the bridge between "us" and "them"

I saw a social media post yesterday that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. It said:

“How many pieces does a heart break into when the homeland your ancestors were uprooted from, attacks the homeland your people built, from the homeland that doesn’t want you?”

I don’t know who wrote it, but I feel a visceral familiarity about the ache buried between the lines. I know the pain of never really belonging anywhere. Of watching the places that shaped my blood, breath, and becoming collapse into violence and contradiction. Of wondering where my grief is allowed to go.

There’s a loneliness I’ve been carrying for a while now that doesn’t always have a name. Not the kind of loneliness that comes from being alone. But the kind that creeps in when I’m surrounded by people. The kind that shows up when the world insists on dividing everything into “us” and “them”—and I’m not sure where I fall. I’ve spent my life being told I’m too much of one thing, not enough of another. My identities stretch across borders that others want to seal shut. They don’t always know what to make of me—and sometimes, neither do I.

And meanwhile, the world just keeps getting meaner.

People talk over one another. Dehumanize each other with stunning ease. In coffee shops, in classrooms, on sidewalks and screens. I don’t know when cruelty became so casual, when we stopped looking each other in the eye. But it’s our new normal. Even though nothing about this moment is really normal. And it’s exhausting.

I’ve been trying so hard to tap into joy, but it isn’t working. There are moments I still try to smile. To hold onto some shred of normalcy. But inside, I’m disoriented. My nervous system is fried. I feel the headlines in my body. And every time I try to catch my breath, I feel the gut punch of another story: ICE agents throwing people to the ground, lawmakers gaslighting their sheep with no consequences, entire populations being erased off the earth while the people of privilege around me choose to ostrich their way through life, even as their children inherit a legacy of fear as if it’s all just part of the deal.

Every day, the gap widens, and I struggle to understand how we’ll ever build a bridge long enough to connect the ‘us’ and the ‘them.’ I try to be a carrier of hope—to believe it’s still possible—but the thing we seem to forget is how quickly the light of hope fades as we fall deeper into the chasm.

What does it mean to be resilient in a country that refuses to see so many of its own? Resilience is the ability to bounce back to where we were before we encountered a trauma, or fell into the chasm. Where is that in the history of this country? We’re a nation built on earth soaked with the blood of its native stewards, on the backs of enslaved people, and with the sweat of immigrants whose only desire was a better life for their children in the land where they were told anything was possible. To what moment of our individual or collective history in this country do we bounce back, when all of it is rooted in oppression, supremacy, and a dream that was never intended for everyone?

I don’t have the answers. Only more questions.

How do we keep showing up, keep hoping, keep feeling the joy of living when the unspoken undercurrent of our existence keeps whispering: How are we going to survive this?

Maybe it’s less about bridging the distance between us and them, and more about bridging the distance between head and heart—just enough to hold onto the hope that somehow, even in this season of ache and alienation, we might still find our way back to one another.

Maybe belonging was never about crossing over to the other side.

Maybe it’s always been about allowing something new to take root in the liminal space between what was and what could be.

a compassionate reframe

Belonging was never meant to be earned through assimilation or proximity to power.

It is our birthright.

And maybe, in this moment, belonging isn’t about feeling at home everywhere. Maybe it’s about finding the people who see us clearly and wholly. The ones who hold our contradictions, our grief, our complexity—and don’t simply stay—they love.

Because us and them was always a lie. And somewhere in the in-between, we get to choose what kind of world we want to belong to.

reflection prompts

As you reflect on what belonging means to you, I invite you to consider the following:

• Where is the grief most alive in your body right now? What does it need?
• What helps you stay tender in a world that makes many of us feel like we have to armor up to survive?
• What does bridging the gap between “us” and “them” look like from where you stand?
• When have you felt a flicker of joy in the midst of heartbreak? What allowed it to surface?

one final thought

This world may not have been built for our wholeness—but our wholeness is what will help remake the world.

We don’t have to belong everywhere.

But we do belong to the truth that we—and those who come after us—are worthy of love, of safety, and of a future.

Even here. Especially now.

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