Human after all

Just a ball of feelings moving through the now 🥺

Source: Open

Good morning from my bed 👋🏽

My heart has been heavy. My head draped in a thick fog. According to my whoop, I slept for 9 hours and 11 minutes last night, but the way these fever dreams had me in chokehold, it felt like nothing. Writing about grief that isn’t directly your own feels oddly like appropriation? But after the 3rd day in a row feeling like this, spiraling over graphic images of death, I reminded myself that I’m human — that I feel deeply. And I’m glad I do. I’m not Palestinian, but I don’t need to be to understand the collective suffering of anyone who has ever been oppressed. I’m human after all.

Some days are better than others. I resent myself for the days where I forget for a moment, caught up in a cotton candy haze of late-stage capitalism as I bop through life thinking about what I might wear to so and so’s birthday. Or head to a happy hour and dance it off. Or spend a day making a Rendang with a friend when so many are starving. My brain reflects a game of Tetris as I try and stack the blocks of my life neatly on top of one another and make them all fit. But then the feeling comes back. And there’s gaps in the game. I’m used to the feeling of “but”, “and”. Most of my work in therapy has been about moving through the guilt of being the one in my family who got to do it differently; being the woman who got to choose. I spend most of my sessions untangling the web of being two different people, a split that makes sense to most immigrant children growing up away from their home particularly when that new space is in the western world full of foreign ideals.

I watch others faces when they ask me how I’m doing and I bring up words like Genocide and Gaza and I see their discomfort. I feel the words twisting and shrinking and going right back down my throat, almost choking me for daring to speak, when I realize there’s no space for this conversation here. No one wants to hear another rant about a thing that is so confusing because of misinformation, propaganda, and patriarchy. I see the expressions that look at me puzzled and because I’m an empath, I know what they’re thinking: “Why does this affect you so much?” But it does. In a land not that far from Gaza, a similar cleansing (on a much smaller scale) is happening to my people. I think about what Punjab will look like in a hundred years. I think about my dad returning from his latest trip saying that there’s “not much left to go back to.” My heart hurts for all of it. I’m human after all.

Yesterday was a heightened day of the fog. Work was as busy as it was stressful. The to-do’s were piling up and I couldn’t focus, let alone tick them off. Every minute I was checking instagram to see the same thing I’ve been seeing since October 7. More bodies. More grief. Anger. Sadness. Beautiful little brown babies in tears. A whole group of displaced people going through the most sacred time of the year, Ramadan, and having to do so like this? If this doesn’t have you seething with rage from the inside out, I don’t know what will. None of it feels normal. And yet I won’t look away. It’s a privilege to look away.

When I’m in the swirl, I think about going inward. How I can change the life I’ve always known and move differently, so that maybe one day soon I won’t be tied to the systems of supremacy and the rules that come with them. I start to toy with the idea of making plans for myself, setting goals and intentions. Starting a Tik Tok account. Writing a Substack. But the paralysis seeps in again. Everything feels like a joke. An ongoing April fools. All those tiny things I worry about — Will i lose my job? Am I going to be successful? Will I be loved? Should I wait 20 weeks for the Hay pier system desk to be delivered? — ultimately mean nothing. Algorithms push me back down into the swirl until I feel numb and waste my own time.

I feel frustrated for not having the answers on how to move through, or the strength to overcome the conditioning. It’s isolating.

The rain doesn’t help.

When I was little my mum would say that it rains because god is crying. Today I would tell my 5 year old self that god is sad at how humans are treating the world and each other. That’s why it’s raining so hard.

When getting out of bed feels hard, I put the Japji Sahib Path on, a morning prayer composed by Guru Nanak Dev Ji and let the words wash over me. I send love and prayers to Palestine, Sudan, Congo, the Uyghur people, Punjab, and everyone around the world trying to break free from their oppressor. They’re humans after all.

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A few years ago, I had the honor of being part of a writing group where I met Anam Raheem, a brilliant writer who has deep roots connected to Palestine after working and living in Gaza. If you’re looking to widen your understanding of what’s happening now, head to her substack Liminal Fuzz. Her words bring me to tears every time she writes.

I never imagined living through revolution. I thought I was just a Punjabi girl who was going to work in fashion, get married, have kids, and do things differently than my immigrant parents. But different feels so scary when you have no capitalist blueprint to go off and you don’t want to go back to the way things were. It’s the ultimately awakening. Being SHOOK to your core.

I spent 9 hours and 11 minutes writing this in my sleep, so if you’re finding it hard to get through the day too, and are trying to navigate many things been true at once, I hope you find some comfort here. We’re living through some gnarly fucking times. I hope you’re giving yourself permission to feel. You’re human after all.

A #FreePalestine frees us all.

Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee <3