Hope Deferred.

I read a headline the other day that nearly made me laugh, but the humor lodged in my throat like a pit, bitter and unmovable. "I thought I needed five million to retire. I now have seven million. It still doesn’t seem like enough." I don’t know anyone—anyone—who will retire with even a fraction of that. And yet, here it is, framed as a universal woe, as if we are all tethered to the same fate, rowing in harmony toward some distant, golden horizon. But no. Some recline in the sun, their hands soft, their worries mere flickers of inconvenience, while below deck, in the sweltering dark, the rest of us row until our palms split open, until the water stinks of sweat and something like despair.

Retirement was once a promise, an end that could be worked toward, but I have come to understand it as a mirage—an oasis that vanishes the closer I get. To me, it’s only revealed itself more clearly over time. Maybe I realized this when my rent doubled overnight, not because the walls were reinforced, not because the floors gleamed with new polish, but because the market had sniffed out fresh prey. My rent leapt from $550 to $1,200 with no warning, no justification, no mercy. A week before Washington’s post-COVID rent moratorium lifted, the landlords seized their moment, locked in their winnings before a ceiling could be lowered. And just like that, the raise I had fought for, the tiny foothold I had gained, crumbled beneath me. The sense of relief was brief, fleeting. The illusion of progress disappeared like a dream upon waking. I was not moving forward. I was sinking in place.

And still, I worked. I showed up. I played the game. But the game was never made for people like me to win. I am afflicted, born a bird with a broken wing.

I am angry, and don’t tell me not to be. Anger is not a stain to be scrubbed away, not an embarrassment to be swallowed. It is a map of every betrayal, a ledger of debts unpaid. They tell me to be calm, to be reasonable, as if my silence is the price of their comfort. As if fury is the real offense and not the wounds that caused it. Time and time again, the people I should have been able to trust have failed me, leaving me to patch the holes in a boat that was never meant to hold my weight. They abandoned their responsibilities, and now they want absolution. They want me to say that it’s fine, that I understand. I am told to extend grace, to let go. But where is my justice? Where is the restitution for the stolen years, the lost chances, the choices I was never given the luxury to make?

We are not born as blank slates. We are born into a system already shifting beneath our feet, some stepping onto solid ground, others into quicksand. Some of us are born into homes where bookshelves sag beneath the weight of stories, where college is a given, where safety is assumed. Others, like me, are born into survival. Into a world where education is not a birthright but a battle, where we are expected to prove our worth before anyone will invest in us. The men around me were handed opportunity on the hope of their potential. I had to carve mine out with my own hands, splinter by splinter. And yet, [so often,] they were the ones allowed to fail. Again and again, I watched them stumble, fall, be caught, lifted, given another chance, while I was expected to succeed flawlessly or not at all.

This is the theft before the theft. The theft of what could have been. The quiet robbery of possibility, of paths that never opened. Instead, we are written into the margins of history, our labor devoured and forgotten, our exhaustion mistaken for compliance.

I was supposed to believe that if I worked hard enough, sacrificed enough, I could climb free. [But I see now] the system was never built to reward me. It was built to drain me, to siphon every last bit of effort until I was spent, and then discard me for the next willing body. And when I dared to name this truth, dared to say it out loud, I was accused of victim thinking—as if recognizing injustice is the same as surrendering to it. As if naming the theft is more offensive than the crime itself. They told me I was making excuses, that I should just move on, as if acknowledging the rigging of the game meant I refused to play. But victim thinking says, “There is nothing I can do.” That is not what I am saying. I am saying, “This is what was taken. This is how. And I will not pretend it was fair.” They tell people like me to stop complaining, to just “work harder,” but that is the con—the lie that suffering is a ladder to a better life, when in reality, it is just another weight strapped to our backs.

I have regrets, but the deepest one is ever having believed that hope could save me. That hope—God, that hope—is the cruelest thing of all. It does not nourish. It does not soothe. It gnaws, it hollows, it dangles the promise of something better just out of reach, a poisoned carrot on an endless string. And yet, we are told to keep hoping, to keep striving, even as we watch the world shift further and further away from us, its doors closing one by one.

And all the while, I have carried the damage of childhood, the weight of the rage and desire adults offloaded onto me when I was too small to bear it. The neglect, the harm, the stolen pieces of my mind—taken before I even knew they were mine to claim. It is not just the theft of opportunity that wounds, but the theft of self before selfhood is even formed. How much energy have I spent simply trying to reclaim what was never allowed to take root? How many choices were shaped, not by what I wanted, but by what I had to overcome first?

I am still waiting for the justice that should come. And a few tell me—shame on you for wanting such a thing. As if it is greedy to ask for what was taken. As if it is wrong to want acknowledgment, to want reparations, to want something tangible for the years spent fighting just to exist. In a world built on uneven ground, calls for equity are mistaken for entitlement.

I do not want apologies. I do not want empty words about fairness and best intentions, spoken as if acknowledgment alone could undo the damage. Recognition is not restitution. Justice is not just words. I want the debt repaid, the balance corrected, the stolen years accounted for in something real—something that does more than soothe the guilty conscience of those who benefited from my loss. I want justice. I want what was stolen. But more than that, I want a world where this theft does not continue, where support is not a luxury but a right, and where the next generation does not have to live through the same slow, grinding erosion of self, where opportunity is not a privilege reserved for the already fortunate. But I know better than to expect it. And that, perhaps, is the cruelest theft of all. Generations have held onto hope that never fully arrives; it turns the heart raw when that promise remains deferred.