Our only true power, now.

Ever since I discovered the way certain humans were treated in the world, when I was about 4, I started wondering what was wrong with people. What was this world I had landed on? I had spent my two first years in Cameroon, Africa, and suddenly I was told many children starve, and die of terrible illnesses…on the continent I saw as my first home, where my parents were born. What?? It made no sense to me that people were just talking about it without doing anything. The rage and grief, mixed with a sense of powerlessness were causing so much guilt in me that I didn’t have the capacity to hold it. And so, early on, I numbed it out.

The pain would come back regularly throughout my life of course, each time I was learning a new sad truth about the injustices of the world. But seeing nobody was moving, and feeling like I couldn’t change anything from where I was either, I gave up.

I felt so powerless and trapped in guilt that I decided to stop feeling. Little did I know I was actually cutting myself from my greatest power.

When it became too strong, and numbing wasn’t possible anymore, I experienced all of the pain almost all at once: my personal, and the collective pain. That started about 4 years ago. As a hypersensitive it has been intense. There is so much pain to feel that I have had to learn to practice safely feeling every single day all the muck that there is. The human mind will find thousands of excuses not to feel the pain (including convincing you that you don’t want to live), because there’s a deeply engrained belief in the collective that “it’s not good to experience pain”.

The thing is, my power