Lately, I’ve been feeling it more in my chest than in my mind.
It’s not panic. Not urgency.
It’s a slow-burning, wide-lens kind of dread.
The kind that doesn’t come from one breaking story—but from all of them, layered and compounding until your nervous system stops registering them as separate events and just folds them into one long, aching exhale.
And honestly? That might be the scariest part.
Not the laws. Not the violence. Not the unchecked hate.
But the fact that I’m already bracing less when it hits.
That the heartbreak is starting to feel familiar.
That the body learns how to flinch in silence.
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I don’t need to list the headlines. You already know.
The bans. The rollbacks. The erasures.
The steady unraveling of rights that were never guaranteed to begin with—but that we wanted to believe were safe.
For women. For trans and queer folks. For immigrants. For anyone with a marginalized body or politic or voice.
And while much of it is happening in the United States, I don’t feel separate from it.
I feel proximal. Vulnerable. Exposed.
Because ideologies don’t stop at borders.
And the systems that allow this kind of dehumanization?
They’re not uniquely American.
They are present here, too—louder than we’d like to admit.
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There’s this quiet myth in Canadian culture—this belief that we’re not like them. That we’re more progressive, more peaceful, more safe.
But safety isn’t guaranteed by policy. It’s shaped by culture.
And I’m watching the culture shift. Subtly. Repeatedly. Violently.
I’ve been seeing it in real time.
The anti-trans rhetoric.
The creeping presence of far-right language.
The normalization of cruelty in the name of “debate.”
It’s here. It’s spreading.
And if you’re feeling it too—not just intellectually, but in your body—you’re not imagining it. You’re not being dramatic. You’re paying attention.
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What I’m noticing in myself—and in a lot of the people I work with—is this unbearable tension between wanting to act and feeling too overwhelmed to move.
That’s not apathy. That’s shutdown.
We are not desensitized because we don’t care.
We’re desensitized because we’ve been hit with too much, too fast, with too little recovery time in between.
And the systems that benefit from our powerlessness?
They’re counting on that.
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So I’m not writing this with answers.
I’m writing it to say: Stay scared. Stay awake. Stay human.
I don’t want to numb out.
I don’t want to normalize this.
I don’t want to treat policy as background noise or treat other people’s rights as political chess pieces.
I want to feel the weight of this moment.
I want to stay connected to my own humanity while this world keeps trying to crush it.
And I want to stay connected to yours, too.
If you’re feeling the fault line—don’t collapse alone.
Name the fear. Let it shake you.
And let that shaking remind you that you’re still alive, still feeling, still here.
Let’s not make numb our baseline.
Let’s not confuse burnout for disconnection.
Let’s hold this fear together.