There are times when everything in our life and in the world feels very heavy and dark. In troubled times, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and hopeless. This is a natural cycle for humans, in part because our species wreaks havoc and creates terrible circumstances. It’s also true that our brains are designed to focus on scanning for danger and threats, so we notice all the negatives.

Life has been weird lately. It has been weird in the sense that sometimes I wake up and forget where I am. For a second each morning, I panic and try to find something familiar in the dark of my room to prove that I am here, and not somewhere else very far away. Growing up in a very small and isolated town, this feeling of displacement makes me who I am. I start to feel homesick when I find peace somewhere bigger than that town.

Never in my more than 30 years on this planet have I witnessed such large scale obfuscation of facts and information. Never have I witnessed such a unified and concerted effort to tell only part of the story. Never have I witnessed such complicity with murder and injustice, at the cost of so many thousands of civilian lives.