I live in North Pasadena, got evacuated, and plan on returning home in a couple days. I went through this with my partner, we still have a house, and we were able to stay with my parents this past week. So we got really lucky, but also came closer to danger than we ever thought because of the super high winds. I honestly don't know how to describe how I've been coping. My partner reads everything, and I try to take in less information. I'm on instagram, and he's not, and we share things we find interesting. Exercising for an hour yesterday really helped.
But I've been thinking about how going through crisis doesn't mean you're only going through one thing. Maybe there's strain in the family, financial problems, health issues, petty friendship disputes. All of these things predate the crisis and coexist with it. It's a lot, and I think we're on a spectrum of shock and sadness, while going about our days with school, work, and normal stuff.
I am scared to return home and see Altadena so badly burned up, to see burned houses on my daily walks. Will I change my route? How can I meaningfully volunteer? I don't know yet. I know from the last wildfire that high winds and the scent of fire will startle me for a while. I know it's going to be hard to keep working and studying amidst a destroyed neighborhood. And I really hope to find ways to help my friends and community who lost their homes.
This is the best thing I've read so far, or at least what I enjoyed reading the most: (I'm not a subscriber and don't know a ton about Eddie Huang, but I enjoyed reading a couple of his newsletters) https://basedfob.substack.com/p/do-the-right-thing
I'm so Lauren, I can't imagine. About the strain of overlapping issues—been thinking about this so much. From afar you just hear these crazy numbers and see crazy photos but it's shocking to consider the complex traumas of every single home lost when you zoom in. Will read the newsletter you linked!! Take care.
I reacted in a familiar way for our age with a solid 5 day doom-scroll.
In times like these I think I look for the bigger picture (especially since I’m not directly affected by these fires). In an effort to climb out of the internet trap, I’ve been thinking a lot about climate action. How can I direct my skills towards something that needs doing. I picked up Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book “What if We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures”. This is a book I’ve been avoiding I think because I wanted to stay cynical. But that’s no way to be, right? It’s a hopeful take on the future, grounded in scientific reality. I don’t know if it’s helping yet since I feel like the tears are flowing more freely at any news about the fires or climate. I’m hoping it helps inspire me to action instead of despair.
I think a lot of what is being described here can be captured by the scholarly concept of "affective witnessing". Bearing witness to the pain and suffering of others connects us to it, even when we are not directly affected ourselves – it is embodied, highlights relationalities and inequalities. Affective witnessing can be a precursor to action, yet it can also be connected to disenfranchised grief. There's lots of good stuff on affective witnessing in academic sources (full disclosure this includes my own work): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750698015622058
Referencing some writing I find particularly poignant at this time as I write this from my home in Los Angeles, 20 minutes away from Altadena which is covered in ash as large embers and debris rained down from the sky for days.
Fire is not new in Los Angeles and we already are succumbing to mistakes from the past. Would be interested to hear your take on this as the climate change argument is making its way into politicians soundbites and news stories locally and nationally. Certainly we will have more frequent and intense disasters due to a warming planet, but there are frequent disasters throughout history and specifically in Los Angeles (see essays below):
Joan Didion writes about Fire Season in an essay published in the New Yorker in 1989
Joan Didion believed to live here in Los Angeles is to inherently accept living on the edge of catastrophe and I agree with this sentiment. It's easy to fall into seeking a sole source of blame in aftermaths of disasters like this, i.e. climate change, utility companies, politicians, chronic underfunding for city/county resources with huge funding increases for police, housing crisis forcing development in fire prone areas, redlining, etc. However, it might be more complicated than social media or the news makes it seem and might be an "all of the above and it's complicated..." answer.
Feeling thankful to have my home and appreciating all the mundane things about it. Even if you aren't in an area prone to natural or manmade disasters, I recommend making an evacuation plan (aka a list of all the things you would be sad if you couldn't grab and essentials for survival if you need to leave in a rush, all organized in a step a-z fashion). I made my list this past week which really clarified what I valued most.
Sending love to all who are affected by the fires.
Hello, from a safe distance from my home, which is about a mile outside of the evacuation zone.
Loss is a part of life. Intense, personal loss is a part of life. Intense, not-your-fault, nothing-you-could-have-done, I-was-just-trying-to-live-my-life-here-and-more-powerful-forces-had-other-plans loss is a part of life too.
Loss doesn’t compete with other losses. A loss that gets a lot of media coverage is a loss. A quieter, less-visible, less-newsworthy loss is a loss.
On this note, what I really want to say is this: when experiencing a loss yourself or observing others in loss — really, regardless of your distance or relation to that loss or the people in the thick of it — resist the temptation to compare it to something or make it about something else: another issue, another event, whatever. I understand why we do it. It’s tempting to grasp for something that appears similar, understandable or actionable in the face of an incomprehensible, largely un-actionable loss. Have grace for people, including yourself, who may be grasping. But loss — and the grief it inspires — is profound enough to be considered on its own without comparing it to anything else or compounding it with anything else. Something so universal (we will all go through a version of it, if we haven’t already, and probably multiple times in the course of our lives) yet so specific and unknowable — that is profound. In my own experience, trying to simply meet the bare face of loss with humility, respect and attention without flailing, comparing, gawking, whatever, has been almost as challenging as moving through the grief that followed.
Whatever you do, don’t tell people “it’s just stuff” (they can say that, not you). My partner’s apartment burned down during early covid lockdown and he and his roommates made it out alive but he was asleep and had to jump out a second floor window in the middle of the night to save his own life. It is so incredibly destabilizing and confusing to suddenly lose everything and not have a home to go back to. I’m really thinking of everyone who has been affected by these fires, and all of the natural and unnatural disasters happening more and more frequently lately. 🫂 I don’t have money right now but I’m interested in joining Avi’s sunny-rise movement (I’m so sorry I was unable to stop myself from typing this dad joke)
I love your prompt about "how [we] process faraway atrocities." I've been revisiting Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower because my feed, and the internet, has been filled with quotes from this 1993 book, which is a dystopian (or critical, speculative) reimagining of a near-future America—ravaged by climate collapse, economic disparity, social ravelling, and so on—set between the years 2025-2027. Particularly that Butler wrote about fires in the post-apocalyptic account of LA, and the journal entry dated "February 1, 2025" is ominously close to today. But I've been trying to think beyond the despair aspect of this book, or how Butler "predicted" or "knew," and to see instead what else we can learn from her speculative fiction and teachings in this novel. One aspect that struck me upon rereading is the main character's condition of "hyperempathy syndrome," which forces her to feel and experience others' pain. And when she comes to appreciate this condition, she asks, “But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?” So I've been thinking about "empathy" a lot. I actually wrote about it too this week. But like, what is empathy, how we might have lost it, or did we lose it? And if we did, was it to cope with things, to survive in a hyper-individualistic society shaped by capitalist motives?
Haley, I feel your question about the need to look and the need to look away lingers in that space of empathy. Another comment here mentioned Le Guin and how the distance of fiction helps us look more critically, and closely?, at events. I completely agree. And I find that this SF (in Haraway), and speculative fiction specifically, is a lot more effective than realism in allowing us to see things not only differently, but a lot more clearly. Thank you for your all your words.
man, once again, you've put into words exactly how I feel. I've been wavering between looking at and looking away - trying to conjure the appropriate amount of empathy by imagining the pain - re: Palestine since it started. I think what frustrates me the most is how much energy this zaps from you, leaving me much less likely to take any kind of action at all. i admire how you stay curious about your feelings/reactions without feeling zapped. i feel so stuck.
personally, i do whatever i can to move forward and make change, holding the minds of all those suffering in my heart. there's this idea in buddhism that your actions are supercharged when you have the intention to save everyone - humans, animals, their habitats (not just yourself and your own). so i try to do that and hold hope that my actions are part of a bigger movement, even if i can't see it right now with these eyes. its a privileged position to take, and i acknowledge that. lately i have also been taking it as an opportunity to explore my own attachment with "my" things. who would i be if i didn't have my stuff? where does my identity fit? who am "i", really? the book 'when things fall apart' by pema chodron comes to mind, too.
i have also run through all of the things I would take and wondered how many minutes people had to figure out what to take. its so, so sad. my heart breaks. then i see friends who have raised tens of thousands to help rebuild and my heart swells again... i hope silver linings appear soon and those in power take the devastation (in LA and globally) seriously. time will tell.
I finally read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin over the holidays and I had seen this quote around online but never in context:
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
I have been reflecting on it a lot since. I see it as a very eloquent explanation of why it's both individual (our 'spirit'), as well as collective.
I really recommend reading the book. It's astonishing. The fact it's sci-fi provides a zoomed out perspective, while still critically engaging with the realities we often want to turn away from in our own world.
Likewise! I read her when I was young but rediscovered her incredible wisdom last year (and finally made all the connections to Jung, buddhism etc that I missed in my youth). Have been slowly working through everything she's ever written since.
I’m a public defender, so I deal with people in crisis nearly every day. I do think experiencing a loss of everything is a human experience that has been extremely common for all of human history - and that our relative insulation from it is a reflection of privilege and the effects of capitalism and liberalism too. There are people experiencing this everywhere - all the time. And the fact I’m sitting comfortably in my home is BECAUSE other people are in crisis, not despite of it.
And yet we keep moving. I don’t think humans will change in that we will ever be able to avoid the emotions and motivations that cause this loss and destruction. But we can do better to infuse empathy and community in our day-to-day lives.
The movement versus individual action discussion is one I have a lot with my coworkers, because there are a lot of arguments our assistance to individuals is actually contrary to a movement based approach. But I believe we need both. And more than both, we need to fundamentally restructure the way we think about that discussion. Social justice is a mindset, an approach, an inability to accept less, rather than any specific action or decision. If not looking away gives you energy to volunteer, donate, or participate in community movements, great. If looking makes you exhausted and drains you (I feel this away about the news, personally), then figure out what you need to participate.
Haley, I think you do a great job creating a space for thinking about these issues, and that’s a great contribution to movement building in and of itself!
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this essay for a while now. I live in lebanon which (quite recently) got heavily bombed by Israel for two months straight, which is traumatic af to put it mildly.
I think when these disasters happen im very quick to just feel sadness and make donations and hope it doesnt happen again but this week i found myself so angry and cynical. I of course feel so awful for all those affected but when i thought about donating i felt this inner anger towards the billionaires who could have prevented this / could use their $ to rebuild all this yet it feels like the people who care the most / are trying to help the most are not the billionaires. I ultimately did make some donations and am trying to not be so angry but it feels hard to constantly see everyone else try to help yet the few at the top keep hiding in their mansions… idk if this is coherent but i am just so upset. Also, thank you for writing this Haley, made me feel a little better about what i’m feeling.
Internet princess’s piece from December called “the ends of empathy,” about the limitations of empathy/emotion as a tool for political galvanization, feels like a good follow-on to this piece, even though she wrote it in response to an entirely different topic.
There was an explosion and fire in a house in my town. People died. I drive past it every week on my way to therapy.
I was so shocked by this terribly thing and then even more shocked by my shock which was simply so huge because the site of the tragedy was so close. Nothing else. I find it crazy how much more overwhelming a tragedy is when the only factor that differentiates it from a fire in a rural town in Africa is proximity and culture.
I have no solution for this.
I don’t mean to shame anyone or point out some kind of „favouring“. I just find it odd that it feels „worse“ because it’s closer (I’m now disregarding politics, personal losses etc.,ofc that’s something different).
My heart goes out to anyone affected by this tragedy ♥️
I live in North Pasadena, got evacuated, and plan on returning home in a couple days. I went through this with my partner, we still have a house, and we were able to stay with my parents this past week. So we got really lucky, but also came closer to danger than we ever thought because of the super high winds. I honestly don't know how to describe how I've been coping. My partner reads everything, and I try to take in less information. I'm on instagram, and he's not, and we share things we find interesting. Exercising for an hour yesterday really helped.
But I've been thinking about how going through crisis doesn't mean you're only going through one thing. Maybe there's strain in the family, financial problems, health issues, petty friendship disputes. All of these things predate the crisis and coexist with it. It's a lot, and I think we're on a spectrum of shock and sadness, while going about our days with school, work, and normal stuff.
I am scared to return home and see Altadena so badly burned up, to see burned houses on my daily walks. Will I change my route? How can I meaningfully volunteer? I don't know yet. I know from the last wildfire that high winds and the scent of fire will startle me for a while. I know it's going to be hard to keep working and studying amidst a destroyed neighborhood. And I really hope to find ways to help my friends and community who lost their homes.
This is the best thing I've read so far, or at least what I enjoyed reading the most: (I'm not a subscriber and don't know a ton about Eddie Huang, but I enjoyed reading a couple of his newsletters) https://basedfob.substack.com/p/do-the-right-thing
I'm so Lauren, I can't imagine. About the strain of overlapping issues—been thinking about this so much. From afar you just hear these crazy numbers and see crazy photos but it's shocking to consider the complex traumas of every single home lost when you zoom in. Will read the newsletter you linked!! Take care.
I reacted in a familiar way for our age with a solid 5 day doom-scroll.
In times like these I think I look for the bigger picture (especially since I’m not directly affected by these fires). In an effort to climb out of the internet trap, I’ve been thinking a lot about climate action. How can I direct my skills towards something that needs doing. I picked up Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book “What if We Get It Right: Visions of Climate Futures”. This is a book I’ve been avoiding I think because I wanted to stay cynical. But that’s no way to be, right? It’s a hopeful take on the future, grounded in scientific reality. I don’t know if it’s helping yet since I feel like the tears are flowing more freely at any news about the fires or climate. I’m hoping it helps inspire me to action instead of despair.
That book sounds lovely and very needed!!
I think a lot of what is being described here can be captured by the scholarly concept of "affective witnessing". Bearing witness to the pain and suffering of others connects us to it, even when we are not directly affected ourselves – it is embodied, highlights relationalities and inequalities. Affective witnessing can be a precursor to action, yet it can also be connected to disenfranchised grief. There's lots of good stuff on affective witnessing in academic sources (full disclosure this includes my own work): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750698015622058
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13534645.2021.1883301
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/01634437211040952
Referencing some writing I find particularly poignant at this time as I write this from my home in Los Angeles, 20 minutes away from Altadena which is covered in ash as large embers and debris rained down from the sky for days.
Fire is not new in Los Angeles and we already are succumbing to mistakes from the past. Would be interested to hear your take on this as the climate change argument is making its way into politicians soundbites and news stories locally and nationally. Certainly we will have more frequent and intense disasters due to a warming planet, but there are frequent disasters throughout history and specifically in Los Angeles (see essays below):
Joan Didion writes about Fire Season in an essay published in the New Yorker in 1989
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1989/09/04/joan-didion-letter-from-los-angeles-fire-season
Mike Davis wrote "The Case for Letting Malibu Burn" and it's in his 1998 book "Ecology of Fear"
https://longreads.com/2018/12/04/the-case-for-letting-malibu-burn/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR1SqiVD7OjtQRnAACd0LIr3icXufP5favjIW9jEOmPDPKA2MzcprC5XZis_aem_Bwj47b0X2zhTSeJRSsWQ0Q
Joan Didion believed to live here in Los Angeles is to inherently accept living on the edge of catastrophe and I agree with this sentiment. It's easy to fall into seeking a sole source of blame in aftermaths of disasters like this, i.e. climate change, utility companies, politicians, chronic underfunding for city/county resources with huge funding increases for police, housing crisis forcing development in fire prone areas, redlining, etc. However, it might be more complicated than social media or the news makes it seem and might be an "all of the above and it's complicated..." answer.
Feeling thankful to have my home and appreciating all the mundane things about it. Even if you aren't in an area prone to natural or manmade disasters, I recommend making an evacuation plan (aka a list of all the things you would be sad if you couldn't grab and essentials for survival if you need to leave in a rush, all organized in a step a-z fashion). I made my list this past week which really clarified what I valued most.
Sending love to all who are affected by the fires.
Thank you for sharing these!!
Just read this and thought it might be helpful.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ginamartin/p/rrrr-los-angeles-fires?r=4wq5s&utm_medium=ios
Hello, from a safe distance from my home, which is about a mile outside of the evacuation zone.
Loss is a part of life. Intense, personal loss is a part of life. Intense, not-your-fault, nothing-you-could-have-done, I-was-just-trying-to-live-my-life-here-and-more-powerful-forces-had-other-plans loss is a part of life too.
Loss doesn’t compete with other losses. A loss that gets a lot of media coverage is a loss. A quieter, less-visible, less-newsworthy loss is a loss.
On this note, what I really want to say is this: when experiencing a loss yourself or observing others in loss — really, regardless of your distance or relation to that loss or the people in the thick of it — resist the temptation to compare it to something or make it about something else: another issue, another event, whatever. I understand why we do it. It’s tempting to grasp for something that appears similar, understandable or actionable in the face of an incomprehensible, largely un-actionable loss. Have grace for people, including yourself, who may be grasping. But loss — and the grief it inspires — is profound enough to be considered on its own without comparing it to anything else or compounding it with anything else. Something so universal (we will all go through a version of it, if we haven’t already, and probably multiple times in the course of our lives) yet so specific and unknowable — that is profound. In my own experience, trying to simply meet the bare face of loss with humility, respect and attention without flailing, comparing, gawking, whatever, has been almost as challenging as moving through the grief that followed.
Thanks for reading this. I wish you all well.
Really beautifully said and totally hear you on the comparison thing
Whatever you do, don’t tell people “it’s just stuff” (they can say that, not you). My partner’s apartment burned down during early covid lockdown and he and his roommates made it out alive but he was asleep and had to jump out a second floor window in the middle of the night to save his own life. It is so incredibly destabilizing and confusing to suddenly lose everything and not have a home to go back to. I’m really thinking of everyone who has been affected by these fires, and all of the natural and unnatural disasters happening more and more frequently lately. 🫂 I don’t have money right now but I’m interested in joining Avi’s sunny-rise movement (I’m so sorry I was unable to stop myself from typing this dad joke)
I love your prompt about "how [we] process faraway atrocities." I've been revisiting Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower because my feed, and the internet, has been filled with quotes from this 1993 book, which is a dystopian (or critical, speculative) reimagining of a near-future America—ravaged by climate collapse, economic disparity, social ravelling, and so on—set between the years 2025-2027. Particularly that Butler wrote about fires in the post-apocalyptic account of LA, and the journal entry dated "February 1, 2025" is ominously close to today. But I've been trying to think beyond the despair aspect of this book, or how Butler "predicted" or "knew," and to see instead what else we can learn from her speculative fiction and teachings in this novel. One aspect that struck me upon rereading is the main character's condition of "hyperempathy syndrome," which forces her to feel and experience others' pain. And when she comes to appreciate this condition, she asks, “But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain?” So I've been thinking about "empathy" a lot. I actually wrote about it too this week. But like, what is empathy, how we might have lost it, or did we lose it? And if we did, was it to cope with things, to survive in a hyper-individualistic society shaped by capitalist motives?
Haley, I feel your question about the need to look and the need to look away lingers in that space of empathy. Another comment here mentioned Le Guin and how the distance of fiction helps us look more critically, and closely?, at events. I completely agree. And I find that this SF (in Haraway), and speculative fiction specifically, is a lot more effective than realism in allowing us to see things not only differently, but a lot more clearly. Thank you for your all your words.
Thank you for writing about Butler's book (which I haven't read) in more detail!! I'd love to read her work
man, once again, you've put into words exactly how I feel. I've been wavering between looking at and looking away - trying to conjure the appropriate amount of empathy by imagining the pain - re: Palestine since it started. I think what frustrates me the most is how much energy this zaps from you, leaving me much less likely to take any kind of action at all. i admire how you stay curious about your feelings/reactions without feeling zapped. i feel so stuck.
beautifully put. thanks for writing.
personally, i do whatever i can to move forward and make change, holding the minds of all those suffering in my heart. there's this idea in buddhism that your actions are supercharged when you have the intention to save everyone - humans, animals, their habitats (not just yourself and your own). so i try to do that and hold hope that my actions are part of a bigger movement, even if i can't see it right now with these eyes. its a privileged position to take, and i acknowledge that. lately i have also been taking it as an opportunity to explore my own attachment with "my" things. who would i be if i didn't have my stuff? where does my identity fit? who am "i", really? the book 'when things fall apart' by pema chodron comes to mind, too.
i have also run through all of the things I would take and wondered how many minutes people had to figure out what to take. its so, so sad. my heart breaks. then i see friends who have raised tens of thousands to help rebuild and my heart swells again... i hope silver linings appear soon and those in power take the devastation (in LA and globally) seriously. time will tell.
I finally read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin over the holidays and I had seen this quote around online but never in context:
"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
I have been reflecting on it a lot since. I see it as a very eloquent explanation of why it's both individual (our 'spirit'), as well as collective.
I really recommend reading the book. It's astonishing. The fact it's sci-fi provides a zoomed out perspective, while still critically engaging with the realities we often want to turn away from in our own world.
I love ULG so much—never read the dispossessed, now I really want to!!
Likewise! I read her when I was young but rediscovered her incredible wisdom last year (and finally made all the connections to Jung, buddhism etc that I missed in my youth). Have been slowly working through everything she's ever written since.
Slight segue (but also not really, because everything she does is so imbued with understanding out predicament), I really love her carrier bag theory essay too — https://stillmoving.org/resources/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.
Going to read this!! I also loved her personal essay collection, No Time to Spare!!
I’m a public defender, so I deal with people in crisis nearly every day. I do think experiencing a loss of everything is a human experience that has been extremely common for all of human history - and that our relative insulation from it is a reflection of privilege and the effects of capitalism and liberalism too. There are people experiencing this everywhere - all the time. And the fact I’m sitting comfortably in my home is BECAUSE other people are in crisis, not despite of it.
And yet we keep moving. I don’t think humans will change in that we will ever be able to avoid the emotions and motivations that cause this loss and destruction. But we can do better to infuse empathy and community in our day-to-day lives.
The movement versus individual action discussion is one I have a lot with my coworkers, because there are a lot of arguments our assistance to individuals is actually contrary to a movement based approach. But I believe we need both. And more than both, we need to fundamentally restructure the way we think about that discussion. Social justice is a mindset, an approach, an inability to accept less, rather than any specific action or decision. If not looking away gives you energy to volunteer, donate, or participate in community movements, great. If looking makes you exhausted and drains you (I feel this away about the news, personally), then figure out what you need to participate.
Haley, I think you do a great job creating a space for thinking about these issues, and that’s a great contribution to movement building in and of itself!
So well said Lou thank you!! I totally agree it’s both
I feel like I’ve been waiting for this essay for a while now. I live in lebanon which (quite recently) got heavily bombed by Israel for two months straight, which is traumatic af to put it mildly.
Timi I can’t imagine. I hope your community is safe!
I think when these disasters happen im very quick to just feel sadness and make donations and hope it doesnt happen again but this week i found myself so angry and cynical. I of course feel so awful for all those affected but when i thought about donating i felt this inner anger towards the billionaires who could have prevented this / could use their $ to rebuild all this yet it feels like the people who care the most / are trying to help the most are not the billionaires. I ultimately did make some donations and am trying to not be so angry but it feels hard to constantly see everyone else try to help yet the few at the top keep hiding in their mansions… idk if this is coherent but i am just so upset. Also, thank you for writing this Haley, made me feel a little better about what i’m feeling.
Know this feeling so well
Internet princess’s piece from December called “the ends of empathy,” about the limitations of empathy/emotion as a tool for political galvanization, feels like a good follow-on to this piece, even though she wrote it in response to an entirely different topic.
Will read this!!
There was an explosion and fire in a house in my town. People died. I drive past it every week on my way to therapy.
I was so shocked by this terribly thing and then even more shocked by my shock which was simply so huge because the site of the tragedy was so close. Nothing else. I find it crazy how much more overwhelming a tragedy is when the only factor that differentiates it from a fire in a rural town in Africa is proximity and culture.
I have no solution for this.
I don’t mean to shame anyone or point out some kind of „favouring“. I just find it odd that it feels „worse“ because it’s closer (I’m now disregarding politics, personal losses etc.,ofc that’s something different).
My heart goes out to anyone affected by this tragedy ♥️
❤️