This Was Never Supposed to Be Normal

You wake up and try.That is the part nobody talks about — the trying. Not the failing, not the struggling, not the headline version of hardship that gets shared and liked and forgotten. Just the quiet, daily, almost embarrassing act of waking up and deciding to try again. Getting up. Moving. Carrying the plan you made the night before into a morning that did not ask whether you were ready. You pick up your phone. Not because you want to. But because that is where the world lives now, and you have learned to meet it there even when it costs you something you cannot name yet. You scroll. You look for something useful, something that reminds you why you are moving, something that makes the trying feel connected to something larger than just survival. And then you see it. A number. Thirty people. Or forty. Or a village. Or a bus. Or a market that was full an hour before it wasn't. And the number sits there on your screen the same way all the other numbers have sat there — specific enough to be real, large enough to be devastating, and somehow, somehow, not large enough to stop anything. You stare at it for a moment. Then you keep scrolling. Not because you do not care. Because you have learned that caring without power is its own kind of violence — it takes something from you every time and gives nothing back. So you protect yourself the only way available: you move past it. You carry it quietly into the rest of your day and you do not speak about it because everyone around you is also carrying it quietly and speaking about it out loud would mean admitting something none of you are ready to admit. That this is not alright. That it was never supposed to be like this. --- There is a particular kind of tired that belongs to this place and this time. It is not the tired that comes from hard work. Hard work tired is honest — it has a shape, a source, a bed it leads you to at the end of the day. This is something else. This is the tired that finds you before you have done anything. That meets you at the door before you have even laced your shoes. The kind that bends itself around your schedule, that waits for the exact moment you think you have momentum, and then reminds you — quietly, without drama — that the ground here has never been as stable as you needed it to be. You plan. The country shifts. You save. Something rises in price. You build. The structure moves. You try to stay informed and the information is another body count, another senator's speech that means nothing, another announcement that the people making decisions have decided something that will cost the people with no decisions everything. And you are supposed to keep going. And you do keep going. Because what else is there. Because stopping feels like agreement with something you refuse to agree with. Because somewhere underneath all the exhaustion there is still a version of you that believes — stupidly, stubbornly, almost embarrassingly — that it does not have to stay like this. That belief is expensive. It costs you sleep. It costs you the comfort of numbness. It costs you the ability to scroll past the numbers without feeling them land somewhere in your chest and stay there. But you keep paying it. Because the alternative is becoming someone who has accepted this as normal. And you know, with everything in you, that this is not normal. This was never normal. It was never supposed to be normal. --- I think about what it means to be young here right now. To have arrived at this moment in history — this specific, brutal, absurd moment — with your whole life still ahead of you and the ground shifting underneath every plan you try to make. To have grown up being told that education is the key, that hard work pays, that if you do the right things in the right order something good is waiting at the end of the sequence. And then to become old enough to see how the sequence actually works. Old enough to know people who did everything right and are still waiting. Old enough to understand that the key they gave you opens a door that has quietly been moved. Old enough to have checked your account at the end of a hard week and seen a number that does not match a single hour of what you gave. Old enough to have scrolled past too many death tolls to count. And still young enough that giving up feels wrong. That something in you keeps insisting — against all available evidence — that the life you can see in your head is not impossible. That the version of this country that should exist is still possible. That the thirty people in the headline deserved to be alive, and the fact that they are not is not just sad but wrong, specifically wrong, wrong in a way that should not be smoothed over by scrolling. That wrongness is important. It means something is still working inside you. Something that has not been dulled yet by repetition, that has not learned to call injustice inevitable, that still knows the difference between what is and what was supposed to be. Hold onto that. Not because it will protect you. Not because feeling the wrongness will change the number in the headline or the number in your account or the specific weight of a country that asks everything from its young and accounts for almost none of it. But because the day you stop feeling it is the day it wins. --- Whatever is happening here is not alright. I want to say that plainly, without dressing it up, without making it poetic enough to be comfortable. Not alright. Not a phase. Not the kind of difficulty that builds character and leads somewhere clean on the other side. Not a test with a passing grade waiting at the end. Just: not alright. The dying is not alright. The prices are not alright. The promises are not alright. The silence from the people whose job is to speak is not alright. The noise from the people who speak and mean nothing is not alright. The fact that you have to negotiate with yourself every morning about whether hoping is worth the energy — that is not alright either. And here is the thing about saying that out loud: It does not fix anything. But it refuses something. It refuses the version of events where all of this is simply how things are, where the number in the headline is just information, where your exhaustion is just the cost of living and not the result of a specific, ongoing, documented failure to value the lives of ordinary people trying to do ordinary things. It is not alright. And you are not wrong for feeling it. For carrying it. For waking up tired in a way that sleep does not fix and still lacing your shoes and moving anyway, not because the country deserves it but because you are still here and you have not become someone who accepts this yet. That stubbornness is not small. In a place that has been trying to convince you to go numb, staying awake to the wrongness of it is its own kind of resistance. Stay awake. Not because it is comfortable. Because it is true. Because thirty people in a headline had names and plans and someone who needed them, and the least you can do — the very least — is refuse to scroll past it like it is normal. It is not normal. It was never supposed to be like this. And somewhere, underneath everything this country has piled on top of that truth, you still know it.

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