When the World Is on Fire and You're Just Trying to Stay Human

By Heidi Coleman | Living REAL

I sat down to write something else this week. Then I turned on the news, and I couldn't get there.

So let me just say what's true.

I'm angry.

I'm angry that we appear to be at war — declared without Congress, without debate, without the accountability that's supposed to be the whole point of how this works.

I'm angry at the casualness of cruelty. The way a leader can stand at a podium and speak about people dying — real people, in real places — with no more weight than he'd give a comment about drapes. And the room applauds.

I'm angry that accountability seems to apply to everyone except the people with the most power.

I'm angry about prices. About groceries that cost what rent used to cost. About rent that costs what a mortgage used to cost. About insurance that costs more every year and covers less every year and denies claims in the moments people need it most.

I'm angry that the people I know who are caregiving — already running on empty, already doing two people's jobs, already making impossible choices — are also trying to figure out how to afford the medication, the appointment, the month.

This is not abstract. This is the daily math of people I love and people I serve.

And underneath all of it — underneath the anger — is grief. Grief for what I thought we were. Grief for the gap between what's happening and what I believe people deserve.

The second layer

And then there's the part that's harder to say out loud.

I'm angry at people I know. People who voted for this, who support this, who look at everything I just named and see something completely different than I see.

I said something recently to someone close to me — something I thought was basic, something about human beings deserving not to die — and I was accused of being political. Of taking sides. Of being naive.

That's a particular kind of loneliness. And I think a lot of you know it.

Because it's not just disagreeing about policy. It's looking at someone you love and realizing you're not living in the same reality. That's its own loss. It functions like grief, even without a clean name for it.

Where the REAL Process actually lives — right here, in this

I teach a framework called the REAL Process. Recognize. Embrace. Align. Live. And I'll be honest with you: this week I've had to use it on myself, in real time, in the gap between the news and my response to it.

Recognize asked me to be specific about what was actually happening inside me. Not just "I'm angry." But: I'm grieving. I'm activated in the same way I used to get activated during the hardest years of caregiving — that particular helplessness of watching something terrible unfold with no power to stop it. The tight chest. The spinning mind. The feeling of being responsible for something I cannot fix.

Recognizing that doesn't make it better. But it tells me what I'm actually dealing with.

Embrace — always the hardest step — asked me to stop fighting the fact that I cannot control this. I cannot un-declare a war. I cannot make someone feel the weight of a life they've spoken about carelessly. I cannot change a vote already cast or close the gap that has opened between me and people I love.

Embrace doesn't mean approve. It doesn't mean go quiet. It means stop spending energy on resistance to what is, so I have something left for what's mine to do.

Align asked: what is actually mine here?

Not the bombs. Not the prices — I can't fix those either, not directly. But I can decide how I spend what's left of my energy. I can choose which conversations are worth having and which ones are costing me everything and changing nothing. I can protect enough of myself to keep showing up for the people and the work within my reach.

I can write this essay.

Live is doing all of this imperfectly, in today's real conditions. Today's conditions include a world that feels like it's moving in the wrong direction, fast. And I'm still here, at my desk, at 5am, writing to you. Because this is what I can do.

Both/and for the unbearable

Here's what I keep landing on:

I can be furious at what's happening AND acknowledge I don't have all the answers.

I can grieve people I'll never know AND refuse to pretend any of this is simple.

I can love someone AND be unable to reach them across a divide that has grown too wide for one conversation.

I can feel completely helpless about what I cannot control AND show up fully for what I can.

Both. Not either/or. Both.

This is not a call to be passive. It's a call to be strategic with your energy in a world that will consume all of it if you let it.

The people bearing the real cost of these decisions — the ones paying the prices, the ones without insurance, the ones in places being bombed, the caregivers stretched past their limit — they didn't make the choices that led here. That's not okay. I'm not going to dress it up.

But my despair doesn't help them. My rage, untended, doesn't either.

What might help — in whatever small, human-scaled way I can — is staying clear. Staying grounded. Staying capable of action when action becomes possible.

The REAL Process isn't a way to feel better about bad things. It's a way to stay functional in the presence of them.

There's a difference. And right now, that difference is everything.

I don't have a tidy ending this week.

The world is doing what it does. The people I love are further from me than they've ever been — not in miles, but in something harder to measure. And the daily cost of living keeps going up while the people making the decisions don't appear to feel it at all.

And I'm here. Writing. Staying human as deliberately as I know how.

That's all I've got. I think it might be enough.

If this landed for you, just reply. I read every one.

And if you're navigating a different kind of impossible — the caregiving kind, the grief-before-goodbye kind — The REAL Anticipatory Grief Journal is there whenever you're ready.

Heidi Coleman | heidicoleman.com | Substack @heidicolemanreal