What Leaving Grad School Taught Me About Therapy

Over fifteen years ago, I dropped out of graduate school in London.

I remember the moment I decided to leave. It wasn’t dramatic. No big breakdown. Just a quiet, growing certainty that I couldn’t keep going—not like that, not in that place. I packed up my books, my shame, and my hopes for the future, and flew home with a deep sense that I’d failed.

For a long time, I carried that failure like a secret weight. It colored how I saw myself—my capacity, my worth, my place in the world. I worried about how I would explain it, how it would look on my CV, what people would think. I didn’t yet have the language to talk about what was really happening: the cultural dissonance, the isolation, the unspoken pressure to succeed at any cost.

All I knew was that I had walked away. And it felt like the end.

But I remember the friend who sat beside me when I requested a leave from the program. Who had coffee with me for hours. Who didn’t offer solutions or try to talk me out of anything—just stayed. Sometimes that’s all we need. Someone to witness the moment we begin again, even if we don’t yet know what we’re walking toward.

What feels like an ending is often a beginning in disguise.

That experience—of leaving, of loss, of starting over—shaped me far more than any degree could have. It cracked open my understanding of resilience, especially in the face of setbacks, not as something loud or heroic, but as the quiet courage to try again. To rebuild. To become.

In my work now—as a therapist and consultant—I often sit with others at their own thresholds. Moments when the map is unclear, and the road ahead feels heavy or uncertain.

I don’t offer quick fixes. I don’t have all the answers. But I do know this: failure alone doesn’t define us—what we carry forward, and what we choose to let go, does.

I’ve come to realize that many of us carry stories like this—unspoken fears about how we’re seen, what we’ve lost, and whether we’re still enough.

This blog is a space to explore those stories together. To reflect on healing, identity, culture, and the many ways we begin again.