The Weight of Powerlessness
During Friday prayer, a strange, heavy gloom settled in. In the quiet lull of the sermon, my mind drifted unexpectedly to Manchester by the Sea. I found myself thinking of Casey Affleck’s character, Lee Chandler—the hollow, unmovable weight he carries after an irreversible catastrophe. I don’t know what clinical Depression strictly looks like, but in everyday experience, it feels close to that: an unbearable loss that defies description, where the specific circumstance changes from person to person, but the underlying substance remains identical. You wake up to a world that was shattered by something you can never undo.
There is a lyric that captures that sickening descent:
I’m sorry for everything, oh, everything I’ve done
From the second that I was born, it seems I had a loaded gun
And then I shot, shot, shot a hole through everything I loved
If we were handed a second chance to return to the past, we would swear never to repeat the same mistakes. Yet our blind spots and biases seem to march us straight toward the very outcomes we never intended. Confronted with that reality, something inside shuts down. We reject what is happening in front of us. And while you can mask that fracture in public, your eyes will give you away. When you are finally alone, the eyes—the singular window to how you experience this world—never lie.
Sitting in that congregation, another image broke through without warning: footage I had seen of a child’s severed foot in Palestine. It hung in my thoughts, disjointed and raw, completely drowning out the voice of the preacher on the pulpit. The routine cadence of the sermon receded into white noise. All that remained was the visceral horror of an innocent life torn apart, reduced to flesh on a screen, thousands of miles away.
What follows an image like that is an agonizing realization of absolute powerlessness. And I hate being powerless.
You find yourself sitting among people going about their routines, trading jokes about pop culture or mundane grievances, and you start questioning your own place in the room. Why do we obsess over trivialities? Perhaps that is simply how we survive: by systematically numbing ourselves so we never have to stare directly at the horror. Ignorance offers an easy comfort. It is tempting to envy those who can move through the world entirely shameless, unburdened by guilt or conscience, completely detached from the misfortune of others.
I tried to force myself into that mold, to adopt that callous detachment. I could not do it. No matter how hard I tried to play along with the daily rhythm, intrusive reality kept breaking the surface. When success is defined as the total absence of shame, choosing not to feel makes you feel hollowed out anyway. We are made of different temperaments; some of us simply cannot switch off the ache.
Sitting there, holding back tears in a room full of peers, I wanted to put on a mask of tough indifference just to protect my pride. But under that defense mechanism lay the unvarnished truth: horror exists, we are bearing witness to it in real time, and we possess almost no leverage to stop it.
When you feel that powerless, the immediate instinct is rage—an urge to strike out wildly. Yet striking without stability or balance only makes you stumble into a deeper slump. Confronting horror requires standing firm in the grief first, refusing the cheap escape of cynicism.
I suppose that is the quiet thread tying it back to Manchester by the Sea: the staggering weight of loss, the humiliation of helplessness, and the refusal to pretend everything is fine. I do not have a grand strategy to fix the world, nor do I know how to fight the vast injustices surrounding us. But I know I cannot choose blindness. I have to find my footing, keep my eyes open, and figure it out from there.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2025-05-16), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.