JJ Hastings

It’s okay to be terrified right now. I mean really, truly, bone-deep afraid. It doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re alive. Aware. Still human in a world that’s working overtime to make us forget how to be human.

I know you feel like you have to be strong for everyone around you. Like if you show the cracks, everything will fall apart: your loved ones, your community, the fragile scaffolding of your own sanity. But I want you to hear this: it is absolutely okay to be scared. Not just okay…expected. Logical. Honest.

And I know why you’re hiding it. Because the world has become a hell of a place to be vulnerable. You’re scared to let the fear show because the vultures are watching. The ones who feed on fear, the ones who twist it, weaponize it, meme it, mock it. The ones who will shame you for feeling and then act like your fear proves you’re the problem. You’re not.

The truth is, a lot of us are scared. Like actually, clinically, can’t-eat-sick-in-the-morning scared. We’re all conceptualizing evil through our own lenses (faith, identity, history, memory) but that fear? The feeling of it? That can be universal. And we need to stop pretending it isn’t there. We need to see each other. We need to witness each other’s humanity. That is the only way we hold onto it.

So my beloved reader, I want you to know that I’m terrified. Every single day. I wake up with my heart pounding and my stomach doing cartwheels and not a damn shred of optimism in sight. And I try to give myself a moment to feel all of it before I put on the armor and do the day. Some days I don’t even get that moment of bravery, I simply barrel roll into the terror and into the world to process it, in motion.  

Every day I cry in the bathroom. Most days I mourn strangers I never met because this world keeps showing us just how disposable people are to power. I mourn how we weaponize and exploit those who have experienced horrifying tragedy for gossip, politics, commerce. I mourn how once we age out of “being cute”, our fellow human beings lose every shred of merciful reverence for what we have survived.

And still. I laugh. I ugly laugh, with my whole face and my entire mouth. I sit, mouth agape, and watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with my best friend and critique their mansions from the apartment I can’t afford. I pet the dog and tell him he is very kind, and wise, and beautiful, because I do not have a child to tell they are very kind, and wise, and beautiful.

I stand on the back porch and allow myself to cry because the sunset is too beautiful for a world this broken. I let myself experience the immeasurable swell of gratitude within my chest for the love and acceptance of those I let into the deepest parts of myself.

I volunteer. I read. I over-research and under-rest. I build these tiny little nests of hope and tuck them in corners like they’re baby birds. And every day, I feed them.

I feed them because they’re all I have. Because it is all I can do to keep marching towards survival.

And right now, those tiny nests of hope are enough. 

That’s the part we forget. This world wants to convince us that only big things matter. That we have to be warriors or saints or saviors.

But surviving and loving and feeling…especially feeling…are acts of radical defiance. Building even the smallest refuge of hope is an act of rebellion in a time like this.

So if you’re scared, I see you. You’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re still here. You’re still trying. That’s what keeps our humanity whole.

That’s everything.

xx JJ