09.10.2025

I'm beginning to trust that our living loved ones are coming home, and while I'm relieved, I'm finding it impossible to access anything approaching joy, or, for that matter, any kind of emotion at all.  

It makes no sense. It isn't because there's some level on which I'm disappointed, or worried, or trepidatious.. I'm none of these things. It doesn't seem to be attached to anything;

I just can't access any feelings at all, eventhough I want to.

I feel like something's deeply wrong with me. I feel alien. If this thing that I.. that WE have been waiting for now for 2 years, standing in bleeding, bare feet on broken glass, wanting with every fibre of our collective soul, if this can't elicit in me jubilation, and some kind of desire to connect and celebrate with my people, there's something deeply wrong with me.  

All I feel is tired. Tired to the point of apathy. 

But maybe that's not true. 

As I've said before, I often write as a form of therapy. It's a conversation I have with myself, and, writing this, I've come to suspect that something I said above is inaccurate: that my apathy can't be attributed to disappointment. I think it actually is.  

On some level.. no. On most levels, I feel that at this point, it matters so much less than it should. These poor men who've been held as some kind of horrible reserve bargaining chip, who've been tortured in ways that I don't want to imagine, even after having been released, returning to what's left of their lives, their communities, their families, I can't imagine that they'll ever be able to recapture the vital things that have been stolen from them, including the freedom of joy they may have had before that horrible day and the 734+ days thereafter. I can't trust that there's any way for them to ever feel unfettered hope, or innocence again. 

I know that there are those who'll invoke stories of survivors who'd rebuilt their lives after the Shoah, who will remind me that we Jews, we Israelis are a people of resilience, and I don't deny any of that, but at 56, I've been alive long enough to understand that so much of the resilience that's the world celebrates, is more cosmetic than not; the horrors we live through, never really leave us. We may surrender ourselves to performing recovery, rebuilding, "moving on", because we learn just how isolating trauma can be, and that if we ever want to connect with others again, to experience any kind of intimacy, we have no choice but to sublimate those parts of ourselves in order to make others comfortable, but in the end, this performance only serves to isolate us further, and we're left feeling that no one except for our demons will ever truly know us, ever again.  

I suppose it's all of this. It's undeniably a good thing, that they're coming "home", but I can't shake the deep awareness of the fact, that "home" will now forever remain only in the painful/sweet realm of nostalgia for them, and in that, I feel that there's really very little to celebrate at all.