Dear Colleagues,

There are days I look around at our healthcare system and feel a weight in my chest that I can't quite name. It's more than frustration. It’s deeper than exhaustion. It's the quiet heartbreak of realizing that the system we’ve poured our lives into—trained for, sacrificed for, stayed late for—is not just failing. It’s functioning exactly as it was built to: to prioritize profit, protect power, and leave the rest of us scrambling to do what we can in the margins.

Let’s be honest: we’re not burned out because we lack resilience.
We’re burned out because we’re working in a machine that asks us to abandon our values every day. To document instead of listen. To rush instead of relate. To explain to a parent why their child can’t get therapy because the insurer said no—again. To chart that visit with one eye on the clock and another on your inbox, while your soul quietly shrinks.

And yet—we keep showing up.

Not because the system deserves us.
But because people do. Because healing matters. Because we remember what it’s like to feel seen in a moment of fear or pain. And that memory keeps us tethered to something human inside this inhuman machine.

But here’s what I want to say today, from one weary-but-still-fighting person to another:

We’re not powerless.
We may not be able to flip a switch and fix it all. But we can refuse to go numb.
We can speak the truth in rooms that prefer silence.
We can build micro-worlds of sanity—inside our clinics, on our teams, in our choices.
We can opt out of the cult of overwork.
We can remember that our worth was never meant to be measured in RVUs or productivity metrics.

And if enough of us start to live that truth—not in defiance, but in integrity—we start to carve a new path through the wreckage.

A better system is possible. It won’t come from the top down. It will rise from the ground up—through voices like yours, through collective refusal, through new ways of imagining care.

You don’t have to save the whole system. But you can refuse to lose yourself in it.

With deep respect and quiet fire,
Emma Jones