When I read Rosie O’Donnell’s post, Irish Times—which I recommend you check out—I felt it in my chest before I could even name it. Not because her experience shocked me, but because it touched something real in me. Especially at 42. The quiet grief of being a woman who never quite fit the mold. The body image stuff we carry. The sadness we hide. The feeling of being too much and not enough at the same time. Failed relationships, buried dreams, the slow erosion of spirit when you keep showing up for a world that rarely shows up for you. I didn’t just understand her ache, I’ve lived parts of it. Along with the guilt that comes with that ache.

But here’s the difference: she could leave.

I can’t. Or more accurately, I don’t feel like I can.

I’ve thought about it. Plenty of times. Not as a daydream, but as a spreadsheet. What country has healthcare? Where could I still afford to live with a disability? Where might my story as a Black woman be treated with dignity and not suspicion? But even in all the planning, I come back to the same heavy truth: this country was built on my people. On our backs. On our brilliance. On our blood.

My ancestors didn’t get to choose America. It was forced on them. And they still built it. Survived it. And left just enough behind for me to make it through. So even when I feel like this place was never built for me, even when I want to vanish from it entirely, I feel tethered to what they endured to get me here. And that’s not a chain I wear lightly. It’s not patriotic. It’s ancestral. It's complicated.

There’s also the other part people don’t like to talk about: the reality that Black women like me—proudly part of the 92%—don’t exactly have a “home” waiting for us somewhere else. We are deeply American, but never fully embraced by it. And we are often treated like outsiders in the places people tell us to escape to. So, what are we supposed to do?

It’s a strange kind of grief, to feel stuck in the very land you helped build. To belong to something that never made space for you. To be loyal to survival because it’s the only thing that’s ever felt remotely possible. And it’s not just emotional. It’s physical. The scanning. The guarded walking. The way your nervous system stays on even when you’re alone. You carry it in your back, your breath, your bones. Trying to find safety in a body that’s never been fully welcome is its own kind of exhaustion. But somehow, we’re still expected to keep going. Like it’s normal.

So no, I’m not leaving. It’s not that I don’t love this country. I do. That’s why it hurts so much to watch it fail the same people who built it. And everyone else it’s decided not to see. I believe in what it could be. What it still has the potential to become. But right now, it’s failing. Not just politically, but morally. The cruelty is so casual, so public, and so wide-reaching that no one who lives outside the margins is safe. It targets anyone the system decides not to value. And still, I stay. Not because I’m not exhausted, or furious, or worn thin. But because this is the only place that even begins to understand what my people endured just to exist.

Even if it rarely acts like it.

That’s the tension I live in. And like Rosie said, I don’t know how to hold it anymore. But I’m still trying. Because somehow, that feels like a kind of freedom.

Tasha Monroe
Founder, Simply Edyn & Co.
Editor & Writer, The Commons Dispatch