The essays in ROOM 10.25 are as raw and urgent as any we have received. Their authors hail from Sudan, Palestine, Israel, Croatia, and the US. They write about what it feels like to be living a split screen. They write about how we split words from context. They write from inside a refugee camp in Gaza and from inside the federal building in New York.
We can’t split something off when we’re surrounded by it. The same forces flattening Gaza are showing up here under different names—economic inequality, xenophobia, the rollback of human rights. I’m trying to bridge the divide between denial and collapse, to find ways of staying engaged without turning away.
My first day volunteering at immigration court began with a medical emergency. A man had collapsed in his wheelchair while DHS officers surrounded his terrified family. When I identified myself as a physician, they demanded proof before allowing me to help. In that moment, I understood what it meant to live in a country where mercy requires credentials—and where witnessing itself can feel like an act of resistance.
In Gaza, we live in a state that feels like waking up after a long night of fragmented, restless sleep. It’s as if you’ve spent the night on the edge of fear—between the hum of drones, the echo of explosions, and the relentless pounding of your own heart. You wake up with a head that feels as heavy as the earth itself, your eyes swollen and tired, your body limp and worn. Conversations are dull, voices are low, emotions seem colorless … not because of sleep deprivation, but because of hunger, despair, and a prolonged absence of safety.
While the idea of “discovery” holds many meanings, I consider here the way it was and continues to be used as a colonizing concept. Christo-European monarchs used the Doctrine of Discovery to lay claim to land they deemed uninhabited despite the presence of indigenous peoples—negating their humanity and existence. Further in 1823, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery into US law in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) in order to justify withholding land from indigenous peoples. Discovery portends the idea that someone has found something previously unknown to others, and that the discoverers have the right to lay claim to this knowledge, land, or space. “Discovery” in this way erases those present before, like the erasure of the Javanese sailors that had navigated the Cape of Good Hope long before the Portuguese or how many of Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious and the mind were long known to many different peoples across the world (Said, 2003).
We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.
The floors are red, not as a metaphor, not as a political statement; they are red. And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red? Are we made of the same substance, the same suffering, the same divine breath that once stirred a man’s lungs? If so, why do we die like vermin, why does the world avert its eyes while we rot in plain sight? Why does the hunger of a single hostage shake the souls of nations, while the emaciated bodies of a million children elicit only polite disbelief?
Such desires must be obfuscated. Indeed, in the face of blatant refusal to protect children, which amounts to relentless aggression against them, we find psychoanalytically curious invocations of protection amidst active harm, a phenomenon observable in abusive families and troubled intrapsychic environs alike. ‘Protective custody’ results in incarcerated children—another pause-worthy phrase that describes a violation of children’s rights per the Convention—languishing alone in solitary confinement for their ostensible protection in adult prisons.
Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that ‘works’ for everyone—allowing us to maintain our identities, our professional roles, our political affiliations, our ways of life, while experiencing ourselves as caring, engaged people who are doing something about this terrible problem. Our ritualized response to school shootings, going back to the Columbine shooting more than twenty-five years ago, protects us from confronting the transformations required to address this tragedy.
I began having violent fantasies about walking through the halls with a duffel bag full of guns, shooting whomever I saw as well as throwing grenades into classrooms.
The astronauts on Apollo 13 had all piloted fighter jets and held jobs flying newer planes to ensure they were not prone to pitching and yawing and, you know, breaking up in midair. This kind of person does not dwell on the past. Consequently, the tense of the phrase “we’ve had a problem”: the initial problem is over, now we focus on making a plan for repairing the damage and resuming the mission. It is no surprise that in the wider populace, the words were wrangled back into the present tense as a cry for help. To us civilians, an explosion that occurred a few seconds ago is a current problem, and so we treat ourselves to a few minutes of high panic.
Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also denying those who have inhabited the region for centuries, especially the Bedouin of the Al-Naqab, their rights to the land. Only the former South African ambassador refused to have trees planted in his or his country’s name, saying that it replicated apartheid.
The group has spurred activism in both red and blue districts, and large cities as well as rural areas. For ROOM, we have invited members to speak of the role the group has played in their capacity to find emotional balance and to act constructively in these times.
The first “Psychoanalysis in Action” event was a major demonstration outside the Kishon detention center in response to the extended detention of four men who had fired flares at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s home during a protest.
The idea of their inseparability is made possible by the vagueness of the terms “writer” and “analyst.” The overlap of the Venn diagram gets dramatically smaller when comparing the role of psychoanalyst and novelist.
Each of the writers in ROOM 6.25 has captured, in their own way, something of this extraordinary moment we are all living through. This is not easy. In his essay Why I Write, Thomas Ogden explains why. “Part of the difficulty of writing well lies in the fact that writing any sort of analytic essay, literary essay, poetry, fiction is autobiographical,” Ogden writes; “I must find a way of capturing a situation in my own way, a way that bears my own mark.” This unique issue of ROOM bears the mark of multitudes and holds the scars of generations.
The grief I carry isn’t just personal; it has been shaped by years of sitting with survivors of this kind of trauma. When we dismiss their warnings, telling ourselves it can’t happen here, we fall into the very delusion that makes us vulnerable.
I’ve been teaching the Holocaust for the better part of my career at university and beyond. It seems to me that in all of the chaos of this Trump administration, their most consistent policy thus far, maybe even their single most consistent policy, has been to foment antisemitism.
When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not wanted.
It seems possible that this dulling may contribute to my current state of political fecklessness: while before I felt able to fight, now, with the situation seeming so much worse than in 2016, there are times I wish it would all just go away. I am used to being at least externally “okay,” even when many others are not. Whether rising above or cowering in fear, I lose my capacity to act from a grounded center.
Roy Cohn brought his style of aggressive attacks to our campus. I too often saw him, an unattractive, thin man, agitated and angry, standing on a platform, holding a megaphone, giving speeches to my fellow students in the quad, yelling at the top of his lungs, “The red sea of Communism is spreading over us all!” as he grimaced and pointed below to the crowd of booing students. As one of the few girls in this crowd, I stood among them, appalled, but silent and terrified.
… While the Declaration cannot tell us how to respond to tyranny in our time, it can perhaps encourage us as the actions of the Trump administration become ever more lawless and the danger in the nation mounts.
I realize now that I am composed of the full inventory of the slights and dehumanizing aspects of racism I have known. But why did this story return so suddenly? Was it because many people were talking about racism and anti-Semitism? Why did this early event cause so much anguish and trauma in me thirty-five years after it happened? Was it because all nuns represented a kind of goodness in my six-year-old mind, a goodness that was shattered in an instant?
Matt was crazy, or that’s what some people said. Once, in the midst of a panicked and angry moment, he sat down right in the middle of Braddock Avenue and refused to move. Drivers honked in confusion and yelled out their windows for him to get the hell out of the road, but he wasn’t going anywhere and certainly not for them, no matter how angry or leering or even genuinely concerned they might have been… These things happened with Matt, sometimes.
For 27 years it has been a local tradition. It is our little Sturgis. The town becomes unrecognizable but in a way that feels like the “rebellious, no rules, party of the century is here to stay” feeling. … And year after year I didn’t notice the subtle changes. It wasn’t until this year that I felt the pivot point of a paradigm shift. The realization of what I was seeing struck me with such a force that I had to stand frozen in the middle of a sea of bodies and go inward to try to reclaim my composure, emotions, and balance.