Many people face awful things.

Sometimes, those things aren’t fixable.

Sometimes you can’t make it better. Sometimes all you can do is try to find a way to live with it.

Living and enjoying your life doesn’t make the bad things irrelevant.

Often, people who don’t face the awful things want to pretend that everything is either fixable or already ok.

This leads to pressuring people experiencing awful things to smile and pretend everything is ok.

That doesn’t help. It doesn’t make anything ok. It just means that people are forced to face things alone. This isn’t right.

People shouldn’t force you to pretend that you’re ok when you’re not. People shouldn’t force you to pretend that the world is better than it is. If you’re facing that, I’m sorry that’s happening to you.

Sometimes we can’t fix the bad things. But there are problems we can fix. We can stop silencing people and we can stop isolating people. We can respect people, and stop expecting them to protect us from reality.

We can’t fix everything, but we can stop being jerks to people facing unfixable problems.