On the Limits of the Human Body
I don’t believe the human body was created to hold this much rage.
Not this constant, low-grade burn of anger. Not this relentless procession of headlines. Not this cycle of grief layered on grief layered on grief.
Yesterday’s shooting in Minnesota - another life lost, another family shattered - landed in my body before it landed in my mind. Before opinions. Before analysis. Before language. It arrived as tight shoulders, shallow breath, a clenched jaw I didn’t realize I’d been holding.
We talk so often about “processing” tragedy, as if the body were a machine designed for endless intake. As if our nervous systems were meant to metabolize this much violence, this frequently, without consequence.
But I don’t think they are.
I think rage is a signal, not a destination. I think grief is meant to move through us, not take up permanent residence. I think empathy - real empathy, the kind that refuses to turn away -comes at a cost.
And today, I feel that cost.
There is a particular exhaustion that comes with caring deeply in a world that keeps offering you reasons not to. A temptation to numb. To scroll past. To harden. To tell yourself that outrage fatigue is just the price of being informed.
But I don’t believe numbness is the solution.
And I don’t believe rage alone can sustain us.
The body knows when something is wrong long before the mind catches up. It knows when the load is too heavy, when the grief has stacked faster than it can be released, when the constant vigilance begins to erode our capacity for softness.
I feel that erosion today.
And I am resisting it.
Because to be empathetic in a world like this is an act of quiet defiance. It is choosing to stay tender when everything is telling you to armor up. It is acknowledging that this hurts - not abstractly, not theoretically - but in the muscles and bones and breath.
I don’t have solutions today.
I don’t have tidy conclusions or calls to action that fit neatly at the end of an essay.
What I have is a truth I’m trying to honor:
that we were not made to carry infinite rage,
that something in us breaks when we try,
and that tending to our bodies / our limits, our grief, our humanity - is not disengagement.
It is survival.
Today, I’m letting myself feel the weight without letting it calcify.
I’m choosing to grieve without surrendering my capacity for wonder.
I’m remembering that empathy is not weakness - it is evidence that my body still knows what love costs.
And that, somehow, feels like the most honest response I can offer right now.
God of breath and dust, who formed our bodies with limits and called them good -
Receive now the anger we do not know how to carry, the grief that has arrived before language, the weight of violence that presses against our bones.
We confess that our hearts are overwhelmed, that our spirits grow weary under the ceaseless toll of lives taken and futures undone.
Grant rest to the one whose life was lost, and mercy to those who mourn with a grief too deep for words.
Where rage threatens to harden us, soften what must remain tender. Where sorrow threatens to consume us, teach us how to lament without despair.
Deliver us from the lie that we were made to bear this alone. Bind up our frayed nerves, steady our shaken breath, and return us to the work of loving without surrendering our humanity.
May justice rise without cruelty. May compassion endure without exhaustion. May peace take root where fear has flourished.
Into Your keeping we commend the broken, the grieving, the angry, and the still-hoping.
