Priya writes

I’m tired. God, I’m so tired.

Not the kind of tired you sleep off. Not even the kind coffee can fix. This is a soul-deep exhaustion — the kind that festers from screaming into the void for months, years, and getting nothing back but the echo of your own despair. It’s watching the world burn in real time — genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the Rohingyas forced to flee their homes and live like ghosts in countries that barely acknowledge them — and being told to move on, to “stay hopeful,” to donate ten bucks and sleep better at night.

But there’s no sleeping anymore.

There’s no rest when your phone is a war zone — every scroll, another child pulled from rubble, another mother screaming into dust, another hospital turned morgue. I’ve seen more corpses on Instagram than I ever wanted to. I’ve watched bodies being bulldozed, parents cradling pieces of what was once their children, and I’ve heard the world respond with statements, press releases, empty “concern.”

We protested. We wrote letters. We made calls. We shut down bridges and filled streets with chants until our throats bled. And still — nothing. Deafening silence from governments who swear by human rights until those humans are Palestinian, Sudanese, Rohingya. Until those humans are Muslim. Until those humans are inconvenient.

The truth? The international community has failed. Spectacularly. Utterly. Irrevocably. The UN has become a rotting relic of post-WWII idealism, its resolutions ignored, its warnings trampled under tanks and drone strikes. International law? That’s a sick joke now — a dusty rulebook that only applies to the powerless. When the powerful kill, it’s “self-defense.” When the oppressed fight back, it’s “terrorism.”

And yes — Hamas has committed atrocities. The killing of civilians, the taking of hostages — that is violence, that is a war crime. But Israel’s response isn’t justice. It’s collective punishment. It’s starvation as strategy. It’s white phosphorous lighting up the night skies over refugee camps. It’s a siege on life itself.

And the U.S. — oh, the United States. The land of liberty and freedom — bankrolling bombs. Supplying the bullets. Using vetoes like grenades in the UN Security Council, smashing every chance at a ceasefire. The UK, Canada, Germany — complicit, cowardly, washing their hands in the blood they helped spill. What do you call a world where millions of people are stripped of their right to exist, and the most powerful nations either cheer or look away?

This isn’t neutrality. This is complicity.

And here we are. The survivors. Not of war, but of witnessing it. Our generation is walking around with trauma we didn’t earn but can’t shake. Guilt like a second skin. We’re watching entire nations erased, cultures obliterated, and we’re told to be patient, to wait for change, to “vote.” As if voting ever stopped a bomb mid-air. As if ballots could bring back the dead.

This is what survivor’s guilt looks like now — watching kids our age, younger, die on live stream while we go to work, attend meetings, pretend we’re okay. We’ve memorized the names of the murdered more than we’ve memorized our own birthdays. We carry grief in our pockets, scroll through suffering like news updates, and still wake up the next day pretending we can do anything about it.

What kind of world are we living in where genocide is just… part of the timeline?

I don’t have a neat ending for this. There’s no ribbon to wrap it in. Just this rage. This unbearable, suffocating, incandescent rage — and the crushing sadness underneath it. A sadness that the world is not broken — it is working exactly as intended.

And it’s killing us all.