We Don’t Talk About That | JBE Mindful Pathways
If you sat at this table tonight, you’d hear it straight. The neighbor whose wife almost gave up. The dealership guy who had a heart attack a month ago and still dragged himself back to work. The moms online crying into their phones, begging for one damn breath. The mechanic, the corner-store guy, the women in my feed saying they’re hanging by a thread. You’d hear me. You’d hear you. It’s the same story, just different mouths telling it. And all of it? Heavy as hell.
We keep running the same script every day until it eats us alive. Wake up. Survive. Pay. Crash. Repeat. Call it a routine if you want, but it feels more like a trap on loop. And it doesn’t matter who you are—mom, dad, single, married, working three jobs or none—the wheel spins the same. Politics, religion, society—they just keep stacking weight on top, daring you to break while telling you to smile for the camera.
My kids aren’t blind. They say there’s no middle class anymore—you’re either rich or broke, period. And when you’re clawing, trying to climb, they just yank the damn ladder higher. So tell me, what the fuck are we supposed to do with that? Pretend it’s fine? Pretend exhaustion is our fault? That’s the game, right? They burn us out and then gaslight us into thinking it’s “normal.”
We might not tear the whole system down by tomorrow morning. But here, at this table, we stop pretending. We stop swallowing it quiet. We say it plain: we’re tired as fuck. We’re tired of bending. We’re tired of running. And if nothing else, we can start by naming it. Because naming it—that’s the first crack in the cage.
The Hump We’re Bent Beneath
Some of us carry it on our backs like a shadow nobody else can see. It’s the hump that bends us, reshaping our bodies and our lives, until the weight feels like part of who we are. Burnout isn’t always fire and collapse. Sometimes it’s just the slow curve of your spine under the invisible load — bills, kids, expectations, the thousand tiny tasks that never end.
And it doesn’t discriminate. My neighbor’s wife, who doesn’t clock into a job, still feels crushed under the sameness of her days — enough to break her spirit. Meanwhile, her husband comes home from twelve-hour shifts swearing she does nothing, not realizing she’s already drowning in her own version of nothing. Then there’s the dealership guy who survived a heart attack just last month, already back at work, because in this system, stopping is the same as dying..
Men, women — the details differ, but the story’s the same. A wheelbarrow of burdens nobody else can see, but your body does. Your soul does. And it’s heavy in ways we can’t measure. Women are told they’re “too emotional,” men are told they’re “machines” — both get boxed into roles that burn them from the inside out. And all the while, the hump grows, bending us down further until one day we look in the mirror and don’t even recognize our own stance.
The cruelest part? Society teaches us to normalize it. To laugh about mom wine nights or dead-eyed dads in cubicles. To shrug and say “that’s life.” But beneath that humor is a quiet gravity no one can deny. We’re bent beneath it, and pretending it isn’t there just makes the hump grow heavier.
When the Wheels Won’t Come Off
You ever seen a car that should’ve died on the highway but just keeps rolling, rattling, making that metal-on-metal scream? Wheels spinning, tires bald, frame shaking like it’s about to come undone — but it doesn’t. It just keeps dragging forward, refusing to collapse even though every damn part of it wants to. That’s what most of us look like right now. Not stopping, not crashing, just stuck in motion, living on fumes.
We call it routine, but really it’s survival on autopilot. Wake up. Get the kids ready. Work. Pay the bills. Argue. Sleep. Repeat. And the days blur so much you don’t even remember what month it is until someone tells you. It’s a hamster wheel, sure, but not the cute kind you see at the pet store. This one is rusty, oversized, and you’re inside it running for your life — because if you stop, you’re scared it’ll crush you flat.
The dealership guy said it plain: he feels like a robot. Punch in, punch out, go home, repeat. Even after a heart attack, he didn’t get to step off. Why? Because bills don’t pause for your body to heal. Fear doesn’t let you. Fear whispers that if you step off, everything will unravel — the house, the marriage, the kids, the scraps of stability you’ve been clinging to like lifelines. So you keep running. Men keep quiet because “providing” is supposed to be enough. Women keep quiet because “holding it all together” is supposed to be enough. Both are suffocating in silence.
And then there’s that children’s song — the wheels on the bus go round and round. Cute when you’re five. Sinister when you’re forty-two and realize that’s your life. Wheels round and round, never stopping, never coming off, not even for you to breathe. At some point, you’re not steering anymore. The car is driving you, unhinged, running a million miles per hour down roads you didn’t even choose.
It’s no wonder people are breaking. Not breaking like a glass that shatters clean. Breaking like a car that refuses to stop — every part worn down, every sound screaming, but still dragged forward until one day it just seizes in the middle of traffic. And we wonder why depression and burnout numbers are through the roof. We’re not machines, but we’ve been tricked into living like we are. And when the wheels won’t come off, when you can’t even crash right, all you’re left with is exhaustion that feels endless.
The Zookeepers of Our Cage (Part One)
Every cage has a keeper. And ours isn’t holding a set of shiny brass keys — it’s holding the entire fucking playbook on how to keep people tired, sick, and begging. That’s what the government feels like right now. Not leaders, not protectors — zookeepers. Feeding us just enough scraps to keep us alive while making sure the bars stay tight, the wheel keeps spinning, and nobody remembers what freedom tastes like.
Look around: rent climbing while wages don’t budge, food prices climbing like ivy choking the brick, healthcare dangled like it’s a luxury item. They call it “the economy” like it’s some untouchable god we can’t question. But the truth? It’s just people in suits making decisions that make them richer and keep us crawling on our knees. They strip programs, funnel money where it benefits them, and then smile in front of cameras talking about “the American dream.” Dream my ass. For most of us, it’s survival, not dreaming.
And don’t even get me started on the mental health system. They’ll throw millions into defense contracts and wars halfway across the world, but when a woman says she’s burnt out, suicidal, or drowning in the same four walls, what does she get? A waitlist. A fucking hotline that might put her on hold. Pills that cost more than groceries. But hey, at least there’s a shiny commercial telling her depression is just a chemical imbalance — as if her poverty, her exhaustion, her trauma aren’t also bleeding into her veins.
The cage is built out of more than steel. It’s built out of debt, fear, propaganda, and distraction. Keep people fighting each other — left vs. right, poor vs. poorer — and they’ll never climb the bars. Keep people terrified of losing the little they have, and they’ll stay in line. Keep dangling hope like a carrot — a better job, a tax break, a tiny bit of relief — and people will keep running the wheel, even as their lungs collapse.
And when we do break down? They don’t rush in with care. They rush in with judgment. “Lazy.” “Unmotivated.” “Entitled.” Those words aren’t accidents — they’re weapons. Tools of control. The zookeeper doesn’t need to whip you if he convinces you that your exhaustion is your own damn fault. That’s the trick. That’s the brilliance of the cage: it makes you blame yourself for being locked in.
(Part Two)
Politics isn’t leadership anymore. It’s theater. It’s clowns in suits pulling strings while we fight over the scraps they drop on stage. Red, blue, left, right — they’ve turned it into a goddamn circus so we never notice the cage they’ve built around all of us. They feed us fear: fear of immigrants, fear of losing jobs, fear of losing safety, fear of each other. Because as long as we’re busy clawing at our neighbors, we won’t look up and realize the zookeeper has his boot on all our necks.
And religion? Let’s talk about it. For centuries it’s been used as both comfort and a weapon. Comfort when you need to feel less alone, a place to pray, to cry, to believe. But a weapon when it’s hijacked to control. Look at how it’s been twisted to silence women, to shame LGBTQ+ folks, to justify slavery, segregation, and violence. People in power cherry-pick holy words to build fences higher, to shame bodies, to decide who gets to be “worthy.” Faith itself isn’t the problem. It’s the people who weaponize it like a leash.
Then there’s capitalism — the engine behind it all. Capitalism doesn’t care if you’re black, brown, white, male, female, straight, queer, trans, poor, middle class. It cares if you can produce. If you can make money for the machine. That’s it. But here’s the catch: not all of us start on the same playing field. Women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, immigrants — they start the race with weights on their ankles, hurdles stacked higher, cages within cages. And still, they’re expected to “compete fairly.” What a fucking joke.
Sexism is baked into every paycheck, every job posting, every boardroom where men love to mansplain shit they barely understand to women who already know their stuff. And it isn’t just men — some women pick up that same toxic habit, either because they think it’s the only way to be taken seriously, or because they’ve mistaken survival skills for leadership. Mansplaining becomes a default language of power, a way to flex authority by pretending others don’t know enough. We even do it to kids sometimes, talking down instead of talking with, but at least kids grow into their knowledge. Women, queer folks, marginalized folks? They’re treated like perpetual children in those rooms — always “needing” to be explained to, even when they’re the smartest ones at the table. Racism is stitched into laws, into neighborhoods, into police reports, into who gets believed when they say “I can’t breathe.” LGBTQ+ folks? They’re told to “be themselves” while being stripped of healthcare, protection, and basic rights, while laws are written to erase their existence. Kids grow up learning early which boxes they’re allowed to check, and God help them if they try to color outside the lines.
And men? They’re in the cage too. Told to man up, shut up, don’t cry, keep grinding. If you break, you’re weak. If you stop, you’re lazy. If you feel, you’re less of a man. So they die younger, of heart attacks, of silent depressions, of bottles drained in the dark.
It’s all connected. Women, children, queer folks, Black and brown folks, men bent into roles that break them — all of us jammed into cages built by people who profit off our exhaustion. The zookeepers don’t give a damn if you’re starving, if you’re suicidal, if you’re running in circles until your lungs give out. As long as the wheel spins and the money flows, the show goes on.
(Part Three)
Here’s what the cage looks like today, 2025: groceries cost more than some people’s rent used to. A bag of food is a damn rent check. Gas prices climb and climb, but your paycheck doesn’t. People are choosing between insulin and electricity, between keeping the lights on and keeping their kids fed. And the government shrugs like this is just “inflation,” as if that word explains away the gnaw in your stomach.
Immigrants still get hunted. ICE doesn’t care if you’ve built a life, raised kids, worked your ass off. Families ripped apart in parking lots and kitchens, as if cruelty is the point. Black and brown communities keep paying the highest price — locked up, locked out, locked away. Every headline about “justice reform” fades when another name hits the news for being killed in their own damn neighborhood.
Our kids? We used to send them to school for safety, for education, for a chance. Now we send them with prayers. With fear. With “please, not today.” Schools have become battlegrounds — not just with shootings but with politics crawling into classrooms, deciding what history gets erased, what books get banned, what identities get silenced. LGBTQ+ kids get told they don’t exist, that their pronouns, their lives, their love are “up for debate.” That’s not education. That’s erasure dressed up as curriculum.
And the middle class? My kids are right. It doesn’t exist anymore. You’re either drowning or floating. Either you’ve got wealth with a safety net, or you’ve got bills stacked higher than your paycheck with no net at all. They sold us the dream of climbing, but the ladder’s missing rungs. You claw your way up, and they move the top higher. It’s designed to keep you chasing.
This isn’t just policy. It’s a chokehold. It’s zookeepers deciding how much air you get, how much freedom you can touch before they pull it back. And still, we blame ourselves. Still, we think if we just worked harder, hustled longer, prayed better, maybe the wheel would slow down. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? The cage isn’t supposed to open. Not for us.
And yet — here we are, talking about it. Naming it. Calling it out. That’s the start of prying at the bars. That’s where we as the collective come in — what happens when we stop swallowing it, when we finally admit, together, we’re tired as fuck.
Talking Shit While We Stand Up
We can’t just sit back and wish for change like it’s some Amazon delivery that’ll show up if we click hard enough. Change doesn’t come with free shipping. Change costs sweat, voice, risk. And right now too many of us are sitting in our cages scrolling, complaining, praying for something different while still keeping the wheel spinning for the same zookeepers who are grinding us down.
I’m telling you this because I’m guilty too. I’ve been tired. I’ve wanted to just shut my mouth and let life run me over. But no more. I can’t. Not when I know my voice is my weapon. My words are my fight. This — what you’re reading right now — this is me standing up. And I know not everyone can march, not everyone can protest in the streets, not everyone has the same strength in their body. Disability, illness, poverty — they break the body. But not the power. Everyone has a grain of salt they can throw into the fire.
Your grain of salt might be a blog. Might be a poem. Might be checking on your neighbor. Might be refusing to swallow the bullshit at work one more time. Might be teaching your kid to question authority instead of bowing to it. That’s still rebellion. That’s still resistance. That’s still saying: I am not just another hamster on your wheel.
And my neighbor said it plain, and I’ll repeat it because it’s the truth: the government works for us. They’re our employees. We are not their livestock. They’ve got that shit twisted. And they’ve kept it twisted because we forgot. We forgot that we’re the bosses, the voters, the payers, the people who decide who sits in those chairs. They act like kings, but kings only exist if the people kneel. And we’ve been kneeling too long.
So this is where we stand up. Not with polite requests, not with whispers. With talking shit and backing it up. With voices, with votes, with refusing to play their game of division. With remembering that united — even just a little united — we’re louder than their entire circus. Because the minute we stop swallowing their script and start writing our own, the wheel grinds to a halt. And they know it.
Because when one voice refuses to stay quiet, others remember theirs. And when enough of us remember, the cage doesn’t stand a chance.
With grace, grit, and a love that refuses to quit.
Keep showing up—even when it feels like no one’s watching.
Your presence is powerful. Your love is building something they’ll one day thank you for.
From one fighter to another—
With strength and softness,
~ JBE Mindful Pathways
Wellness Advocate | Writer | Mother | Still Learning, Always Loving
“Ready to dive deeper? Explore more eye-opening stories like this in the We Don’t Talk About That collection—where silence ends, and truth begins.”
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