“Everything hurts,” I wrote.

Since June 23rd, exactly. I have been living inside of grief, endless and without oxygen. I don’t shy away from any emotion; instead, I sit next to it alone, and try to understand it, so that I might hear the message it’s trying to communicate.

This past year has devastated me. Especially these last nine months, heightened more recently. Everywhere I look, I see nothing but degradation, rooted in the individualistic concept of “me me me” above all other things. Over community, family, commitment, our word. No oxygen. Since June 23rd, I have not been able to take a prolonged deep breath.

Spasms of caught air. A heart-full afternoon. Evenings with beloveds, time with my family, but still. But still.

It has taken me nearly two weeks to understand the grief with which I continue to wrestle. Months macro, two weeks micro. It was not until yesterday that I understood, and only then was I able to break down. At one point I couldn’t get off of my kitchen floor because I was crying so hard.

We are in HD and real-time watching the Illegal Sett/er C0/0ny, commit daily acts of unimaginable horror against my People, while bold-faced lying into cameras. Gaslighting. Mockery of morality.

I am low on energy because of what I have had to process, as equally as what I have had to deny and acrobat into understanding just to daily make it through. My heart feels both deflated and heavy; she is sick, I think.

I wish to see the beauty in everyone, in all of His creation but I am incapable at present and I don’t know how to recalibrate. Time, I guess. The passage of time dulls everything. But what about those for whom I don’t care or actively dislike? A part of His creation, they are beauty-full, aren’t they? No. Maybe I can simply aim for neutrality, I believe.

Every emotion is its own compass. The grief which I am experiencing is because I had been denying all above and below, which I have known in my bones my entire life. And when we lie to ourselves, we disfigure. The heart will step in to remind us of our beauty only if we are open to it.

It is the yesterday realization that we are in a world where a country may continue to commit a bold-faced gen0cide because we are, on an individual basis, morally corrupt and bankrupt. If we were a humanity making moral choices, making decisions from places of integrity and care for one another, recognizing that every – every – choice and decision are infinitely connected to every single other individual in this world, it’s not that we would be able to stop the gen0c!de, but rather it’s that we would have created a world in which it would not have been possible to even contemplate such a horror.

Instead. We have created a world where lying, misrepresentation, gaslighting – on an individual as well as a political / country level – are par for the course. How could we demand moral righteousness from a government – any government – while we are so morally bankrupt ourselves?

Are we this delusional? Or are we so severed from our heart-center that we cannot connect the dots as we need to?

I am a woman with a heart always full on hope – hope for better tomorrows, for gentler interactions, for forgiveness and softness. Hope for all things to root in love for one another but I have, for over two weeks now, nothing to hope for. I cannot even force it, I am at such a logjam in my brain. It’s as though what little veil was left between me and the poison of human choices in service of ego, too often rooted in cowardice, fell away on June 23rd.

Ya Allah, help your creation. We are lost to ourselves. And everything hurts. Everything hurts.

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