To the One Who’s Still Willing to Feel in a Country That Keeps Choosing Force

Dear friend,

There are days & nights when the world breaks in ways we’ve seen before—and still, it feels unbearable.

Days & nights when the air goes still with knowing. When a headline becomes a gut-punch. When the old machinery of empire sputters to life again and reminds us: we’ve learned nothing at all.

This weekend, war was chosen—again—with the kind of ease that should terrify us.

Some will say it is strategy. Others will call it strength.
But I want to tell you a truth:

War is what happens when a nation fears intimacy more than it fears death. Because what is war if not the loudest avoidance of what is real?

Grief.
Fear.
Responsibility.
Reckoning.

We don’t know how to stay with those things. With ourselves or with others. So we detonate instead.

This country has been fluent in firepower yet illiterate in intimacy.

We’ve learned how to stand tall and build weapons.
But we never learned how to see each other—or to hold what we saw.

And now we’re watching the cost of that ignorance unfold in real time—once again.

It’s easy to harden in moments like this.
To let our bodies go cold.
To wrap ourselves in despair and shut down what hurts.
To change the channel.
To keep scrolling.

But I don’t want to be one more citizen who forgets how to feel. I don’t want to be one more American who learns how to numb instead of love.

Because beneath all this anger—there is grief. A deep, ancient grief that lives in the land, in the lineage, in our very cells.

We have been carrying the cost of disconnection for generations.

And before we rise, we must root.
We must name what has been lost.
We must feel the full weight of what we keep choosing instead of love.

So if you are heartbroken today, stay there a while.
If you are shaking, let yourself tremble.
Let your body tell the truth before your mind rushes to solutions.

Because when we root into what’s real—what’s honestly, unbearably real—we don’t need to be told how to rise.

We remember.

Some will call this letter naïve.
Too soft. Too idealistic. Too progressive.
They’ll say it’s disconnected from the reality of power, of politics, of how the real world works.

But let me tell you this:

There is nothing naïve about grief.
There is nothing weak about tenderness.
There is nothing unrealistic about learning how to love what we’ve spent lifetimes trying to control.

What’s truly naïve is believing that more force will finally make us feel safe. That fear will keep us free. That disconnection will protect us from ourselves.

It takes maturity to stay soft.
It takes courage to be with what hurts.
And it takes a radical imagination to believe there’s still something worth healing here.

America has never known what to do with softness.

It fears it. Mocks it. Legislates against it.
But maybe the most revolutionary thing we could do now is learn how to be close.
To grief. To hold difference. To hold one another.

I do not want a country that wins.
I want a country that learns.
That unlearns the myth of dominance.
That stops believing control is the same as safety.
That remembers the human cost of forgetting.

Because here is what I know in my bones:

Power over feels easier when we’ve never been taught how to be with.

We keep reaching for control because we never learned how to stay in connection. But what if the most radical act of national courage isn’t defense—it’s intimacy?

What if the revolution isn’t in the retaliation or dominance—but in the refusal to abandon tenderness?

We’ve literally spent decades perfecting destruction. And now we need to remember what it means to build something. To be responsible for one another. To belong to one another. To love something enough that we would rather stay and feel than run and destroy.

We’ve mastered the language of force around the world. But intimacy? That’s a mother tongue we were never taught. And yet—it may be the one that saves us.

So no—I will not become cold to this.
And I will not look away.

Let this be a day we remember what we are capable of when we feel everything and still choose to show up anyway.

Let this be a day we remember that courage is not numbness.
It is presence.
It is softness with a spine.
It is intimacy as rebellion.
It is choosing to stay tender even when the world tells us that tenderness has to be earned by force.

Let this be the day we begin again.

Intimately.