By Danielle Stevens | Co-Founder of This Bridge Called Our Health

your grief is stardust.

vast and kaleidoscopic

elusive, and yet so familiar.

personal and divine.

a dark, stormy, tumultuous and breathtaking rebirth

an emergence

a melancholy ending

and always a new beginning.

As a Black queer woman living in the United States, I exist under the constant condition of terror, or the credible threat of it, directed toward my body. When I learned what had occurred in Orlando, I did not experience shock. I experienced recognition. I read a single article before my body revolted, and that night my sleep was overtaken by nightmare. This response was not apathy; it was an embodied refusal to absorb yet another instance of spectacularized violence into a nervous system already shaped by inherited and lived trauma.

For the sake of my own preservation, I have chosen not to consume the details of the Orlando massacre. As an empath, a highly sensitive person, and someone navigating profound embodied and intergenerational trauma, unfiltered exposure is not neutral information intake—it is a physiological event. To submit my body to that process again would not deepen my care; it would compromise my health. We all possess thresholds for pain, and those thresholds are neither moral failures nor political shortcomings. They are sites of discernment. Honoring them is an act of self-knowledge.

If this moment feels unbearable to metabolize, that does not indicate indifference. It indicates an understanding of what your body can hold. We must begin to normalize boundaries around psychic and emotional exposure in moments of mass violence, particularly for those whose lives are already structured by precarity and threat.

[This Bridge Called Our Health is a two-person, volunteer-run platform for Black women, femmes, and girls, and non-Black women, femmes, and girls of color. Community support sustains our work.]

For more than a decade of engagement in social justice and movement spaces, I have observed an unspoken but rigid protocol following moments like this: immediate action, immediate visibility, immediate mobilization. “Take to the streets.” “Organize now.” “Act.” These imperatives are frequently framed as moral necessities, yet they often function as ableist demands that disregard the realities of grief, trauma, and differential capacity. They presume a singular way of responding to violence and erase the legitimacy of withdrawal, silence, and care as political choices.

Rarely are we invited to step back from the relentless circulation of violence in order to tend to what has been fractured within us. Rarely is rest acknowledged as a prerequisite for sustained struggle. There is no ethical requirement to repeatedly witness brutality in order to oppose it. There is no obligation to rewatch, reread, or recirculate harm in order to prove solidarity.

Grief is not a performance, nor is it a linear process with prescribed milestones. There is no universally correct way to mourn. You are not required to read every account, attend every vigil, or participate in every response in order to be committed to justice. Engagement can take many forms, including distance. Choosing not to expose oneself to graphic violence is not disengagement; it is a strategy for survival.

We do not need to retraumatize ourselves to affirm the humanity of those who were killed. We do not need to anesthetize ourselves with horror to remain politically awake. Our capacity to continue imagining, loving, and organizing depends on our willingness to protect our interior lives. Honor the way grief moves through you. That, too, is a form of resistance.