In just over a year, things didn’t just change. They distorted.

Not all at once, not in a single moment you could point to and say, there, that’s when it broke, it was slower than that, more insidious, like something bending just slightly out of place over and over again until one day you look around and realize nothing sits where it used to, and the strangest part is not the chaos itself, it is the way it is being presented back to us as normal, as reasonable, as something we are supposed to adjust to without question.

We are living through a time where leaders stand at podiums and speak about God while starting wars that leave children buried under rubble. They invoke faith while funding violence. They talk about sacrifice, but the sacrifice is never theirs.

It is always yours. It is always the people choosing between groceries and rent, the people watching gas prices climb while being told to be patient, to understand the bigger picture, to do their part. It is always the families absorbing the cost of decisions they never made, while those same leaders frame rising costs as necessary, as unavoidable, as the price of something bigger, even as billions continue to move freely through a system that somehow always has room for excess.

People are being told to tighten their budgets and brace for impact, told to accept higher costs as necessary, while the Pentagon spends tens of billions in a single month, with millions going not just to defense but to luxury food, lobster and crab, steak, furniture, electronics, even items that signal comfort and status rather than necessity, a level of spending that makes it painfully clear that austerity is not a shared condition, it is something imposed, all while it is burning through roughly a billion dollars a day on a senseless war.

At the same time, people are calculating groceries down to the dollar and watching their cost of living climb in real time, while those in power continue to move through private golf courses, luxury properties, political fundraisers, and expansion projects like ballrooms, operating inside a world that remains untouched by the consequences they are asking everyone else to absorb.

So when they stand there and talk about sacrifice, what they mean is your sacrifice. When they talk about endurance, what they mean is your endurance. When they tell you to bear the cost, what they mean is that the cost will not be theirs. They say it with a straight face. They say it while looking directly into the camera, as if the disconnect is not obvious, as if we cannot see the gap between what they preach and how they live, as if invoking God somehow cleanses the cruelty of what they are doing.

That is the part that unsettles something deep in the body, because it is not just policy and it is not just economics. It is the moral inversion of it all, the rewriting of right and wrong in real time, where greed calls itself strength, where cruelty calls itself practicality, and where indifference calls itself leadership.

If you have found yourself feeling like you are losing your grip on reality, like you are constantly trying to reconcile what you know to be true with what you are being told is true, that is not a failure in you, that is your awareness working exactly as it should, this moment has demanded something unnatural from people, it has asked you to watch suffering and call it strategy, to watch excess and call it success, to watch hypocrisy dressed up as righteousness and pretend not to notice, it has asked you to go numb.

And a lot of people have. You can see it and you can feel it, the quiet checking out, the “this is just how things are now,” the slow acceptance of things that not long ago would have stopped us in our tracks, but not everyone has gone there, there are still people who see clearly.

There is still something in people that resists, and you can see it in the anger that will not settle, in the discomfort that will not go away, in that persistent feeling that something is wrong even when the noise is telling you everything is fine, and that is not weakness and that is not overreaction, that is the part of you that still recognizes truth when it sees it, and that matters more than anything right now.

What is happening is not just political, it is not just about one administration or one set of policies, it is about the normalization of a way of thinking that separates power from consequence, that allows people to make decisions that reshape millions of lives while remaining untouched by the outcomes of those decisions, it is about a system where those in charge can tell you to endure hardship while actively insulating themselves from it, and then call that leadership, call it necessary, and somehow call it good.

There is a kind of psychological strain that comes from living inside that contradiction every day, from seeing clearly and being told not to trust what you see, from feeling deeply and being told you are overreacting, from watching people justify things that should never need justification. It wears on you. It makes time feel strange and reality feel unstable. But here is the truth that I think a lot of people need to hear right now.

If you feel disoriented, it is because you are paying attention. If you feel angry, it is because something in you still knows what should not be accepted. If you feel like the world has been turned upside down, it is because in many ways it has, and choosing not to adapt to that upside-down version of reality is not a failure, it is clarity.

There is power in refusing to normalize what should not be normal. There is power in holding onto your sense of right and wrong, even when it is inconvenient, even when it isolates you, even when it makes you the uncomfortable voice in the room, because that discomfort is honest, and honesty is becoming rarer by the day.

We are living in a time where people are being asked, very quietly and very consistently, to trade their humanity for comfort, to look away just enough to make it easier to function, to accept just enough to avoid conflict, and every time someone refuses to do that, it matters, every time someone says no, this is not okay, it matters, every time someone feels the weight of what is happening instead of numbing it out, it matters, that is how reality holds, not through the loudest voices and not through the people in power, but through the people who refuse to let what is happening rewrite their understanding of what is right.

So if this past year has left you feeling like something is off, like things do not add up, like the world is asking you to accept something you cannot accept, hold onto that, because that feeling is not confusion, it is recognition, and as long as that recognition is still there, as long as there are people who can still see clearly, still feel deeply, and still question what they are being told, this is not over.

Not even close.

A Note From Me:

I hope this helped put words to something you may have been feeling but couldn’t quite name, that quiet, persistent sense that something is off, that things don’t quite add up, that what you are being told does not fully align with what you are seeing and feeling in your own body. That subtle dissonance, the moments where you pause and question if it’s just you, if you’re overthinking it, if you’re the only one noticing, that is not something imagined. It is something many people are carrying, often silently, often without the language to say it out loud. You are not alone in that.

I try to write pieces like this because what we are living through is not just political, it is emotional, it is disorienting, and it is hard to make sense of in real time. I try to put language to that feeling, while also breaking down what is actually happening so we are not just feeling it, but understanding it. The context, the research, the clarity, and also the anger, the real, human anger that comes from watching things that should not be happening, happen anyway.

—Judith