I want to name something for people who are struggling right now.
If you’re watching family or friends justify what’s happening in Minneapolis - the raids, the fear, the shooting of Renee Nicole Good - and you feel gutted or betrayed, like the ground is shifting under you:
That’s grief.
(And if you’re not ready to sit with grief right now, or if naming it feels too heavy - that’s okay. You can come back to this when you’re ready. Or not at all.)
I have family who voted for this administration. I’m grieving too.
What we’re grieving
The relationship you thought you had with people who are now defending this.
We believed these people - family, friends, community members - shared our baseline values. That when it came down to it, they’d choose human dignity over political loyalty.
We were wrong. Or they changed. Or we never knew them as well as we thought we did.
The safety you thought you lived in.
Not physical safety (many of us never had that). But the belief that enough people would push back. That institutions would hold. That “it can’t happen here” was true.
It’s not. It is happening here.
The version of America we were taught to believe in.
Due process. Rule of law. “All men are created equal.”
Yes, it was always a lie for many people. But some of us are just now watching that myth collapse in real time.
The shared reality you thought you had with people you love.
We’re watching people we love look at the same facts - armed agents, closed schools, a woman shot - and arrive at completely different conclusions.
Not because they don’t have the information. Because they need a different story to be true.
That’s terrifying. Because if we can’t agree on basic reality, how do we stay in relationship? How do we stay safe?
The future you thought you were building together.
Some of us believed we were moving - slowly, messily - toward a more just world. And now people we love are defending the opposite. Cheering for it, even.
So we’re not just grieving what’s happening now. We’re grieving the future we thought we were moving toward. Together.
Grief is the right response to loss.
You’re not overreacting. You’re not being dramatic.
You’re mourning something real.
And underneath all of that grief, people are being terrorized. Families are being separated. Renee Nicole Good is dead.
This isn’t abstract. This isn’t theoretical.
What you need to do right now
You don’t have to fix this.
You don’t have to have the perfect response or the right words or a five-point plan.
What you need to do:
Feel it. Name it. Talk to someone who gets it.
Step away from the people who are making it worse.
Reclaim your sense of self and your joy - not because everything is fine, but because you need those things to survive what’s coming.
Tending to yourself isn’t selfish. It’s not apathy.
It’s how you stay intact enough to keep going.
And you’re not alone in it.