Living in this time is a lot like living in a house that’s still under construction — one we didn’t design, didn’t vote on, didn’t even get a choice about. Yet somehow, we’re the ones expected to keep it running. Every day we wake up surrounded by half-built walls, exposed beams, loose screws, and people shouting instructions from other rooms like they actually know what they’re doing.
The adults wander through the place reminiscing about “how sturdy it used to be,” as if the cracks weren’t forming back then too, just in quieter places. They talk about the past like it was a mansion and not just a different version of the same unstable structure we’re standing in now.
Meanwhile, we’re the ones feeling the floor shift beneath us.
Political arguments echo through the hallways, so loud they drown out the parts of the house that are actually breaking. Everyone’s arguing about which room deserves attention while entire families are being pushed into corners that were never safe. People debate policies and plans while ignoring the fact that, on the other side of the wall, some rooms collapse without warning — and the people inside them had nothing to do with the cracks.
Some mornings, we hear distant thuds — not storms, but consequences. A section of the house giving way. A family that won’t get to come downstairs again. Children who never even made it past the doorway of their own futures. The adults try to keep us away from those parts of the house, hoping we won’t notice.
But we do. We always do.
The silence afterward is impossible to ignore.
What hurts most is knowing that so many of these collapses could have been prevented. The warning signs were there: broken beams, ignored repairs, arguments that dragged on for so long the house started rotting from the waiting. Innocent people keep getting hurt while different groups stand in the hall pointing fingers, insisting that fixing the house is important — but only after everyone agrees on who caused the damage.
So we’re left navigating a place that feels both familiar and unpredictable, a house we know by heart but still don’t fully trust. We try to make it feel livable anyway. We patch what we can. We comfort who we can. We check on rooms other people pretend aren’t falling apart.
And somehow, despite the chaos, we’re trying to imagine something better. Not because we’re naïve, but because we’ve seen what happens when things are left untouched for too long. We’ve seen how fragile people are when the structures meant to protect them fail. We’ve seen the cost of neglect, not as headlines but as a heaviness that hides in the corners.
We don’t want a bigger house.
We don’t want a prettier house.
We want one that doesn’t bury its own people.
One where no child’s safety depends on which room they were born into.
One where storms don’t always hit the same families hardest.
One where the people in charge stop arguing long enough to notice who’s hurting right in front of them.
The truth, the emotional truth, is that growing up right now means constantly holding your breath. It means hoping the wall beside you doesn’t buckle. It means caring about people you’ve never met because you know the house could shift under anyone’s feet.
And maybe the most painful part is this: we‘re young, but we already understand loss on a scale that should belong to adults.
We already know the feeling of watching a part of the house crumble and realizing the people inside never even had a chance.
But even with all of that, we keep trying to hold this place together. Not because it’s perfect, or fair, or easy — but because people live here. People we love. People we’ve never met. People who deserve rooms that won’t collapse on them.
So no, the house isn’t finished. It isn’t safe enough.
It isn’t fair enough.
It isn’t kind enough.
But we’re still here, carrying tools we were never trained to use, caring in ways no one taught us, feeling the weight of every broken room.
And if anything is going to change it will be because we couldn’t stand living in a house that keeps losing the people inside it.
