fatigue she sometimes feels when working with her students. She cares deeply for her students because she can relate to them – she was one of them. But she has to learn to balance her emotional capacity; otherwise, the empathy drains her.
Sometimes, the struggle feels like a tug-of-war. Being a black woman, she describes it as playing a game of mental chess 24/7. It is tiring, but she also draws strength and affirmation from her black identity, realizing her life is explicitly shaped.
She knows herself, and she no longer allows others to define her. She believes “we attract the things in our life that are best for us only when we know ourselves.”
Winn said, “there are people I'm not going to touch, and there are people that I'm not going to be able to convince. But their journey is something different from mine, and that is okay.”
Recently, Winn has been working on her master’s degree at Walden University in industrial and organizational psychology. She is studying the dynamics of how humans behave in group environments and foster cooperation and harmony. Eventually, she hopes to use these skills to help children build identity positivity in early childhood education, reaching those as young as transitional kindergarten (TK). She wants children to have a better experience than she did.
Outside of her studies, she enjoys gardening and practicing meditation. She is working on a series of children's stories and podcasts about meditation and mental health. She wants to see more black representation in meditation practice and mindfulness.
For Black History Month, she conducted a workshop at SMC titled “The 10-Minute Manifestation Plan”. The practice introduced at the workshop was meditating for 10 minutes, for 100 days, and over 10 things you want to manifest in your life. This tool has worked for her, and she wants to share it with her students.
There are only a few intangible things Winn wants. She is pursuing things that she hopes will leave something positive for others, and affect permanent change.
“There are things that are unkillable. I’m hoping things that I do are unkillable… the ‘undieable.’ So (do not) invest your time and effort in things that can be burnt or can be sold or that can be lost, but things that will be cherished forever,” said Winn.
She doesn’t know if they are “impermanent,” but with each endeavor, she keeps adding another semicolon to her life as yet another unwritten story.
SMC’s Center for Wellness and Wellbeing is available for those who feel anxious or depressed. The center can be contacted at 310-434-4503. For their 24/7 Emotional Support hotline, call 800-691-6003.