Part of me needed to see what would happen.

After years of accumulating skills, experience, and expertise, I wanted to know whether there was finally room for me to simply be myself at work. Not exceptional. Not disruptive. Just honest. Present. Human.

We spend most of our lives working. I cannot exist in a space where I am required to be fake for eight hours a day. Where I have to flatten myself, dilute my instincts, or tolerate practices that feel wrong in my body just to survive. That kind of compromise accumulates. Over time, it costs something real.

I never wanted wealth or status. Those things can be nice, but they were never the point. What I wanted was simpler. A place where I could work as who I am.

I grew up parentified. Raised by a young single mother. I learned early how to feed myself, get myself to school, and navigate the world without much guidance. Independence was not a personality trait. It was a necessity. What that leaves behind is not a hunger for recognition, but a longing for acceptance. To be allowed to show up whole.

So when I entered professional spaces, I carried that hope with me. That once I had proven competence, once I had paid my dues, there would be room for authenticity. That good work would be enough.

What I learned instead is that many systems are not designed for that kind of presence.

Highly regulated environments often value compliance over connection. Predictability over judgment. Optics over substance. The work becomes less about responding to human reality and more about maintaining a particular version of practice that is legible to the system itself.

This is not a moral accusation. It is a structural observation.

When someone works relationally, intuitively, and responsively, they introduce variance. Variance makes systems nervous. Not because it is wrong, but because it is harder to control, harder to measure, and harder to defend when things go poorly.

Over time, I learned that my way of working did not fit cleanly inside those containers. Not because I lacked ethics or discipline, but because my approach relied on trust, presence, and judgment rather than strict procedural distance. That mismatch created friction.

Eventually, that friction became unsustainable.

I do not believe mental health work is a conspiracy, nor do I believe institutions exist solely to cause harm. But I do believe many systems are designed primarily to manage risk, liability, and cost. Healing, when it happens, often occurs despite those constraints, not because of them.

Mental health does not offer cures in the medical sense. It offers containment, support, symptom relief, and sometimes transformation. That work is slow, relational, and difficult to standardize. When systems are stretched thin, the pressure to prioritize efficiency over depth becomes intense.

In those conditions, certain kinds of practitioners thrive, and others are slowly pushed out.

What I am grieving is not a loss of status or position. It is the realization that the environments I entered were not built to hold the kind of work I was trying to do. That authenticity, for me, came at a cost those systems were not willing or able to absorb.

That does not make them evil. It makes them incompatible.

So this is not a rejection of mental health care, nor a declaration of opposition. It is an acceptance of limits. Of fit. Of reality.

I am no longer interested in proving that a system is broken. I am interested in building or finding spaces where I do not have to fragment myself in order to function.

Spaces where judgment is trusted. Where presence is valued. Where the work is allowed to be human.

That is all I ever wanted.