The Cost of Bearing Witness

In a world that never stops burning.

Photograph by Daniel N. Johnson

Hi, folks. Three weeks into 2026, and wow. Checking in on you, and myself in the process. The first few days of the new year, along with the 2025 holiday season, felt promising.

What a beautiful thing it was to wake up on New Year’s Day and celebrate the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani — the joy, the hope, the inclusivity, the clarity of both the man and the message, all sprinkled with confetti as the final words were spoken, coming right after the high of a Heated Rivalry Christmas.

The year started strong, and we’ll hold on to that hope no matter what. Anything else would be capitulating to power — and we’re not the bending kind. Unless we choose to bend for things far more pleasurable than letting the government fuck us in the ass.

Did anyone truly believe we’d get a whole week into the new year without state violence, lightly seasoned with yet another breach of international law? I did. I was riding the high on my Mayor / Cottage crossover, and I foolishly believed we might have a chance of catching a breath.

And after two years of struggling to find my own sense of meaning, living in a country in perpetual decline, I was determined not to let 2026 be taken from me in the same way.

No can do, said the crime syndicate, pretending to be your government.

Only three days into the new year, and it’s already Grand Theft Venezuela — snatching presidents of foreign, sovereign countries to steal their resources, all in service of attacking another, bigger, badder enemy that threatens the ethnostate we’ve been propping up since 1948.

Only two weeks into the new year, and it’s the Israelization of the U.S. in full swing — IDF, sorry, my bad — ICE shooting citizens on the street, taking out nurses documenting violence and cruelty.

Bearing witness.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes with being a writer today — one that has nothing to do with motivation or creative block. It is the exhaustion of bearing witness. The cost of it.

When you just consume information, you read it, possibly share it — and it leaves you. I take that back: if you have a strong moral compass, it never fully leaves you. But you don’t have to sit inside it the way someone does who has to live in it — who has to stay with it long enough to research it, source it, and write about it.

And bearing witness, in this moment, is not a passive act. It is an active, grinding labor carried out in a world that produces suffering faster than it can be processed.

Frends, I’m exhausted.

This is not the fatigue of consuming news. It is the fatigue of carrying it. Witnessing without pause, of being unable to look away because looking away feels like moral failure, yet looking directly feels like erosion.

By the time you finish researching one atrocity, another one has already replaced it. By the time you shape a sentence to honor the dead, the algorithm has already moved on.

Seven million pieces of information a day. This is the reality of writing now. Not writing as commentary. But writing as moral documentation.

Your anger is needed.

The other day, I received a message from someone I know. She told me she appreciates everything I’ve been doing for the past two years — posting, writing, informing people about the genocide in Palestine, U.S. aggression around the world, and ICE violence at home.

Then she added that I don’t seem as angry as I used to. That it looks like I’m able to enjoy other things too, not just write about constant violence.

I think it’s your turn to be angry — I responded. For the past two years, she never said a word about a livestreamed genocide and shared my story about it twice.

For the past two years, many of us have been saying this clearly — If you stay silent about Palestine, the violence will come home. The same government that funds genocide abroad will use the same tools here.

You didn’t listen.

You thought what was happening to the Palestinian people was far away. Someone else’s problem. Not connected to your life. But now you’re seeing those same tactics used here, at home, in the U.S.

And now you’re angry. Now you want me to be angrier, too.

I already saw the worst things human beings can do to each other. I saw children’s limbs blown apart. I saw suffering that most people chose to scroll past.

You feel angrier than I do right now because you turned away when brown bodies were being destroyed. Now, when violence reaches people who look like you, it feels like the worst thing you’ve ever seen.

For me, it isn’t.

Bearing witness for two years — really bearing witness — cost me my health, my sanity, my sense of self. That’s the price of not looking away.

So yes. It’s your turn to be angry now. Feel it. Sit with it. Carry the weight yourself.

Connection has always been there. Palestine trained us to watch horror, scroll past it, and keep going — so that when violence shows up here, it doesn’t shock us anymore.

Your anger is needed now.

My anger is spent.

Writing in the violent world.

There will always be more suffering than you can document. More injustice than you can expose. More violence than you can contextualize. The work is not to capture everything — it is to refuse the lie that nothing can be captured truthfully.

This is why writing today feels less like creation and more like triage.

And maybe that is what it means to be a writer now: not a commentator on history, but a recorder of its fractures while they are still forming. Not someone who explains the world after the fact, but someone who stands inside it while it burns and refuses to pretend the fire is normal.

Writing in this moment is an act of defiance against erasure.

If this work feels unbearable, it is because it is being done correctly.

Despite all, the work continues. Not because it is rewarded — it often isn’t. Not because it is sustainable — it often isn’t. But because bearing witness is not optional for those who understand what silence protects.