While the Missiles Fly, My Tea Trembles

Note: What I am feeling is beyond visceral. It’s pulsing. Raw. Ruthless. Full of ache and (too much?) self-awareness and cultural rot. I am not  going to pretend to resolve anything but instead drift, ache, doubt, and think. Let my mind spiral, unpack, contradict itself, and stew in the gray. Dig deeper into the psyche and let this mind of mine unravel even more grotesquely, chaotically, or irrationally. I have been feeling this for a couple of days: unhinged spirals, psychological collapse, truth-telling so raw it starts to stink? So, now I am getting in there. I am letting my mind fracture gloriously, digging deeper into psychoanalytic decay and despair. Because, I don't know anything anymore. To push further or hold longer. But, with experience, I know one thing. Writing it, makes it psychologically unbearable in all the right ways. Cracking it open the façade and let rot and reason sit side by side. And, this is my diary of moral decomposition. And, this is sharp, staccato, accusing bile in my throat while I chew on imposter syndrome, grief narcissism, historical reenactment, even public performance of empathy.

Today, I wanted to write about the war. Not a war. Not their war. Our war. This war. The one where my country retaliated after being attacked. The one where I, a person with mismatched socks and a drawer full of expired hopes, "suddenly" have opinions about geopolitical defense strategies. Or think I should. Or wonder if I’m even allowed to. I’m not a soldier. Not a politician. Not a war correspondent. Just a woman with a laptop, peeling her heart open on a screen, unsure if any of this matters. What is this? the psychological tension of being safe while others aren’t, and how the mind tries to create trauma or imagine war scenarios just to feel “included” in the collective national wound. It is ugly. Feels like irons seeping out of self-loathing bleed. Is this emotional leeching? Is it survivor’s guilt or imposter syndrome? And maybe I wish I had a scar. Just a small one. A tangible injury. Something to point to and say, this hurt me. Because how do you explain that your war is all internal? That the enemy sleeps in your bed, wears your skin, eats from your same plate, echoes your laugh, answers your phone, speaks in your voice. You try to shoot it but you are it. So you bleed instead. Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about evacuations. Imagining the trembling. Not because I want it, but because I don’t want to feel so left out of the national pain. What kind of sick mind does that? A mind desperate to prove it still belongs. Maybe the deepest human fear isn’t death. It’s irrelevance. And, it is disgusting, like a sickness in itself.

Do opinions matter? Especially now? I see tweets from people waving flags with urgency, demanding blood in exchange for blood, typing WAR in all caps from a Starbucks, as if hashtags could kill or heal. Others quote Auden or Baldwin or Tagore, crafting threads that dissect moral frameworks in 240 characters or less, sipping green tea while children become shadows beneath rubble. What is the weight of a thought when people are dying? And if they don’t [if all of this is static, not signal] then why does my chest hurt every time I try to shut up?

The futility of thought interests and terrifies me, both. Especially, when I compare the cacophony of social media takes to the noise in an asylum. Why do we keep thinking if none of it stops anything? Has thought become performative? Are we just yelling into the void hoping someone will mistake it for meaning? Sometimes I think our thoughts are just twitching corpses of conscience. Like flies buzzing around a pile of ideology that already rotted last week. We craft careful opinions like assembling IKEA furniture in a burning house, because if I don’t have an opinion, am I complicit? But if I do, and nothing changes, then was it just emotional cosplay? Maybe this is madness: to keep thinking, to keep tweeting, as if the logic itself is a kind of God who might swoop in and rewrite consequences. No "God" is coming. Just us and our threads. We’re not thinking anymore, we’re auditioning grief.

And then there's me. Somewhere in the middle. Swallowed by this vortex of conflicting loyalties and inherited scripts. My country was attacked. And then, my country attacked back. And both felt wrong. And both felt necessary...?

I grew up reading Orwell, who said war is peace. Vonnegut, who begged us to say: “So it goes.” Svetlana Alexievich, who wrote of war not with glory but with vomit and blood and aching bones. They didn't write from safe havens. They wrote from ash and aftermath. I write from my bed.

So yes, I sip my tea and watch missiles stream across a live feed, and I think about how ridiculous my life still feels. I'm still dodging my manager’s sarcasm, still smiling through team calls while my country’s flag is at half-mast. I’m still figuring out if I can afford rent, still swallowing my mother’s passive-aggressive sighs, still making expired noodles in the middle of the night like a sad trope. Is this war-time behavior? Should I be doing more? Less? Nothing? Maybe read Anne Frank, again? [Would Anne have judged me for this emotional luxury?]

Someone on the internet said: Soldiers are fighting for your country. All you have to do is be worth fighting for. And I laughed. Bitterly. Because even my mother doesn’t fight for me. I’ve spent my life being "too much" for my father, "not enough" for my boss, "confusing" for my friends, and "a liability" for every man who ever told me he loved me. No one’s ever fought for me. Not teachers. Not bosses. Not lovers. Not even my goddamn cat as a kid. So now I’m supposed to be worthy of artillery? Of martyrdom? Who are we kidding? I’m not even worthy of a call back after an interview.

How do you be worth fighting for when you’re not even sure you’d fight for yourself?

I tried patriotism once. It felt like wearing someone else’s coat. Too big. Too heavy. The smell didn’t suit me. Then, I read Leo Tolstoy's essay, On Patriotism. I understood false belonging. I understood what it means to love a country that would throw you under a bus for the sake of optics? Does the nation want me or the idea of you it can parade? The self as a state-issued placeholder of loyalty with in-built betrayal, rejection, identity fracture. I think the country only wants me if I come shrink-wrapped in slogans. If I fit into a patriotic silhouette: a woman who smiles during Independence Day celebrations and never asks where the women’s rights budget went. You love your country, but does your country love you back? Would it hide you during a raid? Or would it hand you over to preserve its myth? My therapist once said I have attachment issues. Maybe so does my nation. It loves me when I’m useful. Abandons me when I’m inconvenient. This isn’t patriotism. It’s a toxic relationship in drag.

But retaliation feels like breathing underwater. We didn’t start it, I remind myself. But starting or not starting: does it change the death count? Like drowning in a pool of ancestral scripts, scripted rage. My body reacts before my mind catches up. That’s not reason. That’s instinct dressed in camouflage.

Here’s the irony: we are following the same steps we saw live from wars that weren’t ours. We condemned those. Cried for those. Sent aid, sent prayers. Promised we’d never be like them. And here we are. Copy-pasting live history with shinier graphics.

What else were we supposed to do? Just… sit back? Take the blow? Be peaceful and perish? Or, groupthink and hysteria? Twist logic? Hijack morality? Declare our love for binaries as humans: enemy vs. hero, us vs. them. Because, the brain is allergic to moral complexity. But then: what if that binary rots us from within? It’s horrifying how quickly we become parrots. I mean, is that what defense is? Trauma-induced mimicry? We watched other nations bomb their way into safety [or so they said] and now we march the same beats. We’re not strategizing; we’re imitating. Like toddlers learning violence from cartoons. And in crowds, the lines between courage and cruelty blur until the mob is just a single, screaming mouth. The human brain, under threat, loses complexity. It needs villains. It wants clarity. It will invent evil if evil doesn’t come fast enough. Who do we become when our survival depends on believing a lie loudly enough?

Is survival always noble? If someone hits you and you don’t hit back, are you a saint or a fool? If you hit back harder, are you brave or barbaric? What if humans actually have a self-destructive longing for collapse? Are we addicted to retaliation not just out of defense, but because it feels good to destroy? Can survival be immoral if it comes at the cost of another’s extinction? [Am I doing a Freudian death drive here? Okay...] Maybe deep down, we're not afraid of dying. We're afraid of not mattering. Retaliation gives us narrative. A plotline. Meaning. You kill us, we kill back. Simple, sexy, tragic symmetry. But is it really defense, or is it ritual? Some sick offering to a God of history so that we can be remembered, even if it’s for violence. Freud called it Thanatos: the death drive. I think we crave destruction sometimes just to feel something. Not because we’re evil. Because we’re desperate. And desperation, unlike evil, doesn’t need a plan. It just needs a trigger. 

And who decides? The citizen who tweets? The soldier who bleeds? The government with its bulletproof podiums? Maybe we’re just performance artists of our own tragedy. Begging for someone to say we fought valiantly; even if all we did was burn everything down and call it architecture.

All I know is that between missile sirens and crisis news tickers, I still have to send deliverables by Monday and today is Saturday evening. My world is split: on one side, a battleground; on the other, a Slack notification.

Evening news shows say this is existential. That if we don’t retaliate, we’ll be wiped off maps, our sovereignty stolen. And I think: maybe war is not the enemy of civilization but its proof. Because what's a sovereign without a military? What’s a country without defense? Is sovereignty even real without the threat of violence to uphold it?

Territory. That’s the word. Every nation’s favorite sacred noun. But as I try to scrape enough rice for dinner, I wonder: what about my territory? The tiny rented room where four of us try to breathe without shouting? That space is always under threat. From landlords, from poverty, from silence, from loudness, from one wrong comment that breaks the already thin glass peace of family.

Somewhere a roof may collapse from a missile. Here, my roof may vanish from unpaid dues.

How can I mourn war when I’m already at war with my life? I feel like going off the edge. This is my all-time breaking point, pushing me to spiral into a grotesque, out-of-touch, hypocritical comparison: mother's passive-aggression is a landmine, kitchen sink is a trench, office chat is artillery fire. This is my battlefield. Not some dusty borderland but the kitchen, where my mother hurls shame like grenades, where my father’s silence is a sniper. My job is a trench I crawl through, dodging corporate shrapnel in the form of "feedback" and "team synergy." And I wear my sadness like armor. Because every morning is a mission: get through without exploding. Is this war too? Or just melodrama? Or are they the same thing? Maybe war just makes everything else honest. No more pretending we’re okay. No more pretending the daily grind isn’t slowly killing us. The metaphor is too much, it is making me gag. This grief, it is so egotistic. It always inflates the mundane into the absurd. Especially, in times like this. It is so, so disgusting, it is worth reiterating. I’m nauseated by my own metaphors. But I can't stop. My grief is narcissistic. It wants stage lights. It wants a mic. It wants to win a Pulitzer while people die. What a ghoul I must be.

I’m a citizen, yes. But also a woman. And that war is older than countries. The war of being soft but expected to carry. Of being blamed for cracks you didn’t carve. Of trying to belong to a nation that doesn’t know what to do with your tears.

Is it selfish to feel all this? To process war while folding laundry? To cry for the soldiers while being crushed by your own mother’s words? To debate the morality of airstrikes while choosing between ordering food or instant noodles?

Is it apathy or overload?

They say history will judge us. But history doesn't pay my bills. It won’t hug me when my father screams. It won’t write my resignation letter or help me unlearn fear. And yet, I keep scrolling, keep thinking, keep hurting: for them, for us, for me.

I don’t know if we’ll survive this war. I don’t know if we deserve to. But I do know I’m tired of pretending I understand any of it. I do know sadness; not anger; is the most honest response I have. Not the kind of sadness that seeks answers. The kind that knows none exist.

And so, I write. I ramble. I psychoanalyze. I contradict. I exist in the gray. [Is this gray just cowardice in disguise? Is this clinging to nuance because choosing sides would mean responsibility? What if the “gray” is just another form of hiding?] Maybe I am a coward. Because maybe there are no monsters. Just humans, over and over again, trying not to drown in their own reflections. No, who I am appeasing to? Myself? The reader? Some imagined judge with a checklist of virtue? What a lie! There are monsters, I’ve had to sleep beside them. Had to shake hands with them in broad daylight. What arrogance, to call all cruelty 'confusion'. Maybe this “gray” is just beige apathy dressed in a fancier coat. What if nuance is the hiding place of the emotionally exhausted? (Wow... nuance can be a cop-out when it erases lived trauma!) Am I refusing to choose sides because I fear being wrong or because choosing means becoming a part of the machinery? Because neutrality feels intellectual, but maybe it's just spiritual inertia. Maybe deep down, I want someone else to be the monster so I don’t have to look at the one I cradle inside me. If I picked a side, would I become someone I hate? Or would I finally become someone real?

Because maybe (just maybe) that's all that’s left to do while the missiles fly and the tea trembles.

- Oizys.