The day I watched hope drown
16 years ago, I was a newly graduated psychologist, still believing that the system, flawed as it was, could be fixed from within. That if I just gave enough, worked hard enough, that if I offered everything I had, it would heal what healthcare was never built to hold.
One day, I remember, it was a beautiful Wednesday afternoon, she walked in. A woman, her eyes wide open, was so quiet, almost apologetic, as if even her very presence was a burden, as if she feared she was a nuisance just by existing. She was like a little bird with broken wings, glancing around nervously; her thin body was drowning in oversized clothes, and on her face, traces of her former beauty still flickered behind the shadows of pain and terror. Her body held bruises I couldn’t see, but I felt them pulsing beneath her skin, hiding in her posture. The scars were there, pressed into every pause between her words.
She sat across from me at the family services center, where I had just started working. She said little, but everything in her presence screamed. She was in fear, so much fear. And I was given 7 minutes.
I had seven minutes to gain her trust, to get her to open up, to assess how bad the situation was, to find out if her life was in danger, to give her psychological first aid, to offer advice and information, and to build a strategy for her future.
Seven minutes. Seven minutes to hold a life that had already withstood years, if not decades of harm.
I did everything they trained me to do. I ticked the boxes, followed the protocol, asked the questions, and offered the phone numbers -the ones I knew nobody ever answered. The whole time, I felt this tiny flicker, a trace of hope in her, so fragile I could barely look at it directly. She wanted to be seen, she wanted to be heard, and I couldn’t meet it. I would have been able, but there wasn’t enough time.
I felt devastated; something in me broke that day. When she left, I just sat frozen. My boss praised me, saying, “Nice work, well done”, but I saw the truth: that I had just become complicit in her invisibility, however how kind or careful I was. I came to understand that this system was inherently flawed, and healing was never the goal.
The goal was to control damage with minimal intervention, just enough to say we tried, because we don’t have the time, the money, not enough doctors, not enough resources to really help. That woman received just enough to end her life maybe not tonight, just enough to have maybe a place to sleep, but most likely, she’ll go back to the one who’s hurting her. Perhaps she’ll come back one more time, with deeper wounds, darker eyes, even less of herself, but a year from now, she won’t come back at all. Not ever. And we call that CARE.
I knew that if I stayed in that system, I would continue to fail people at the exact moment they needed to be held. I understood something terrifying: that this system is not even broken, it’s working exactly as it was designed to, and the way we’ve allowed it to function since the inception of modern medicine. Our system was never even designed for true healing; it was designed for control and compliance on both sides. It was designed to break both clinicians and patients, leaving them too exhausted to think, too exposed and battered to dare ask questions.
The following night, I couldn’t sleep. I stared at the ceiling as my mind wandered in all directions; it felt like a fever dream, almost a vision—a vision of a future that, at the time, seemed impossible to reach. I saw no more medical students ending their lives in silence; I saw them happy and curious while preparing for their careers. I saw doctors who were allowed to focus on their own mental health, not burned out and broken by the very system they swore to serve, not drowning in paperwork and bureaucracy—but finally having the time and space to do what they came here to do and want to do: compassionate healing. In that vision, years into their practice, physicians could still greet their patients with a smile and genuine curiosity, and patients wouldn’t walk into consultations shaking, too scared after waiting months just to be seen. In that vision, seeking care no longer felt traumatic or unaffordable.
Since that night, I strive for a future where both doctors and patients feel heard, valued, and treated as deeply human beings. Throughout my career, I kept returning to that vision. The system chewed me up too. Soon, I left public healthcare because I couldn’t bear those absurd seven-minute battles anymore, and I started a private practice, where seven minutes turned into fifty and every month changed into each week, but guilt gnawed at me knowing my knowledge was now only accessible to a privileged few.
Then the private system also broke me because it was up to us to clean up and fix everything the seven-minute model had destroyed. Then came the flood—patients, emails, requests, endless tasks—more than any person could handle. I wanted to give, to fix, to make things right. I wanted to fight for each of my patients, their lives, their rights. But I ran out because, when there was nothing left to give, I gave of myself—my own flesh and blood. I lost friends, relationships, everything to the endless sea of just one more hour, just one more patient, just one more email—on Sundays, at Christmas, on anniversaries, and late nights.
I drowned in it, the same way we all drown, whether as patients or as healers, both swallowed by the same machine.
I changed careers, but my heart always pulled me back to the bedside. I just couldn’t kill the clinician in me.
I saw no way out, and the vision grew dimmer and dimmer, almost fading into oblivion.
You’d probably expect a turning point here, I guess, a moment of clarity or a breakthrough, but actually, there wasn’t one. I just decided to keep going, because even when the vision dimmed, even when the cost felt unbearable, something in me refused to lay down and let the system write the ending. I had seen too much, I felt too much, and I could not unsee, and I could not unfeel it.
At some point, the grief of remaining silent became heavier than the risk of speaking out. Deep inside, amidst exhaustion and disillusionment, I still believed that things could improve, and this bold faith was the first step back toward any kind of future worth pursuing.
So I kept showing up, knowing that if I could survive the weight of the system without losing my soul, I could help others do the same, and I want to give them more than just the ability to endure. I want them to remember why they started in the first place. After nearly two decades of struggle and searching, I finally found something that could offer a solution—and a reason for stubborn hope.
Today, I teach them how to thrive within a broken system and how to plant seeds for a better future as they do. Now, with my educated healthcare professionals and my empowered patients, together we create spaces where trauma and pain aren’t just managed or minimized – they are truly met.
Relentlessly fighting for a future worth living – this is the foundation of everything I do.
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