When you stick to what you know, you know the speed limits, you know how to drive, and you’re pretty sure you’re not going to crash. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. You feel like you actually have your life together. (Although, considering I live in Arizona, maybe I should move away from a driving analogy, not sure how many will track with it…)

The problem is, we live in a world that can’t stand to see a single minute go to waste.

Somewhere along the way, this weird obsession with productivity leaked out of our jobs and completely took over our downtime. You pick up running, and suddenly you’re tracking heart rate zones on a smartwatch like you’re training for the Olympics. You pick up a paintbrush, and this quiet little voice immediately whispers: Could you sell these? Is this pretty enough for Instagram?

We’ve accidentally turned our hobbies into unpaid internships.

I do it all the time. I’ll bake something just for the fun of it - a new cupcake flavor or a fresh batch of sourdough, and before the oven even cools down, my brain goes: Should I try selling this? Or I’ll be out watching a storm roll in, camera in hand, muttering to myself: This could be the photo that changes everything.

Instead of just standing there, watching the sky change color, I’m trying to monetize the weather. It’s kind of strange when you think about it.

We treat rest like a battery that’s only allowed to recharge so we can work harder tomorrow. But what happened to just doing something for the useless joy of it?

Case in point: my attempt at watercolor painting about ten years ago.

I had this dreamy, cinematic vision of sitting by a sunlit window, capturing the soft light on a willow tree. After all, my sister is an incredible painter, as well as my mom, so it is in my DNA, right? Wrong! Reality hit hard within about twenty minutes. I almost drank my paint water twice. My willow tree looked like a wet green hairball. And I kept dragging my sleeve through the palette.

By the time I gave up, my shirt was ruined and the canvas looked less like art and more like a crime scene involving a blue raspberry slushie.

I hadn’t laughed that hard in months. But you know what my very first thought was when I cleaned up? Well, that was a total waste of two hours.

That thought right there is the trap. We’ve been conditioned to think that if an afternoon doesn’t produce something usable, measurable, or impressive, it was a failure.

In reality, unproductive joy asks for nothing. It doesn’t need a takeaway. It doesn’t need a growth trajectory. There is so much freedom in doing something simply because it feels good to do so.

It’s learning three words of a new language with zero intention of ever becoming fluent such as ordering “two hot dogs” with total confidence while accidentally using the word for “fire extinguisher” or inadvertently telling off someone.

It’s baking a loaf of bread that comes out so heavy and dense it could double as a home defense weapon and slathering it in butter anyway because it smelled amazing in the oven and it tastes good right now. (Been there! Done that!)

It’s watching a storm without pulling your phone out to document the lightning. Ok, that one might not be doable for me, just saying, but the goal is there.

It’s the brave people in beginner dance classes, running a full beat behind, looking like they’re swatting away an invisible swarm of bees while everyone else glides. They aren’t trying to build a brand. They’re just spending an hour being human.

When you take the goal away, all that pressure just vanishes. Your ego gets to go to sleep. You aren’t defending a reputation. You’re just playing.

So, give yourself a permission slip to do something completely, wonderfully useless today. Buy the cheap paints. Play the wrong chords. Burn the recipe - just not the house. In a world that demands a return on every single second, choosing to “waste” a little time on pure joy is a quiet, beautiful act of rebellion.

That is the relief of validation - that what you are experiencing or witnessing is not limited to just you. You haven’t lost your mind, your empathy is not a defect, and the absurdity or cruelty you are seeing in the world is real, not just a figment of your imagination or an overreaction. Everyone at some point has had serious doubts about what they are seeing. Whether it is scanning a headline, listening to an interview, or even just being part of an everyday conversation. You feel the need to ask someone else, “Are you seeing what I am seeing?” just to confirm that it is real.

We need that confirmation because, in case you haven’t noticed, we live in a culture that routinely gaslights anyone who not only pays attention but proceeds to call out inequalities. Somewhere along the way, we turned into a society where indifference is now a status symbol, and we treat basic, fundamental human sensitivity like some glitch that needs to be fixed.

Part of that gaslighting is the perpetual rebranding of what used to be considered injustice into efficiency. How many of you have heard the increasingly popular excuse, “It’s just business”? As this becomes normalized, your empathy all of a sudden makes you feel out of place. Instead of the injustice being the glitch, your empathy is.

So, when you finally have someone else look back at you and nod in agreement, saying, “Yeah, I see it too,” it isn’t just a relief, it’s also an anchor.

In looking at our current world, I see it through a very specific set of eyes. I spent years working as a chef before stepping into behavioral health, and I was raised in the Christian faith. All three of these worlds, in their most fundamental forms, are about sanctuary. One is about literally feeding people, one is about helping heal the mind, and the last should be about providing an anchor to those who are lost.

However, in today’s world, these often feel as though they are on the figurative chopping block.

Behavioral health services are being systematically gutted, underfunded, and treated as optional luxuries rather than basic needs. And the Christianity that I was taught, you know, the one that was supposed to center around grace, mercy, and standing with the marginalized and mistreated, has been so severely distorted by cultural and political agendas that it has become unrecognizable. Even the kitchen, which is meant to provide a sense of community and basic sustenance, is quickly getting outpriced for those who truly need it. When you dismantle the very systems meant to heal us, and the moral foundations intended to guide us are twisted to justify personal gain, the exhaustion ends up being not only professional, but existential.

Even sitting down to write this felt like running headfirst into a brick wall.

I’ve been stuck in this weird, exhausting paradox for weeks now. On one hand, I am so deeply, intensely passionate about all of this, from being concerned about human dignity, to protecting people who get written off, to saving the spaces that are actually supposed to heal us. But on the other hand? At times, I feel completely hollowed out. I care about everything, and yet I feel like I have zero energy left to do a single thing about it.

It’s an unsettling place to be. You wonder if you’re burning out, or if you’re just losing your edge.

There’s actually a German word for this exact flavor of grief: Weltschmerz. (I swear, Germans have some of the best words!) It translates literally to “world-pain.” It’s that heavy, bruised feeling you get when the gap between how the world should be and how cold it actually is just gets too wide to cross. It’s having a fire in your gut but feeling like every time you try to use it, the world just dumps a bucket of ice water on you.

Eventually, your brain just hits the emergency brake to protect you. The passion doesn’t disappear but instead it just turns into loud, static noise.

And honestly, I think that’s the final piece of the lie we have to stop buying into. We live in a culture that tells us if we aren’t constantly fighting, constantly producing, or constantly shouting from the rooftops, then our caring doesn’t count. But feeling passionate and completely exhausted at the exact same time isn’t a flaw. It doesn’t mean you’ve given up. It just means you’re a human being trying to hold onto your heart in a world that makes it really freaking hard to do so.

It was a casual reaction to me admitting that something most people would actively shun sounded like a genuinely good time to me. I laughed it off in the moment because, by normal, baseline standards, they aren’t wrong.

I am weird.

I have lost count of how many times I’ve caught people giving me the side-eye over my latest idea. You can practically see the thought bubble hovering above their heads, silently, and sometimes not so silently, questioning how on earth I plan to pull off my latest project or grand master plan.

For a long time, we are taught to view those side-eyes with a quick pang of self-consciousness or shame. We internalize them as a warning track, a signal that we’ve strayed too far from the group. I cannot tell you how many times I noticed those glances and tried to rein myself in to stay in the mainstream. But over time, I’ve come to see my weirdness as my greatest strength and the exact internal anchor I rely on to give me an upper edge.

What the outside world views as complete chaos is often just neurodivergence in action. Many of us don’t see the world in rigid black and white or proceed in linear, neat steps. We live and breathe in a multi-colored, multi-dimensional space where ideas crisscross and fold over each other in ways that seem entirely irrational to an onlooker. To an outsider looking in, our thought process looks like pure madness, a tangled web of tangents and hyper-fixations, right up until the exact moment it all snaps into focus and comes together into a concise, brilliant package.

Yet, despite the magic of that final result, so many of us spend the majority of our lives trying to hide the very engine that creates it.

Think back to your time in school. Step by step, grade by grade, we were slowly sanded down to fit the needed mold just to move forward to the next stage. If you solved a math problem and landed on the exact right answer, but didn’t show the single approved, rigid set of steps, you were told your logic was wrong. You had to do it over again, the “right” way. The educational system wasn’t built to foster divergent thought; it was built for standardization and predictable outputs.

Outside the classroom, the playground and hallways offered an even harsher lesson in conformity. We desperately scrambled to find a group where we fit in, or at least a corner where we wouldn’t stand out as a target. As a neurodivergent person, I quickly learned that survival meant mastering the art of mirroring. I studied the people around me, watching how they talked, what they cared about, how they reacted, and tried to adapt my behavior to match theirs just to blend in. We learn early to file down our sharpest, most unique edges so we can slip seamlessly into the background and avoid friction.

The real danger, however, is that mirroring is an incredibly seductive coping mechanism. What starts as a conscious strategy to get through middle school or survive a corporate job slowly starts taking over our personalities. Over time, that occasional mask worn for safety becomes a permanent feature. We wear it for so long that the seams fuse to our skin, and we gradually lose touch with where the performance ends and our actual self begins.

We live in a culture full of frustrating contradictions. Society endlessly preaches the value of originality, innovation, and “thinking outside the box.” Books are written about it; company mission statements claim to crave it. But in practice, the moment you actually express an unconventional idea or operate outside standard parameters, the immediate social demand is for strict conformity. People want the fruits of creative thinking, but they are often deeply uncomfortable with the messy, eccentric process required to yield them.

What most people fail to realize is that their true value actually lies directly within their eccentricity. If you look at the etymology of the word, eccentricity literally means a departure from the center. It isn’t a defect or a malfunction; it is simply a distance from the baseline average. (Don’t even get me started on how most no longer know the true meanings of words, only the popular interpretation – that’s for another hyper-fixated article.)

Think about it logically: if you think, act, move, and speak like everyone else, you essentially offer nothing distinct to the world. You become polite, agreeable, and manageable but at the same time you also become entirely interchangeable. When you conform, you erase your own signature.

When you finally stop polishing away your peculiarities, a massive shift occurs in how you navigate the world. Censoring your natural rhythm just to avoid side-eyes makes you tolerable to everyone, but deeply compelling to no one. Owning your quirks acts as a natural beacon. It functions like a filter, repelling the people who don’t understand your wavelength while intensely attracting the specific tribe of people who speak your language. It not only ends up being freeing, but for me at least, it alleviated some of my anxiety because I accepted that I don’t fall into any specific category because I have melted all the categories altogether.

Furthermore, people can almost always intuitively sense when someone is wearing a sanitized, corporate mask. It creates a subtle barrier to genuine human connection. Raw authenticity, even when it’s non-linear, intense, or unexpected, actually builds real trust faster than polished perfection ever could. In work, in art, and in leadership, true breakthroughs rarely come from following standard operating procedures step-by-step. They come from applying an unusual perspective to a conventional problem, bringing two seemingly unrelated worlds together because your brain happened to connect them.

Reclaiming your “weird” doesn’t mean changing your entire life overnight or forcing yourself into uncomfortable confrontations. It begins with a quiet internal audit. It means noticing where you are burning precious cognitive energy trying to fit a mold that was never designed for you in the first place. It means letting yourself enjoy the obscure project, voicing the non-traditional idea in the room, and trusting your non-linear path to the solution - even when everyone around you is giving you that familiar side-eye and asking how you’re ever going to pull it off.

Your idiosyncrasies aren’t noise in the system, nor are they flaws that need to be edited out for polite society. They are the system. They are the exact raw material that makes your contribution distinct, valuable, and irreplaceable. Stop sanding down the very parts of yourself that make you unforgettable.

There’s a special, exhausting brand of internal turmoil reserved for people who carry two deeply conflicting traits: a fiery demand for fairness, and a complete, paralyzing dread of conflict. To care intensely about equity, to practically break into hives over a double standard (it can happen with Lupus), while possessing the conflict-management style of a golden retriever is a ridiculous way to live.

It turns my brain into a non-stop negotiation. I’ve essentially volunteered as the world’s most reluctant “designated adult.” I’m walking around with a mental clipboard of everything that isn’t fair, but I refuse to hand out citations because, frankly, I don’t want to deal with the awkward conversation.

My brain is hardwired to spot patterns, inconsistencies, and subtle vibe shifts at lightning speed. I can’t turn it off. And because I’m cursed with high empathy, I don’t just notice a double standard, I get to feel it in my gut. My immediate instinct is to plant a flag, blow a referee whistle, and demand basic mutual respect.

Then, right on cue, the choir starts singing. A loud voice warns me about the fallout, the awkward silence, and the sheer administrative effort of a head-on confrontation. I hate drama, but I love justice. So, my mind becomes a secret courtroom where I play judge, jury, and frustrated bailiff, all in complete silence. Though, if I’m being honest, my face is usually giving away the entire plot in real-time.

The real breakdown happens when the pressure in that silent courtroom blows a gasket. When you’re the designated anchor - the person everyone expects to help them navigate their chaos, spot their triggers, or find their footing - you start holding yourself to a ridiculous, superhuman standard. You decide you always have to be the gold standard of emotional maturity: the shining blueprint of what to do, never the cautionary tale.

Spoiler alert: I am, in fact, that cautionary tale.

When your personal boundaries get pushed, or when the daily friction just gets too heavy, even the best peacekeeper needs a release valve. Instead of having a proactive, adult conversation with the person actually causing the frustration, the temptation is to safely dump that pressure somewhere else. So, we turn to a trusted sounding board to process out loud—hopefully confirming we haven’t completely lost our marbles, when in reality, we aren’t even sure we had them to begin with.

Except emotional physics doesn’t work that way. You can’t vent radioactive steam and expect the room to stay cool.

What’s meant to be a controlled vent leaks. The sheer intensity of the frustration alters the room’s atmospheric pressure, accidentally dragging innocent bystanders into the fallout zone.

And look, we’ve all seen it in the movies, and in real life. Whenever someone is visibly losing their mind, there is always that one brave soul in the crowd who steps up to offer: “Just calm down.” Which leads me to an urgent historical question: When, in the entire recorded history of the human race, has telling an escalated person to “just calm down” ever had the desired effect? Answer: Never. It has a 100% success rate of doing the exact opposite.

And when a situation spirals past what I intended, the self-flagellation starts immediately. Suddenly, the original issue vanishes, and I’m just sitting there thoroughly furious with myself. The anchor lost its grip. The self-proclaimed mediator just made a scene. Flawless execution, truly.

In those moments, I try to turn to history (which is my go-to) for a bit of grounding. Marcus Aurelius famously said that we always have the option to have no opinion, and that we don’t need to trouble our souls over things we can’t control. Which is easy for him to say given that he was the Emperor of Rome and could literally have people removed from his sight.

When I’m angry at myself for letting my frustration spill over, I have to remind myself that learning to be proactive instead of reactive is a never-ending life lesson. No matter how justified the irritation feels, taking a beat to respond with a constructive solution instead of just reacting in sheer frustration will almost always yield a better outcome.

It reminds me of one of the best reality checks I ever received in therapy: “The only reaction you will ever actually control is your own.” If someone else chooses to react negatively, throw a tantrum, or miss the point entirely, that’s on them. My only job is to put my own emotional splash zone in check.

I can’t logic the rest of the world into sudden self-awareness, and I can’t always control the weather when I’m experiencing a personal localized thunderstorm. My flaw isn’t that I care; it’s that I expect myself to operate like a serene, unbothered robot.

True peacekeeping isn’t a flawless performance. It’s a messy, continuous negotiation of tension. The fact that my energy spilled over doesn’t mean I’m a hypocrite or a terrible leader; it just means the internal pressure was too high for one person to carry in silence.

Navigating a high-sensitivity radar while trying to keep the peace is exhausting work. It means learning how to hold the line with patience and giving people room to catch up without letting their chaos dictate my mood. And sometimes, the most revolutionary act of fairness I can perform isn’t fixing the entire room or forcing myself to be perfect. It’s just giving a little grace to the person in the mirror, stepping out of the courtroom, and quietly calling a recess.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am clocking out as the designated adult for the day.

But what about the days where nothing explicitly “bad” happens, yet you still collapse onto the couch at 7:00 PM feeling thoroughly hollowed out?

You didn’t have a massive crisis. What you had was a masterclass in micro-stress.

Micro-stresses are the tiny, almost imperceptible blips of friction that scatter-bomb our days. It’s the passive-aggressive email that takes you ten minutes to draft a “polite” response to (or if you are me, it’s five rough drafts, then crossing your fingers that it still doesn’t come off as too mean). It’s a subtle double standard you witnessed but chose to swallow just to keep the peace. It’s navigating a world designed for perfect consistency when your health, your neurodivergence, or your energy is inherently fluctuating.

On their own, these moments feel too trivial to complain about. We logic ourselves out of our frustration, telling ourselves to “suck it up” or “it’s not a big deal.” But emotionally, we are just collecting these tiny drops of pressure. We think we’re successfully managing our lives, but we’re actually just walking around with pockets full of heavy lint.

Many of my chronic illness and “neurospicy” friends are intimately familiar with Christine Miserando’s Spoon Theory. It’s the brilliant idea that people living with chronic pain or neurodivergence start the day with a limited, finite number of “spoons” which serves as a visual currency for our daily energy. Cooking a meal might cost two spoons. A difficult phone call might cost three. When you run out of spoons, you are done done. There is no pushing through.

But when it comes to the invisible load of micro-stress, the game gets even more frustrating. We expect to spend our spoons on the big, obvious things. What we don’t expect is Spoon Theft.

Micro-stresses don’t demand a full spoon all at once. Instead, they shave off fractions of them throughout the day. Swallowing a double standard to keep the peace? That’s a quarter of a spoon gone. Masking your ADHD symptoms through a tedious meeting? Half a spoon. Masking a physical lupus pain flare while trying to appear “perfectly consistent” for a client? There goes another full spoon, evaporated into thin air.

By 2:00 PM, you look into your drawer and realize you’re completely out of spoons, even though you haven’t actually “done” anything major yet. The silent courtroom in your head has quietly embezzled your entire supply.

Eventually, the pressure inside that tank builds up too high, and we hit a quiet breaking point. Because we hold ourselves to a robotic standard of perfection, we look at our empty drawer of spoons and mistake it for a personal failure of character. We think we just need to hustle harder. Our immediate instinct when we hit this wall is to want to change our external landscape entirely. We wait for the weekend, the next vacation, or a medical breakthrough to finally bring us peace.

Even worse, when we hit that empty spoon drawer, the standard advice is usually to start cutting things out such as dropping responsibilities or shortening our to-do lists. But for those of us who actually thrive on momentum, engagement, and a full schedule, removing the big things isn’t the solution. We want the full plate.

The real, hidden friction doesn’t come from the volume of tasks on our calendar. It comes from the immediate, exhausting background processing that happens every time a micro-stressor hits. Because our brains are naturally wired to spot patterns and solve problems, we don’t just experience a minor daily glitch and move on. Instead, we instantly launch a massive internal engineering project to figure out how to streamline, optimize, and restructure our entire system so that specific friction never happens again.

We are constantly trying to anticipate future events and build flawless operational frameworks in our heads. It’s not the doing that drains us; it’s the constant, silent automating.

And that is the shift we have to make. Micro-stressors aren’t an emergency warning telling us to empty our schedules or quit our lives. They are simply tiny, real-time dashboard data points. They are there to show us exactly where the engine needs a small, tactical adjustment today and not necessarily a complete, exhausting systemic overhaul for next year.

But as the French novelist Marcel Proust famously observed:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

If we are constantly waiting for a new landscape whether it be a world where the healthcare system is flawless, workplaces are perfectly accommodating, or people are magically self-aware (can you even fathom that one?), we will be waiting forever. The breakthrough doesn’t happen by escaping the room; it happens by changing our internal lens.

Having “new eyes” means shifting from a mindset of flawless performance to one of conscious energy management. A diagnosis or a label might describe the complicated soil we are growing in, but it doesn’t dictate how we survive the daily weather.

When you look at your day through this new lens, you stop trying to fix the entire landscape around you, and you start focusing on your own daily boundary lines. You realize that protecting your peace isn’t a perfect science, but rather it is a practiced skill.

Instead of waiting for a massive vacation to empty an overfilled tank, you begin practicing micro-recoveries throughout the day. This is where we redefine what a “good day” actually looks like. It’s the revolutionary act of implementing a “Mental Minimum” which consists of intentional pivots of perspective that take your energy back in real time.

Micro-recovery looks like pausing for three deep breaths after a tense meeting before opening your next email tab. It’s actively hunting for one small pocket of pleasure in the middle of a chaotic afternoon. It’s demanding a few minutes of genuine peace and stillness, letting a minor imbalance pass without turning your mind into a silent courtroom to judge it. It’s allowing yourself to find pride in simply managing your energy well, rather than measuring your value by your output.

The truth is that you don’t need to change your whole life or force yourself to operate flawlessly to protect your sanity. You just need to change the lens. True self-care isn’t about clearing your calendar or escaping the room; it’s just looking in the mirror, letting yourself off the hook for not being a machine, and walking back into your day on your own terms.

Now, imagine living with that exact level of profound exhaustion and physical drain every single day, without an expiration date. And then, layer a severe mental health issue and a neurodevelopmental condition directly on top of it. Suddenly, you aren’t just fighting a temporary virus; you are battling a multi-front war against your own body and mind, all while trying to force a broken healthcare system to give you a map of the battlefield.

Trying to get a medical professional to officially recognize a psychiatric or neurodevelopmental condition like ADHD, severe anxiety, or a Serious Mental Illness (SMI) is already a grueling endurance sport. Unlike a broken bone or diabetes, there is no quick blood test, swabbing of the throat, or X-ray that spits out a definitive answer. Instead, the process relies entirely on subjective behavioral observations, exhaustive self-reporting, psychiatric interviews, and a painful amount of time. The average person can spend years cycling through a frustrating carousel of misdiagnoses, often being patted on the head and told they are simply “stressed” or “overwhelmed by life” while their actual, underlying conditions go completely unnoticed. When you combine that clinical ambiguity with a massive, nationwide shortage of specialists and months-long waiting lists just to get an intake appointment, simply getting a foot in the door of the mental health system requires an immense amount of privilege, money, and relentless persistence.

But what happens when you are trying to survive that chaotic diagnostic maze while your physical body is also actively waging an autoimmune war against itself?

When you inject a complex, chronic physical disease into this already fractured mental health pipeline, the difficulty doesn’t just double; it multiplies exponentially. This isn’t a rare or niche dilemma, either. The reality is that the intersection between physical and mental suffering is incredibly crowded. Studies consistently show that an estimated 60% to 75% of people living with severe mental health conditions also navigate chronic physical illnesses. Yet, when you are forced to carry both burdens at the same time, the medical system often shuts down your ability to get comprehensive help through a clinical phenomenon known as “diagnostic overshadowing.” Because your physical ailments are so loud, heavy, and visually apparent on lab reports, they completely drown out everything else. Your mind is forced to take a backseat to your body.

I know this trap intimately because it is almost the exact blueprint of my life. I live with lupus, ADHD, and anxiety, and my journey to unlocking those three diagnoses was a masterclass in medical gaslighting, systemic failure, and administrative brick walls.

My physical battle started incredibly early. I was first diagnosed with lupus when I was just six years old. At an age when I should have been focused on recess and cartoons, I was thrust into a world of clinical rooms and confusing medical jargon. But because the system is notoriously hesitant to stamp a young child with a heavy, lifelong, incurable autoimmune label, a different doctor eventually reviewed my files, shook their head, and told my family it was a “false positive.” Just like that, the diagnosis was erased, and I was sent on my way. I spent the next fifteen years of my life feeling my body fail me in ways I couldn’t explain - enduring unexplainable fatigue, joint pain, and systemic crashes - always wondering if I was just weak. It wasn’t until I hit my early twenties, after my body forced the issue, that I was finally, officially rediagnosed with lupus.

But getting that hard physical label didn’t unlock the holistic help I desperately needed. Instead, it became a convenient weapon for doctors to use whenever I asked for support. I found myself trapped in an infuriating, seemingly endless loop of medical finger-pointing where no specialist wanted to take actual responsibility for my symptoms.

When my body was flaring up, my joints ached, and I could barely function, I would go to the doctor begging for help managing the lupus. Instead of looking at my autoimmune markers or adjusting my treatments, they would look at my chart, notice my history of stress, pass the buck, and tell me my physical pain was likely just a somatic manifestation of my mental health. They suggested I was just thinking myself into a flare-up.

But then, the inverse would happen. When I went to a clinician to voice that my internal world was spinning out of control - that my anxiety was spiking to unmanageable levels, that I was experiencing terrifying panic, and that my focus was entirely shattered - they would completely pivot. They would point right back at my chart and blame it entirely on the lupus. They told me I was just understandably sad or anxious about being a sick person, or they chalked my inability to focus up to basic “lupus brain fog.”

Because I had a serious autoimmune disease attached to my name, it became the ultimate clinical scapegoat. The distinct, underlying neurobiology of my ADHD and the specific mechanics of my anxiety disorder were completely overshadowed. My physical lupus flares were ignored and blamed on my mind, while my psychological suffering was ignored and blamed on my body. It wasn’t until my late twenties - after decades of being bounced back and forth like a tennis ball between doctors who refused to look at the whole picture - that I finally managed to bypass the finger-pointing, advocate through the noise, and secure my ADHD and anxiety diagnoses.

The human body doesn’t separate physical and mental suffering; they use the exact same chemical, hormonal, and inflammatory highways. This creates a messy biological overlapping zone where symptoms constantly mimic and mask one another. A doctor faces a massive puzzle trying to figure out if a patient cannot get out of bed because a lupus flare has starved their muscles of energy, or because an executive functioning deficit from ADHD has paralyzed their ability to initiate a task. But instead of taking the time to solve that puzzle, too many clinicians use the overlap as an excuse to pass the buck, leaving patients stranded in diagnostic limbo for years.

Ultimately, this structural and biological gridlock leads to a state of total energy bankruptcy. Trying to manage chronic pain, medication schedules, and immune flares takes every single ounce of strength you possess. When you trap an undiagnosed, overwhelmed mind inside a body that is chronically ill, you simply run out of the physical and emotional stamina required to fight a fractured medical system. You are left trying to act as the unpaid, underfunded project manager of your own complex care, desperately trying to bridge two medical worlds - physical and mental health - that refuse to talk to each other.

And yet, getting the diagnosis - climbing that absolute mountain of a system - is only the first summit. Once you finally have the words for what is wrong with you, a brand-new uphill battle begins: surviving in a world that isn’t built for you.

In my professional life, I work directly with clients who have formal SMI diagnoses. Every single day, I watch them carry the heavy trauma of everything they had to go through just to get their conditions recognized by the medical community. They have endured the same gaslighting, the same systemic roadblocks, and the same exhausting finger-pointing that I did. But now that they finally have their answers and are trying to rebuild their lives, they are crashing headfirst into another brutal barrier: the employment world.

They are battling fiercely just to find a place in a traditional workforce that demands rigid, hyper-consistent output. They face an economy that rarely accommodates the unpredictable ebb and flow of a serious mental illness or a physical flare-up. The sheer resilience it takes for my clients to navigate job applications, interview loops, and the terrifying decision of whether or not to disclose their disability to an employer is staggering. They aren’t asking for handouts; they are fighting for a fair shot to utilize their skills, earn a living, and find purpose, but the professional world often closes its doors the second a resume doesn’t look perfectly seamless. Watching them fight this second war makes it undeniably clear that the system doesn’t stop failing you once you get your medical codes.

So next time you see someone who is obviously struggling either mentally or physically, take a minute to think about the whole process to even get to where they are. The fight for a chronically ill, neurodivergent, or SMI individual isn’t just against the symptoms themselves; it is a quiet, exhausting, years-long war against a world that forces patients to fight just for the right to be seen, heard, believed, and employed.

If this sudden plan unfolds as intended, the consequences won’t just affect state budgets - they will reshape the very fabric of how we support recovery.

If you aren’t entirely sure what it looks like on a day-to-day basis, here’s an example to run with: When a client with schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder practices interviewing, masters a new software, or figures out how to ask for a workplace accommodation, they aren’t just checking off a box. They are actively rebuilding their identity. They are proving to themselves - and to a world that constantly writes them off - that they have a place in the community.

But by shifting the whole system from an agency focused on learning to an agency focused on medicine, we are fundamentally changing the conversation. We’re resurrecting the old “Medical Model” of disability. That’s the outdated idea that a person is defined entirely by their diagnosis, and that society’s only job is to clinically manage them.

What makes this shift systematically doomed is the glaring reality of American healthcare. The United States is already notoriously bad at providing basic, equitable medical care. We have a system plagued by administrative gridlock, soaring costs, insurance barriers, and massive care deserts. Forcing vocational training - something that requires agile, individualized, community-level support - into a healthcare apparatus that is already buckled under its own weight is a recipe for disaster. If a vulnerable individual has to fight a bureaucratic war just to see a specialist or get a prescription refilled, how can we expect that same broken system to efficiently help them launch a career?

Think about how that plays out in real life. Instead of asking a client, “What are your passions, and how do we build a career around them?” the system starts asking, “What are your clinical limitations, and how do we keep your symptoms quiet?” For people already fighting intense social stigma, that’s a massive psychological blow. It risks turning active citizens striving for a paycheck back into passive patients waiting on a prior authorization form from an overstretched healthcare bureaucrat.

And then there’s the structural mess this creates for community programs.

The gold standard for helping people with SMI find work has always been integration - getting mental health support and real-world job coaching to work hand-in-hand out in the local community. But the new plan fragments everything. The funding and training move to HHS, but the actual civil rights enforcement is being shipped over to the Department of Justice.

What makes this especially concerning is the reality of what the DOJ has become right now. We are watching the Department of Justice shift away from a non-partisan platform and transform into what looks like a personal justice department for the president, no longer even making an effort to be seen as impartial or non-partisan.

I don’t even want to try to imagine navigating that. If a client faces discrimination at their new job, they can’t handle it under one roof anymore. They, their families, and their employment specialists will have to chase answers across a multi-agency bureaucratic labyrinth just to defend a basic right to work. When bureaucracy gets that complicated, the people who need help the most are usually the ones who give up.

We don’t have to guess where this road leads, either. All we have to do is look back to our history, which tells us exactly what happens when we pull back on community-level integration. When the mass closing of state psychiatric hospitals in the ’70s and ’80s wasn’t met with the local funding promised to replace them, it directly triggered the modern homelessness crisis. We just shifted people from hospital beds to jail cells and sidewalk tents.

If we scale back the legal frameworks - like the Olmstead ruling - that keep people integrated in their communities and working real jobs, we’re just repeating history. When someone with an SMI is denied the specialized, everyday employment training we provide, they don’t just stay unemployed. The risk of isolation, housing instability, and full-blown mental health crises skyrockets.

Global data proves this over and over: robust social investment upfront is a massive cost-saving measure. It is vastly cheaper - and infinitely more humane - to fund a job coach and a skill-building group now than it is to pay for chronic emergency room visits, shelters, and crisis interventions down the line.

The “Least of These” Contradiction

If we’re going to be completely honest about what’s driving this, we also have to look at the ideological engine behind it: the rise of Christian nationalism in federal policy.

It is a deeply strange, frustrating thing to watch. The irony is staggering. The very movement pushing to infuse “Christian values” into American governance is the one architecting a system that strips away support from the country’s most vulnerable people.

If you look at the New Testament - specifically Matthew 25 - there is a core moral mandate that forms the foundation of Christian ethics: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” It’s a call to look at the hungry, the sick, the stranger, and the marginalized, and treat them with the highest level of care, dignity, and active support.

But Christian nationalism, as a political movement, has divorced itself from that theology. Instead of focusing on the compassion of the gospel, it has focused entirely on power and control.

By dismantling the social safety net, making community-based independent living optional, and trapping vocational rehab inside a clinical, medicalized bureaucracy, this policy shift does the exact opposite of holding to a “least of these” mindset. It turns a blind eye to the structural needs of people living with Serious Mental Illness. It takes a population that is already pushed to the fringes and tells them, “Your independence isn’t our priority. Your rights are too expensive to enforce.”

Historically, whenever a religious movement hitches its wagon to raw political power, the first thing it sacrifices is its empathy. It stops being about serving the vulnerable and starts being about protecting its own status.

That’s why this shift is so profoundly concerning. We are watching a political ideology use the language of faith to justify cutting the very lifelines that allow vulnerable Americans to live with dignity.

Work is Wellness

At the end of the day, work is wellness. A job provides a reason to get out of bed, a routine, a social network, and a tangible stake in society. For someone living with an SMI, a paycheck can be the single most powerful tool for long-term recovery.

As a behavioral health provider, your daily work is actually a living reflection of that “least of these” philosophy - whether you’re religious or not. It’s about looking at someone who society has marginalized, seeing their inherent value, and doing the hard, consistent work to help them build a life of independence.

As the blueprints keep shifting in Washington, those of us doing the heavy lifting on the ground have to keep our focus clear. We have to keep arguing, and loudly at that, that employment isn’t a clinical prescription to be managed by healthcare bureaucrats, nor is it a luxury to be scaled back by politicians. It’s a fundamental path to a dignified, independent life.

History has a cruel way of repeating itself when politicians mistake an administrative shuffle for actual progress, and patients pay the price for a system that forgot how to see them as people.

So, as we watch the most vulnerable among us be stripped of the support they need to work and survive, I have to ask:

~ Exactly what part of this falls under the cloak of “Christianity” ~

Yeah, those are fun, right?

You eventually have to just sit there and laugh, because otherwise, it will just drag you down into the abyss. People talk about “getting your ducks in a row” like it’s a standard weekend chore, a simple matter of willpower and a label maker. But let’s be honest: I don’t even have ducks. I have squirrels. They are unmedicated, over-caffeinated, and highly erratic. Currently, one is entirely missing - presumably trying to fight a pigeon for a discarded bagel - and another is in the corner wearing a tiny bandana, actively planning a mutiny against my Google Calendar.

The old saying goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” Well, when I live with the delightful combination of ADHD and anxiety, God isn’t just laughing - He’s hosting a watch party with the angels, eating popcorn, and placing bets on how long it takes me to realize I completely forgot to schedule that one appointment that I spent all of last week reminding myself to do.

The moment I dare to exhale and think, “Wow, look at me, I’m finally dialing it in,” is the exact moment the universe cracks its knuckles, looks at its watch, and says, “Hold my beer, I’ve got a surprise for this one.”

The Trap

We all know the feeling of the Trap. It usually happens on a Sunday afternoon or a random Tuesday morning. If you read my piece last week about my Anxiety and ADHD being the world’s worst roommates, you know they rarely agree on anything.

But for a brief, terrifyingly beautiful window of time, my internal squirrels actually form a truce. The anxious one stops cataloging my flaws, the chaotic one stops researching hats for quail (it’s a thing, look it up!), and I actually accomplish things.

I start getting ahead on my paperwork. I even dare to outline what next week could look like, and if I am feeling particularly ambitious, I begin on that one project I have been putting off for so many months. In the personal side of things, perhaps I buy a cart full of vegetables with the genuine, pure-hearted intention of consuming them before they turn into a science project. I sit back, take a sip of water, and think, “I have done it. I am a functioning adult. I am unstoppable.”

Never say this out loud. The universe treats personal peace like an automated trigger system.

The moment that thought crosses my mind, the universe’s gears shift. The universe doesn’t send a grand, biblical trial to test our faith; it sends a series of highly specific, mildly insulting inconveniences designed to break my spirit.

My grand illusion of control lasted right up until Monday morning hit. The universe didn’t just send a minor inconvenience this week; it hired a Hollywood director and staged a multi-day corporate thriller at my expense. I am sure the bill for the production budget is in the mail somewhere.

I am talking about back-to-back days of surreal, escalating workplace fire drills - the kind where I actively look around for hidden cameras because I am convinced I have been trapped in a dark comedy movie. I suddenly feel like Liam Neeson, tempted to tell whoever is calling next that I have a particular set of skills and to not test my limits.

While I am trying to put out those literal and figurative fires, the space-time continuum of my calendar decides to fold in on itself. I glance at my screen only to be reminded I have an inevitable scheduling paradox, having booked two entirely separate clients for the exact same time slot out of pure optimism. I did this because last week, when I was full of hopes and dreams, I just knew I would be able to do it. And looking back, I did, but it was a stretch to say the least.

At that point, it turns into the infomercial “But wait, there’s more!” Some of my other team members unfortunately come up feeling ill, and another has a computer that decides to experience a significant issue that appears to require an exorcism rather than an IT ticket.

At that point, my brain almost goes into auto-drive. My internal anxiety immediately launches a full-scale investigation into pointing out deadlines that don’t exist outside of my mind and starts drafting a mock email to blast out my impending doom. Meanwhile, my ADHD is so utterly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of competing emergencies that it wants to abandon the building entirely, walk to the nearest nursery, and buy a peace lily.

But here is the secret they don’t tell you about the squirrels: when the mutiny happens, and the row of ducks completely scatters into the wind, we have a choice. We can let the chaos drag us under, or we can pull up a chair, watch the explosion, and appreciate the absolute artistry of the cosmos.

Because honestly? Balancing several clients, while helping a team member with technology issues that require a priest, staff coming up sick, and suddenly realizing I still forgot that one appointment from last week? It is a level of chaos so pure I can’t help but admire it. If I don’t chuckle at the Hollywood-level production value of it all, the universe wins.

Man plans, God laughs, and my missing bagel-fighting squirrel probably just elected himself mayor of the local park using my stolen Google Calendar password. We can’t control the surprises the universe has waiting for us the second we think we have our lives dialed in. But we can choose to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, take a deep breath, and remember that we survived another corporate thriller.

So here’s to the weeks that blow up in our faces before Wednesday even has a chance to start. May your computer screens stay functional, may your peace lily survive, and may your squirrels at least share the popcorn while you watch the show.

Take a typical Tuesday morning, for example. At 7:00 AM, Anxiety stands at the whiteboard, sweating through its shirt, screaming that if we don’t reply to fourteen emails right this second, our boss will fire us, our credit score will plummet to zero, and we’ll inevitably die alone in a ditch. It’s got charts, it’s got graphs, it’s sweating bullets. ADHD looks up from the floor, entirely unfazed, and chimes in with a counter-proposal: Hey, let’s spend the next four hours reading the entire Wikipedia page for the Himalayan cats, and then let’s move the couch to the other side of the room to see if the lighting is better. The compromise they settle on is a total masterpiece of psychological paralysis. Anxiety panics so hard about the emails that it completely freezes my motor functions, while ADHD refuses to let me focus on the actual work anyway. So, I just end up sitting there on the edge of my chair, staring blankly at my laptop screen, vibrating at a frequency that could shatter glass, accomplishing absolutely nothing but somehow still needing a three-hour nap by noon.

And don’t even get me started on the absolute circus when it comes to trying to leave the house. We can’t just walk out the door like normal citizens. First, Anxiety will suddenly realize we can’t find the car keys and launch into a frantic monologue about how being five minutes late means we fundamentally disrespect other people’s time, which proves we are a bad person, which is why everyone secretly hates us. When Anxiety demands to know where the keys are, ADHD cheerfully admits that they were put in an incredibly safe, highly logical place… but the exact coordinates were wiped from my mind the literal millisecond my hand put them down. In fact, ADHD isn’t even sure we own a car anymore, but hey, look at this cool receipt from a smoothie place we went to in 2019! Should we read the ingredients out loud? Anxiety responds by triggering a mild panic attack, and we spend the next twenty minutes retracing our steps, only to find the keys are currently in my left hand. Because of this, I regularly exist in a state of ‘waiting mode’ - thinking about the fact that I have to go somewhere hours in advance and already planning when I need to leave, and don’t even think about starting to do something else because I will focus on that and completely lose track of time!

The social anxiety crossover episode is even worse. If we actually manage to make it to a party or happy hour, the roommates immediately start fighting over the controls. ADHD sees a room full of people and goes, “Brilliant! Let’s bounce around to five different conversations, interrupt three people to tell them a fun fact about porcupines, and then drift away mid-sentence because someone over there has a shiny watch!” Anxiety immediately panics, slams on the brakes, and says, “Oh my god, lock it down. Did you see how they blinked when you said ‘porcupines’? They think you’re a psychopath. We need to go find a seat backed up to a wall, nurse a beverage in absolute silence, and replay that interaction in our head for the next six years.” The result is me typically sitting in the corner of the table, looking like a glitching NPC in a video game, making intense eye contact with someone’s dog while trying to remember how human arms are supposed to hang naturally.

The only time these two bitter rivals ever actually get along is when a genuine, real-world catastrophe happens. If the kitchen pipes burst, an ominous storm rolls in, or there’s a legitimate emergency, they suddenly team up like a seasoned SWAT unit. Anxiety is absolutely thrilled because the apocalyptic worst-case scenario it always predicted is finally here, meaning it can stop worrying about the future and just enjoy the present disaster. Meanwhile, ADHD’s dopamine receptors light up like a Christmas tree because it finally has the high-stakes, red-alert chaos it craves to feel alive. For about forty-five minutes, I am a superhero of crisis management, directing traffic, fixing leaks, and saving lives. But the second the plumber shows up, fixes the leak, and hands us a clipboard, the truce is instantly over. The adrenaline fades, and they go right back to screaming at each other over whether we should do our paperwork or learn how to play the harmonica on YouTube.

I’ve thought about trying to evict one of them, but the terrifying truth is, this toxic living situation is the only thing keeping me afloat. It’s a delicate ecosystem of mutual destruction. If Anxiety moved out, ADHD would leave the stove on, forget to pay the electric bill, and wander into the woods to live with a family of squirrels. If ADHD left, Anxiety would lock us in a sterilized room, check the deadbolt until it breaks, and refuse to eat anything that wasn’t pre-approved by a federal agency. They are a nightmare, but they are my nightmare.

But if I’m being completely honest, when they aren’t actively trying to sabotage my ability to function in polite society, I have to admit they both bring some weirdly incredible superpowers to the table. They’re like a dysfunctional superhero duo where the powers come with heavy side effects.

Anxiety might be a hyper-vigilant buzzkill, but you know what? It’s also the reason my deadlines are met on time and why I am never, ever unprepared for a worst-case scenario. If a friend needs a band-aid, a phone charger, an extra emergency snack, or a fully mapped-out contingency plan for surviving a sudden flight cancellation, Anxiety has already packed it three days in advance. It’s a radar system that, when dialed down, keeps my life from completely unraveling.

And ADHD? For all its chaotic energy and lost keys, it’s the only reason my life has any color. When a project requires creative, outside-the-box thinking, ADHD doesn’t just think outside the box - it forgets the box ever existed and builds a time machine instead. It gives me the ability to hyper-focus on complex problems and solve them in ways a linear mind never could. It brings a sense of childlike wonder, spontaneity, and a genuine passion for the absurd that keeps me from becoming a boring corporate robot.

So, I guess I’m stuck playing landlord to this internal trainwreck for the foreseeable future. They’re exhausting, they’re loud, and they’re incredibly stubborn. But between Anxiety’s fierce protective drive and ADHD’s wild, unstoppable imagination, I’ve realized they make me exactly who I am: a deeply creative, hyper-prepared, completely chaotic human being. Now, if you need me, I’ll just be sitting here at my computer, staring at a blank document, while my roommates spend the next two hours locked in a brutal corporate negotiation over whether our next project should be a meticulously structured, program curriculum, or a deep-dive podcast about the cultural history of coffee.

If you’re from the less populated regions, maybe your version is, “Not my pig, not my farm.” If you travel overseas, you’ll find that other cultures have come up with equally brilliant ways to wash their hands of trouble. The Dutch will dryly shrug off a conflict by declaring, “I’m not wearing that shirt,” while the French will look at a brewing disaster and casually decide to “let them handle their own soup.”

They’re great phrases, right? They make us laugh, they’re witty, and let’s face it - they give us a perfect, socially acceptable exit ramp from having to deal with an awkward situation. But lately, it feels like these funny little disclaimers have evolved from a healthy way to set personal boundaries into a sort of psychological armor. We are using them to justify a society that is quietly, steadily growing numb. What started as a tool for emotional survival has morphed into a collective permission slip to just pass the buck.

You can feel this unwritten social contract fraying at the edges almost every single day. It’s rarely some sudden, dramatic collapse of civilization. Instead, it’s a slow erosion built on a thousand tiny moments of people just not giving a damn. It’s the local animal shelter overflowing to the brink because people are dropping off pets like unwanted Amazon returns the second they grow past the cute puppy phase or require actual effort. It’s the parent staring blankly at their smartphone screen, completely checked out, while their kid treats a retail worker or a teacher like a punching bag. We see this stuff, we wince, and then we reach right for our linguistic shields: Outside my pay grade. Let them handle their own soup.

And look, I get it. I really do. Human beings are hardwired for self-preservation, and right now, caring feels incredibly expensive. Most of us are running on absolute fumes, balancing demanding jobs, family obligations, and an endless list of daily chores. We are constantly rushed, permanently tired, and chronically behind schedule. Even right now I am cautioning myself to not take on too much more. In a world that moves this fast, stopping to take the high road doesn’t just feel heavy, it feels like a massive inconvenience. When you’re already late for a meeting, stopping to track down a cart corral, write a note for a scratched bumper, or help someone catch a loose dog feels like the straw that will break your camel’s back.

When you couple that frantic busyness with the fact that you are constantly exposed to people dodging responsibility, cutting corners, and shifting blame without any real consequences, your internal fairness meter just breaks. You start to experience this heavy, exhausting “accountability fatigue.” You honestly start to feel like a sucker for wasting your precious, limited time being the only person who does the right thing while everyone else plays dirty. In that environment, apathy offers a really tempting, peaceful escape. It whispers that if you just lower your standards, stop paying attention, and stop caring, you can save your time and your energy. It’s an emotional anesthesia.

But we have to talk about the vital, dangerous distinction between maintaining healthy boundaries and completely abdicating human decency. Protecting your energy and knowing your limitations is necessary for survival. We can’t carry the weight of the entire world on our shoulders. But we have to be honest with ourselves about where a boundary ends and bystander apathy begins.

Because sometimes, we are in the circus. Sometimes, the pig is on our farm.

When the fabric of our actual community is tearing right in front of our eyes, claiming “not my problem” is not a sign of emotional maturity - it’s just taking the easy way out dressed up as self-care. Yes, stepping up is inconvenient. It costs us time we don’t think we have, and it requires effort we don’t feel like giving. But it is very much needed. If we only choose to act with integrity when it’s easy, fast, or convenient, or only when society rewards us for it, we’ve handed absolute control of our character over to strangers. We become just as empty as the behaviors we’re complaining about.

So how do we keep from falling into this numb, cynical trap? We have to realize that in an era where everyone is looking out for number one, being a decent, responsible human being is no longer just the status quo; it is, in fact, an act of rebellion. You and I cannot single-handedly fix a culture of convenience, but we can fiercely protect the square footage of earth we happen to stand on.

We can start by modeling the exact behavior that drives us crazy when it’s missing in others. We can commit to absolute micro-accountability, even when there isn’t a single person is watching and even when we are in a rush. If you scratch a bumper, take the extra two minutes to leave a note. If you make a mess, clean it up. If you make a commitment, honor it even when it becomes incredibly inconvenient.

On top of that, we can counteract the coldness of everyday society with what I like to call aggressive small gestures. This means intentionally forcing ourselves to slow down for just thirty seconds to be radically warm to the cashier who looks like they’ve been on their feet for twelve hours. It means waving at the neighbor you’ve ignored for a year, or actually stopping to help someone struggling to load groceries into their trunk. These actions may not necessarily solve global crises, but they do something arguably more important: they send a powerful signal to our own brains that goodness and accountability aren’t dead, because we are actively keeping them alive. By refusing to let our packed schedules justify our numbness, we create friction against the slide toward apathy.

Finally, we have to seek out and protect relationships with the people who still show up, the ones in your life who still flinch at cruelty, who still take responsibility, and who still care deeply about the human beings around them. You cannot fight accountability fatigue all by yourself; you need a sanctuary of like-minded people to recharge your battery and remind you that your efforts actually matter.

The next time you see a situation in your community that needs a hand, try to resist the urge to reach for a clever disclaimer or blame your busy schedule. Put away the shirts, the pigs, the soup, and the monkeys. Sometimes, the most impactful gesture you can do is simply stop looking for a witty exit line, accept the temporary inconvenience, step forward, and take it on.

Best grab a shovel, because it is, in fact, your farm.

And honestly, the hardest part isn’t just the fatigue. It’s the quiet question that starts creeping in when you’re exhausted: “Am I even doing the right thing here?”

When you’re running on empty, you start doubting your choices, your direction, and whether any of your effort actually matters.

There are usually three trains of thought when you hit this wall and those are: suck it up and push through; tuck your head in the sand and just ignore what is going on; or keep telling yourself that someone else has it far worse than you do so quit your bellyaching. None of those are particularly helpful, eh?

“Sucking it up” leads straight to burnout. “Burying your head in the sand” changes absolutely nothing. And minimizing your own struggles just because someone else has it worse doesn’t make your own hill any less steep to climb.

So… what is the fourth option?

I came across a fourth option in a piece of family history. I introduced you all to my great-great-grandmother, Hilda, in a few of my previous articles. Her story, The Echo of Greatness, shares part of her journey. But as a brief recap, she was essentially traded as a commodity among her family in the late 1870s. Sent away to Chicago at just four years old to work as a child seamstress, she was later shipped back to Minnesota to nearly die of illness, only to be sent back once again to Chicago to work when she had recovered.

Throughout her writings and letters, she didn’t just “suck it up.” She often included poems that she used to inspire others, and one such poem is the one I came across today.

Now, the origins of who actually wrote this poem are a bit of a historical debate - whether it was John Greenleaf Whittier or Edgar Guest - but the meaning behind the words remains the exact same. For a woman recovering from a stolen childhood and a broken body in the early 1880s, these lines were not just nice verses to pass the time. They were what kept her going when everything else seemed to be falling apart. She wrote poems and quotes on any little piece of paper she could find and kept them tucked away.

As you read the poem below, don’t just read it as irrelevant old words. Read it as a survival guide for the days when your own dam is cracking and that doubt starts to creep in:

Don’t Quit

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When funds are low and debts are high,
And you want to smile but you have to sigh,
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest if you must, but don’t you quit;
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone one of us sometimes learns,
And many failure turns about,
When he might have won had he stuck it out,
Don’t give up, though the pace seems slow -
You may succeed with another blow.
Often the goal is nearer than
It seems to a faint and faltering man,
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor’s cup,
And he learned too late when the night slipped down,
How close he was to the golden crown,
Success is failure turned inside out -
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,
And you can never tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar,
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit -
It’s when things seems worst that you must not quit.

When you look closely at what Hilda’s note is actually saying, it completely blows up those three unhelpful coping mechanisms we talk ourselves into today. It doesn’t tell you to numb out, pretend life isn’t messy or blindly grind yourself into dust. Instead, it gives us a much better way to look at resilience, especially when we’re feeling totally drained by the sheer weight of everyday life.

It’s okay to hit pause: “Rest if you must...”

Notice that the poem doesn’t say, “Work until you drop, but don’t you quit.” It says, “Rest if you must, but don’t you quit.”

There is a huge difference between quitting and just taking a breather, but we tend to get them confused. When we look at the daily grind, the social division, and the economic stress around us, it feels like we either have to fight until we drop or just walk away entirely because we’re exhausted.

Hilda’s life is proof that resting is just part of the strategy. When her body broke down as a young child and later on as a young teenager, she had to stop. She had to heal. Taking a break isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s just the maintenance you need to stay in the game. Stepping back to protect your peace, turning off the noise, or taking a night off from life’s heavy demands isn’t quitting, it’s just refueling the tank.

Progress is usually invisible: “...though the pace seems slow”

When you’re staring at a cracking dam with a piece of bubble gum, it feels like nothing you do is working. You show up every day, you work hard, you try to do right by the people around you, and yet the hill just keeps looking steep. It feels like running on a treadmill and I am not a runner.

But the poem reminds us: “Often the goal is nearer than it seems...”

Real progress doesn’t happen in a straight line. The biggest breakthroughs in life don’t usually give us a daily progress report; they happen after a long, quiet buildup of refusing to give up. You never truly know how close you are to a tipping point. Throwing your hands up right now might mean walking away five minutes before the breakthrough.

Failure isn’t the end of the story: “Success is failure turned inside out”

Remember the question from earlier? “Am I even doing the right thing?”

Hilda survived an incredibly brutal childhood and was able to learn that questioning yourself is just part of the human experience. The poem captures it perfectly: “Success is failure turned inside out / The silver tint of the clouds of doubt.”

Doubt is not a sign that you are doing the wrong thing. It’s just the cloud that always shows up right before the silver lining. Asking if you’re on the right track doesn’t mean you’re failing; it just means you care enough to question the path.

Setbacks and second-guesses aren’t the opposite of success; they’re just part of the process. They show us what didn’t work so we can adjust our grip, learn the lesson, and try again.

Hilda didn’t keep these words around so we could look at them like old antiques. She kept them because she knew life would always find new ways to test our grit and throughout her life that would be proven true.

So… the next time you notice a new crack starting up in the dam, and that quiet voice asks if any of this is worth it, take a breath.

Don’t bury your head. Don’t just “suck it up.”

Rest if you must. Lean into the story of people like Hilda who walked through uphill battles before you, take a second to reevaluate your mindset, and get back out there. Because you honestly never know just how close you are.

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The other morning, I was talking with a friend about everyday stress, both in the workplace and out of it, because sometimes life just comes swinging extra hard. Out of nowhere, she asked me point-blank, “Are you empathic?”

I didn’t even have to think about it. “One hundred percent,” I responded.

She nodded, admitting she felt the same way about herself, before adding, “I thought so. Then you know exactly how our nervous systems get, and how easily we can burn out just by the environments we’re in.”

She was entirely right. When you navigate the world as an empath, your body acts like a giant sponge, absorbing the invisible frequencies, unspoken grief, and chaotic energy of whatever room you walk into. It can be physically exhausting. Yet, as we kept talking, I told her I firmly believe that this highly sensitive nervous system serves a larger purpose: it brings the exact people we are meant to meet onto our path at the perfect point in time. Or, perhaps, it’s just because those of us who feel deeply tend to see, feel, and absorb a little more of the world than most.

I think the truth is a unique, heavy mix of both. Empathy is not just a passive emotion; it is an active force of connection.

Today, I work in behavioral health, where most of the conversations center around barriers and struggles of some sort and how we can help our clients navigate through them. Over time, some of my coworkers have developed this running joke that if you give me just fifteen minutes with a complete stranger, I will somehow find some obscure, random thing we have in common, whether I am trying to or not. It is a peculiar trait, but that superpower doesn’t come from being the loudest person in the room. It comes from a radar that is constantly scanning for human commonality, choosing to look past the surface even when it is tiring to do so. When you live with an open heart, it acts as both a magnet and a compass, dropping your guard so that others feel safe enough to drop theirs.

Before I made my giant career shift into behavioral health, my true training ground was partially spent behind a bar counter. Back in 2017, I spent my Friday and Saturday nights tending bar - an inevitable reality when you are managing a hotel restaurant and find yourself short-staffed. While I saw myself as an introvert then, and still do now, I often joked back then that I am a “forced extrovert.” With that in mind, as many know, there are usually two types of bartenders: the therapist and the showman. You only need one guess to figure out which one I was.

I remember one specific Friday night when a chatty group came in, and one girl in the party completely zeroed in on me. For three hours, she grilled me with deep, thought-provoking questions about my background, my life story, and what the Romans 5:8 tattoo on my arm meant to me. I didn’t have to answer her. I could have kept it strictly professional, served the drinks, and kept my walls up to protect my own energy. But I could sense a genuine hunger from her. So, I chose to be open and raw.

When it came time to close out their tab, she bypassed all standard bartender-customer boundaries and gave me the biggest hug. (And trust me, I am not typically a hugger, y’all.) She looked at me and said that everything I had shared was exactly what she had been struggling with in her own life, and hearing my story let her know she wasn’t alone. I could have easily played the wallflower that night, just observing and listening. But when we choose to be real, we give others permission to do the same. You never truly know what someone else desperately needs to hear.

The other side of this empathic radar is that it alters your vision entirely. Where some people see a minor inconvenience, empathy forces you to see a human being carrying a heavy load. It makes you pause when the rest of the world is rushing past.

On another evening that same year, my final table came in shortly before closing time. On a normal night, it’s easy to feel that flash of annoyance when people walk in late. You’re tired, it’s the end of a long shift, and your nervous system is already screaming for a quiet car ride home. But it was almost my weekend, so I decided to just roll with it. As I brought over their drinks, both of them turned to me and sincerely apologized for the late hour. They explained that they had driven all the way up from Southern Oregon and had just come from Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, where they had just said their final goodbyes to their two-and-a-half-year-old grandson.

Well that hit me like a brick.

If I had let irritation win, I would have missed them entirely. I would have given them standard, polite, but cold service and missed the sheer weight of what was unfolding right in front of me. Instead, because my radar was up, I was reminded of a vital truth: we truly never know the quiet devastation the person standing in front of us is dealing with. I couldn’t fix their pain, but I could offer them the only things I had in that moment: my time and my ability to listen.

My friend’s warning about burnout is an accurate one, especially working in behavioral health. Managing a highly sensitive nervous system requires boundaries, and it means acknowledging that we cannot carry everyone’s weight. But it doesn’t mean we have to close the door entirely. Those nights behind the bar taught me that empathy is a compass that works best when we are brave enough to follow it. It turns life from a series of random, passing strangers into a beautifully connected journey. We are all unique in what we have gone through, and sometimes, the best thing we can offer the world is just fifteen minutes of shared humanity. Keep your heart open to the timing of life. The right people are looking for you, too.

In today’s world, empathy is so often attacked, dismissed as weakness, or discouraged in favor of building higher walls. But that is exactly why we cannot afford to hide it away. Now, more than ever, we need to strive to show that raw, deeply human side of ourselves. When the world tells you to harden, choose to stay open. Your story, your time, or your open heart might just be the exact coordinate someone else is searching for. Keep your guard down. You never know who you are meant to meet next.

As my mind typically goes, I started thinking about the actual word “service” and how much it has been hollowed out over the years. We use it constantly: when we talk about the “service industry,” “customer service,” or “servicing” a loan and yet it feels like the word has lost its teeth. Somewhere along the way, we stripped the “servitude” out of “service.” We kept the title, but we threw away the sacrifice. To be a servant used to mean that you were bound to something outside of yourself. It implied a level of humility that, frankly, would look bizarre in today’s world of “personal brands” and “main character energy.”

The dramatic change we have seen is really a shift from stewardship to ownership. Historically, being in a position of service was a burden you took on for the benefit of others. You did not “own” the office; you were just holding it in trust for the next generation. It was understood that your personal ego and your private interests had to take a backseat to the collective good. There was this unspoken rule that the higher you climbed, the less you belonged to yourself. But today, “putting others before yourself” feels like an antique relic from a different century. Now, service is often just a transaction. It is a career path, a stepping stone, or a megaphone. People don’t go into office to be a “servant” to the institution; they use the institution as a platform to build their own influence.

This explains why those standards of conduct I discussed with my friend have basically evaporated. When you truly view yourself as a servant, you are bound by the rules of the house. You study the issues deeply and you behave with a certain level of decorum because you represent something much larger than your own reflection in the mirror. You feel a weight of responsibility to be competent because, if you fail, the people you serve are the ones who pay the price. Should I repeat that louder so everyone can hear? If you fail, the people you serve are the ones who pay the price. But when that sense of servitude disappears, those standards start to look like nothing more than annoying obstacles.

If you are not there to serve, why bother with the dignity of the office? If you don’t feel a duty to the public, why spend late nights studying policy when you could be spending that time filming a viral clip or sending out endless, nonsensical “tweets”. We have replaced the “reluctant servant” who is the person that leads because they feel a moral obligation to help, with the “political entrepreneur” who is just looking for a win. It would seem that we have reached this strange point where we have plenty of people in “service” roles, but very few people who are actually willing to be servants. We have the industry, the titles, and the buildings, but we have lost the soul that made them mean something. We have turned a noble calling into a common commodity, and I think we’re all starting to feel the emptiness that leaves behind.

However, a new breed of public servant is beginning to emerge. They are pushing against the status quo by being unapologetically vocal. Unlike the ‘political entrepreneurs’ who shout for attention, these individuals are loud because they have done the homework and they not only hold onto those standards that we have been missing, but they also recognize that guarding their constituents’ interests in a broken system requires a fighting spirit.

So, where does that leave us? We can’t just sit across a table and miss the way things used to be. As the public, we are the ultimate “employers” in this relationship. We have to start asking for the “servant” back. That means holding officials accountable to more than just a party line; it means demanding a standard of education and a level of decorum that matches the weight of the job. We have to stop rewarding the “performers” with our attention and start looking for the “stewards.”

Accountability is not just a vote every few years; it is the consistent pressure of a public that refuses to accept “ownership” in place of “service.” We have to remind those in power that they don’t own the chair they sit in - we do. If we want to see the return of the true public servant, we must start by honoring the true meaning of the word ourselves. We need to stop treating our citizenship like a subscription we pay for and start treating it like a community we are responsible for guarding.

We cannot continue to treat our public servants like celebrities and then be surprised when they stop acting like servants.

The timing of it feels deliberate, as if the words were written exactly for the world we’re living in right now.

I’m not entirely sure where she was when she sat down to write it. I like to imagine her in Chicago, maybe with the window cracked open to that old industrial era, listening to the hustle and bustle of building. Or maybe she was out in the Los Angeles area at that point, sitting in the quiet, orange-grove heat. Either way, she lived in a world that didn’t have the DSM-5 or insurance billing codes. Back then, if you had a paralyzing fear or a mind that wouldn’t stop racing, you didn’t have a clinical label to hide behind or a predetermined “box” to fit into. There was no shorthand for your pain. You just had to look at it for what it was and figure out how to keep going.

And then, in her elegant, dated script, she writes this:

“Roger Babson said, ‘We are afraid to ask questions because we are afraid we appear green. But when you stop to think, it is only the green thing that grows. So ask questions.’”

It’s such a simple thought, right?

Think about how we handle behavioral health today. We have become absolutely obsessed with “expertise” and “certainty.” We live in an era of hyper-diagnosis. When someone finally gets a name for their struggle, there’s often this weird sense of relief and I completely get that. We have overcomplicated the path to get help and assistance, so by time you get there you have had quite the battle. There is power in naming the beast. But the danger is that we’ve started treating those names like a period at the end of a sentence. We say, “I do this because I have [X],” and then we stop. We treat these labels like they are the final answer, as if we have finally reached a state of being “ripe” and finished. We use the diagnosis to close the book on our curiosity about ourselves.

But here is the main thing I keep coming back to, and it is a hill I will stay on: if you have a pulse, you have mental health. It is not a “special interest” group; it is part of the standard human hardware. Yet, we have started using our diagnoses as barriers instead of tools. We let them define the boundaries of what we are capable of, or worse, we let them excuse us from the hard work of evolving. We stop asking those “green questions”, the ones that make us look unsure or uninformed, because we are terrified that if we don’t look like we have it all figured out, we are somehow failing at being “well.”

My great-great-grandmother, through Roger Babson’s words, was trying to tell us that being “green” is actually the only state worth being in. In nature, the moment something becomes fully ripe, it’s done. It becomes static. It stops absorbing nutrients. It just sits there until it eventually decays. But the green thing? The green thing is still pliable. It is still reaching for the sun. It is still capable of being shaped by the wind without breaking.

I think we need to look at our mental health more like a gardener looks at soil. A diagnosis is incredibly useful because it tells you about the dirt you are planted in. It tells you if the ground is too acidic or if it needs more water. It explains why some things are harder to grow in this specific patch of earth. But the soil is not the plant. The plant is you. Your label is a tool to help you understand your environment and your predispositions, not a fence meant to keep you locked in one place for the rest of your life.

If we actually want to build what I call “generational greatness” instead of just passing down a mixed collection of generational trauma, we have to be okay with the vulnerability of appearing “green.” We have to be the ones brave enough to stand up in a world of “experts” and say, “I have this label, and I have this difficulty, but I am still going to make the effort to try and to learn.”

That admission is not a sign of weakness; it is the sound of a living thing growing. That is where the life is.

So, I’ll ask you the same thing I have been asking myself since I found this note: What “green” question are you too afraid to ask today because you are worried about how it looks? What part of yourself are you keeping “ripe” and rigid because you are afraid to admit you are still a work in progress? From where I am sitting, looking at this 100-year-old scrap of paper, that “foolish” question is probably one of the few things that will actually help you grow.

We have something Hilda’s generation did not have: the clinical language to describe our shadows and the scientific tools to bring light to the struggles. Her generation had to rely on pure, unadulterated grit to survive the storms. But knowledge is only a tool if you actually use it to build something; otherwise, it’s just a weight you are carrying. Moving forward let’s not use our modern understanding as an excuse to stand still. Let’s use it as the fuel to keep asking the questions and keep growing, even if we look a little “green” while we do it.

It is so easy to fall into that trap where we think mental health is something only those “other” people have to deal with. You know how it goes, as if it’s a topic reserved for someone with a specific, heavy diagnosis or someone who is currently in the middle of a total tailspin. We tend to treat mental health care like a fire extinguisher; we keep it tucked away in a glass box and ignore it until we actually see smoke, then we are in a sheer panic desperately trying to remember how to work said fire extinguisher. But the truth is, mental health isn’t this black-and-white concept where you are either “broken” or “fixed.” It’s a living, breathing part of being a human being. It’s time we started treating it that way, instead of waiting for an emergency to check in on ourselves.

There’s this unspoken idea out there that some people are just “above” the struggle. We look at the high-performers, some of the leaders (although lately, they are the definition of anything but ok, but I digress), or the friends who seem to have it all figured out and we assume they have some kind of invisible mental shield that the rest of us missed out on or maybe attended a day in school when I was out sick. When you think about it, imagine if we started adding our diagnosis after our name instead of our degrees, eh? That would level the playing field all the more. But let’s be real: if you have got a brain and a nervous system, then you have mental health. Period. No one is immune to the physical toll that stress takes on the body, or that heavy, hollow feeling of grief, or the sheer, bone-deep drain of burnout. It’s like physical health, you are not “too fit” to catch a flu, and you are not “too strong” to break a bone. Nobody is “too tough” to be impacted by the heavy stuff life throws at us.

We absolutely need to flip the script on the negativity around seeking help. Somewhere along the line, we collectively decided that asking for support was a sign of weakness, but if you look at it from where I am coming from, it’s actually the ultimate power move. Think about it this way: the best athletes in the world, the ones at the absolute top of their game, have coaches and trainers. They don’t have them because they’re bad at what they do; they have them so they can stay at their best. Seeking mental health support is exactly the same thing. It’s about having the self-awareness and the guts to address your “internal weather” before it turns into a category-five storm. It takes way more strength to walk into a therapist’s office or grab a coffee with a peer and say, “Hey, I seem to be glitching quite a lot lately,” than it does to suffer in silence while your sleep, your mood, and your relationships take the hit.

If we wait for a formal diagnosis to start caring for our minds, we have already waited way too long. We all struggle with something. Maybe it’s those “glitches” that pop up when we’re overwhelmed, the weirdly lonely feeling that comes with living so much of our lives through a screen, or just the invisible load of trying to keep all the plates spinning at once. These aren’t “problems” to be ashamed of; they are just part of the human experience in a very loud, very fast world. When we normalize the fact that we all move back and forth on that mental health pendulum where sometimes we are thriving, and other times we are just hanging in there, we take the power away from the shame.

At the end of the day, when we stop viewing mental health as this private, secret struggle and start seeing it as something we’re all navigating together, that stigma just starts to evaporate. You don’t need a diagnosis to deserve support, and you definitely don’t need to be in a crisis to talk to a professional. You just need to be human and last time I checked, most of us are human. By looking after our own well-being and being open about it, we aren’t just helping ourselves, we are giving everyone else around us the permission to do the same. So let’s work on moving beyond the labels. Mental health care isn’t just for some of us. It’s for all of us.

When you have allowed “the grind” to define your entire identity for that long, trying to shift gears feels less like self-care and more like a total identity crisis. It’s a strange, uncomfortable silence. Even now, working in a completely different career where the stakes are measured in emails rather than burning pans, I still get those concerned looks from the people around me. You know the ones, the “side-eye” from a coworker followed by that loaded question: “How are you doing? No, really... how ARE you doing?” It’s a fair question, mostly because I’m still unlearning the deeply ingrained habit of trying to earn my right to exist every single second of the day, even after five years.

The reality is that I am naturally driven. I’ve always done well when my plate is full; in fact, I’ve realized that I actually make more mistakes when the pressure is off. Without a certain level of heat, my focus slips. I need the kitchen to be “in the weeds” just a little bit to stay sharp. But there is a razor-thin line between being in the flow of the rush and letting it boil over into a downward spiral. For years, I didn’t know the difference. I thought that if I wasn’t cooking on high heat, I wasn’t actually working.

The problem is that most of us have been conditioned to believe that a “Good Day” is strictly a “Productive Day,” measured only by how much we survived and got across the pass. But I have been trying to learn a different perspective that’s gaining a lot of ground lately. The Mental Health 2026 Initiative actually challenges this exact notion, pushing us toward a more personalized definition of wellness that isn’t tied to a checklist or a manager’s approval. For someone like me who is hypercritical, naturally driven, and wired for a high-pressure environment, I have tried to create a new “recipe” for the day to keep my drive from turning into a destructive spiral.

I’ve started challenging myself to meet three simple, non-negotiable baselines every single day: Pleasure, Peace, and Pride.

It always sounds too simple at first, but for a brain that is used to high-speed chaos and constant fire-fighting, it’s actually a pretty radical shift. I try to end my day by asking myself: Did I enjoy at least one thing today? That’s the Pleasure. It doesn’t have to be a grand event; it just has to be a conscious moment where I wasn’t just checking off the prep list. Then, I look for the Peace: Did I have five minutes of actual stillness? This is the hardest one for a driven person. It’s five minutes of no scrolling, no planning, and no noise, in other words, just letting the kitchen go quiet so the equipment doesn’t overheat. Finally, there’s the Pride: Did I do one thing I am genuinely glad I did? This isn’t about hitting a target or getting a gold star from someone else; it’s about a small personal win, like choosing to handle a difficult conversation with grace or finally tackling a project I’m passionate about.

Establishing these three things as my daily “must-haves” serves as a constant reminder that while the world is always going to demand that we get things done, and while I personally thrive on the challenge of a busy day, we don’t actually owe our entire souls to the hustle. Being hypercritical of yourself is a hard habit to break, and that underlying drive to prove your worth doesn’t just vanish overnight. But checking in on these three goals helps balance the scales. It turns out that you can still be a high-achiever and a hard worker without having to set the kitchen on fire every single day just to prove you were there. Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is simply acknowledge that you’re human.

So, I have to ask (because my mind works in questions):

What are you using to measure the value of your day?

If you took away the cleared inbox, the crossed-off tasks, and the thumbs-up from your boss or coworkers, what would be left? Most of us are experts at surviving the heat of the kitchen, but even more of us are beginners at actually living through it. We have become so good at cooking on high that we have forgotten how to let things simmer.

I want to challenge you to find your own “Mental Minimum.” It does not have to look like my three baselines, but it does need to be yours. Stop waiting for your body to change the locks on you before you decide to listen. Start finding a way to earn your own respect that has nothing to do with how much you have suffered. Because at the end of the day, the medals we get for burnout are not worth the cost of the person wearing them.

Perhaps start with this:

What is one thing you are going to do today simply for the peace of it?

It’s a frustrating sentiment to hear, but it serves as a vital reminder that we really need to keep working to bridge the gap. At the end of the day, we have so much more in common than we have differences, but those who claim autism is a “new” phenomenon are missing the most important part of our history. To me, understanding where we came from is the only way to protect where we are going.

I have this daily habit of scrolling through articles every morning to keep myself informed on what’s happening in the world, and one article in particular really stopped me in my tracks today. It mentioned how what we now call Autism used to be labeled “infantile psychosis.” It seems strange to think about, but back in the 1960s, the medical world didn’t see autism as a different way of being or a spectrum of human diversity. Instead, they slapped that dehumanizing label on it and treated it like a total break from reality.

If a child struggled with social cues, didn’t make eye contact, or found sensory input like loud noises or bright lights overwhelming, they weren’t seen as having a different internal “wiring.” Instead, they were seen as “broken” or even “lost” to a psychiatric void. And the worst part? The blame was often put squarely on the mothers. They were labeled as “refrigerator mothers”, women accused of being so cold or lacking in maternal instinct that they effectively “caused” their child’s withdrawal. This wasn’t just bad science; it was a localized trauma for thousands of families that we are still untangling today.

When people say autism “wasn’t around” forty or fifty years ago, this is the reality they are forgetting. It was there; it was just hidden in the shadows of misdiagnosis, locked away in institutions, or explained away as a “psychotic break.”

Fast forward to 2026, and we’re supposedly on the right side of history now. We’ve spent decades learning how to actually accommodate and respect the neurological diversity that has always existed. We’ve moved toward the “Social Model” of disability which is the idea that a person is only “disabled” when their environment refuses to meet their needs. But lately, it feels like that progress is under fire. It’s disheartening to see so many departments and organizations, particularly the ones that used to be the champions for inclusion, starting to pull back or dismantle the very programs that helped neurodivergent people feel seen and supported in the workplace and in schools.

When we start attacking inclusivity, we’re essentially flirting with those old, uneducated ideas again. We risk losing the incredible contributions that come specifically from the way an autistic brain processes the world. We have to ask ourselves: what would the world look like if we had “cured” or silenced the people who see things differently?

I think of Dr. Temple Grandin, who completely revolutionized the livestock industry. Because she “thinks in pictures,” she could see exactly how cattle perceived their environment, noticing things like a shadow on the floor or a fluttering flag, in a way neurotypical scientists totally missed. Her “difference” saved millions of animals from unnecessary fear. Or look at the blunt, unwavering clarity of Greta Thunberg, who uses what she calls her “superpower” to speak truth to power about the climate without the distraction of social filters. She often stands up to people who are decades older than she is without fear.

We continue to see this “superpower” in the legendary Anthony Hopkins, whose unique focus and “restless” brain have given us some of the most iconic performances in the cinematic world. And if you’ve never looked into the work of the “Human Camera,” Stephen Wiltshire, I highly recommend it. He can fly over a city like London or New York once and then draw the entire cityscape from memory with perfect, window-by-window accuracy. His drawings are incredible, and they challenge everything we think we know about the limits of the human brain.

If the history of “infantile psychosis” teaches us anything, it’s that we cannot afford to lose our empathy or our commitment to diversity. When we build bridges for autistic individuals, we aren’t just performing an act of charity; we’re making sure the rest of us don’t miss out on the next great scientific breakthrough, the next masterpiece, or the next cultural shift. We’ve come too far and learned too much from the mistakes of the 1960s to stop building those bridges now.

The truth is, we don’t need to ‘fix’ the way autistic people see the world; we need to fix the way the world sees them. Because the same ‘different’ mind we once tried to label away is often the only one capable of solving the problems the rest of us can’t even see.

As I mentioned in my last article, The Secret Sauce: Why I am the Way I am, my arch nemesis through my educational years was math, which was not necessarily a good thing when your father was an accountant. Being chronically sick, I was out for a majority of the “building blocks” of math such as memorizing the times tables, fractions, etc. Compound that with my nature of needing to be shown why I needed to learn something first before I would put in the effort to learn it. Naturally, most of my progress hit a wall the moment the alphabet invaded my math homework. There was absolutely no need to add letters to the numbers in my mind, therefore why do I need to invest my time in learning it when I have woods that needed to be explored or a book that needed to be read. The result? Countless evenings of frustration with my father trying to get me to say the correct answers ending, more often than not, in tears. I remember being so desperate for it to just make sense so that I could get the answer out and get everything over with.

This level of consistent frustration and feeling like there was something wrong with me was carried all through high school. Finally, when I started in Culinary School, the tides switched. Refreshingly, there was a reason why I needed to learn this particular math, there was a tangible meaning behind the process. Here, math was not an abstract obstacle; it was the difference between a perfect souffle and a wasted tray of eggs. I didn’t need a better brain; I needed a better “why”. Moving forward, the remainder of the schooling came with ease.

These years of frustration and the sense that I was the only one that didn’t understand have stayed with me well into adulthood. It helped shape how I would eventually not only teach others but supervise/manage them as well. We live in a world that champions diversity and inclusion. Yet, we still struggle to adhere to those values when someone simply needs a different approach to the same task. We like to quickly point out that we are willing to work with anyone at any level, yet when it comes to it, we are equally quick to put them down or say they are just not trying hard enough when our method doesn’t make sense to them.

The next time you are tempted to write someone off because they ‘just don’t get it,’ I challenge you to pause. Instead of questioning their effort, try questioning your delivery. Maybe they don’t need a louder explanation; maybe they just need a different ‘why.’ After all, a person isn’t a broken machine just because they don’t respond to your specific set of instructions. Give them the grace of a different approach and you might just find that the person you were ready to give up on is the one who ends up perfecting the recipe.

What was one thing that everyone had given up on with you,
yet you ended up proving them all wrong?

When you have the never-ending curiosity that I do, you are always interested in others’ stories. I was reminded this weekend that my story has yet to be shared. While I insert certain aspects of my history in my writings, I realized that the majority do not know the story behind everything. So here goes!

I grew up in a small, small town in southern Oregon, and while it had its hiccups, I am truly grateful I was able to. How many can say that they grew up with a creek that they could explore whenever, fresh fruit and veggies that were grown at home, or that they never went outside their house only to see their neighbors directly across from them? I had an older sister who I shadowed all the time, I had the chance to have my grandparents literally down my driveway, with my aunt and uncle even further down the same driveway. As a kid, it was idyllic. I had my bike, my dog, and an endless imagination. Given that I was chronically sick as a kid, having that setting to grow up in gave me an added level of security.

As I progressed through high school, that idyllic image began to crumble. To put it mildly, tensions were rising between my parents and even between my father and myself until ultimately one night my mom and I made the difficult decision to leave. Although it took longer than an instant, that night shattered the world that I was familiar with. Family that I thought would always be there suddenly treated me as though I was a stranger, and a volatile one at that. My mom and I worked to establish our “new normal” while I also focused on graduating from high school.

There were two integral lessons I learned from this specific chapter -

One: that family, the true meaning of family, goes well beyond being related by blood and the other: that we all will struggle with our mental health at one point or another.

While we worked through this chapter, there were countless individuals that invested in our lives, made sure we got through everything ok. Most of those are still what I consider family. I also became acquainted with how my mind decided to handle the stress and the adjustment and that was by going into “auto-drive mode” as I call it, in other words, dissociating. But, thanks to those that were invested in my mom and I through this time, I came through it as well as could be hoped.

Fast forward to graduation, I somehow pulled it off, even though I was one of the few that needed to return after the graduation ceremony to continue battling with my arch nemesis – Math. What I discovered that year was that I had a passion for writing, because in my high school instead of senior projects, we had to do a senior paper. That was probably my first experience of really hyper-focusing and becoming knowledgeable on a specific topic due to hours upon hours of research. That year then went into the next significant challenge I faced – what do I go to college for?? I really was one of those kids who liked anything and everything as long as it was on the creative side, much like how I am now. Ultimately, I finally decided to go into culinary school with the focus being on baking and pastry. My mom had been a cake decorator as I was growing up, my grandmothers on both sides of the family always had me in the kitchen showing me how to cook and bake, so ultimately it was a natural progression.

As if it were a sign of things to come, I did not even follow the normal path for that. I started at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone campus in St Helena, California before jumping across country to their Hyde Park, New York campus. Exact opposite of how 99% of the student base went about it. I was one of three at that time to go that route as most started at the main New York campus and progressed to the St. Helena campus to put the finishing touches on their degree. Because of this, I was given the chance to audit basically any course I wanted, as they had to piece together my curriculum as it was already. What did I choose? Creative Writing/Menu Design, Business Management, Food Photography, Gastronomy, Food History, even getting my certificate in Wine Studies - all which ignited a further interest in everything. In keeping with the non-conformist image, I wrapped up my degree by leaving for an internship, which were typically done mid-degree. Because it was the last thing I needed to do in order to graduate, I was given an internship that doubled as my first culinary job at the same time. I was able to be the acting pastry chef for the Nakoma Resort in Graeagle, California. If anyone knows the hierarchy of the restaurant world, I somehow skipped in the line about seven places.

Throughout the years, I eventually found myself in the Portland Oregon area ready to continue to expand my knowledge. That time span of about 14 years proved to be a treasure trove of life experience and truly allowing myself to understand who I was and who I wanted to be. I became a hybrid, learning cooking and cater to ultimately go from being the baker at a university to the sous chef, and eventually the Assistant Food and Beverage Manager. While I was finding my stride professionally, my mom also had found her new chapter along with her person, eventually getting remarried. After all the hurdles and trials, it would appear as though we both had established a “new normal”. During this time I feel I truly had begun to find my footing and “leveled up in adulting” if you would. It wasn’t anything grand, but it had its consistency and security.

But… life has a way of testing the foundations we build just as the concrete finally sets. My mom called in the middle of the night one night, breaking the news that she had unexpectedly lost her husband. Once again, the world as I knew it had shattered. My sister and my mom’s life-long friend hopped on the first available flight to where my mom was and all three began the journey across country from where they were to where I was in the Portland area. Upon their arrival, we walked through the agonizing process of closing out that chapter of my mom’s. While we were in the middle of everything, I posed the question to my mom “Where would you like to live?” to which her response was, “Well, I think I would like to move to Phoenix, AZ.” She and her husband had some happy years while they were there and that settled that. Honestly – Arizona was never on my radar, ever. I always joke that I was meant for the Arctic Tundra and Arizona is the exact polar opposite of that, but that’s where we went.

In the back of my mind, I thought I would maybe give it a year or two, then return to more familiar territory. There is an old Yiddish proverb: “Der mentsh trakht un got lakht,” which translates to “Man plans and God laughs.” Little did I know what was actually in store for me. I arrived in Phoenix with 20 years of chef experience, assuming it would be a piece of cake (no pun intended) to find my place. I was wrong. I hit dead-end after dead-end until the restaurant industry left a bitter taste in my mouth. For the first time, I looked outside the kitchen. I took a plunge on a company I’d only heard of through a chance meeting - and I haven’t looked back since. I traded the heat of the kitchen for the complexities of the human mind, realizing that my years of managing high-stress environments and diverse teams were actually training for something deeper. I jumped full force into the world of behavioral health, pulling all the experiences from my previous chapters – the instability, the “auto-drive” years, and the hard-won “new normals” - in order to relate and encourage the clients I am working with. Because I have walked through wreckage of my own shattered worlds, I am able to stand next to them as they navigate through theirs.

At this point, it was becoming evident that I was in Arizona indefinitely. To further cement it, the one thing I had completely given up on ever happening, happened – I met my best friend, my husband. I never quite understood the level of security and acceptance there could be until I met him. He is one that has me thinking every day: “Why could I have not met you sooner?” but I am forever grateful that I get to do life moving forward with him. Each day gets better and better as we build our world together.

When I get into details about certain events in my life, I am often asked if there would be anything I would change about my life. My answer is always emphatically no. There is a quote I stumbled across years ago, which has become a go to and that is:

In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.
– Andrea Dykstra

I often have the chance to share that same quote with my clients. There are days where you simply want to just bury your head and not resurface until everything that is stressful disappears, but by allowing yourself to do that, you are stunting the potential that you have to show the world.

Not every chapter is going to be “roses” but the difficult ones make you adaptable. They make you grateful for the good.

I’m glad you’re here. If you want to explore more stories about resilience, the ‘new normals’ we create, and philosophical views of society I have gathered from both the kitchen and the behavioral health world, I’d love for you to subscribe and join the conversation.

If you have spent any time around me, you know that I often refer to anxiety as a superpower disguised as a disability. While I recognize that this experience isn’t universal, for the vast majority of us who live with it, anxiety is an engine of constant motion. It is a brain that refuses to sit still, a mind that is perpetually recalculating, reassessing, and running simulations of the future. While the world often views this as a “disorder,” I see it as a masterclass in adaptability. We are the architects of the “Plan B,” the “Plan C,” and the “just-in-case.” We certainly have our comfort zones - perhaps even more than most - but there is a profound irony at play: true preparedness, the very thing an anxious mind craves, actually requires us to step far beyond those zones. You simply cannot be ready for a changing world if you only ever look through a fixed, familiar lens.

This is where the “superpower” of anxiety meets the modern definition of literacy. We usually think of courage as something loud and external - a superhero landing, a bold speech, or a defiant stand. But there is a quieter, much more taxing version of bravery that happens entirely behind the scenes: the intellectual grit required to admit that our internal maps might be outdated. It is the courage to look at the “rules” we have used to navigate our lives and realize they no longer apply to the road we are currently travelling on.

Alvin Toffler famously captured this necessity when he wrote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” In a world that moves at the speed of light, “knowing” things is no longer the ultimate advantage; the advantage lies in how quickly you can let go of what you thought you knew. For someone with an anxious mind, this cycle of relearning is already happening a thousand times a day in small, frantic ways. The challenge - as well as the opportunity - is moving that energy from a place of “what if something goes wrong?” to a place of “what if what I know is wrong?”

This shift is the essence of what is referred to as Intellectual Courage. It isn’t a matter of high IQ or academic achievement; it is a matter of character. It is the willingness to look at a belief you have held for a year, a decade, or perhaps even your entire lifetime, and have the guts to realize it has become a relic. Toffler’s warning is clear: if we cannot cycle through this process of updating ourselves, we become intellectually stuck - frozen in a version of reality that no longer exists - while the rest of the world moves on with a brand-new rulebook.

But why is unlearning so difficult? Why does it feel like pulling teeth to admit a long-held strategy is failing? It’s because unlearning feels like losing a piece of your identity. Our beliefs are the anchors of our ego; when we toss one overboard, we feel like we might drift away. This is where the “recalculating” nature of anxiety becomes a vital tool. We are already used to the feeling of the floor shifting beneath us. We are already experts at scanning for new information. To unlearn effectively, we have to lean into that familiar “recalculating” energy to navigate the external and internal pressures that come with changing our minds.

There is a significant social cost to unlearning as well. It’s tough to stay true to a new perspective when your “tribe” - your friends, your family, or your professional circle - hasn’t caught up yet. It is lonely to be the one who says, “I used to believe that, but I was wrong.” Furthermore, it takes emotional maturity to sit with the guilt or embarrassment that bubbles up when you realize you’ve been operating under a false assumption. We often judge our past selves for not knowing what we know now, but that judgment is a wall that prevents further growth.

To survive this, we have to adopt a realistic approach toward ourselves. This is especially crucial during the “messy middle” phase - that awkward, uncomfortable gap where you have successfully let go of the old way of thinking but haven’t quite mastered the new one yet. It’s the gutted room in the middle of a renovation. The old, familiar wallpaper is stripped away and the studs are exposed, but the new furniture has not arived. It is a dusty, skeletal mess. Most people get overwhelmed by the chaos and try to glue the old scraps back up because the emptiness is too scary. But the anxious mind, if trained correctly, can learn to see the potential in the blueprint before the walls are even built - treating that void not as ruin, but as a transition.

Ultimately, being “literate” in today’s world is a continuous, daily practice of staying resilient, balanced, and - most importantly – open-minded. It is the understanding that your internal software requires constant updates to remain compatible with the world around you. We must realize that the most powerful tool in our arsenal isn’t actually the sum of what we know. It is the depth of our curiosity and how brave we are willing to be with everything we don’t yet understand. Our anxiety doesn’t have to be a cage; it can be the very radar that helps us navigate the unknown, provided we have the courage to trust the recalculation.

Your anxiety is not a glitch in the system; it is the very thing that ensures you will never be left behind.