The Regulator Broke

I am currently lying in my bed, after being devastatingly sick with food poisoning the last few days. Feeling relieved that at least in this moment, I'm feeling a little better and finally able to keep fluids down.

Two straight days of fever, chills, body aches, and I’ll spare you the nasty details, but let’s just say the first night especially was the kind of sick where cold bathroom tiles became my bed for the night.

By last night, I couldn’t keep anything down and finally had to call a friend to take me to urgent care. One IV bag and some anti-nausea medicine later, I was feeling a whole lot better and was able to come home and sleep.

But that first night was a doozy. I’m lying there, feeling like every ounce of strength had been drained from me and left somewhere on that cold bathroom floor. Mentally retracing everything I’d eaten while visions of RFK Jr. and recalled produce danced through my increasingly dehydrated head, wondering if I’d become one of the unlucky ones who actually ate whatever the internet has been frantically warning us about this week... Or maybe this was just a bug, probably. But who the hell knows these days? And I couldn’t help but wonder, with some irritation, if this was really the way I was going to go out. Okay... maybe I was being overly dramatic, but I felt really, really bad.

So I’m lying there in my self-pity, and then a particular kind of vulnerability takes over. All the emotional walls I’d built so I can do this work day in and day out without every horrible thing I see breaking me open just gave way. And suddenly, I wasn’t just looking at it anymore, I was feeling it. REALLY feeling it. I really didn’t want to... why was I doing this to myself at this ungodly hour, at the worst time humanly imaginable?

I have had to teach myself over the last nineteen months to look directly at human suffering, at cruelty, at laws being rewritten around people’s lives, at institutions being dismantled, at so much devasting horror… trying to not let every individual story move permanently into me.

And yes, of course I feel it, you know that I do. That wall isn’t numbness; it’s more of a regulator. I let enough through to remain human, angry, compassionate and affected. But I’m always aware of those really sensitive parts of me... the parts with no natural stopping point... that if I let them feel the FULL weight of it, they will keep feeling until I drown in it.

But lying there, suddenly, the regulator broke.

And I started sobbing. Not quietly... full-on sobbing. Everything that has been accumulating inside me over the last nineteen brutally unrelenting months. Everything I had been keeping at a survivable distance suddenly had no distance at all. Every face. Every story... all those images of screaming children being torn from their parents at the hands of ICE thugs, the scenes in Gaza that make me feel physically sick and utterly powerless to help, desperately wanting it to stop while knowing I cannot reach through a screen and put my hands between a human being and what is happening to them. It's everything and so much. But the it's the children, the children that get to me the most.

And maybe that is one of the most maddening things about witnessing suffering from far away. Your body keeps insisting on an instinct your circumstances cannot satisfy: do something. I NEED to do something. But I feel so powerless.

It’s watching the endless cruelty of people who have the power to make things better and just… don’t. The weirdness of going about your day knowing what’s happening somewhere else. People are buying coffee, walking their dogs, complaining about traffic. The sun is out, the birds are singing... and somewhere, at the exact same time, somebody is living through the worst moment of their life.

And underneath all of it was this one overwhelming realization.

I’m so fucking tired.

Excruciatingly tired.

I’m so tired of having to metabolize horror every single day and then wake up and do it all over again. Tired of having to learn the name of another person who never should have become a headline.

Tired of watching sniveling, spineless, puffed-up little wannabe tough guys play soldier, round people up and drag terrified human beings away, acting like a badge and a uniform somehow make them tough.

Tired of watching rights we used to take for granted disappear and then having to fight like hell to get them back. Tired of watching women still have to explain, in fucking 2026, that our bodies belong to us. Tired of watching vulnerable and marginalized people get used as political targets because people are still so goddamned racist.

Tired of fucking wars.

It’s all so unnecessary. What the fuck are we doing?

Kids are learning what bombs sound like before they’re even old enough to understand what war means. No parent should have to watch their child get used to being afraid.

Tired of animals suffering because somebody found a way to turn their pain into revenue. Watching wild horses being chased by helicopters and then having to investigate where they end up. Tired of finding out that the answer to “surely we wouldn’t do that” is, so often, yes.

Apparently we fucking would.

Tired of catastrophe becoming scenery. Fires. Floods. Poisoned air. Another record broken that nobody wanted broken.

Tired of billionaires accumulating immeasurable sums of money that they cannot spend in a thousand lifetimes while everyone else is quietly subtracting things from their cart.

Tired of the lies. Jesus Christ, the lies. Tired of fact-checking things that shouldn’t even need to be fact-checked. Tired of watching something happen right in front of all of us, only to be told five minutes later that it didn’t happen, or that we didn’t see what we very clearly just fucking saw. Tired of having to constantly prove that reality is, in fact, reality.

Above all, I’m so very tired of being angry... tired of NEEDING to be angry.

Tired of feeling guilty when I’m not angry because somewhere, right this second, something terrible is happening, and looking away feels like abandoning the people it’s happening to.

Tired of caring and wishing, for five fucking minutes, that I could care just a little less... while knowing I never actually want to.

Tired of people having to be resilient.

God, I am tired of that word.

Why the hell are we asking people to be this resilient in the first place? We shouldn’t have to be this good at surviving things that never should have happened to us.

It’s so fucking unnecessary.

All of it.

Entire systems have been built that make it incredibly easy to hurt people, and then the people responsible stand around acting like the cruelty is some unfortunate flaw nobody saw coming instead of admitting they fucking built it into the design.

We know how to feed people. We know how to house people. We know how to keep families together. We know children need safety. We know bombs tear bodies apart. We know animals feel pain. We know the planet cannot endlessly absorb what we do to it. We know hoarding obscene wealth while other people go hungry is grotesque.

So much of this is not some impossible riddle humanity has failed to solve.

We know.

And we keep doing it anyway.

That might be the part I am most tired of.

At the risk of sounding painfully naive or overly simplistic...

I just want peace.

I want people to be able to live. To be safe. To love and be loved. To raise their babies and grow old and sit outside in the sun and laugh until their stomachs hurt. I want people to have enough. I want them to have something that should never have entered the category of luxury: time.

Time that belongs to them.

Time that isn’t spent surviving somebody else’s greed, somebody else’s war, somebody else’s hatred, somebody else’s hunger for power. Time to breathe. Time to notice beauty. Time to waste an afternoon and not have to apologize for it. Time to live an ordinary day without knowing how extraordinary an ordinary day actually is.

That's it.

For all the fucking complexity we have manufactured around being human, what I want is embarrassingly simple.

I just want us to live.

Really live.

A little note from me:

I believe in sharing the vulnerable moments. Not because I want anyone to rescue me or feel sorry for me, but because I think there’s something important about reminding each other that we’re human. That it’s okay to feel overwhelmed by all of this. It’s okay to be angry and heartbroken and exhausted. Honestly, I think not feeling any of it would be so much worse.

I know the world is complicated. I know there are no simple answers, and some days it feels fucking impossible to hold all of this and still believe anything can get better. But feeling it ~ really feeling it ~ is such a beautifully human thing. It means we still care. It means none of this has become normal enough to stop hurting.

Anyway. Love you all. Take care of yourselves. And don’t forget to let yourself feel things sometimes, even the really shitty things. It’s part of being human.

~ J

Share

Leave a comment