The current state of America doesn’t surprise me as much as it probably should. Not because I secretly hoped for collapse, but because I had already experienced all this in my head, and I was waiting for the rest of the country to catch up. I tend to see connections others miss, and I follow the trail long before most people even notice there’s a trail to follow. That means I reach the end before they’ve even realized there was a beginning.

What I didn’t anticipate was the pace. I assumed America’s collapse would be fast. Clean. A loud break in the system. Instead, it has been slow, uneven, and until recently, strangely quiet. It accumulated almost imperceptibly, each slight injustice adding to the ones before it, until a gap opened between the story we were told and the reality in which we’re living. And inside that widening gap, the dissonance had already formed, yet I watch the world insist everything is fine.

Most people don’t notice the dissonance enough to understand what it even means, but they notice a change in their comfort level almost immediately. Even so, people rarely trace the full sequence of events that led to that change. They just try to figure out whatever they need to do to pretend everything is normal. When someone in their circle does something harmful, they ignore it. Not because the harm is unclear, but because acknowledging it would break the illusion their comfort depends on.

I don’t have that luxury. I notice every shift in a room before anyone else does, at a depth most people don’t register, and whether I like it or not, my mind doesn’t give me the option to look away. Once the mechanism of failure is visible, the consequences are predictable. Some call it a gift, others call it anxiety, but I see myself more like a canary in a coal mine. Thankfully, I’m a canary that knows how to wear a gas mask, so by the time the danger is obvious to everyone, I’ve already been preparing for the aftermath.

Living that far ahead of the moment inevitably comes with its own cost. There is a particular kind of grief in being right too soon, the result of seeing the consequences long before anyone else is willing to acknowledge the cause. You end up grieving losses before anyone else realizes they’re coming, and explaining how you got there would mean walking someone through your entire thought process. That would take too long, and most people wouldn’t even begin to understand anyway. It’s what I imagine Cassandra of Troy must have felt like, constantly seeing what comes next and knowing most people would not believe a word you say.

I feel no joy in being right. I find myself hoping I’m wrong about almost everything. I wanted the world to surprise me with restraint, and for people to see the danger before it arrived at their doorstep. Instead, I watched the train wreck unfold in slow motion. I’ve seen people deny the obvious, defend the indefensible, and cling to the story long after seeing evidence to the contrary. 

Because I see so much, I also see how people look at me when I don’t react the way they expect me to. At the same time, if I were to see something and stay silent, and something irreversible were to happen, I would still feel responsible, because I’d always wonder if I could have made a difference. I know it isn’t my job to save everyone. But I’ve already watched something very similar to this play out in my head, and it feels wrong not to use what I gathered from that to keep a few people from walking blindly into it. And sometimes it feels like the average American has the survival skills of a potato chip. It leaves me choosing between telling the truth and being treated like the problem, or saying nothing and carrying the weight of it later.

I don’t resent anyone for not catching on as quickly as I did. I resent the burden of realizing where we were headed so early. And as the world cracks in ways I’d hoped I would never actually see, it exposes a question we’ll never be able to answer: whether anything could have influenced the trajectory we were on.

Maybe it’s too late to change what’s already in motion.  

But if one person puts on their gas mask because of something I said, then maybe that’s enough.