Get ready to reach for the stars!
Join us for an unforgettable evening featuring our powerful featured speaker, Jayson Blair, meaningful connections, and exciting raffle opportunities.
Come for the inspiration. Stay for the impact. Leave knowing that your generosity helps ensure that when someone reaches out for help, a caring community is there to answer.
Together, we’re turning isolation into connection, uncertainty into understanding, and hope into action.
Where: The Secret Garden, San Diego, CA
When: November 13th, 2026
Time: Social begins at 6:30 PM
Words from our featured speaker, Jayson Blair!
Jayson Blair has been an advocate for people living with bipolar disorder and other mental health conditions for more than 20 years. Diagnosed with bipolar in 2003, Jayson started a support group to learn from others who had been living with the condition. That support group turned into a regional advocacy network focused on support, education and community service. Jayson’s diagnosis came after working as a reporter for The New York Times, where he covered the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the DC Sniper shootings. In his career, he also covered the downing of TWA Flight 80, the crash of USAir Flight 427 in Pennsylvania and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2003, Jayson plagiarized and fabricated a series of details in stories, which led to a hospitalization, his diagnosis and a scandal. Out of the ashes of that, Jayson has leaned in to making good come out of those experiences through advocacy for mental health and ethics in journalism, and for those living with bipolar and post traumatic stress disorder, which he has also been diagnosed with. He is also the managing partner of Goose Creek Consulting, where he has been a coach, facilitator and consultant since 2010. He also hosts an interview-based podcast called The Silver Linings Handbook that is focused on exploring the lives of interesting people.
Jayson will draw on his own lived experience as a former New York Times reporter, the subject of a very public scandal, and someone who has spent years learning to live well with bipolar disorder. His work as an executive coach and mental health coach, has allowed him to understand what it looks like to become the author of your own treatment journey, not just a passenger in it. He’ll talk about how he built a support team that rides shotgun with you, how to give the people who love you a real map for how to help, and how to find your voice with the providers who hold so much of your care. Jayson believes that recovery has a way of widening your heart and that sometimes the best amends is just doing the next right thing, which, for him, involves keeping the door open for others to heal, grow and transform.
Living with bipolar disorder means navigating a complex system of providers, medications, treatment decisions, and the unpredictable terrain of your own mind. But you don’t have to navigate it alone, and more importantly, you shouldn’t have to navigate it passively.
Warm, honest, and grounded in both personal story and professional insight, this conversation is for anyone who has ever felt like their illness was driving, and who is ready to take the wheel.
Thank you to our current Starry Night sponsors! Together, we’ll light the way.
