Abstract:
I’m Jennifer Thompson, and I often say when I present that I think, more often than not in life, that we do not choose our journeys. I believe that the journeys somehow choose us, that we are put on a path and we don’t necessarily know we are going to be put on the path, and we probably don’t necessarily want to be put on the path, but we’re on the path. And you always stay on the path, I think, until you learn what you need to learn from your journey. And that has certainly been my experience for most of my adult life. I’ll tell you a little bit about me, to put my story in maybe a deeper, more meaningful context. I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Which is like the tobacco belt, right? It’s the home of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. It was Winston’s cigarettes and Salem cigarettes—combined, we get Winston-Salem. And so of course as a tobacco industry city, it was very, very wealthy. It’s also the home of Hanes Hosiery; it’s the home of Babcock Medical School. There is some very significant wealth in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But it’s also the home of some very significant poverty. As you can imagine, there were the people who made the money from tobacco and there were the people who worked the tobacco. And right down the center of Winston-Salem was a railroad, truly, and it was really one of those cities where you lived on one side of the tracks. And so, by some genetic lottery, I was born on the “right” side of the tracks.
