For the past two years, like anyone with a talent for words and a functioning conscience, I wrote about power. I wrote about wars, genocides, cruelty, violence, and the cost of bearing witness. That cost was high for me. I lost myself in the process. I became a shell of a human being — waking up every day to frantically research the latest atrocity that had happened while I slept, taking notes, consuming, sourcing, reliving it in my bones so I could put it on paper and pass the information on. I haven’t slept properly in two years; I was napping, researching, writing — rinse, repeat.
I stopped writing about myself, and in doing so, I stopped examining myself. I stopped caring for myself. I stopped examining the world; the art, music, and craft I had loved and written about for most of my life.
Live genocide, streamed daily on our phones, paralyzed me.
How do you write about your life, culture, movies, film, books, relationships, love, and tell all these beauti…
