What Feels Like Breaking Is Also a Beginning

You wake up already carrying it. Before you’ve even had a chance to think about your own life, your own plans, your own day, there’s this weight sitting on your chest that does not belong to you alone. It is the accumulation of watching harm happen in real time, watching decisions being made that you understand the consequences of, watching the world tilt further into something darker and more unstable under the Trump regime and alongside leaders around the world who are tightening their grip on power.

It is the awareness that while you are brushing your teeth, answering emails, trying to exist like a normal person, there are children being killed in war zones, families being torn apart, people losing protections that once kept them safe, entire systems being hollowed out in ways that will take years to repair. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

And that kind of awareness does something to your body over time. It changes how you move through the world. It makes rest feel incomplete, joy feel interrupted, and even the quiet moments feel like they come with a cost.

You know you need to find moments to step away because you have to protect your mental health, and for a little while, it almost works. You laugh at something small, you focus on something right in front of you, you remind yourself that you are allowed to exist outside of this. But it never fully leaves. There is always that thread pulling at the back of your mind, reminding you that while you are trying to rest, decisions are still being made that will hurt people, that policies are still being enforced that will separate families, that violence is still unfolding in places you cannot reach.

It creates this disorienting split where everything around you can look normal, people going to work, posting their lives, talking about everyday things, but internally it does not feel normal at all. It feels like you are living in two realities at once, one where you are trying to function and one where you are constantly processing something heavy, something relentless, something that keeps building because it is not stopping.

This is what it feels like to live under sustained harm being driven from the top down. This is what it feels like to live under a system that is not just failing people, but actively choosing policies that create suffering, instability, and fear. This is what it feels like to watch power being used without restraint, where cruelty is normalized, where accountability is avoided, where human lives become collateral in political strategy.

It is watching children pulled from their families and placed into systems that do not protect them. It is watching bombs fall and knowing civilians are underneath them. It is watching leaders speak about entire populations in ways that strip them of humanity, making it easier to justify what happens next. It is watching laws shift in ways that remove rights, protections, and safeguards while being told it is about safety or order. It is watching truth get twisted so consistently that people begin to question their own reality.

And your body knows the difference, even when the world tries to pretend this is normal.

It starts to settle into your nervous system in a way that feels eerily familiar. The constant checking. The constant anticipating. The way your mind scans for what happened overnight before you even get out of bed. The way your chest tightens when you open your phone because you already know something has escalated. The way time starts to blur together because every day carries a new version of the same underlying fear. It feels a lot like what we went through during the pandemic, that same psychological weight that never fully turned off, that same sense of living through something historic and destabilizing while still being expected to carry on as if everything is fine.

So if you feel exhausted in a way that sleep does not fix, if you feel like you cannot fully disconnect even when you try, if you feel like you are carrying something that other people around you do not seem to be acknowledging, that is not because there is something wrong with you. It is because you are paying attention. It is because your mind and your body are responding to sustained exposure to harm, instability, and injustice.

But here is the part that matters just as much, even if it does not feel like it on the hardest days. The same pressure that is weighing on you is also revealing things to people who were not seeing them before. The same constant escalation that feels overwhelming is making it harder and harder for others to ignore. People who once dismissed it are starting to feel the consequences in their own lives. People who once defended it are starting to question what they were told. People who stayed quiet are starting to speak, even if it is hesitant at first, even if it is uncomfortable.

You are watching awareness spread in real time.

It does not always look dramatic. It does not always look like a sudden shift. Sometimes it looks like someone quietly admitting something does not feel right. Sometimes it looks like people asking questions they would not have asked before. Sometimes it looks like cracks forming in places that once felt completely solid. But it is happening.

History has always moved through moments like this, periods of intense pressure, confusion, and pain that force people to confront what is actually happening around them, moments where the cost of ignoring it becomes higher than the discomfort of facing it, and when that shift happens across enough people, it changes the direction of everything. What you are feeling right now is not just the weight of this moment, it is also the awareness that defines it.

And awareness is where change begins.

So even though this feels relentless, even though it feels like it is everywhere all the time, even though it can make it hard to fully live your life the way you used to, something is shifting underneath all of this. People are seeing more clearly than they were before. They are starting to understand how power, profit, and harm are connected. They are asking questions they did not ask before. And once that awareness begins, it does not quietly disappear again. This is how things start to change.

That does not erase how hard this is. It does not soften the grief, the anger, the exhaustion, or the very real harm that people are experiencing right now. But it does mean that what you are feeling is not just pain for the sake of pain. It is part of something that is being seen, named, and understood in a way that cannot be easily buried again. And if you’re tired, if you feel like this has taken something out of you, that makes sense. But you are still here. You are still paying attention. You are still refusing to look away. That matters.

Even now, you are not alone. There are people everywhere who see this, who feel this, who have not gone numb to it.

What feels like breaking is also a beginning.

A Note From Me:

If this piece felt like something you’ve been carrying but didn’t have the words for, that’s exactly why I do this. So people don’t feel alone in it. So it makes a little more sense. So it feels a little less heavy to hold by yourself.

All of my writing is free because I believe everyone deserves access to this kind of clarity and connection. If you’re able to support this work for $5 a month, it supports the time and emotional weight that goes into writing like this, reading, understanding, sitting with everything that’s happening, and putting it into words in a way that actually feels honest and human and helps me get one step closer to doing this work full-time.

And if you’re here as a free subscriber, free subscriptions matter for reach and community, and I’m truly grateful for everyone who supports this work.

— Judith

Share

Leave a comment