A Better Tomorrow
When the heart grows calloused; A survivor’s guide to reclaiming compassion after disaster overload
“I stopped crying at the headlines; then I said, ‘It was time to show up!”
The ping arrived at 3:07 a.m. Another aerial video of roofless homes in Jamaica, captioned “Pray for us.” I watched it once, twice, then auto played into a montage of flooded streets, wailing grandmothers, and a single pink sneaker caught on a barbed-wire fence. By sunrise I had shared, donated, text-checked on cousins, and still felt… nothing.
My coffee tasted like copper. My thumbs kept scrolling. Somewhere between the fifth fundraiser link and a tweet blaming the government, I realized the disaster hadn’t happened only on the island; it was unfolding inside my chest.
Compassion fatigue is the emotional concussion nobody diagnoses. It is the sudden snap when the heart, over-pressurized by secondary trauma, seals itself shut. In North America we are marooned on couches, mainlining crises through 6-inch screens, mistaking proximity for preparedness. The brain cannot tell the difference between a hurricane 1,500 miles away and one blowing through the living room; cortisol floods either way.
“The brain cannot tell the difference between a hurricane 1,500 miles away and one blowing through the living room.”
Last week I spoke with a Jamaican-Canadian psychologist who studies “digital diaspora trauma.” She told me her Toronto waiting list tripled after Hurricane Beryl clips went viral. “Clients arrive convinced they’re broken,” she said, “But they are actually over-connected: no ritual, no rhythm, no release.” She keeps a box of river stones in her office; patients select one, name the headline that numbed them, and hurl it into a bowl of water. The splash is the first felt sound some bodies register in weeks.
I tried it. I named the pink sneaker. The stone sank; my shoulders rose.
Empathy has two chambers: affective (I feel with you) and cognitive (I see you). Algorithms pump the first chamber until it ruptures, while starving the second. The cure is a disciplined perspective. Baldwin once wrote, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
The “Shirt Off My Back” drive began when I received a phone call from my mom letting me know that our family in Westmoreland had lost everything. I could tell she was upset; the weight of responsibility was on us because we were “in foreign.” “How are we going to help everyone,” she asked? At that moment, I had nothing. I sat there for a bit unsure how to process my mother’s pain, and the pain of the family that I could not directly feel.
I picked up the phone and gave one of my mentors Roger Mooking a ring; as we were talking, he noticed that I didn’t sound like myself and called it out. I told him what my mom had said, and he said right away, “I have some items I can donate. Let me call my neighbours and see if anyone has anything to donate.”
Within 24 hours, we had a truck full of clothes, a warehouse space donated to us by Mr. Guy Steer from Steer2Home, and a group of community partners ready to get in where they fit in. Just like that, cognitive empathy was restored, affective empathy protected.
“Let me call my neighbours and see if anyone has anything to donate.”
I learned that the best way to deal with compassion fatigue is to take action. Instead of just scrolling through feeds and sharing posts (which I still do from time to time), I found peace in developing a sustainable plan to help my family, and their communities restore a level of normality. I also utilize my psychological toolkit to help me deal with the constant dread feeds that are being amplified. I thought I would share some of these tips with you:
- Curate your feed: Mute hashtags that update every thirty seconds; follow two local voices you can name in the dark.
- Schedule the grief: Set a 15-minute “headline window” after lunch; outside that, the phone sleeps in another room.
- Move the story through the body: Ten squats for every reshared post; the quadriceps remembers what the heart can’t yet hold.
Last night the same cousin who sent the pink-sneaker clip forwarded a 12-second video of a little girl twirling in a new yellow dress. I felt the old tug behind the ribs, inside the throat, the place where compassion lives when it is rested. I didn’t cry. I exhaled, long and slow, like someone who had almost forgotten the texture of her own breath…