A friend and I went for a walk this morning. She is someone who loves books, the kind of person who used to stay up too late because she could not put one down. Lately, she has started three different books and cannot get past the first hundred pages of any of them. She picks one up, reads for a while, and then puts it down. Not because the writing is bad. Because something in her cannot settle long enough to be carried away.
I knew exactly what she meant. I have been distracted and exhausted in a way that feels different from ordinary tired. Jumpy at small things. Tearful at unexpected moments.
Many of us are living in a kind of low-grade, constant alertness right now. We scroll and find something devastating. We put the phone down and try to go on with our day — make dinner, answer emails, laugh at something — and there is a small, persistent voice that says: How can you?
That voice is not wrong. It is trying to protect our integrity. It is asking us to stay honest about what is happening in the world. But when it becomes the only voice we can hear, it stops being conscience and starts being paralysis.
What is happening in the world right now is genuinely devastating. Over this past week, US and Israeli strikes on schools, hospitals, and other sites in Iran have killed more than 1000 people, including more than 150 children. Girls between the ages of seven and twelve, in a place built for their learning and their futures. Across the globe and here at home, we are watching the rights of transgender people stripped away, piece by piece, in state after state, not as a policy disagreement, but as a targeted effort to make certain people’s lives harder, smaller, less safe. And these are not isolated events. They are part of a pattern I have been watching for a long time: harm wielded as a tool of power, used most fiercely against those who are already living close to the edges.
I want to name that pattern plainly, not to overwhelm, but because naming it is part of how we stay clear-eyed. When we understand that cruelty and stripping of rights are strategies, ways of consolidating power by fragmenting people who might otherwise stand together, it changes something in how we see our role. The goal is not just to make us sad. The goal is to make us feel alone and helpless. To make us believe that nothing we do matters. To make us turn away from each other.
That is exactly why we cannot.
There is a concept in trauma work called vicarious trauma — the weight that accumulates in us when we witness suffering, even suffering that is not our own. It is real. It affects our sleep, our concentration, our capacity for joy. It is part of why my friend cannot finish her books. It is part of why I have found myself sitting down to write something and then just staring. Or startling at a notification. Or crying in a way I did not see coming. I share this not to center my own experience, but because I think many of us are walking around carrying this and believing we are the only one. We are not.
And alongside it, many of us are carrying something like survivor guilt. Life goes on for us. We get coffee, we go to work, we watch a show. And that ordinariness can feel obscene when we are holding images of school bags pulled from rubble, or reading about a teenager in Kansas who just lost access to the healthcare keeping them alive. We do not know how to hold our own ordinary life and the weight of these times in the same body.
I do not have a clean answer to this. But I do know this: collapsing under the weight does not serve the people who are suffering. Numbness does not serve them either. What serves them, and us, is staying present, staying connected, and finding ways to act that are grounded in our values rather than our despair.
This is not a call to toxic positivity. I am not asking you to focus on the good and let the rest go. I am asking something harder than that: to stay awake to what is painful, and also to stay awake to what is possible. To let the grief and the action live side by side, neither one canceling the other out.
That balance looks different for each of us. Some of us are called to march. Some to write. Some to show up for a neighbor, a student, a child who needs to know they are seen. Some to make sure that the people with the power to make decisions hear from those of us who believe in a different kind of world. That last one matters more right now than it has in a long time.
One of the things I believe most deeply is that democracy is not just a system. It is a practice. It requires us to keep showing up — not just in moments of crisis, but in the quieter moments when we decide who leads, who makes choices, who sets the terms of our shared life. One of the most direct ways any of us can act right now is to make sure that the people in power are people who believe that everyone deserves safety and care — that seven-year-old girls in Iran deserve safety and care, that transgender teenagers in Kansas deserve safety and care, and that no one should ever be written off as an acceptable loss in someone else’s pursuit of power.
With that in mind, I am hosting a Flip the Vote House Party on April 30, 5 to 6 PM PST. It is a space to come together, to be in community rather than isolation, to talk about what each of us can do, and to remind ourselves that when we act together, it counts. No demonizing and no despair spiral. Just people who care about this world, figuring out how to show up for it.
If that is you, I would love to have you there.
Register at: https://bit.ly/FliptheVotewithRoxyApr30
If you want to support the work financially: https://bit.ly/DonatetoFliptheVoteWithRoxy
My friend and I kept walking. By the end of our conversation, she had not solved the book problem. But she seemed lighter, just from having named it out loud. That is not nothing. Sometimes the first step is simply saying: this is hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The next step is finding each other.
