the low hum beneath everything

some nights i sit down to write because i don’t know where else to put the feeling.

it doesn’t have a name. it isn’t one thing. it’s a low hum beneath everything, like the house is quiet but the refrigerator is still running, reminding you that something is always on. i carry it through grocery store aisles, through small talk, through the glow of my phone at 2 a.m. when i should be asleep but can’t quite convince my body that it’s safe to rest.

there’s a tension in the air that doesn’t announce itself. it just presses. conversations feel thinner. laughter sometimes lands and then disappears too quickly. everyone seems to be holding something back or holding something in, i can’t tell which. maybe both.

writing feels like loosening my grip.

when i let the words move without asking them to behave, something opens. the sentences don’t want to make arguments. they want to confess. they want to wander. they want to admit that i am tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix, that i am paying attention even when i wish i weren’t, that i am grieving something i can’t point to without sounding dramatic.

i keep thinking about how often we’re told to be resilient. to adapt. to toughen up. as if hardness is the same thing as strength. as if softness is a liability instead of a measure of how deeply someone is still alive.

what scares me isn’t chaos. it’s numbness.

it’s how quickly extraordinary things become background noise. how easily we scroll past suffering. how often fear disguises itself as certainty and certainty disguises itself as virtue. how empathy starts to feel like a risk instead of a responsibility.

i notice how language has changed. how words are sharpened. how nuance is treated like weakness. how people speak in absolutes because absolutes are easier to carry than questions. questions require staying open, and staying open hurts.

sometimes i wonder when we decided that listening was the same as agreeing, or that caring meant choosing sides instead of choosing people.

there’s a grief in realizing that so many of us are bracing instead of living. bracing for the next headline, the next argument, the next moment where silence feels like complicity and speaking feels like exposure. bracing becomes a posture. then a personality. then a way of moving through the world.

writing is the one place i don’t brace.

here, i let myself say that i miss slowness. i miss conversations that weren’t performative. i miss when disagreement didn’t feel like a threat. i miss when compassion wasn’t something you had to justify.

i don’t trust neat conclusions anymore. i don’t believe in bow-wrapped hope. what i believe in is attention. in staying human on purpose. in choosing not to let cruelty make a home in my voice, even when i’m angry, even when i’m scared.

this isn’t a manifesto. it’s a release valve.

it’s me admitting that i’m trying to remember what matters while everything competes for urgency. it’s me choosing to write instead of harden. to feel instead of disengage. to stay soft in a world that keeps insisting i shouldn’t.

if there’s anything i’m holding onto, it’s this quiet refusal to become less myself in order to survive. the belief that tenderness is not naive. that care is not weakness. that paying attention is a form of love.

writing doesn’t fix anything. but it reminds me that i’m still here. still feeling. still capable of holding complexity without turning it into an enemy.

and for now, that feels like enough.