When I finished my master’s degree in public health in the middle of COVID, I was cloaked in the illusion that my timing was miraculous, that I had positioned myself at the center of history, that I would be part of real change during a once in a hundred year pandemic and that this was proof I had made all the right decisions. I believed I had followed the formula precisely and that the formula would reward me.
What I did not realize is that there was never a safety net waiting to catch me in the real world.
I always carved out space for writing and hobbies because something in me refused to disappear entirely into the system, but it was not until I stepped outside of what I had been told was secure that people began reflecting back to me what I could actually be. A master’s degree did not pay my student loans. It does not automatically create leverage. It does not insulate you from living paycheck to paycheck, and many of you reading this know exactly what that feels like.
We were handed a framework and told it was the only path to stability.
Get an education.
Become an expert.
Climb the ladder.
Make good money.
Make marginally more good money.
Retire with enough savings to survive your senior years.
Take vacations if you can manage it.
That blueprint was presented as unquestionable. If you followed it, you would be fine. If you worked hard enough, you would be protected.
But the hard work I put in, the expertise I developed, and the skills I sharpened did not determine whether I was laid off. There was no invisible shield that activated because I had done everything right. There was no social obligation for anyone to open a door for me when that one closed. And to be fair, it was never anyone else’s responsibility to find me a job. There were no guarantees written into the margins of my diploma. I had not prepared for the possibility that the system itself might falter because I had signed my name confidently at the bottom of a contract I believed was solid.
This connects to ideas I shared in Be a Catalyst!.
I explore this further in We Are Socially Hungover….
I’ve written more about this in My Top 3 Favorite Hikes (Thus Far!).
I spent years in public health earning little more than minimum wage in roles that promised security and networking contacts as if proximity to power was the same thing as power itself. No one advised me to lean into my actual strengths and capitalize on what I offered the world. My writing. My ability to connect with strangers. My comfort speaking in front of a room without hesitation. My ideas. Those parts of me were trimmed off like excess dough from a cookie cutter, the scraps no one bothers to repurpose because they do not fit the mold.
The traditional approach told us to work hard, stay quiet, keep our heads down, and blend in. That formula did not make me stable. It made me restless. It made me angry. It ignited the parts of my personality that refused to shrink into a box designed for predictability over possibility.
Creativity never thrived in the work I was doing, even though it constantly whispered solutions. I could see how to improve processes, how to communicate policy in ways people would actually understand, how to shift systems toward something meaningful. But creativity was not rewarded, and being outspoken marked you as difficult rather than valuable. The moment you dared to raise your hand with conviction, you were met with the look that says you are out of line, that you should be grateful, that you should sit back down and let the machine run the way it always has.
How can you be an outsider inside a system you invested in? That is a question I am still unraveling.
What I do know is that the support we believed existed was more atmospheric than structural. It felt real because it had always been there. Benefits packages. Upward movement charts. Enforced pay scales. Promises of loan forgiveness. The language of security was polished and repeated until we internalized it as truth.
But I was not standing on solid ground. I was dancing, jumping, and performing cartwheels on thin ice above freezing water, convinced the surface was permanent because everyone around me was doing the same choreography. And when that ice cracked, it did so faster than it took me to earn the degree that allowed me to step onto it in the first place. And dang…the water was cold.
We were not foolish for believing the blueprint. We were disciplined. We were ambitious. We were obedient to a story that had worked for generations before us. But the conditions changed, and no one updated the instructions.
If this resonates with you, it is not because you failed. It is because the structure we trusted was never designed to hold the weight of all of us at once.
And maybe the wildest realization of all is that the parts of us that were trimmed away, the creativity, the voice, the refusal to blend in, might have been the only real safety net we ever had.