It takes a special strength and poise to manage the challenges life hands us.
Janice Dean has that strength and poise.
Dean, best known as the affable meteorologist on Fox News Channel’s morning show “Fox & Friends,” talks in detail about her own challenges in her new book, Mostly Sunny, laying out the struggles that many of her viewers and followers knew nothing about.
She delivers them with grace, wit and clarity as she takes the reader inside her world discussing life as a working mom, the complexities of being in the public eye, workplace sexual harassment, and how she lives and works and plays after her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis.
“When I was diagnosed with MS it was one of the darkest moments of my life because I really thought my life was gonna be over. I thought ‘my boyfriend’s gonna leave me, and my career’s gonna be over, and I’m gonna a miserable human being,’” Dean said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Dean said she was first diagnosed with the disease in 2005 at the age of 37 after waking one morning and finding she could barely get out of bed. After a series of doctors and tests she was sent to a neurologist. Her worst fears were realized when the MRI and a spinal tap confirmed she had MS, the auto-immune disease that attacks the protective covering around the nerves.
“I looked for hope during that time. I just wanted to find people who had an obstacle in their way and they overcame it and they were doing great, and that’s what I needed,” she said.
She searched for that ambassador of courage and optimism until she found it looking back at her from the mirror. Now she strives to be the person she needed when she was younger. “This book,” she says of Mostly Sunny, “is sort of a book that I would have liked to have read when I was sort of at my lowest point.”
Dean says her broadcasting career has taken her from her radio days in Canada, Houston, and New York, where she was the entertainment reporter for the “Imus in the Morning” radio show before she went back to school for meteorology.
Along the way she talks candidly about sexual harassment, inappropriate behavior she suffered, and the struggles and strains of maintaining a certain appearance when you are in the public eye.
All of those experiences have taught her a lot of lessons that she shares with the readers.
“I’m sure when I’m 90, I’ll have more lessons that I’ve learned. Part of the message … in the book is the people you meet on the way are so important. All the jobs, all the great career moves and places that I’ve gone, have been because of the people I’ve met, not because of how smart I was, or how many courses I took in school, or how beautiful my hair looked. It was because I met these amazing people that lifted me along the way and wanted to help,” she explained.
“And that’s really, that’s what life is about too: these connections, connecting with human beings. And so that’s what I also try to stress is, be kind, be kind to people. You never know when a smile or somebody opening your door is gonna completely change your day,” she said.
Which is why if you ever wander over to her social media handle on Twitter you will not find her engaged in a way that knocks people down, instead you find grace.
“I think we need more of that [grace] right now. I certainly find that when I step inside my home and I’m with my boys and my family it is what really sort of centers me, after getting in from the storm of what we’re dealing with on social media and in the news today,” she said.
“You really have to get back to the basics and just realize that what is the most important thing in my life? It’s my husband and my two boys, and making sure that we’re all happy and healthy as possible. That’s what matters. So, you know, and this is a book of hope. I want people to realize that.”
“There are certainly stories in there that when I was living them at the time they weren’t very hopeful, but looking back on them, I can see why they were put into my timeline. I can see why the past went the way it did, because ultimately that path led me to my husband to have my family,” she said.
And most importantly she said would not alter her path to today, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”
