Why I’m Letting Go of Fixing the System and Holding Onto Myself

I’ve spent years trying to fix a system that wasn’t made for people like me, and every year it breaks me a little more.

The longer I work in this field, the more I feel like I’m betraying myself as a psychiatric survivor. I find myself assimilating as a mad person into the professional world, trying to speak their language, present myself as polished, act like I belong. I used to believe, like so many before me, that I could change the system from within. That if I stayed long enough, tried hard enough, believed deeply enough, I could shift it. But somewhere along the way, I had to face the truth: I will never change this system.

Every time I’ve tried, it has broken me. It has exploited my labor, used my story, drained my energy, and then blamed me for not practicing enough self-care. All while paying me $15 an hour to carry the weight of everyone else’s pain. They talk about mental health days but never give space for them. Or if they do, they leave guilt waiting in their place.

I’ve been doing this work since 2007, and nothing has really changed. The same stigmas, the same recovery-only narratives, the same saviorism dressed up as care. The same sanism at every table. It’s the same system I stepped into nearly two decades ago, only now with more branding and buzzwords.

I used to think I was part of a movement. Now, I see the movement has been folded into the very system it once sought to dismantle. And I know I’ve been part of that. I’ve tried to hold both my truth and my need to survive. I’ve tried to stay rooted while navigating workplaces that never truly made space for people like me. I’m still trying. I want to make an exit, but the grip of capitalism is real. Bills don’t wait for liberation.

Still, I hold onto this: our pain, our rage, our stories are not signs of weakness. They are acts of resistance. To speak honestly in this world, as a mad person, as a survivor, is to refuse erasure.

I may not be able to change the system, but I can refuse to be swallowed by it. I can choose not to mold myself into its image. I can honor the parts of me that have always known another world is possible, even if it hasn’t arrived yet. Liberation will not come through job titles, institutional policies, or professional respectability. It will come through community, through truth-telling, through the messy and sacred work of building something different.

This is why I keep showing up. Not to be polished. Not to be professional. But to be real. To be mad. To be free.