Pausing to Breathe and Celebrating in a Burning World

I have so much stuff to do. There I have said it and there I have affirmed the cycle of work and service that seems to plague educated Black women and what I believe to be all Black woman full stop. However, I will speak distinctively as my experience of being a Black woman with extraordinary education and extraordinary sensitivity to the flames that seem to be engulfing our world.

I celebrated my engagement a bit chaotically 12 days ago with community. It was also AUnt Michelle's birthday. I forgot to call Danah and Danielle and wish them a happy birthday as well as announce that my Aunt Toots transitioned this day in 2019. All January 16th. So much memory and complex happenings on that WInter day. I called an old friend and wished her happy birthday two days ago and I am sitting with my mother aging and in a much different space physically as her birthday is tomorrow. January 29th. With all that seems to preoccupy my mind and space, I have had a very visceral reaction to pause and catch up to what is inside these flames around me and within me.

I have no photos to break up the words I am letting flow out of me like a consciouness. So many things have happened and I need to get them out, authentically. So there is that unapologetically. There is a strange violence in being asked to celebrate as if the world is not on fire.There is also a strange courage in choosing to celebrate anyway—but only if we refuse amnesia.

This moment of my life is one of love, commitment, visibility, and abundance. It has many downs and frustrations and many ups and pure bliss.I am engaged. I am held. I am building a future with someone that loves me and we are trying our best. And I know—deeply—that this joy is not evenly distributed, not randomly withheld, not innocent. My joy exists inside systems that allow some of us to breathe while others are buried under rubble, debt, displacement, hunger, and silence. I am bombarded by this when I open my phone and sit with the fact that people have froze to death. People's significant others and family have been affected by ICE. My students and their families still live in fear. Food insecurity is at an all time high and yet so many of us are ineligible in a first world country to receive funds to help us live and eat. Many of us being highly educated, many of us having public service jobs, and many of us simply doing our best as everyday people... Everyone deserves to be well-sheltered and eat. So this is me refusing the lie that celebration requires forgetting. Because while some may believe I have forgot to send thank you cards( I techinally have 2-3 weeks), I have not but I have to release these burdening thoughts and make a pathway of sense.

I am writing this because I believe joy must be accountable. I believe love must be political. I believe celebration, when done consciously, can be a form of redistribution, a disruption, a refusal to let power dictate whose lives are grievable and whose are disposable.

The world is not “just going through a hard time.” People are being systematically erased.

In Gaza, families are living inside a permanent emergency. Not only bombs, but the slow, calculated destruction of infrastructure: hospitals without medicine, children without water, parents waiting for food that may never arrive.... I mean entire bloodlines erased in minutes. Time itself weaponized, waiting becomes torture, survival becomes a daily negotiation with death. Death, so much literal, material death of PEOPLE. And it feels like the only question is: What can we do? Sheer apathy. In Sudan, millions are displaced, starving, cut off from care. This is what happens when war becomes a business and civilians become the terrain, so please do not think this is just chaos unfolding for chaos sake.. Women give birth without clinics. Children die of treatable illnesses. Whole regions are emptied of continuity.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, massacres happen in the shadows of global supply chains. Minerals pulled from the earth to power our phones, our electric cars, our “green futures,” while communities are terrorized, displaced, and forgotten. Extraction is not just economic—it is bodily, psychic, ancestral.

In Haiti, gangs rule not only streets but possibility. Sexual violence is used as governance. Displacement is normalized. Fear becomes routine. The world calls it instability; Haitians live it as captivity. In Myanmar, Rohingya people remain in the afterlife of genocide, stateless, camp-bound, forgotten by the same world that promised “never again.”

And here in the United States, Black death is managed bureaucratically.Black maternal mortality. Black infant mortality. Black stress-related disease. Black women dying in hospitals while being dismissed. This is not accident. Welcome to the policy and design. This is slow violence wearing a lab coat and a clipboard in a space where have been gaslit to believe we are safe.

If you are celebrating something right now—a wedding, a promotion, a birth, a milestone—I invite you to ask: Who is paying the price for this system that made my joy possible? How can my joy move resources, not just feelings? How can I celebrate in a way that leaves the world more held than I found it? This is not to make you feel guilty but to make us aware. Because it is a burning world we are being asked to live in.