Eyes Wide Open, Heart Still Soft
The duality between staying informed and staying intact
The world isn’t just noisy right now, it is screaming.
Every scroll, every headline, every conversation seems to contain another gut punch: rights stripped, communities targeted, truths denied.
If you care deeply - staying informed can start to feel like drowning.
And yet… turning it off feels like betrayal.
Ignoring it feels like complicity.
So, we sit in the tension: Eyes wide open. Heart still soft.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the cost of bearing witness.
Not in a distant, intellectual way, but in a very real, somatic, nervous-system kind of way.
That feeling of being emotionally saturated. Frayed. Exhausted before you even get out of bed.
You read the news. You feel the weight.
You want to know what’s happening - because people’s lives are at stake. But in the process, your own aliveness can start to slip away.
This is the paradox of consciousness:
We want to stay awake. But we also need to survive.
The Privilege of Looking Away (And the Cost of Looking Too Closely)
Let’s name it:
It is a privilege to be able to look away from oppression, violence, and injustice.
But it is also a type of trauma response to stare at it endlessly without pause.
This is the loop so many of us get trapped in.
We feel a sense of obligation to witness, and a sense of guilt when we reach our limit.
We judge ourselves for logging off.
We spiral when we don’t.
What if instead of choosing either extreme, we practiced a third way?
What if we intentionally witnessed AND then tended to our nervous systems with just as much purpose?
Information Hygiene: A Practice of Self-Preservation
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t eat all day without stopping to digest, right?
Information, particularly trauma content (the type that assaults our nervous system), requires the same kind of digestion.
Try asking:
What kind of news format nourishes me rather than floods me?
Do I scroll first thing in the morning, before my own body has spoken?
Am I seeking connection or just compounding despair?
When was the last time I moved my body instead of reading about someone else’s being harmed?
Tending to the Tenderness
We live in a culture that values cynicism. That treats numbness as maturity. Keep going, keep grinding, don’t look up.
But that’s not who I am, and probably not who you are.
I still feel deeply.
I cry at beauty.
I hold nuance.
I dwell in duality.
And I ache because I care.
Let’s protect that. Let’s build internal structures that make it possible to stay present without shattering.
Let’s pause when it’s too much.
Let’s dance when we need to shake it off.
Let’s let silence speak when words are too heavy.
Let’s remember that turning toward joy isn’t turning away from truth.
A Soft Invitation
This holiday season, you may feel a thousand things.
Grateful. Grieving. Guilty for enjoying a moment of peace while others suffer.
It’s okay.
You are allowed to regulate.
You are allowed to rest.
You are allowed to protect the sacred fire of your own heart because it is what lets you keep showing up again and again.
This isn’t detachment
It’s discernment.
Reflection Prompts:
What does information hygiene look like for me?
What signs tell me I’ve reached my limit?
How can I honor both my desire to witness and my need to rest?
