A Trauma & Grief With No Exit Wound

none of us should have to imagine what a genocide feels like to care about it

Rage & Softness is reader-supported! Thank you to the folks who pay monthly to support my work. If you want to upgrade to paid, go here.

• Add your favorite song to the newsletter Playlist!

• Please “heart” or share my writing with your community and comrades! Forward this email to a friend, put it in your own newsletter, screenshot and share it on social media.

• If you would like to pay for a subscription, but don’t want to do so through Substack, you can pay via my Venmo or PayPal. Also, if you’d like a paid subscription, but can’t afford it, please email me and I’ll add you—no questions asked.

Two Gazan Girls Dreaming of Peace, a 2020 work by Malak Mattar.

I think about what it would be like to be buried alive by a bombed building. I think about how the panic would set in, how my breath would tighten until there was none left. Would this death be fast or slow? Would I have time to think about the fact that I was dying? Would I have time to miss my loved ones before my last breath?

I lie in bed most nights thinking about Palestine. My mind and body wonder how it must feel to hear bombs outside the home; to then suddenly have no home. To see family and friends die one after another. To wonder when you’ll be next. The trauma and grief that has no exit wound. 

Beyond amplifying posts on social media and sending money, I’m not sure what I can do. I feel so infinitesimal. I feel like a speck of dirt. I feel hopeless and angry. I want to snarl and scream and shout. Sometimes I do. 

I’m afraid for Palestinians. I’m afraid for the world. I’m used to living a constrictive existence due to my own disabilities and trauma, but this moment is different. I have never felt safe living in the US, but I’ve felt an urgency to flee more than I have in the past. I can’t actually leave and that feels claustrophobic. I don’t want to be here, but I can’t escape. I felt this when Covid hit and the US did nothing. I have felt this with the decades’ news of mass shootings. I have felt this whenever violence erupts (which is frequent). Living in the imperial core is scary and uncertain.

I take these moments before bed to feel into a mere fraction of what Gazan’s are experiencing—if, for no other reason, than to be hyper aware that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” I’m not entitled enough to think that what’s happening there can’t happen here. I’m not delusional enough to think I’m safe in one of the most violent countries in the world.

I cannot understand the intense hatred that zionists have for Palestinians. I fail to understand how anyone can witness this genocide and not cry and thrash. If you are pro “Israel,” are you even human? I mean that seriously. Are you a human with empathy and compassion and feelings and a body? It doesn’t seem like it. I am gutted and forever changed by this. How are you not?

None of us should have to imagine what a genocide feels like to care about it. We shouldn’t have to see images of it to believe it’s real, either.

1. Keeping Each Other Alive: Mental Health and Collective Survival - Kelly Hayes

2. Death of the Party: On grief and writing - Raven Leilani

3. How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war - Naomi Klein

4. My whole life has been fringe, and my grief is too -

   Fae Wolfe

5. FEMA Workers Told to Flee North Carolina After Threats From “Armed Militias” - Julia Conley

6. What do you do with a genocidal society? - Avik Jain Chatlani

7. ‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots - Jason Koebler

8. The Feminist Multiverse of Chitra Ganesh’s Art - Julie Schneider

9. Why the American Labor Movement Matters - Kim Kelly

10. really digging this song: