Unlearning Martyrdom
Celebrating Five Years of Entrepreneurship & Connected in Community
Connected in Community turns five today!
July 1, 2020, I officially launched this practice to support my side gig. At the time, I was working full time as a university faculty member, but would see a handful of clients virtually in the evenings and on the weekends. Purchasing this LLC was the first step I took on a journey that has become much more than I initially anticipated.
If there’s one thing entrepreneurship has taught me, it’s to become comfortable and quickly adaptable to change.
What started as a solo side gig quickly grew into my full-time job, and a group therapy practice with multiple clinicians working together to meet the demand for culturally conscious mental healthcare. The growth was rapid, but in December 2024, I made the public decision to close Connected in Community as a group therapy practice. Not because the group practice wasn’t profitable—it was. But it wasn’t working for me. Running and maintaining a group practice required much more of me than I was willing to give. I was not (I am not) willing to trade time with my family, my health, and living with constant stress for the sake of ambition.
The practice made money. That was never the issue.
The issue was that revenue came at the expense of me. Managing the care of over 200 clients while supporting a team of therapists meant that I was constantly on call. At any moment, I could be pulled into a crisis, whether a client emergency or a therapist locked out of the office. It became too much. Too much time. Too much stress. Too much responsibility.
And layered on top of this was the weight that came with community responsibility. As a practice whose clientele was 100% Black and/or Queer we had the added layer of responsibility that comes with supporting the needs of the most vulnerable in our city. The level of need in Indianapolis for mental health services that center the Black and Queer experiences is staggering. Providing the level of care necessary for this community requires a lot of time, energy, money, and resources. While larger organizations may receive funding and other resources to respond to these needs, they frankly can’t provide the culturally appropriate care these communities need (a much deeper topic for another day). And while we had the ability to provide the care, we didn’t have the infrastructure or resources to sustain the capacity to meet the community's needs.
It all became too much, too fast. And I couldn’t do it all on my own.
