The Long Unwinding: The Relief of Collapse (Part 2)

When the truth slips through the cracks of old systems

I was nine the first time I remember watching the end of the world.

It was the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes.

Taylor (Charlton Heston) rides up the beach, angry and broken. He comes upon the ruins of a symbol of civilization. He drops to his knees and shouts at the sky:

“You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!”

There are certain moments that stay with us. Not because we fully understood them at the time, but because something in the body felt them. Moments that didn’t make sense in words, but carried a knowing. A frequency.

I remember feeling something clearly in that moment, but it’s taken me a long time to put those feelings into words. Not horror. Not fear. What I felt was:

A relief.

A knowing.

Awe.

I wasn’t mourning the loss of the world.

Instead of seeing science fiction, I saw the truth revealed.

Of course, I didn’t have language for that at the time. I just knew it meant something.
It felt like a veil had lifted.

And, to be honest, I had a similar experience on Election Night 2024. I was sitting on my sofa, watching the news report the results of the presidential election. At the end of the night, they called it for Trump. That’s the last thing I’d wanted. But the body never lies—when I heard the announcement, a lightness bubbled up from deep inside. I didn’t have words for this feeling, either. But my sense was that it had to do with a deeper truth coming to light.

Not because I wanted the outcome. I didn’t. But because something false had fallen away.

It was as if the system had finally stopped pretending.
And the body, tired of holding tension, could finally exhale.

That’s what I mean when I say relief.
Not joy. Not apathy. But a release.
A quiet, unsettling recognition: yes, this is what it is. And this is what we’ve been living in all along.

My family came to the U.S. from China and Japan between the 1860s and the early 1900s. I also had an Irish great-great-grandmother who lived in New York City, but her origin story has been lost in the ashes.

I don’t know exactly why my ancestors left their homelands. Were they fleeing famine? Political unrest? A lack of opportunity? I also don’t know what made them stay. It couldn’t have been easy—selling supplies to miners, working on the transcontinental railroad, learning a new language, navigating an unfamiliar culture. Facing prejudice and discrimination at every turn.

But they made it through. They built businesses. Raised children. Fought in a war. Some were imprisoned behind barbed wire in internment camps. And somehow, through all of it, they held on. One thing I know for certain: they had community. I think that’s what sustained them. That, and the ability to own and run businesses. To build something of their own, even in a system that didn’t fully welcome them.

They built a life here, but were still seen as outsiders. Foreigners. It didn’t matter if they were U.S. citizens or not.

And my nine-year-old body knew that something wasn’t quite right.

Growing up in the 70s, we were bombarded with messages about the great American melting pot. That you could be anything you wanted to be. That this was the land of the free. We went to baseball games. Sang the national anthem. I pledged allegiance to the flag every morning at school.

Schoolhouse Rock! even blasted us with it between Saturday morning cartoons with “The Great American Melting Pot”:

Lovely Lady Liberty

With her book of recipes

And the finest one she’s got

Is the great American melting pot

And in some ways, it wasn’t entirely untrue. My neighborhood was a lower middle-class community made up mostly of Asians, Whites, and Blacks. We lived alongside each other harmoniously—with kindness, respect, and neighbors looking out for one another. It gave me a glimpse of what was possible.

But the national story that was fed to us in classrooms and cartoons carried a tone of easeful belonging that didn’t reflect the fuller picture. That story skipped over the cost of assimilation. It didn’t account for what it meant to be seen as foreign, even when you were born in the U.S. and your family helped build the country’s infrastructure.

Because outside that small, familiar bubble, things felt different. Belonging was more conditional. People who looked like me had to be more cautious. There was an unspoken pressure to stay small, to be quiet. Because the dominant system, although it allowed us to live and work in this country, was not something we could fully trust.

I didn’t have words for any of this at the time. But my body knew. It always knew. It knew when something felt off, when the surface didn’t match what was underneath. It knew that belonging could be taken away, even when it was earned. It knew that safety, for some, was situational.

And maybe that’s why, when things begin to fall apart, there’s a part of me that doesn’t panic.

We’re taught to see collapse as a kind of failure. A sign that something has gone wrong. But what if it’s the opposite? What if collapse is what happens when something unsustainable can no longer hold?

What if it’s not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the truth?

So when I say I felt relief watching the world collapse in a movie or on election night, it’s not because I wanted suffering or destruction. It’s because I wanted the pretending to end. There’s a strange kind of peace that comes when the illusion breaks: when the stories that insisted everything was working finally fall apart. Stories that told us the system was fair. That anyone could make it if they tried hard enough. That success was a matter of effort. That freedom and equality were foundational, not aspirational. When those stories begin to unravel, something more honest and real starts to emerge.

And yes, there’s grief in that. There’s fear. But there’s also a softening. A breath that’s been held for too long, finally released.

I don’t believe collapse is the end. I think it’s a turning back toward each other. A return to relationship, reciprocity, and the wisdom of the circle. To something more human. More whole. Something our ancestors once knew, and that is waiting to be remembered.

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This essay is Part 2 of a series, The Long Unwinding. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

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