A lot has happened since my last post. In the world, in my life, in the universe. And as I'm sitting here typing in my favorite cafe, listening to music, watching the people walk by in the window, I am wondering and feeling many things. I have never been so uncertain about the future, and I feel like nobody else knows either.
My comfort has made me uncomfortable. My privilege has made me hollow.
I keep this part of myself fairly private, but I am a spiritual person. Not in the Christian sense, but in the sense that I feel the pain of others in the air. (It's more complicated than that but follow me here.) I know exactly how someone's feeling, and what's causing them strife. I have never felt this prevailing sense of dread in the air, and for a while I couldn't put my finger on what was causing it.
The screams of people miles away from me, with no association to me, I can feel in the air, and it's like poisonous smog.
Except I am associated. Those are human beings, exactly like me with hopes and dreams and feelings of their own. There's a young woman in a faraway place that is like me: with her own plans, her own family. She is gone. She is me and I am her. Her spirit lies within many, and when she visits me I hope she knows that she can lie in my heart and rest peacefully.
When my mother was alive, I remember her and I watching the news about the bombings in Syria, which feels like yesterday and somehow decades ago. She saw a picture of a child, her face covered in debris, lost and confused; not old enough to even process what was happening, and my mother cried. My mother would not live long enough to witness Palestine, but I can tell you she wouldn't feel any different in this instance. She would be angry. She would be tweeting #FreePalestine. She'd be using her voice. My mother was made of pure feelings, and I admired her for that.
These atrocities have had me rethink who I look up to. (Including my favorite magazine, the Atlantic, which I can never read again.) How can they be okay with this? How can they be silent? What I thought was merely a conflict turned into something more horrible than I could even imagine. I want to scream. I want to do something. My hands are tied. I am only one person! What can I do? I want to ask my mother, and I can't even do that. Helplessness, that's an understatement.
I lost my mother to cancer last year on May 12th. It was the hardest period of my life, something I'm still trying to comprehend and deal with today. It felt so unfair. She tried everything to live, and I mean everything. Under no circumstances did she want to die, but... unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. I felt helpless. How could I fight cancer? I couldn't. I felt weaker than I ever had before. If you're not familiar with American healthcare, just know that it's almost impossible to fight any terminal disease without having money or status. Do you have insurance? Do you have ___ paperwork? Sorry, we can't help you.
If anyone knows about loss that is unjustified, it's me. If anyone knows what it's like to sit aside and watch the person you love most pass before you, from a force you cannot control, it's me.
This is unjust. This is unfair. This is beyond that. I am feeling that same rage I did with my mom's passing and I feel angry tears well up in my eyes.
So this is the only thing I can do. Touch the minds and hearts of people in hopes that the right one will read it and internalize what I'm saying and feeling and do something about it.
If you are one of those people, please. Please find it in your heart to make the right choice. Please make a change. Please push for cease-fire. Stop the suffering. I am begging you on behalf of my late mother, on behalf of the people who have passed on, on behalf of the people who have been hurt, who have lost loved ones, who are looking for a light in pitch black darkness. Please find your humanity that's calling for you to make the right decision.
We are all the same soul living on the same plane of existence, and it's our job to help each other like we help ourselves. Just like the young woman I see as myself, there is someone in Palestine who looks, thinks, and acts like you, with family like you, friends like you, dreams like you. They are you; you are them, and we are all one.
Do the right thing.
~
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