Empaths in a burning era

One day, the country slipped into the wrong hands and the rest is…making history.

Not the kind you frame. Not the kind you teach with pride. The kind you read about later and whisper, we should’ve known.

My generation has never felt anything like this. Not even after September 11. And that’s saying something because that day felt like the sky itself had been ripped open. Literal doom broadcast live.

But here’s the part that unsettles me most: back then, I felt everything. Now, I often feel numb, as if my system forces itself to restart. That frightens me. I’m one of the most outspoken people among my peers, and I don’t want that to be suppressed because we’re being flooded with unprecedented events after events.

For days after 9/11, I could think of nothing else. I remember watching the Twin Towers get hit. In my classroom, on TV. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Part of me thought it had to be a movie. It was something too catastrophic to be real. Until a much older adult said the words: terrorist attack.

That was the first time I had ever heard that phrase.

We were sent home. The hallways were quiet in a way I had never experienced before. At home, I glued myself to the news. I barely left the couch. I was trying to make sense of terrorism, of hatred, of how something so violent could exist in the same world where we protected human rights and worried about healthy eating.

The feeling was cavernous. A sunken, hollow ache in my chest. I held those victims close to my heart. I grieved for their families. I grieved for strangers. I even grieved for us — a younger generation who were absorbing a weight we didn’t understand and didn’t deserve.

That’s what empathy does to the soft-hearted.

Fast forward to 2026, and I am terrified in a way that feels multiplied, tenfold, maybe more. Except this time, the fear isn’t a single catastrophic strike. It’s slower. Wider. More deliberate.

In the early 2000s, even in grief, there was a sense of unity. Allies rallied. The skies, somehow, still felt protected. Breathing was possible. Traveling started to feel challenging but not haunting.

Now it all feels inverted.

Communities of every ethnicity feel targeted. People of every immigration status are not safe. We are at war again, and the reasoning shifts like smoke. No one trully knows why this government is blowing up everything and everyone in other countries. The danger doesn’t feel foreign. It feels domestic. Sanctioned. Signed off on. 

The most chilling part? The blows are coming from inside the house. From an unchecked government that moves boldly because it has learned it can. Because there’s no accountability, no consequences. And maybe because it has learned a lot of people are too tired to fight back.

It feels like we’re living in a warped version of Pinky and the Brain — except Pinky’s gone, and all that’s left is Brain, unhinged and unchecked, chasing power not for comedy, but for conquest.

What I fear most is permanence. That this isn’t a phase, not a pendulum swing, but a new normal. That we’ll spiral past the point where repair is possible. That when the nightmare ends — if it does? — we won’t remember how to rebuild what was broken.

Sometimes it feels so absurd, so brazenly cruel, that numbness becomes self-defense. I understand why people shut down. When outrage goes unanswered long enough, exhaustion sets in. And exhaustion can look like apathy.

If you had told me on 9/11 that we would one day feel even more destabilized — more divided, more desensitized — I would have refused to believe you. I thought that level of horror was the ceiling. I didn’t know there were basements.

It has forced me to confront a hard truth: cruelty has no natural boundary. It stretches as far as we allow it to. And empathy? Empathy doesn’t disappear, but it does get tested.

I was wrong about many things. About how protected we were. About how resilient institutions automatically are. About how obvious right and wrong would always be.

But I’m not wrong about this: there are still millions of decent people. Millions of empaths. Millions who feel the weight and refuse to look away. People who are tired but not surrendered.

Some days I wonder if it’s enough…

It feels heavy. It feels endless. It feels like standing in a storm that doesn’t move.

And yet, there’s still a pulse of hope in me. Small, stubborn, unextinguished. A belief that peace is not naive. That empathy is not weakness. That history, even ugly history, is still being written — and we are not done holding the pen.