Amba Untamed

The Tiger Knows the Way Home On the body remembering peace, the exhaustion of being needed, and the strange, beautiful experience of no longer having to fight for your own existence. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. It isn't necessarily physical. It is the exhaustion of anticipation. Of waking up and immediately assessing what might go wrong. Of interpreting someone's tone before they've finished speaking. Of recognizing subtle changes in behaviour and mentally...

I have been thinking a lot about compassion lately. Not the word itself. We have plenty of that. People talk about compassion constantly. They talk about empathy, kindness, understanding, giving people grace, putting themselves in someone else's shoes. They describe themselves as compassionate people. They will tell you that they understand trauma, that mental health matters, that everyone is fighting battles we cannot see. And then somebody's trauma becomes inconvenient. Somebody needs more...

There are some things we spend years trying to understand because we believe understanding them will finally allow us to put them down. We gather the pieces. We revisit old conversations. We search through records we haven't looked at in years and compare dates against memories, policies against actions, what should have happened against what actually did. We find people who were there and ask what they remember. We reconstruct rooms, conversations, sequences of events. We become...