My journey through my BSSW and MSW—and the lived experiences that shaped me long before I entered a classroom—has brought me to a crossroads. In these difficult times of turmoil in the United States, I have realized a difficult truth: we have been conditioned to accept a cycle of inherited hardship.

We often mistake our exhaustion for a grievance against our peers, falling into “horizontal hostility”—a state where we direct our valid pain at the people standing right next to us. It is an unconscious distraction. When we focus on making sure others “earn” their way through the same struggle we endured, we lose the strength we need to look up and dismantle the systems that created that struggle in the first place.

Today, I invite you to reject the bitter, hollow logic of “I suffered, so you must too.” I know the weight you’ve carried. I know the scars left by systems that were unfair, underfunded, and often unkind. Your struggle was real, and the pain you feel is valid. It shouldn’t have been that way. But I ask you not to direct that fire at the person standing behind you. If we survive only by passing our pain down, we aren’t moving forward—we are just spinning in circles.

Let us turn our gaze upward. Let us channel our righteous anger at the machines that hurt us, rather than the survivors standing next to us. We must realize that allowing others to struggle because it “builds character” doesn’t empower the individual; it protects the system. Our ancestors did not endure the unthinkable so that we could become the new gatekeepers of misery; they struggled so we could be the architects of liberation.

I invite you to turn your scars into maps. We endured the storm not to prove our toughness, but so that we might build a shelter ensuring no one else has to weather it alone. True progress is measured not by how much weight we force others to carry, but by how many burdens we can lift from the shoulders of the next generation.

We honor the social justice giants who came before us—not with silence, and certainly not by repeating their trauma. We honor them by refusing to let their sacrifice be the end of the road. We honor them by standing with the immigrant, the criminalized, and the weary.

My invitation to you, and to the world, is this: Walk away from the mentality of shared misery. No matter how hard it has been, no matter how much the system has hurt us, let us choose a higher calling: “Because I struggled, I will fight to dismantle and change the systems so you won’t have to.” Let us honor our lineage the only way that matters: actively, faithfully, and defiantly.