I may not know you, but I think I know something about you.
I know you’ve felt something break inside lately, an invisible fracture that only you’re fully aware of.
I know the way you walk away from conversations with people you once relied on for wisdom and clarity and compassion, doubting your own sanity because you no longer recognize those things in them.
I know the way you feel internally estranged from the friends, coworkers, family members, and neighbors you used to find affinity with—and you wonder if you’re losing your mind.
I understand how you stare at the perpetual parade of horrible scrolling past you, from the second you wake up prematurely in the early morning until the stretched-out nighttime moments you try unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and how you question how much worse it might get.
I know the disbelief you feel in the presence of loved ones and ministers and leaders who now seem to be speaking some strange foreign tongue that you can’t make any sense of.
And I hear the nagging question you ask inside your head a few hundred times a day: “Is it me, or has a huge portion of this country lost its mind?”
It isn’t you.
You’re quite fine, and this is, of course, both good and terrible news—because of what it says about you and about the place you find yourself.
The fact that you see how wrong this all is means your faculties are intact, your mind is fully right, and your heart is working properly. It’s all confirmation that you still have a soul doing what souls are supposed to do: keep you deeply human in profoundly inhumane times.
This is why you need to hold tightly to that soul because it is rarer and more valuable than ever.It’s why you need to embrace this holy unrest in the center of your belly, because it is the antidote to this present epidemic of apathy.It’s why you can’t allow your right mind to make peace with such abject madness.
If enough time passes, an otherwise healthy person can get used to being sick. They can slowly begin to convince themselves that almost any horrifying, toxic, painful, twisted reality is acceptable.Little by little, they can gradually allow themselves to acclimate to the nightmare, to come to see it as normal.Either that, or they determine that they’re actually out of their minds, and they collapse inside.
This is a reminder that this is not at all normal and that you are right to feel this disorientation.
I need you to hear this, friend:You’re okay.You’re not alone, and you’re not crazy.You’re also in good company.
Right now, there is a massive army of similarly walking wounded sharing this place with you; fellow exhausted souls who realize that none of this makes any sense; people concluding that, for their health, they will need to create distance from people they once allowed proximity.There are millions of good people out here still looking to be the kind of people the world needs; those committed to not harming, burdened to bring something decent where it is missing.
And this sprawling, disparate assembly sees what you see, and they know what you know: this brutality is not normal, even if it is prevalent.
And that’s why we need to keep resisting it.
We need to push back against the madness that tries to convince us that it’s we who have gone mad.
We need to press on because in days when evil is normalized, the perseverance of goodness matters most.
In times when truth and news are pliable, courageous truth-tellers are worth more than gold.
Your heart is the greatest weapon in the war for the soul of the place you call home.
Yes, friend, inhumanity is commonplace at this moment, so be ruthless in staying human.
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