BY Samira Isimbi
Dear feminists,
I am writing this from a place of profound hopelessness, and I hope that by the time I finish, I will have found even a small spark to keep me going. I hope it brings you closer to me, and us closer to each other. The collective will save us. The collective is our only way forward.
I have been an activist for more than a decade, and I remember when speaking about my beliefs about the systems that oppress women and marginalized people flowed easily from my tongue. Now, silence has engulfed it. I fight it every day with everything in me, but it clings like a shadow I cannot separate from.
Palestine has been enduring genocide for 23 months. It floods our TV and phone screens, yet life continues around us while children die of starvation. As a Rwandan woman, I carry the shame of believing in “Never Again” when it is happening again. Just yesterday, on August 11th, 2025, the Al Jazeera crew was murdered while sitting in their tent.
More than 150 Congolese women were raped and burned alive during a jailbreak, according to the UN. It takes only three hours to travel from Kigali, where I live, to the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I grew up alongside many Congolese people; their struggles should also be mine. Colonialism and its legacies fractured our sense of community and oneness. We are foreigners to each other, and yet so similar, bound by shared borders, languages, and culture. I have watched Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese killed and burned alive on live TV, and I am left not knowing what to do with such unbearable knowledge. My heart is heavy with sadness, and the question lingers: What should we do about all of this? It is heartbreaking to realize how little I can do. Yet, the chance to write about it offers me a fragile lifeline, a way to ease my hopeless heart, if only for a moment.
My social media feels like a strange collage: A Palestinian journalist killed in an Israeli strike, my struggle to write my master’s thesis, and a friend’s birthday picture. It all feels wrong. Some days, I don’t want to wake up; other days, I think I owe the universe the gratitude of life. Living in this reality has built a kind of immunity and numbness to the grief that has engulfed us globally. There is no way to process it all. This collage becomes my survival, my imperfect attempt at believing that somehow we will make it out alive. I wonder where this world is taking us. I wonder how this hopelessness is shaping my activism.
I am craving a space to pour out my rage at the patriarchal capitalist world that does not want us to live in our complete freedom. I am craving sisters who will hug me and promise that we will fight until we are free. I am craving some sign from the universe that there might be an end to this oppression.
I carry survival guilt, guilt for living when everything else is burning, when so many people are dying. I celebrate life in its entirety, yet my heart still bleeds for people with dreams and rights all over the world, dying as if their lives matter less.
Our mental health is forever changed. How do we heal from such injustice? How do we find peace when so much innocent blood is being spilled? Should we hope that there is meaning in all this? Or should we accept that suffering will sit with us, deep in our bones? Where will my fire come from now that I feel this void? How do I hold you, my sisters, and how do you hold me?
The pain of carrying so much terror is indescribable. Anxiety walks with me, from Palestine to Congo to Sudan’s war-torn villages. I weep.
How can I be okay with this? How can I inspire hope when we are all so tired?
In a workshop with other contributors, what we called a writing circle, a fellow writer told me that joy is resistance and asked me to list what is bringing light to me and my people right now. And so, here it is: amidst the madness, joy still finds me. I got engaged to a beautiful soul who holds my heart with care. My brother finally started school after waiting for so many years. I am almost done with my master’s degree. These moments are not a betrayal of the world’s pain; they are a refusal to let the darkness have all of me. As a feminist and activist, I am beginning to realize the importance of creating safe spaces for women. Spaces for us, where we can express ourselves and give voice to feelings we cannot share elsewhere. This work is both necessary and heavy, carrying with it profound grief but also profound resilience. Let us commit to building more of these spaces where we can lay down the burden of the world for a while and allow ourselves to marvel at the small joys, both personal and communal.
I hope we never lose our humanity. I’m beginning to understand that it matters for my heart to feel a sense of heaviness. Maybe this heaviness is the light I’ve been searching for as a reminder to sit with the pain instead of running from it.
I want to feel it fully, in the hope that I never grow immune to the violence of this world.
So, I will sit here, with my confusion and my hopelessness, letting them exist without forcing meaning too soon. Perhaps next time, I’ll tell you what they’ve taught me.
I don’t know if hope will save us. But I know the collective will.
In rage and love,
Samira Isimbi