Sometimes I stop everything I’m doing as a comfortable person with a job and income and food and a home and it hits me that there is a genocide happening in this moment and children being murdered with state-sponsored weapons, and it’s crippling.
I am not a young person, I have seen some shit in my decades. But it still hurts like hell every time I think about the suffering we’re still allowing as a species and that feeling and sensitivity to the knowledge has only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. Greater awareness leads to greater pain because you start to see the whole picture; what we are as a species, what we can and cannot do, and how much sorrow and misery we put each other through needlessly.
I often come across as cold and unsympathetic, severe and uncompassionate.
That’s because I’m extremely empathetic, toward all life. I don’t even kill bugs. But I know too much. I’m aware of mass suffering around the world, needless and preventable.
I’ll give myself little spaces of time to just sit and think about everything, and it just turns into ugly weeping. You can’t function like that. The only way I can get through my day is by turning that dial waaaay down outside of my designated mourning time.