This Is Not Background Noise
Grief, witnessing, and attention as a practice
It feels like everything is escalating at once.
The increasingly open embrace of cruelty by those in power are not isolated events. They stack. They overlap. Before I’ve had time to take in one, another is already demanding attention.
And alongside these are the smaller violences: the casual dehumanization, the tightening of language, the ways harm gets justified as necessity. I feel these too, even when I don’t stop to name them. My body often registers them before my mind does.
Witnessing all of this is exhausting. I notice how easily I slip into coping mechanisms: reading quickly instead of carefully, moving on before anything has a chance to land, checking out.
Sometimes that’s me respecting my limits. Sometimes it’s me pulling away.
Because I understand the impulse to look away. Attention costs something. It asks me to stay in contact with pain I didn’t cause and cannot fix, pain that implicates systems I live inside of and benefit from.
Looking away can feel like relief. Life gets smaller, more manageable. But it’s not harmless.
When my phone notifies me of breaking news, I feel my jaw tightening, my eyes glazing, my thumb hovering a moment before clicking. I fear that what once felt unacceptable is becoming something I might adjust to. I can feel that shift in myself when I’m not careful. It feels like a dulling, a quiet acceptance that this is just how things are now.
I worry that one day I won’t feel the tightening at all. That I’ll still be informed, still articulate, and already too far gone to notice what I’ve lost.
I don’t think witnessing means taking everything in all the time. Being flooded isn’t the same as being present. There’s a difference between staying informed and staying awake. But I don’t want the answer to be indifference.
I don’t want to survive by becoming less responsive, less tender, less human. Even when caring strains my nervous system. Even when the scale of harm makes my efforts feel small.
So I keep paying attention, imperfectly. I step back when I need to regulate, and I return when I can. I let myself feel what’s happening without asking myself to carry all of it at once.
Don’t misunderstand. I don’t believe witnessing alone is enough, we must also take action in our own ways. But looking away feels like a different kind of loss and one I’m not willing to accept.
If you’re feeling this too, if your nervous system is frayed, if the grief feels ambient and hard to place, I don’t think the answer is to push through or toughen up. I think the invitation is to be with the grief, deliberately and in doses small enough to survive.
For me, that sometimes looks like slowing way down and letting one story, one name, one loss be enough for a day. Reading carefully instead of endlessly. Allowing the grief to be specific rather than infinite.
Sometimes it looks like moving my body in simple, repetitive ways, so the grief has somewhere to go besides looping in my head. That could look like walking, stretching, moving gently to music, or creating art.
And sometimes it looks like speaking the truth of what I’m feeling out loud, to another human who can bear it with me. None of us were meant to metabolize this much harm in isolation. Being in community doesn’t remove the weight of what we’re witnessing, but it changes how it’s held. It reminds me that my anger, my sorrow, my tenderness is not excessive or misplaced. That I am not the only one feeling the strain, and therefore not required to carry it all myself.
These aren’t solutions. They don’t fix what’s broken. Some days I do all of this and still feel hollow and irritable. Some days the grief doesn’t move; it just waits.
But they do help me stay present without shutting down. They make room for grief to move, rather than calcify. They remind my nervous system that care is still possible, that tenderness is not a liability, that being affected is not the same as being undone.
If we are going to keep witnessing (and I believe we must) then we need places to put what we’re carrying. We need practices that allow us to feel without flooding, to care without burning out, to grieve without going numb.
This is not about being strong.
It’s about staying human together, and choosing (over and over) to meet this moment with open eyes and a softened heart.