Yikes, I Know It’s Been a While

There is so much I could share since my last post. So many moments, realizations, and quiet shifts that deserve their own space. I've thought about writing them down more than once.

But it's the weight of what's happened this week that finally pushed me to sit down and write.

Some weeks don't wait for us to be ready. They arrive heavy, unrelenting, and demanding to be witnessed.

My heart has been heavy over Renee Good.

I'm not interested in euphemisms here. What happened was cold-blooded murder. And what breaks me just as much is that it took this—a white woman, a mother, a name the media could easily humanize—to finally pierce the awareness of people who have been willfully oblivious to Donald Trump's cruelty, lies, and the machinery of violence he normalized and empowered.

Renee is not the first.

She is not the first life lost to ICE. She is not the first family shattered. She is not the first body treated as disposable in the name of "law and order." The difference is visibility. The difference is proximity. The difference is that for once, the loss was impossible for certain people to ignore.

And that truth makes me furious.

Because there are countless other lives—brown lives—taken without wall-to-wall coverage, without candlelight vigils broadcast on cable news, without the sudden moral outrage of people who didn't want to see it before. Those deaths mattered just as much. They still do. And the fact that they didn't move the needle until now says everything about whose pain this country has been trained to value.

If Renee's death is what finally angers a base that has swallowed Trump's bullshit for years, then so be it. I don't celebrate that. But I won't apologize for saying it either. Sometimes awareness comes late. Sometimes it comes wrapped in tragedy. What matters is what we do after we can no longer look away.

So this is where I am right now.

I'm sitting with grief that is both personal and political.

I'm sitting with anger that refuses to be polite.

I'm sitting with sorrow for the lives lost loudly—and the ones lost in silence.

I'm sitting with the understanding that loss doesn't ask permission or timing.

And I'm choosing not to numb myself just to make others comfortable.

I don't have solutions today. I don't have a neat takeaway.

But I am present.

I am paying attention.

And I am not looking away.

With love always — The Not So Common Gal