Posted on December 15th, 2025

You check the phone before your feet hit the floor, and there it is again. Another headline, another loss with numbers that seem too large to fathom. You carry it into the kitchen, where it sits in your chest while you pour the grounds. You wonder if you’re allowed to enjoy the coffee.

You are.

The world is not asking you to stop. It never will. The grief isn’t a debt you can pay off by refusing small pleasures. It’s just weather now, this sorrow. Some days a downpour, others partly sunny with humidity that makes breathing feel deliberate. And you’ll be still at times. You’ll read something and your throat will close and you’ll think, I can’t keep doing this. The caring, the knowing, the being awake to all of it.

But you will.

This is not a flaw. It’s the thing in you that still turns toward the world even when the world itself is unbearable. The thin strip of sunlight through the window, falling over your hand, warming it. It’s the part of you that wounds faster than you can heal, and it’s how you know you’re still a part of it all.

Breathe.

The steam rises from your cup. A child outside shrieks with laughter. It doesn’t fix anything. It isn’t supposed to. It’s the ordinary, running parallel to the unbearable, and you can let it in without letting anything else go. You can hold the weight of the world in one hand and a warm cup in the other and sit there, alive to all of it, doing nothing heroic except refusing to numb.