The academic year turns in the fall. For those of us shaped by the rhythms of the semester, September has always been less an ending than a beginning, the season we return, reset, and begin again.
Some of us are arriving at this one tired. It has been a demanding year, politically and economically, and the strain has reached into our clinics, our classrooms, our labs, and our own households. Many of us have spent the year pouring out—for our clients, our students, our communities—with too little poured back in. As psychologists, we know the costs of sustained depletion.
This season, I offer an invitation to replenish. Not as indulgence but as the precondition for the work we carry. In a year that has asked so much of us, the effort to restore ourselves may come closer to resembling a radical act. To insist on our own restoration is to refuse the false bargain that says devotion must be proven by depletion.
“Leadership” is the word I want to leave you with. We lead as educators, as scientists, as clinicians, as advocates, and in each of those rooms, others are watching how we carry ourselves under pressure. When we tend to our own well, we model something our trainees and colleagues cannot learn from a syllabus: that this work is sustainable, that it can be done with steadiness and even joy, that we need not burn ourselves down to prove our worth.
This fall, I ask you to reset with intention. Return to why you entered this field. Let us renew that sense of purpose by choosing, together, to replenish what it took from us and find grounding in the wisdom we now carry.
bell hooks reminds us, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
Our renewal was never meant to be a solitary project. We restore one another by how we show up, how we make room, how we lead. The society we serve needs psychologists who are not merely capable but also whole. Let us begin there, together.
Be well—Radically Well, Together!
