I don't function anymore.

Over the past two years we have become witnesses of our own dehumanisation. Everything has been stripped of us. Our rights, our voices, our existence, our humanity. And the world has stood by. Idly, in complicity, wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or not, it doesn’t really matter.

This genocide is my genocide. In the privileged safety that I am, I am its object as well. My name is a target, my skin is a target, my face is a target, my identity is a target, and everything you may project onto me makes a me a legitimate target.

I have no place anymore in this world. I have lost trust in everything and everyone, apart perhaps from my daughter, my own flesh. And even with her I can’t let go of the feeling that I am betraying her, by putting her here, by being consumed with the suffering of other children, the illusion of a different world, the cynicism of the present one.

Do you function? How do you function? in a world that shows you every day how worthless you would be were you stuck in a place a few thousand kilometres away. In a world that shows you every day that you must endure this spectacle, this massacre, without protesting. Don’t you dare speak up. Don’t you dare leave the place we assigned to you. We will let you know that there is no space left for you. Make sure your beeper doesn’t go off. You worthless piece of soulless flesh.

It has been two years of vertigo, nausea, anxiety, shivers down my spine, complete loss of sight and orientation and balance and any seeming feeling of security and sense of safety. I walk around like a dizzy zombie and constantly ask myself what fucking illusion this is I am living in.

When you lose trust in everyone around you, what is it then that you hold on to? And how can you function to be someone that someone else can hold on to?

I will never be able to rebuild that illusion of a world built on rights and universal justice. I won’t be able to unsee, unlive, unrealise, unbreak. Everything has been disrupted and I know that everything is broken, but I haven’t yet found out what is left. What it is that keeps me alive.

This lawlessness means worthlessness.

Picking up pieces of ourselves and throwing them away again because we don’t know where to put them. Where to attach them. Because everything has shifted. The dimensions, the light, the speed, gravity. Nothing fits anymore.

What is the way out? Resignation, I feel like I am resignated already. I have no hope left, only cynicism. Only utter cynicism and disdain for this hypocrisy. Reorientation? Where should I go to? Does God hold the answer to all of this? Is there refuge in the divine? I am seeking and sometimes feel like I find it, but am I not fleeing one illusion for another? Radicalisation? I don’t feel like I can radicalise more, before falling into hatred and giving in to the warm sweetness of devilish revenge. This is as radical as I can get without losing my humanity. And then again, what am I holding on to? What is humanity anyway? Is it not just another illusion? Another concept that keeps us trapped? Another lie we tell ourselves? Perhaps it would be easier to give in to the rage, to let it in, flow through you, so you become just that animal, the blood-seeking beast that has no mercy with those beasts it considers its enemies. Perhaps then at least here would be a sense in my existence, knowing that I am no different, that I am just the same, that we are all the same and all one, and that the pain that I feel has a purpose, namely to make me wake up to my true nature, that of the merciless beast. Talionic instincts ruling, endless cycle of destruction and annihilation. Perhaps that is where the peace lies.