March 12, 2025

emerge transformed in a million years

This email comes with the following:

• A warning: This piece is about suicidality, trauma, and immediate political horrors including deportation. Tread carefully. Don’t read it if you’re not in a good place.

• A disclaimer: It has been a weird, stressful day, but I am okay, and I am not in danger.

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I spent a lot of time ideating at university. At first, this was terrifying. My brain felt overheated, furious, pushed to extremes by factors – what the scientist I heard speak today at work would call “insults” – I couldn’t control. I was horrified to discover what I was capable of wishing on myself, or wanting for myself. I was eighteen; nineteen at a push. I was out on my own for the first time, finally free to be in active crisis without any meaningful structure to keep me contained. I had no idea how to live. It remains miraculous that I got out on schedule and intact.

At first. After a while, the worst horrors become a matter of daily routine. Wanting to die is not always a cataclysm; in fact, I would say that’s usually the case. More often than not, it’s something you do quietly while you go about your day. Wake up, make breakfast, walk to meet your tutor, think about drowning. I knew all the deepest parts of the river that cuts through Cambridge. I knew where the current was strongest. That kind of knowledge remakes you in its image. It wears grooves into your cerebellum; it carves its fingerprints onto your sense of self. And you just live with it.

You just live.

That, in its own right, used to make me cry. You live, and the intolerable conditions of living continue to change you. You learn to cohabit with death and you can never unlearn it again. It’s tacky as hell to quote Hamilton in 2025, but the first time I heard the line “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory” I felt something close in my throat. I had never found a way to put it so neatly. You live, and you change, and you can’t control the ways that you change, even when they hurt to become. Even when they hurt to be.

Here’s the fun and cool thing about the world right now: Death, in 2025, is the absolute least of what I fear. I already know that one, guys. Fuck me up. What else have you got?

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I don’t cry about trauma anymore, really. I heard Isaac say to someone on the phone that he hasn’t gotten to the place I have, on that front; he’s still mad that any of it happened to me. I love him for that, but it’s past the point of anger for me now. It’s just facts. It’s done.

That’s not to say I’m not angry. I’m fucking furious that it’s happening again.

For me, at least, mass traumatising events – like Covid, like the current political moment in the U.S. – really betray who’s been through it already and who has not. I remember freaking right the fuck out at the start of lockdown because I knew we were never going to be the same, even if we all made it out (which we did not, and have not, and continue decisively to Not). Nobody gets to survive something that monumental completely unchanged. In the UK, at that time, my prevailing memory is of a gritted-teeth blitz-spirit sort of optimism. I got it! Even at the time, I did understand; now, I think I understand it more clearly. But there was a part of me that absolutely could not tolerate that naïveté.

I freaked out on election night, too. I sobbed in Isaac’s arms and asked him where we would go. What I meant was why isn’t there anywhere to go, of course. It was Constantine Cavafy; it was this city will always pursue you. It was the certainty of a new and terrible world being born.

During the pandemic, I had a slow-motion mental health collapse and stopped doing literally anything. Perhaps this time I’ve overcorrected? I am always on, always wired in, like information will protect me even as I know it’s all just poison. I think here and there about putting a bullet in my head. Then I answer an email, or process an expense report. Then I look at the news again, again, again.

I don’t know what to say. I’m safe, obviously. You wouldn’t have read any of this if I weren’t.

Let me amend that. I’m safe from myself. I am not safe from the world at large. I am not safe from the country where I have built my little home.

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They’ve detained a permanent resident for protesting. His name is Mahmoud Khalil and he’s married to a U.S. citizen. They have a baby due in a month. He’s currently in ICE detention in Louisiana, because he exercised his constitutionally protected right to free speech in support of a cause the administration does not like – specifically, the personhood of Palestinian people.

Whatever you feel about Palestine, I need you to understand why this isn’t okay. I need you to understand why I am afraid.

I was at a protest last week. I went to the Stand Up for Science rally at City Hall, because I work with scientists and I see every day the incredible work that they do, and I am disgusted at the administration’s efforts to cut that work off at the knees. I am now frightened to go to any more. Because Khalil is here on the same grounds as me. Because they’ve promised more arrests to come. Because today it’s Palestine, and tomorrow it could be so-called gender ideology, and the day after that it could be anyone who disagrees, full stop.

(Because I have a family. Because I have a life here. Because everything is precarious but love is the consolation, and if they separate me from my husband I will not survive. That much, I know.)

It’s working. They’ve found a way to scare me into silence. That knowledge will change you.

I already hadn’t been to any on-the-ground actions for Palestine, precisely because I was worried it might come down to this in the end. Now I know I’m a coward. I get to know that forever. That knowledge will change you, too.

Yesterday I started drafting an email full of dates and numbers and contact information: all the things Isaac will need if they do decide to deport me. We are all so diminished by the place we have come to. I know we will grow and flourish again. Intellectually, I know it. But when I try to imagine that future, it’s as distant as the person who was born into my body, before the world had touched them even once.