Member-only story
A Message on Silence
And How to Use Yours for Change
I spent all of Blackout Tuesday feeling listless and un-empowered. In the morning, I woke up to a message from my brother telling me to call him right away. He told me, haltingly, that he had gotten some strange news from an acquaintance. Apparently, on Tuesday, June 2, our father walked into a local Starbucks and asked the barista, who knew my brother, to tell him that our father had been in a bad motorcycle accident.
I had awoken already with my heart heavy from Coronavirus, the protests, my lack of ability to do any productive work on finals essays due to the fact that our world seems to be burning around us. But I spent the morning calling around to hospitals asking if my father had checked in. I felt powerless and scared.
It took a while, but I got to the bottom of the situation, and luckily, everything is strange but mostly okay.
The rest of the day felt like a weird blur. By midnight, I felt like I had lived a hundred hours of this interminable grueling feeling cast somewhere between entrenched sadness and intense apathy.
I wanted to reach out to friends. I wanted to use my coping mechanism of writing to deal with it, but on Blackout Tuesday, my voice wasn’t the one that needed to be heard. Nobody needed another whiny Medium article about my…
