The heart reaches out, the conscience recoils. The result is the quiet gaze of the onlooker, the bystander’s posture. Seeing harm, feeling its weight, but remaining still. It is not lack of care that stops them, but fear of the moral work that true empathy would require.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love… Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,

Demanding optimism from someone in crisis is like demanding a patient recover by attitude while we hold back the medicine, backwards and, even when well-meant, cruel in effect.

What I asked was simple: If you believe in justice, start here. If you believe in access, help carry my case. If you believe in truth, stand beside my account. If you believe in care, risk being changed by what you hear. But Joe Ceci didn’t.

I walked away from a significant financial offer, enough to keep a roof over my head, enough to buy time, finish school, stabilize. I knew exactly what it would cost me. I did it anyway. Because I knew what signing would mean.

The absence of support transformed my struggles into a solitary battle, one that I had to face without the understanding or compassion that

My loneliness is not about the absence of others. It’s about the collapse of shared reality.