How do I keep going when the system grinds down my clients?

You came to this work believing you could help, and the system keeps proving how little it bends. Your clients get ground down, your idealism with them, and you are tired in a way sleep does not fix. That exhaustion is not failure. It is what caring costs when you are up against something this heavy. You will not fix the machine, and pretending you can will only break you faster. But your reach is not the whole system — it is the person in front of you. You cannot save everyone, yet you can be the one part of a cold process that treats a person like a person. That is not small to them. It may be the only decent thing in their day. To last, you have to measure your wins smaller. Not whether you changed the system, but whether you did right by this one person today. Keep a private list of those moments so you can see them when despair says nothing matters. Fight the machine where you can, but do not let it convince you that your daily decency is worthless. It is the whole point.