Living through what we lived through demanded two things that are almost impossible to do at once: it demanded that someone keep feeling, and it demanded that someone keep functioning.

To keep feeling — to weep, to grieve, to stay soft, to refuse to go numb — is what keeps a person human through horror, but it is also disabling; a person fully occupied with the enormity of what is happening to them cannot also calmly plan an escape.

And to keep functioning — to go cold, to watch, to calculate, to hide a phone and photograph a desk drawer and say I’m memorizing — is what makes escape possible, but done alone it hollows a person out, hardens them into a machine that survives and forgets how to be a person worth saving.

Neither mode is sufficient alone.