The Distance Between Functioning and Healing

There is a version of me that looked completely fine from the outside. She had a career, a routine, a carefully curated answer to the question 'how are you?' She was functioning. She was not healing.

For nine years, I worked in corporate advertising. I was good at it. I was strategic, driven, and practiced at performing competence even when I was running on empty. I had learned, as so many of us do, that the most valuable thing I could offer was my output. Not my presence. Not my grief. Not the parts of me that were quietly unraveling.

When I finally started therapy, I was not looking for transformation. I was looking for a way to manage. To get back to functioning at full capacity. To fix whatever was slowing me down. What I found instead was something I had not expected: a space where I did not have to translate myself.

My therapist was a Black woman. That mattered more than I had words for at the time. I did not have to explain the particular exhaustion of code-switching. I did not have to justify why certain things felt heavier for me than they might for someone else. The context was already there. The cultural fluency was already present. And in that presence, something in me began to soften.

The Year Everything Shifted

2020 did something to a lot of us. The convergence of a global pandemic, the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, and the collective reckoning that followed cracked something open that could not be closed again. I watched the mental health crisis among Black women and women of color become impossible to ignore. I watched people reach for support and find nothing that fit.

I also watched myself. I was still in corporate. I was still producing. But I was asking a different question now: what am I actually doing this for?

The answer that kept surfacing was not about advertising. It was about the room I had been given. The room where I did not have to perform. The room where my whole story was welcome. I wanted to build that room for other people.

Functioning Is Not the Goal

Here is what I know now that I did not know then: functioning is a floor, not a ceiling. It is the baseline of survival, not the fullness of living. And for a lot of high-achieving women, especially women of color who have been conditioned to perform strength as a matter of survival, functioning becomes the only metric we allow ourselves.

We do not ask if we are thriving. We ask if we are keeping up. We do not ask if we are at peace. We ask if we are still productive. We mistake the absence of crisis for the presence of health.

Healing looks different. It is slower. It is less linear. It requires you to feel things you have been expertly avoiding. It asks you to look at the narratives you built to survive and ask whether they are still serving you. It is not efficient. It is not optimizable. And it is absolutely worth it.

Why I Built This Practice

Eclectic Counseling exists because I believe that the quality of care you receive should not depend on whether your therapist already understands your world. It should not require you to spend half your session explaining your cultural context, your family dynamics, or why certain things land differently for you than they might for someone else.

I built this practice for the woman who is tired of translating herself. For the one who has been strong for so long she has forgotten what it feels like to be held. For the one who is functioning beautifully and quietly falling apart.

You do not have to be in crisis to deserve support. You do not have to be broken to benefit from healing. You just have to be willing to show up. And if you are reading this, you are already here.