Under the Surface:

Lately, I’ve noticed something unsettling, not just in my own body, but in the people around me. Friends, colleagues, and even strangers at the store—they’re all complaining of sudden bouts of insomnia, unexplained body aches, and anxiety that seems to come from nowhere. At first it felt like a coincidence. But the more I listened, the clearer it became.

We are afraid.

Even those who want the changes that are happening around us are afraid. It’s too much, all at once rapid, erratic shifts with no sense of what will come next. It feels careless and destabilizing. That kind of instability rattles something deep inside of us.

The Foundation We Thought We Knew

I didn’t realize how important my American identity was until I started to feel like America was crumbling piece by piece. I had always taken for granted that, no matter the challenges, there was a foundation we were standing on together. Now, when the foundation itself feels cracked, it’s disorienting. It makes the ground under our feet feel unreliable.

That foundation was never perfect. Its checks and balances had failed to protect some of us in the past, and too often they were slow or selective in their protection. But it was something. It was at least a structure to point to, a framework that suggested there were rules, limits, and lines that should not be crossed.

By 2025, we had reached a point where certain forms of open denigration based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, or difference were no longer publicly acceptable in the same way they once had been. That progress was uneven, and the work was far from complete, but there was at least the sense that those lines were not to be crossed.

And yet here we are—watching those boundaries unravel with the support of too many neighbors. To see women lose their rights to their own bodies, and even more powerfully, the right to decide whether they could shoulder the commitment and responsibility of being someone’s mother, is to watch dignity and humanity treated as disposable. It is a profound destabilization of what many believed could not be undone. And it leaves me feeling untethered.

It seems I was extremely naive about who we (America) were and what we were imperfectly striving to be. The truth is harsher, and seeing it up close has forced me to confront just how fragile the ideals I thought we shared really are.

The Weight of Complicated Trust

And of course, as an African American woman, my relationship with this country has always been complicated. There is distrust woven through generations of harm, neglect, and exclusion. But alongside that distrust, there has also always been trust: trust in our resilience, trust in the collective power of ordinary people, and trust in the hope that one day we might operate from a place of deep respect for our shared humanity.

Holding both is part of the paradox of being here: knowing the truth of our history and still daring to hope for a different future.

But as we watch people dragged off the street by masked law enforcement, I can’t help but wonder if one day I will feel a deep sense of shame about the fact that I saw what was wrong and I did nothing. I stared with frozen eyes of fear, hoping that the persecution would not find someone I cared about. Is this what it means to be complicit during violations of humanity?

Naming What We Cannot Ignore

Honestly, I didn’t want to write about this. I wanted to ignore it and keep moving forward. But then I started to see the same patterns again and again—body aches, sleepless nights, a constant hum of unease. And I had to ask myself, how can I be a therapist and not name it?

That’s our job, after all. Therapists sit in the space where people bring what they can’t say anywhere else. We name the truth when it feels unbearable to look at. We hold it steady so that others can finally exhale and say, “Yes. That’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling.”

Note: While I observe these patterns broadly across many communities, I maintain appropriate professional boundaries and speak only in general terms about the collective distress I’m witnessing.

So let me name it plainly: we are living through a season of profound uncertainty, and our bodies know it. Our nervous systems register the chaos, even when our minds try to reason it away. Safety and predictability are human needs, and when they’re missing, distress shows up in our sleep, our muscles, our digestion, and our moods.

If this is you, please know: you’re not delusional. You’re not exaggerating. You’re responding exactly the way a human body responds to instability. And if this feels overwhelming, you’re not alone. Many of us are quietly carrying the same weight, even as we move through our daily tasks of work and family commitments.

The First Step Toward Healing

We can’t stop uncertainty, but we can stop pretending it isn’t there. We can look at each other and say, “This is hard. This is scary. And I feel it too.” Sometimes, that truth-telling is the first step toward finding our ground again.

I know people often say community is important, or that advocacy matters, or that we should limit our exposure to the chaos. And all of that can be true. But maybe what we need right now is simply to allow ourselves to grieve.

To grieve the loss of an idea.
To grieve the loss of whatever security (however large or small) we once drew from our country.
To grieve the unraveling of something we believed would hold.

Naming that grief doesn’t mean giving up hope or abandoning civic engagement. It means honoring the truth of what we’ve lost so that we can move forward with clarity rather than denial. Grief, when acknowledged, can become the foundation for more authentic action and deeper resilience.

Finding Our Way Forward

This process will look different for everyone. Some may find solace in honest conversations with trusted friends. Others might benefit from putting these feelings into writing, art, or movement. Some may discover that their grief motivates them toward specific forms of advocacy or community building.

The point isn’t to prescribe a single path, but to acknowledge that we cannot build something steadier, something worthy of our hope, until we first allow ourselves to feel the full weight of what we’re experiencing.

You are not alone in this uncertainty. Your body’s wisdom in responding to instability is not a sign of exaggeration, it is a sign of your humanity. And that humanity, even in its vulnerability, may be the very thing that helps us find our way forward together.