A Writer's Notebook, Day Six-Hundred-And-Fifty-Six

I have been focusing on keeping my focus here on my work, but of late, I have seen so many people turning silent, and it is clear that many of them were responding solely because of the social pressure, but have not continued.  My choice to focus on my work here was largely an attempt to maintain a space for that.  Much of the thinking and action I am taking in my own life is not anything I feel comfortable just speaking about here at the moment, because I am still educating myself and coming to an understanding of things, but I also realize the callousness that it can communicate. I do not know that I need this as a space where I can discuss my work, but it is not possible to have any platform without crying out right now.  I live in a nation where citizens live, daily, under fear because of the existential threat that even a minor encounter with the law represents, and that is only the top of a much longer blade.  To not speak now, to not act, no, I cannot be that person.

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