You don't need fixing.
You need unlearning.

I grew up in South Africa, under the last gasping breaths of apartheid, inside a Christian Nationalist community with a very clear picture of who you were supposed to be. I am queer and bisexual. That picture didn't include me. I got good at performing the version of myself that kept things quiet, which is one way to survive childhood and a very slow way to lose yourself.

Some of the unlearning was uncomfortable. The racism that was ambient in the culture I grew up in, absorbed without asking and examined deliberately later. The beliefs that felt like facts until I looked at them. The version of strength I inherited that turned out to mostly be about not needing anything.

I spent two decades in software engineering — fifteen of those running my own consulting business — and it turns out I was coaching people the whole time. The technical problems were rarely the hard part. The hard part was always people: how they work together, where they get stuck.

Staff, colleagues, direct reports. Someone coming out at work and not knowing who was safe. Someone's marriage falling apart mid-project. A career crisis dressed up as a performance problem. I wasn't their therapist, but I was often the person they came to — and I took that seriously. Debugging people, essentially.

I moved to the United States as an adult. Tried building the life the script back home called for. Some of it held. Some of it didn't. Loved in ways that didn't fit what I'd been handed. Lost close friends to suicide. Did my own religious deconstruction. Survived a few things that didn't come with a warning label.

I've also done the formal training. Suicide prevention, crisis conversations, relationship dynamics. Some of it to be better equipped for the work. Some of it because I needed to understand my own life better. Usually both.

I've been in therapy for most of the last twenty years. Not because something's wrong. Because I'm paying attention.