Systems are lived, not abstract

I come to systems work from many different place.

I studied them formally, through sociology, psychology, and later through clinical training, learning how structures shape behavior, how power moves through institutions, and how patterns repeat across groups and generations. That theoretical grounding mattered. It gives me language, frameworks, and a way to locate individual experience inside something larger.

But theory alone never felt sufficient. What deepened my understanding was being close enough to see how systems are actually experienced.

In therapeutic settings, that meant sitting with people whose lives were shaped by forces they didn’t choose: family systems, economic pressure, institutional constraints, historical trauma. You could see how policy, culture, and access showed up in the most intimate places (i.e., relationships, coping strategies, bodies. Change there was never abstract. It was slow, relational, and uneven. It required patience, clarity, and a respect for what couldn’t be rushed.

In community and neighborhood work, those same dynamics played out at a different scale. Decisions made far from a place landed directly on the people living there. Development language promised improvement; lived experience revealed tradeoffs. Progress was real, but so were its costs. Being inside that work meant learning how to hold multiple truths at once, and how to think carefully about who benefits, who carries the burden, and who gets to decide.

Organizing, research, therapy, and development all taught me different aspects of the same lesson: systems are never neutral in practice, even when they are well-intended in design. They are felt locally, relationally, and unevenly. And when they fail to hold, people tend to compensate quietly, often at a cost.

Those experiences changed how I approach work now. I don’t treat systems as abstractions or assume alignment between intention and impact. I’m attentive to how decisions will be lived, not just justified. I take seriously the emotional, relational, and material labor that systems either support or offload. And I understand that meaningful change (whether personal, organizational, or collective) requires both structural insight and human patience.