United in Grief
First string of thoughts while my eyes are halfway closed, like I am caught between sleep and something too real to ignore. I am not polishing this. I am not softening it. I am letting it come out the way it sits in my chest, heavy and loud, like it has been waiting for a place to land.
I should have written this when it first hit me, when it burned instead of lingered. Back when it felt sharp, like something breaking open inside me. But maybe this is what it turns into when it does not leave. Maybe this is what happens when you carry it long enough. It settles into your bones.
The world we are living in does not feel real. Or maybe it is real, and that is the problem. Maybe this is exactly what it has always been, and I am just seeing it clearer now. It feels like a loop, like the same patterns repeating over and over again, but something is off. Something is wrong in a way I cannot ignore. Like the cycle has been tampered with. Like the wrong people keep ending up in power, playing roles they were never meant to hold, rewriting outcomes that could have been different.
I keep coming back to power. Who gets it. Who is denied it. Who is allowed to shape the future and who is forced to survive it. How do you stop someone who was capable, someone who could have shifted things, from leading something as powerful as this country? What is so threatening about real change that it has to be blocked, twisted, replaced?
Because this country was never clean. It was never pure. It was built on violence and called it order. Built on stolen land and called it discovery. Built on broken bodies and called it progress. White supremacy made sure of that. It wrote itself into everything. Into the laws, into the systems, into the way people think without even realizing it. Indigenous people erased. Black and brown lives used, discarded, rewritten like they were nothing.
And that does not just disappear. It does not fade because time moves forward. It lives here. It breathes in everything we are still dealing with. People want to pretend it is over, like it is history, but history is not dead. It is active. It is shaping right now.
Every day feels like we are standing on the edge of something collapsing. Like the ground is cracking and people are pretending it is solid. Being led by people who feel empty, disconnected, hungry for control in a way that has nothing to do with care or humanity. It feels sick. It feels obvious. And what messes with me the most is that so many people can see it, can feel it, and still nothing changes the way it should.
We say we should fight. We say we should rise up. But there is this weight, this stillness, like something is pressing down on everyone at the same time. People are tired. People are scared. People are overwhelmed to the point where survival feels easier than resistance. And that silence starts to feel like compliance, even when it is not.
And in the middle of all of this, the children are the ones paying for it.
That is the part that sits the heaviest in me. The part I cannot shake.
Because no one is truly protecting them. Not the systems. Not the people who claim they are. Too many children are being hurt, shaped by pain before they even get the chance to understand what life is supposed to feel like. And it does not always look loud. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes it is hidden. But it follows them. It stays with them. It changes how they see themselves before they even know who they are.
It feels like a cycle of harm that keeps feeding itself. Like pain being passed down, embedded, repeated until it becomes normal to the people living inside of it. And those children grow up carrying something they never asked for, trying to make sense of a version of themselves that was interrupted too early.
That kind of damage does not just go away. It lives in the body. In the mind. In the way people love, in the way they protect themselves, in the way they question their own worth.
I think about innocence, and it makes my chest tight.
Because once it is taken, it is taken. You can rebuild, you can heal, you can find yourself again, but something about that first version of you, the untouched version, is gone. And I think that is what hurts the most. Knowing how easily it can be taken, and how permanent that loss feels.
And this is not just something I am watching from the outside.
I know what it feels like.
I know what it feels like to have something pure disrupted by something that never should have been there. To carry something that was not yours to carry. To sit with a version of yourself that had to grow up too fast, or in ways that were never fair.
So when I look at the world, it is not distant to me. It is personal. It is connected.
And I keep asking myself, when does it stop?
When do the wars stop being about power and start being about people? When does land stop mattering more than life? When do we stop destroying each other for things that will never matter more than being human?
And where do I stand in all of this?
Because I cannot ignore it. I cannot unsee it. But I also do not know what it looks like to carry this and not feel like I am drowning in it sometimes.
I want to help. I want to heal something, even if it is small, even if it is not everything. I do not want to be another person who sees it and turns away. I want to create something that gives back what was taken, even if it is just a piece of it.
Maybe it starts with intention. Maybe it starts with refusing to be numb. Maybe it starts with caring this much, even when it hurts.
I do not have the answers. I do not know how this ends.
But I know this is real.
The pain is real. The history is real. The damage is real.
And so is this feeling inside of me that refuses to let it be ignored.
Maybe that is where it begins. Maybe that refusal, that ache, that awareness, is the first step toward something different.
Because even in all of this, I still want healing to exist. And maybe wanting that, this deeply, is not weakness.
Maybe it is the only thing that has a chance to change anything at all.