You’re Not Broken. You’re Just Paying Attention.

Julie Bolejack

— 2 min read
You’re Not Broken. You’re Just Paying Attention.
Photo by Soheb Zaidi / Unsplash

If you’re tired, distracted, slightly feral, and occasionally tempted to move into a yurt with no Wi-Fi and one extremely judgmental cat — congratulations. You are having a completely normal response to living in the United States in 2026.

If you wake up, check the news, and immediately feel like you’ve aged four years before coffee, you are not weak.

You are informed.

Let’s review just a sample of what your nervous system is expected to process before lunch these days:

  • Democracy hanging on like a shower curtain rod installed by a landlord
  • Courts that now feel more like improv theater
  • Billionaires playing real-life SimCity with the economy
  • AI doing everyone’s homework except Congress’s
  • And a political class that treats “public service” like a sponsored content opportunity

And then people say things like:

“Have you tried gratitude journaling?”

Yes. I have. I am grateful we still have weather.

🧠 Your Brain Is Not Built for This Much Stupid

Your brain evolved to:

  • Watch for lions
  • Gather berries
  • Avoid the weird guy in the next cave

It did not evolve to:

  • Absorb 400 headlines a day
  • Watch democracy get stress-tested like a Cybertruck window
  • Or process seven simultaneous scandals involving people who somehow still have podcasts

So if you’re:

  • Anxious
  • Short-tempered
  • Weirdly tired
  • Or alternating between rage and numbness

Congratulations. Your threat detection system is working perfectly.

You are not broken.

You are paying attention.

📱 Doomscrolling Is Not a Hobby (But We All Have It)

We now live in a world where you can go online to look up a soup recipe and accidentally witness the collapse of three institutions and a Supreme Court norm.

We were not meant to carry this much information, this constantly, with this little resolution.

Your nervous system thinks:

“The tribe is in danger and no one is in charge.”

Which, to be fair, is not entirely wrong.

🛑 You Are Not Required to Be Everything

You are not required to be:

  • Informed
  • Activated
  • Calm
  • Productive
  • Hopeful
  • And emotionally well-regulated

…all on the same day.

Some days, resistance looks like marching.

Some days, resistance looks like:

  • Turning off the news
  • Making soup
  • And not reading anything with the words “breaking,” “bombshell,” or “constitutional crisis” in the headline

Both count.

🪑 Radical Rest Is Still Radical

Here is your subversive assignment:

  • Sit in a chair
  • Drink water
  • Breathe like a mammal
  • Go outside and look at something that is not a screen or a billionaire

This is not quitting.

This is maintenance.

And history is saved not by vibes — but by people who don’t burn out before the next chapter.

🇺🇸 You’re Not Weak. You’re Still Here.

We are living through:

  • Institutional decay
  • Information warfare
  • And a long national experiment in “What If We Just Let The Dumbest People Drive?”

And yet.

Here you are.

Still caring.

Still paying attention.

Still capable of laughing.

Still capable of love.

Still capable of outrage and tenderness.

You are not broken.

You are awake.

And that is exhausting work.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

SUBSCRIBE AT julies-journal.ghost.io

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