Let’s Sit With That
On care, complexity, and not rushing the hard parts
If you’ve ever heard a therapist say, “Let’s sit with that,” and immediately thought Let’s not, you’re my kind of person.
I chose this title partly because I say it all the time as a therapist—and partly because I then get to hear it said back to me in my own therapy, where my internal eye-rolls are too numerous to count. But I also chose it because it captures how I think about care. Not as something we rush through, optimize, or neatly resolve, but as something that unfolds over time—often awkwardly, uncomfortably, and in ways that refuse to follow a tidy arc.
Over time, I’ve come to see that the discomfort we’re asked to sit with isn’t just personal. It’s structural. What feels like an individual struggle often reflects research priorities, policy decisions, and systems that don’t quite know what to do with complexity—so they label it, streamline it, or move past it.
This Substack is a place for me to think out loud about those intersections.
Why this space exists
The truth is, I don’t always want to sit with things. Most of us don’t. We want clarity. Relief. A plan. Preferably by Tuesday.
But again and again—in my work and in my own life—I’ve seen how much gets missed when we rush past the parts that don’t resolve quickly.
Throughout my career as a therapist and during my doctoral training, I kept noticing the same gap: the distance between how distress is actually lived and how it gets studied and addressed. In therapy, I see people navigating anxiety, shame, burnout, and complicated relationships—with substances, with family, with systems that are supposed to help. Research works to name and study these experiences. Policy works to act on them. But both require simplification, categorization, and decisions made under constraint—and what often gets lost in that translation is how distress actually feels, unfolds, and is navigated in real time. Somewhere in that process, the complex lived experience of being human gets smoothed out.
The TikTokified mental health discourse has only made all of this glossier and more entertaining. Social media has, on one hand, radically changed and normalized conversations about mental health in ways that in my 10-year career, I’m still trying to wrap language around. And on the other hand, our love of a 30-second video has flattened complexity through a kind of speed-run certainty, where nuance gets traded for traction.
Suddenly, everything is pop psychology: everyone is either anxiously attached, a narcissist, or one viral video away from a brand-new diagnosis. Then come the “justs”: just set boundaries, just practice self-compassion, just use this coping skill—as if we’re all casually skipping the part where it’s hard.
Most people I work with aren’t struggling because they don’t know these ideas. They’re struggling because change is hard, context shapes what support is even accessible, and care doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
I wanted a place to slow that conversation down.
What I’ll write about here
This won’t be a how-to newsletter. I’m not here to give you five steps to fix yourself (though if you have managed to fix anything complex in five steps, I’m genuinely interested), or to explain therapy in bullet points. There are plenty of places for that, and many of them are good.
Instead, I’ll write about:
What I notice in my work as a therapist
How research helps explain patterns people feel ashamed of (probably around substance use, since that’s where a lot of my time gets spent)
Where policy shapes—and limits—mental health care
Why certain things feel harder than they “should”
What we lose when we rush to solutions
Sometimes that will look like naming a familiar experience and explaining why it makes sense. Sometimes it will be a reflection on my own work and process. Sometimes it will be a critique of systems that mean well and still cause harm.
Often, it will involve sitting with ambiguity.
What this is not (a friendly disclaimer)
This is not therapy. It’s not a substitute for care, and it’s not advice directed at any one person. It’s also not a place where I’ll pretend there are easy answers to complicated problems.
If you’re looking for certainty, you may find this frustrating.
If you’re looking for language, context, and a sense that you’re not imagining how hard this can be, you might feel at home.
An invitation
My hope is that this space helps bridge worlds that are often kept separate: the therapy office, the research article, the policy memo, and the lived experience of trying to get through the day.
If something here makes you pause, nod, or think oh—yes, that, then it’s doing what I want it to do.
So for now, let’s sit with that.