Agency in the Age of Overwhelm

It was November 2024. The US election had just happened and the internet was doing what the internet does- spiraling. Everybody yelling. Everybody predicting the end of everything. Every feed turned into a megaphone of panic.

And DEI- the work I care most about- was in the cultural crosshairs. Being picked apart, politicized, turned into a punching bag.

I remember thinking, very clearly: I cannot stay in this level of noise. Not right now. I need to protect my peace if I'm going to stay in this work.

So I stepped away. No X. No TikTok. No Instagram. No news sites. No "just checking" before bed. Just... silence.

It felt like standing on a cliff and choosing not to jump.

It wasn’t noble. It was necessary. That was exactly one year ago.

The Pull is Real

Those first days were rough. My hand would unlock my phone and reach for the exact apps I'd deleted, like my body was trying to get back to its old rhythm. That little hit of drama. That sense of "knowing what's going on." The shared panic. The doom scrolling. The self-soothing with animal videos or that guy on TikTok who mows people's lawns for free. It's all addictive.

And being around people was tricky too. Some days when friends or coworkers would launch into the latest crisis, I'd just nod and let it wash over me. Some days I had to interrupt: "Hey, I'm not doing news right now. Can we talk about something else?" And some days, honestly, I just checked out completely. Let their words become background noise while I thought about literally anything else.

Not proud of that last one, but it's the truth.

Did anyone think I was avoiding reality? Judge me for it? Probably.

But here's the thing: I didn't do it for them. I did it for me. And for my family.

The world didn't need me to have an opinion on everything. My nervous system needed a break.

The Silence Was Not Graceful

I missed the shared panic of the collective.

There were moments where I almost re-entered the noise just to feel connected. Because chaos, when it’s familiar, can feel like home.

But I kept choosing quiet. Not because I didn’t care. Because I cared too much. And I needed to figure out who I was without being in reaction to everything all the time.

When I stopped living on the edge of every headline, there was finally room to hear myself. Not the polished, LinkedIn-ready version of me. The one underneath. The one who’s tired of being “the strong one.” The one who’s carried more than she ever said out loud.

What Opened Up

When you stop filling every quiet moment with other people's emergencies, space opens. Real space.

I watched the entire final season of Dexter with my 12-year-old. (Don't @ me.) And we had real conversations- about morality, consequences, what it means to be a good person when you're carrying damage. The kind of talks you only get when you're actually present, when your brain isn't half-occupied with processing whatever fresh outrage is trending.

The space also gave me room to keep healing from my own trauma and chaos. Because here's what I realized- when you grow up in chaos, you're already hypervigilant. When you’ve lived through chaos, you develop a sixth sense for threat. Your nervous system runs ahead of you. You’re always scanning, always braced for the next bad thing.

Adding a constant stream of global chaos on top of that? That's not "staying informed." That's re-traumatization on loop. It just keeps your body in a state of alert that it was never meant to sustain.

I didn't need more crisis. I needed room to heal from the ones I already had.

It's Not Just Personal

I've known since I was a kid that I wanted to make change in the world. Maybe that sounds grandiose, but it's core to who I am. I was born righteously indignant, with a finely tuned sense of right and wrong. I could see where systems were crushing people, and it felt intolerable to just watch.

That's why DEI work matters so much to me. It's systems work- redistributing power, dismantling structures that decide for people what they're allowed to access or become. Creating conditions where more people have agency over their own lives.

But here's what I had to learn- I can't do that work if I'm running on fumes. I can't advocate for other people's agency while constantly overriding my own limits. I can't fight for dignity and equity for others while abandoning my own.

The embargo wasn't retreat. It was protection. Protection of the capacity I need to actually show up for the work that matters. To contribute to equity-deserving communities with something real to give, not just the dregs of whatever's left after doomscrolling.

The righteously indignant kid needed the adult to learn boundaries. To understand that you don't honor your purpose by martyring yourself to the information firehose.

Life Still Happened

But this isn't a tidy story about how everything got better once I unplugged.

Seven months into my embargo, I got laid off.

And I did what I always do when life gets uncertain, I disappeared into books. I've been a book-aholic for years, but suddenly I had even more space for it. One after another, losing myself in other people's stories when my own felt too precarious.

The embargo wasn't a shield from pain or disappointment. Life still life’d.

But here's what changed:

I didn’t collapse into the spiral. Not because I was calm (I absolutely was not). But because there was finally space for the experience to land. I could feel without drowning in it.

I grieved. I spiraled a little. I hid in books. I did the very human things.

But I had enough reserves to ask different questions too. What is this an opportunity for? What do I actually want? What matters to me? What kind of work aligns with who I am and what I care about?

I didn't have control over what happened to me. I couldn't prevent the layoff.

But I had capacity to respond.

And that space changed everything.

What’s Yours to Tend?

We are not biologically wired to carry the weight of every global crisis in real-time.

Our brains evolved for small circles - maybe 150 people- to worry about immediate, tangible problems within our sphere of influence. Not the entire planet, in real-time, with commentary, on repeat.

Now we're expected to carry wars on multiple continents, climate catastrophe, political instability everywhere, economic precarity, and a constant stream of injustices we can witness but often feel powerless to stop.

And we wonder why everyone is so damn tired.

That bone-deep exhaustion isn't weakness. It's not a personal failing. It's a rational response to an irrational information load. It's a biological mismatch.

There's this insidious guilt that being a "good" or "responsible" person means consuming all the news, staying outraged on demand, having takes on everything. But being informed and being inundated are not the same thing.

One leads to awareness. The other leads to collapse.

Most of that minute-by-minute "staying informed" doesn't translate into meaningful action anyway. It just translates into anxiety and the awful feeling of helpless witnessing.

So here's the question I keep coming back to: What is yours to tend today?

Not "What should you care about?" (Everything! All of it! The whole burning world!)

But "What can you actually touch? What's within your sphere of influence? What becomes possible when you protect enough space to think, to feel, to choose?"

Agency isn't about controlling what happens to you.

Agency is about protecting enough space that you can choose how you respond.

What Might You Need to Loosen Your Grip On?

You don’t have to go dark. You don’t have to unplug completely. You don’t have to disappear from the world.

But you might need to loosen your grip on it.

I am asking:

• What are you carrying that isn't yours to carry?

• What are you taking in that your system cannot process?

• What might you need to put down, even temporarily, to stay human? To tend what's actually yours? To show up for the people right in front of you?

The world will keep turning without you witnessing every moment of it. The crises will continue whether or not you refresh your feed.

And the work that is yours to do- the people you love, the causes you can meaningfully affect, the systems within your actual reach- that work needs you to have something left to give.

So I'll ask again, gently:

What is yours to tend today?

And what must you put down if you want to stay human enough to tend it well?