It started with a tiny black kitten.

She was scooped up by a man named Patrick who lives on the south side, on a street crawling with strays. He’d seen her and her sibling darting around for days before finally catching one and bringing her into a few local dive bars to see if anyone was looking to adopt a cat.

My boyfriend Dan was there. He’s a lifelong cat person, and I’ve been encouraging him to get a cat for years. But he always said the Cat Distribution System would deliver one when the time was right.

Apparently, the time was now.

The kitten perched on Dan’s shoulder like a pirate’s parrot.

And then she moved in with us. We named her Sylvie.

I told Patrick, “If you see her sibling, let us know.”

A few days later, he texted us a video-not of a sibling, but a mother cat. A spitting image of Sylvie.

“If you really want to save Mama,” Patrick said, “here she is.”

We picked her up that evening. She was young, petite, with long black fur just like Sylvie’s, but you could tell her giant green eyes had seen things. She had cool witchy/bohemian rocker chick energy, so we named her Stevie.

Then came the third text.

I know what you’re thinking: you cannot possibly be considering bringing home another cat.

But Patrick had found an orphan. That’s how he described her. A kitten that didn’t even look like a kitten. More like a cartoon mouse. She had a pointy little triangle face, half tan and half black, with giant ears and a butterscotch colored nose.

“Sylvie would love a playmate,” I rationalized.

All my cat friends said it’s better to get kittens together while they’re young. They also warned me not to get my hopes up about a family reunion. Mama cats and kittens don’t always recognize each other. This way, Stevie could have her space and the two kittens could entertain each other. Perfect.

So I texted Patrick: “We’ll come pick her up tonight.”

When we arrived at his duplex, we passed six street cats just walking up the sidewalk. When Patrick opened the door and showed us the kitten, Dan and I exchanged a look.

She looked dead.

She lay on her side, almost completely still. Her breathing was shallow and jerky, barely moving her sharp ribs. Her gums were stark white. I’m not a cat expert, but I am a nurse. And in nursing school they teach you: trust your gut.

Something was very wrong.

Patrick told us he’d found her lying in the wet grass of a neighbor’s yard, covered in flies. “Cats don’t do that,” he said. He thought she was dead. But her eyes were open.

He and his mom (an incredibly sweet woman in her 80s) named her Possum.

They’d already bathed her and spent four hours combing out fleas. We got in the car, and I thought about how hard we’d worked to pay off our credit card debt after I started two businesses last year. How good it had felt to finally catch up.

But I also knew I didn’t want to wake up to a dead kitten.

We took her to the ER.

The front desk tech took one look at her gums and whisked her to the back. Minutes later, the vet came in. “She’s severely anemic. She needs a blood transfusion.”

The quote was around $4,000.

I’ve worked in hospitals long enough to know that sometimes we keep creatures alive for ourselves, not for them. I told the vet, “If she’s suffering and she’s not going to make it, I don’t want to prolong it.”

But the vet said it was likely flea anemia. If we gave her a transfusion, she had a real shot.

We decided to give her one.

While we waited for updates from kitten ICU, I took Stevie in for her spay.

An hour later, I got a call from the vet operating on Stevie: “She’s pregnant.”

Sylvie’s siblings.

I thought of Possum hooked up to IV fluids, clinging to life. I told the vet to proceed with the spay. I felt sick.

Possum ended up needing two transfusions. Technically, they were supposed to charge us for both, but they didn’t. “It’s so stupid,” the vet said. “We are technically supposed to bill you for both, but we didn’t use the whole bag the first time. We just want to help the cat.”

When they brought Possum out after the second transfusion, her tiny head lifted. Her ears perked up. Her little possum face came back to life.

I felt a flicker of hope.

And it held. She survived.

The bill came to $2,000. And now we have three cats: Sylvie, Stevie, and Possum.

Patrick promised he wouldn’t send us any more photos.

Ten years ago, when I was a brand new nurse working at a pediatric residential facility, I remember being stunned by how many kids had no one. Or worse, had parents so neglectful it barely counted. The same kind of people who would leave a kitten in the wet grass to die.

I remember feeling overwhelmed by how much I couldn’t fix.

I have more capacity now than I did back then. More tools. More perspective. But the world still hurts.

Between the broken systems, the relentless news cycle, and this summer’s climate chaos, the existential dread has been loud.

But three cats who should’ve died are alive.

And maybe, for today at least, that can feel like enough.

From the beginning, I knew I wasn’t going to play the numbers game.

I’d been a nurse. I’d already knew the difference between caring for 20 patients at a time (hello private psych “hospital”)—then four at a time (thanks university hospital ❤️). And I felt the difference (trust me, it’s different)

I knew firsthand what a massive difference that ratio made in my ability to actually help someone. So when people in psych NP school told me, “You’ll have to get used to seeing patients every 15 minutes,” I just said, “No. I won’t be doing that.”

Because I’d already felt the cost of practicing in ways that went against my moral compass. I didn’t want to build a career on moral injury. I wanted something I could sustain.

And I had a situation (aka being childfree and largely untethered) that enabled me to make that decision—I could move cities, decline jobs, carve out a path that felt right for me.

I’d spent the past 5 years learning that fast care often isn’t effective care.

The truth is: Psychiatry is changing.

It’s becoming more personalized.

More trauma-informed.

More integrated with the nervous system, biology, & story.

But the institutions we train in are still catching up.

They were built for throughput, documentation, liability, checklists and compliance.

And so many brilliant, compassionate, emotionally intelligent people are questioning whether they belong in this field, because they’re sensitive to systems that strip the meaning out of care (which is a good thing to be sensitive to).

If you’re early in your career—or trying to start fresh—here’s what I wish someone had told me:

• You’re not crazy for wanting more time with patients.

• Boundaries don’t make you less compassionate.

• You’re allowed to craft your own rhythm. You don’t have to copy your preceptor’s schedule, or anyone else’s.

• You don’t have to “find your niche” right away. Your niche will fine you. It will be made up of the people who feel seen with your tone, your presence, and your perspective.

• It’s okay to outgrow the goals you used to chase.

• There’s more than one way to help. Seeing patients is one. Writing, teaching, and advocating are others. Do what fills you up, if you can.

• You don’t have to prove your worth by suffering. You’re allowed to protect your joy and your career.

We need more providers who know themselves, stay curious, and move with purpose.

If that’ s you, just know that you don’t have to torch your entire life to make space for something better.

You just have to start by listening to that one stubborn, inconvenient part of you that keeps whispering, “This isn’t it.”

Then maybe take one small step toward the thing that might be.

You’re building a life. You’re more than a LinkedIn bio.

And your people need you.

I was 23. Still new. Still figuring out what kind of nurse I wanted to be.

It was a residential psych unit for kids. Most hadn’t even hit middle school yet. But they’d already been through more than most adults ever will. You could see it in the charts—page after page of trauma histories followed by labels: ODD, DMDD. Antipsychotics prescribed like vitamins.

There was one night I remember: a kid was screaming. Full meltdown. She wanted to go home. She was begging, actually. Loudly. Staff were tense, trying to manage the rest of the unit. One of the nurses said, “Do you want to go to bed, or do you want a shot?”

And yeah, it was disruptive. It was late. Other kids were waking up. But something in me just couldn’t respond like that. So I sat with her. Read her a story. Tried to make bedtime feel like bedtime.

I was chastised by coworkers for rewarding the kid’s behavior.

We didn’t have enough staff for me to be off the floor like that. There are 23 other kids on this unit, and only one other nurse. Two techs, but they were busy with safety checks and cleaning up after dinner.

Later, I came back and asked, “What would’ve happened if I hadn’t been here?”

The nurse shrugged. “She probably would’ve needed a PRN.”

I said, “That’s so sad.”

And she said:

“Well… are you going to take her home?”

I think about that all the time.

Because she was right. I wasn’t going to take her home.

This system doesn’t have space for what kids actually need. It has meds. It has behavior plans. It has threat-response and liability coverage. But doing whats best for an actual person is not its priority. That girl didn’t need to be sedated. She needed a person to help her. But the budget doesn’t staff for that.

So instead, she learned the lesson the system teaches best:
that big feelings are problems to be contained,
(not signals to be understood)
and that needing someone is something you eventually get medicated out of.

When I worked in residential psych, I got really good at behavioral emergencies.

I didn’t want to be. But I was.

I was 23, a bright and shiny new nurse, and I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to hold tension in your body at work for 12 hours straight.

I got good at recognizing when a kid was about to blow, at scanning the room before anything happened, at calling a code without panicking (sort of). I knew which staff to grab, what tone to use, how to track a kid’s eyes and body for that moment when the energy shifted from overwhelmed to unsafe.

I got good at writing the restraint notes, too. Documenting without sounding dramatic. Using language that was neutral but still technically true. “Patient escalated. Safety maintained.” That kind of thing. I never said what I was actually thinking, which was usually something like: this kid is scared out of their mind and doing what they’ve always done to protect themselves. And we just don’t have what they need.

I knew the meds helped sometimes.

But they didn’t teach regulation. They didn’t build trust, or fix what was broken in the kid’s environment or nervous system. I could give a PRN, but I couldn’t sit with them in the hard moments the way they really needed. We didn’t have the staff, the time, the model. So much of it was just crisis control.

I did my job.

I showed up, shift after shift. I followed protocol. I kept people safe. But most days I’d leave feeling like I hadn’t actually helped. Like I was working in a place that called itself therapeutic, but ran more like a trauma containment unit. And it messed with my head because I loved those kids. And I knew they deserved better.

If I could’ve written what I really wanted to say in those notes, it would’ve sounded more like:

“We managed the behavior, but we didn’t meet the need. This kid doesn’t need better meds. They need a system that isn’t always asking them to prove they’re in crisis before we respond.”

But that’s not a note the facility can submit for billing. And it wouldn’t be acceptable to my nurse manager.

So I’d write the note.

Check the boxes.

Take a breath.

And go get ready for the next med pass.

That’s the part I don’t think people understand about psychiatric work. It’s not just that it’s hard. It’s that so much of it goes against what you know good care should be. And you keep doing it anyway, because someone has to.

That’s what moral injury feels like.

He was 14 or 15. Ninth grade, just beginning his long term commitment to noncompliance. He had already racked up a drinking ticket after getting vodka-drunk with his senior girlfriend, hitting his head, and landing in the ER. The court assigned him community service. A few volunteer hours. Some classes. Nothing wild.

He refused to do any of it.

My brother, in that era, wore Dickies with the cuffs rolled up, hot pink fuzzy slippers, and a Green Day Kerplunk shirt every day to school. He entered rooms like Kramer from Seinfeld, just limbs and chaos, and constantly smelled like weed masked with Axe. He told our mom his aluminum foil-and-apple contraptions were “art projects,” and she believed him.

She was like that. An artist and a free spirit, the kind of mom who let friends sleep over on school nights and let us draw on the walls if it felt right. She’s always been known for her childlike innocence. People always said that she “doesn’t have a mean bone in her body”. Which is true. She genuinely thought he might be sculpting something. She’d tilt her head and say, “That’s interesting, what are you making?” while he used a ballpoint pen to hollow out a makeshift bowl.

Girls loved him. Always did. Cool, older girls at school would pretend to befriend me just to get invited over. He was one of those beautiful boys who didn’t try, who didn’t care. Just seemed to breeze through life like a walking dare. And while he seemed wild to everyone else, to me, he was just my brother. Loud, funny, infuriating. A gravitational force that I was born to orbit.

The day it happened, I was in that little hallway computer nook by the bathroom. He asked to go pee when the police arrived. They let him.

He shut the door. Locked it.

I remember one of the officers pressing his ear to the door.

I remember turning my music up louder and louder. Maybe Blink 182, maybe the All American Rejects. Trying to make it sound normal, like nothing was happening. I don’t know if that counts as helping or not helping.

But when they broke down the bathroom door, he was gone. Out the window. No sign of him in the side yard, or the little rock-lined drainage ditch that tunneled under the street and into the neighbor’s yard. I remember staring at that small, quiet residential road. No footsteps, no movement. Just stillness, like he’d vanished into thin air.

He was free for two days.

Eventually they caught him and he landed in juvie. At the juvenile court hearing, he mooned the judge. Pants down, no shame, no hesitation. That’s my big bro: even his rock bottoms have punchlines.

After that, my dad pulled him out and sent him to a therapeutic boarding school—one of those live-off-the-land programs. And that’s where he learned to survive outdoors. That’s how he eventually became homeless. He didn’t learn compliance or submission. He learned how to disappear.

This isn’t a redemption arc or a cautionary tale. It’s just a memory I keep replaying lately. The absurdity, the heartbreak, the weird loyalty of turning up the volume when someone you love is climbing out the window.

But the one time I was willing to hustle-was when I needed my ticket to middle class.

I’m naturally a meaning-oriented person, always asking, “Why? What’s the point?”—constantly questioning expectations.

Even as a kid, I knew I wasn’t going to follow someone else’s template of “success” if it didn’t feel right.

I was a creative soul. Voted “Most Likely to Be a Movie Star” at our 8th-grade graduation, though I missed the ceremony because I was serving In-School Suspension for writing a poem with the F-word in Baden Piland’s yearbook (a story for another day).

The point is, I’ve always had an imaginative mind. Achievement for achievement’s sake wasn’t my thing—authenticity was.

But — when my mom’s second marriage to a gambling alcoholic cost her our home, teenage me realized real quick that hustling for financial stability wasn’t optional—it was survival. My dream of becoming a veterinarian went out the window. Too much school. not enough money up front.

Instead, I chose nursing: Practical, Free Tuition, a Guaranteed Job straight out of college. My One-Way Ticket to the Middle Class.

In my family, addiction and low-wage jobs were common. I loved them, but I didn’t want that to be my story.

So— when I got that first nurse paycheck—and later, the nurse practitioner paycheck—I thought, “I’ve made it. The hustle’s over.”

I was ready to settle in and just do my job, which, by the way, I truly loved.

But then... something felt off.

The places I worked didn’t line up with my values. Damn.

So I hopped around: private psych hospitals (the literal worst), university hospitals, public clinics—you name it, I tried it. I even did psych evals in corrections (what was I thinking?)

Now, after five years as a psych RN and four as a psych NP, I finally realized the truth.

If I want to do work that aligns with my values, I have to build it myself.

The mental health industrial complex isn’t going give me a job that feels right, or even one that doesn’t cause immense moral injury. I’m gonna have to make one.

So here I am. THIRTY TWO years old (how is that even possible?) and owner of my own practice despite being the second most Type B Personality I know (the first is my mom, housing insecure and living off $800 per month).

If you’ve ever stared down entrepreneurship, wondering if anyone actually knows what they’re doing—same. And let’s be honest: you probably know what you’re doing more than I do.

But I’m telling you (and myself): it’s going to be okay. Or I won’t-and I’ll lose my home and my middle class status. But I’ll be okay. I’ve hustled before.