What They Don’t Want You to Understand
There are two things people are discouraged from connecting.
The first is the quiet collapse of senior care in Maine.
The second is what happens to individuals who stay inside failing systems for too long.
I know this because I’ve lived on both sides of that line.
What they don’t want you to understand about senior care
Senior care in Maine didn’t “suddenly” break. It didn’t fail because families weren’t loving enough, or because workers weren’t trying hard enough, or because older adults “didn’t plan.”
It failed because it was built on assumptions that no longer hold.
It was built assuming:
Families would absorb whatever the system couldn’t.
Staff would compensate emotionally for structural understaffing.
Stability could be signaled through appearances—new paint, new programming, friendly language—rather than operational reality.
And most importantly: that pressure could always be pushed downward without consequence.
What families don’t see is that many facilities are no longer designed to function under sustained strain. They are designed to look functional while relying on invisible labor—family advocacy, staff burnout, resident adaptation—to keep things moving.
Residents learn this quickly.
They don’t trust “the facility.”
They trust patterns.
Which aide listens.
Which nurse rushes.
Which administrator avoids.
Which promises actually stick.
When those patterns break, trust collapses fast. And when trust collapses, families are told they’re being “difficult,” “anxious,” or “overinvolved”—instead of being told the truth: that the system is brittle, and your engagement is compensating for that brittleness.
What they don’t want you to understand about institutions
Here’s the harder part.
The same dynamics that destabilize residents destabilize people inside the system.
I stayed close to this work for years. I absorbed it. I carried stories that weren’t mine to fix. I learned how to translate between families, facilities, policy, and reality. And like many people who become good at holding complexity, I didn’t realize how much load I was carrying until my own system failed.
Eventually, I was hospitalized.
Eventually, I moved through the judicial system.
That sentence makes people uncomfortable, because we like clean categories: professional vs. personal, helper vs. helped, stable vs. unstable. But systems don’t care about those categories. Systems respond to pressure the same way, every time.
When pressure exceeds capacity and accountability is unclear, responsibility is pushed downward.
When responsibility is pushed downward long enough, something breaks.
In senior care, that “something” is often a family, a resident, or a worker.
In my case, it was me.
What they don’t want you to connect
They don’t want you to understand that institutional failure doesn’t just harm “the vulnerable.” It consumes the people trying to make sense of it.
They don’t want you to see that when systems rely on individual resilience instead of structural support, they eventually create crises—and then label those crises as personal failings.
They don’t want you to ask why:
Families are expected to become case managers overnight.
Staff are expected to operate without slack.
Residents are expected to adapt endlessly.
And people who speak plainly about collapse are treated as problems instead of signals.
Why I’m saying this now
I didn’t come back from hospitalization and court to tell a redemption story.
I came back with clarity.
Clarity that collapse doesn’t announce itself with alarms. It shows up as normalization.
Clarity that being “functional” inside a broken system is not the same as being well.
Clarity that understanding how systems behave under stress is not cynicism—it’s protection.
Maine doesn’t need more inspirational messaging about aging.
Families don’t need to be told to “stay positive.”
Older adults don’t need to be reassured while their trust erodes quietly.
What we need is honesty about capacity, incentives, and limits.
And what individuals need—whether they’re residents, families, or professionals—is permission to recognize when adaptation has turned into harm.
The part they really don’t want you to understand
Understanding is power.
When you understand how systems fail, you stop blaming yourself for responding appropriately to pressure.
When you understand patterns, you stop chasing reassurance and start demanding stability.
When you understand collapse, you stop mistaking survival for success.
That’s what I do now. I help families see the system they’re actually inside—not the one they were promised.
And I say this plainly, because I’ve lived it plainly:
If a system requires you to break in order for it to keep going, the system is already broken.
Understanding that isn’t dangerous.
Pretending otherwise is.
