I can't handle this anymore.

I like to think of myself as an optimist, but it's becoming increasingly clear to me that there's simply no justice in the world. As each new story comes out, I already know how it's going to end. We all do. With each new story, I get a bit angrier, my spirit grows a bit darker, my mind grows a bit more callous. For every big story that's publicized, there are hundreds of smaller ones. You get stopped for "looking suspicious", get a gun pointed at you, neighbors who just moved in calling the cops on you just for walking down the street you've lived on your whole life. I know I can't complain or get mad because then it becomes my own fault for being so "aggressive". So I just nod and smile, like "one of the good ones", while inside I just want to end it all.

Hell, I'm afraid to jog around my upper-middle class, mostly white neighborhood at night because I'm afraid people will think I'm a terrorist. My grandfather, who stays in shape by taking walks after sundown once got reported to the police for being suspicious. He was just standing on the corner taking a breather after walking uphill. This is reality even for well-off minorities. And yet on reddit we like to pretend it's not about race. It's your income, or the way you dress or the neighborhood you live in. ANYTHING but race, and if you say it's race then you're a "race-baiter". Anything to keep us from addressing the elephant in the room.

Every time I talk about this and get pushed aside or told that somehow I deserve this treatment or that what I'm experiencing is due to something completely different that's somehow my fault, it hurts. I know we throw that term around a lot, but I mean it literally.

My worst nightmare since I was a child is to be drowning, or suffocating, or otherwise dying in front of a crowd of people and everyone just stares at me blankly like nothing's happening. There's this sense of betrayal, confusion, complete hopelessness, and an overwhelming feeling of anger and teenage malcontent that makes you want to scream at the world until someone finally listens.

It hurts. In my brain, like some sort of mental block that I can't cross. I feel it in my extremities, like my fingers and toes and ears are hot and vibrating. It's like I need to move or shout but I know anything I do will just make me seem like an "angry young brown person".

It hurts.

And it never stops.