I am not even one week into my internship, and I can already feel it changing me—or perhaps it is helping me recognize a change that began years ago.
The truth is that this transformation did not start with my internship. It started when I began caring for my father.
Becoming his caregiver changed something fundamental in me. Our relationship had been distant, but caregiving required me to enter his life differently. It forced me to carry responsibilities I had not anticipated while navigating complicated emotions, old wounds, love, duty, frustration, and eventually grief. I had to keep functioning even when my emotional world felt anything but stable.
I do not think I fully understood how much that experience changed me while I was living through it. There was no clean ending where I returned to the person I had been before. I simply continued moving forward—working, studying, managing responsibilities, and trying to build a life around everything I had experienced.
Now, as I begin my internship and learn to sit with other people’s pain, I can feel those parts of me rising to the surface again.
I am not sure whether my current sensitivity has anything to do with last week’s full moon eclipse in Pisces, whether it is connected to stopping amycretin, or whether my mind and body have simply reached their limit. Since stopping the medication, I have gained a few pounds, and I can feel the inflammation slowly creeping back into my body. Emotionally, I feel more sensitive and less grounded.
Maybe it is all connected. Maybe none of it is. I only know that something feels different.
This week, my clinical supervisor told me that I still tend to think in black-and-white terms. That was difficult to hear because I have spent so much time believing that I had made progress in that area. I thought I had become more flexible, more reflective, and better able to recognize the gray areas.
Perhaps I have made progress. But growth does not mean that old patterns disappear completely. Sometimes they return when I am exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, or feeling unheard.
Despite everything I have learned about trauma, communication, mindfulness, and self-awareness, I still became so emotionally dysregulated that I almost ended a relationship that had barely begun. In that moment, I communicated in a way that did not reflect what I truly wanted or what I was actually trying to say.
That is the part that exhausts me.
I am tired of feeling as though I am trying to do everything the right way, only to discover that I still became dysregulated, still communicated poorly, and still created distance between myself and someone I care about. I am tired of understanding these patterns intellectually while feeling unable to stop them once my nervous system takes over.
Sometimes, all the insight in the world seems to disappear the moment I feel overwhelmed, criticized, rejected, or unsafe.
My frustration did not begin this week, either. For the last three years—beginning during the period when I was caring for my father—I have tried to communicate what I need and explain what is not working. I have tried to be direct, patient, professional, flexible, and solution-focused. I have rewritten emails, reconsidered my tone, questioned my own reactions, and searched for better ways to express the same concerns.
Yet very little changes.
Eventually, being expected to communicate differently begins to feel like the responsibility for fixing everything rests entirely on me. I am left wondering how many ways I am supposed to explain the same frustration before someone truly hears me.
Then, when everything finally spills over and I become emotionally dysregulated, the focus shifts to how I communicated rather than what I have been trying to communicate for years. I can acknowledge that my delivery is not always perfect, especially when I am overwhelmed. I can take responsibility for my words, my tone, and my reactions.
But taking responsibility for my reaction should not require me to ignore everything that led to it.
My disappointment also extends to leadership. It is difficult to watch the same patterns continue when the people responsible for addressing them seem aware that something is not working. From where I stand, there are few visible consequences for the behavior creating the problem, yet there always seems to be a consequence for my reaction to it.
My frustration becomes the issue. My tone becomes the issue. My emotional response becomes the issue. Meanwhile, the circumstances that pushed me to that point remain largely unchanged.
I understand that leadership decisions often happen privately and that I may not see every conversation or intervention. Still, it is exhausting to feel as though I am repeatedly asked to regulate myself within environments that are not being held equally accountable for their role in my dysregulation.
Accountability should not begin only when the person who has been struggling to be heard finally reacts.
At the same time, my life is not only unraveling. In some ways, it is finally coming together.
I recently paid off my car loan. After carrying that payment and watching so much of my income disappear into debt, I am beginning to see a path forward. I am still working through other financial obligations, but I am slowly coming out of debt. That matters. It represents discipline, sacrifice, and years of continuing to move forward even when progress felt painfully slow.
There is something strange about experiencing genuine accomplishment while also feeling emotionally unsteady. I can be proud of paying off my car and still be disappointed in myself for how I communicated. I can be moving toward financial freedom while feeling trapped inside patterns I thought I had already outgrown. I can be beginning an exciting new chapter in my professional life while also feeling overwhelmed by everything that chapter is exposing.
Maybe this is another example of my black-and-white thinking. Part of me wants this period of my life to be either a success or a failure. I want to be either healed or unhealed, regulated or dysregulated, progressing or falling behind.
But perhaps both realities can exist at once.
I started three classes on Monday, August 31. I began my internship while continuing to manage responsibilities at two different workplaces. I am trying to navigate competing expectations, workplace stress, school assignments, internship hours, clinical development, my health, my finances, my grief, and a new relationship.
Each responsibility may be manageable on its own, but together, they feel like too many browser tabs open in my brain—and every one of them is making noise.
Still, I keep telling myself that I should be able to handle it all. I should communicate correctly. I should regulate my emotions. I should recognize when my thinking becomes rigid. I should know better because I have studied these things.
But knowing better and being regulated enough to do better are not always the same thing.
Perhaps that is part of what this internship is already teaching me. Becoming a clinician is not only about learning how to recognize patterns in other people. It also means being confronted with my own patterns, sometimes before I feel ready. It means recognizing how caregiving, grief, work, relationships, and years of feeling unheard have shaped the way my nervous system responds today.
Being told that I still think in black-and-white terms does not erase the progress I have made. Becoming dysregulated does not mean that everything I have learned has failed. Communicating poorly in one painful moment does not mean that I am incapable of learning how to communicate differently.
Likewise, paying off my car does not mean that every financial struggle has disappeared. It means I reached an important milestone within a much longer journey.
Maybe emotional growth works the same way.
Progress may not mean becoming someone who never gets triggered. Maybe it means becoming someone who notices her patterns sooner, takes responsibility for her reactions, repairs what she can, and remains curious about what happened instead of deciding that she is broken.
It may also mean learning to hold other people accountable without abandoning myself in the process.
I do not feel particularly graceful right now. I feel tired, inflamed, overwhelmed, proud, disappointed, hopeful, and uncertain—all at the same time. But perhaps change does not always arrive looking like confidence or clarity. Sometimes it arrives as discomfort. Sometimes it sounds like feedback we do not want to hear. Sometimes it looks like one debt finally being paid while another part of life still feels unresolved.
My internship may be bringing these feelings into sharper focus, but it did not begin this transformation. Caring for my father did.
That experience changed how I understand love, responsibility, grief, and myself. Now, as I learn how to sit with other people’s pain, I am also learning how to sit with everything that caregiving awakened in me.
Maybe this is not evidence that I have failed to grow.
Maybe this is what growth feels like when it is happening in real time.
