By Ameera Steward | For The Birmingham Times
A few months before graduating Birmingham’s Ramsay High School Randi Crawford was heading to work when her car hit black ice causing her to skid into a pole. “[The doctors] told my mom … I was going to die that night,” remembered Crawford. “But I didn’t die. I woke up three days later. They said, ‘well, she’ll be a vegetable.’”
Within two months she was back at school and work, but not without challenges. The accident caused Crawford to lose her short-term memory and she had to relearn “everything” during her two months of recuperation from how to walk to how to write.
This would later be helpful in building her into the therapist she is today because due to her short-term memory loss it’s beneficial to not take her patients’ stories into the next session, or into her life outside of the office, said the licensed professional counselor.
By opening her own counseling office where she specializes in providing therapy to children, adolescents, teens, and young adults struggling with behavioral and mental health issues, Crawford said she found her purpose.
Walks of Life, located at 105 Vulcan Road in Homewood, not only allows Crawford to provide high quality therapeutic outpatient services to the city of Birmingham, but also allows her to live out her life’s mission of showing “the love of God.”
“Whatever I say [to her patients] I want it to honestly be from [God], because I’ve learned over the past couple of years [that] being a therapist, it’s almost like I’m a superhero,” said the 34-year-old. “That’s so scary…it’s never me [in the sessions], ever.”
Purpose Through Pain
Although Crawford currently lives in Center Point, she grew up in Collegeville and graduated from Ramsay in 2006.
After recovering from her car accident, she was told by doctors not to go far for college, leading her to attend Jacksonville State University — located in Jacksonville, Alabama — to study nursing.
In 2009, while in school one day Crawford and her mother [Marie Hardy] thought her grandmother was asleep. Her mother told her to check her grandmother — since she had just learned how to check for a dying heart. “And I heard it [her grandmother’s heart] slowly going out,” Crawford said.
“When I went back to school,” she continued. “We were working in a nursing home for clinicals, and I was just like, ‘I can’t do this.’”
She then changed her major to exercise science and in 2011 graduated but wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next.
Her boyfriend at the time mentioned that she should go back to school to study counseling because she loved talking to people and talking to kids. So that’s what she did. Crawford went back to school to receive her masters degree in clinical mental health counseling at JSU and graduated in 2016.
She went on to work at Hill Crest Behavioral Health Services where she would always work in the group home “because I saw a difference in talking to kids than when I [worked] with adults.”
If It’s His Will, It’s His Bill
While getting her hair done in 2023, Crawford told her beautician Juanica Hardy that she, Crawford, wanted to open her own practice … “[where] I could treat people how they want to be treated, and show [them] that there are really people that genuinely love [others].”
Hardy told Crawford that she would help her pay for it and fill out the LLC paperwork and all Crawford had to do was come up with the name which was easy for the emerging business owner.
She remembered a conversation with a client from her former job who told Crawford she was easy to talk to.
“And I said, ‘yeah, that’s because we all come from different walks of life…just because [some may be] a recovering addict, [doesn’t] make [them any] different from [someone] having a baby out of wedlock,’’ Crawford explained.
She went on to tell her client she wanted to have her own office one day and the client exclaimed that ‘Walks of Life’ should be the name.
After Crawford made an announcement that she was opening an office on Facebook, “people started cash-apping me…buying all the items in my office,” Crawford said. “The only money I put in that office was $40…even that first month’s rent, a couple of my close friends at the time, donated [money], Juanica sent me $100, until I needed $150 left. And my mom just randomly asked me…’do you have your first month’s rent?’ And I was like ‘nope’ and she Cash-Apped me $150,” which was the exact amount she needed.
One Sunday before opening her office, she was attending Rock City Church located at 1120 Apricot Ave., and Pastor Mike McClure Jr., delivered a sermon where he asserted “if it’s God’s will, it’s God’s bill.”
“He [said] ‘for all my entrepreneurs, anybody trying to start a business, stop worrying about where your money is coming from. If it’s his will, it’s his bill.’ So that’s when I initially was like, ‘wow…God I hear what you’re saying,’” said Crawford, the mother of two boys, 11 and 3 years old.
Walks of Life
In collaboration with one other therapist, Crawford provides child play therapy, and helps with behavioral issues, ADHD, anxiety, depression, and more.
Patients range from five to 38 years old. However, most are adolescents and teens, who Crawford said experience suicidal thoughts most often.
“A lot of these kids deal with so much bullying in school [and] social media,” Crawford said. During their developing years, social media can be a challenge because it encourages young people to compare themselves to who they’re following on social media, and “it’s a lot of pressure, and I feel like it’s just becoming too much.”
In addition, the rise in suicidal thoughts also comes from family dynamics and issues. Crawford said, “you would be surprised how many families really don’t know how to show genuine love and care.”
Crawford ensures that she cultivates a peaceful and loving environment for her patients.
For example, one said that counseling is the one place in his life where he isn’t constantly in trouble. “He said, ‘everywhere else I just feel like I’m always in trouble, or nobody wants to listen to me,’” Crawford explained. “‘But when I’m in here I know I’m not in trouble, you’re listening to me…I’m just comfortable.’”
Crawford can be reached at https://www.walksoflife.net/ or 205-520-4303
