06/08/2026
There's a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep.
It's the kind of tired that comes from being made "other" again. From walking through a day where someone decides your face, your child's face, your family's history, is an invitation to make you smaller.
Today was that kind of day.
I am Chamorro. Indigenous to the Mariana Islands. My family survived colonization, occupation, and concentration camps. I carry five hundred years of that survival in my body. And still, in 2026, I spend my energy explaining to people why dehumanizing my child (with racial slurs and referring to her as a monkey for being mixed race by Italian children) is not a joke, not a misunderstanding, not "kids being kids."
The exhaustion isn't only the cruelty. It's the aftermath. The part where you report it and get told you misunderstood. Where you name exactly what happened and watch people rearrange their faces into doubt. Where the burden of proof always, somehow, lands back on you.
That's the quiet violence of being othered. You don't just absorb the act. You absorb the denial of the act.
Here's what I want to say plainly: I am not confused about what I'm seeing. I have seen it my whole life. In the Southern US as a kid, and now here. The accent changes. The mechanism doesn't.
So, yes, I'm angry. Yes, I'm tired in a way that lives in my bones. But tired is not the same as defeated.
Because I know exactly who I am. I come from people who were not supposed to still be here, and we are. That lineage doesn't fold because someone in a nice coat decided I don't belong.
I'll keep naming it. Not because I enjoy it — I really f*cking don't — but because silence is what they're counting on, and I am not built for silence.
It's Kafkaesque, isn't it? Being forced to exist on the margins, navigating systems that twist and confound, is endlessly, profoundly exhausting.
To anyone who knows this specific exhaustion: you're not imagining it. You're not too sensitive. You're not the problem.
You're tired because you've been carrying something heavy, alone, for a long time.
Set it down for tonight. Pick it back up tomorrow. We endure. We always have. 🖤
