I tried to avoid watching the video.

When it appeared on my feed, I scrolled past. When I saw it on the news, I looked away. When it came up in conversation, I lied, and claimed I had seen it already. I made the appropriate expressions of horror and grief, and changed the subject.

I told myself I understood. I didn’t need to see another shooting to know what happened. I had seen the videos of Eric Garner and Oscar Grant, of Walter Scott and so many others. I told myself that I did no one any good by subjecting myself to unnecessary pain.

Unnecessary pain.

What else is it when your nation forces you to watch the execution of your fathers, ten times a day on every screen? What else is it when your government boasts of one justice system for your sons, and another for your protectors? What else is it when you realize that, for your brother, no justice exists at all?

But I watched the video- by accident, really. It was at the tail end of a documentary about modern policing. I tried to turn away, but couldn’t. My shame had overwhelmed my discomfort. So I watched, for sixty brutal seconds, as two protectors lifted a father bodily off of the ground and drove him to the concrete. I watched, as they twisted his arms behind his back, and shoved his head to the ground. I watched, as they cried gun over his prone frame. And I watched, as they pulled their weapons and unloaded into his back. Testosterone, adrenaline, and blood.

I thought I would feel angry on watching the video. I thought seeing the moments would arouse some righteous fury in me, the kind I feel every time I hear about George Zimmerman’s latest desecration of Trayvon Martin’s memory. I thought it might awaken the horror I feel, every time another one of Freddie Gray’s killers is exonerated. But I felt little more than a gnawing numb. And it was the absence of feeling that scared me. It made me wonder if I was growing too tired to feel anymore.

Because I am tired.

I’m tired of explanations and rationalizations, I’m tired of equivocating and exculpation. I’m tired of having to engage the man who reminds me he had a gun — as if owning a gun is a capital crime. As if selling bootleg CDs or loose cigarettes is punishable by death. As if a hoodie and a bag of Skittles is justification for murder.

I’m tired of the people who will claim to cherish life, and spit on the memory of loving fathers, sons, husbands, daughters and sisters. Defiling them in the last, darkest moments of their lives.

I’m tired of the people who shout down our grief, telling us that the rhetoric of our pain, the anthem of our humanity is an attack on our protectors. When the world refuses to acknowledge your humanity, affirming your importance is itself an act of violence.

I’m tired of the people who derail, pointing to black crime statistics as exoneration.

“People tend to kill the people they live around. Black people are among the most hyper-segregated group in the country. The fact that black killers tend to kill other black people is not refutation of American racism, but the ultimate statement of American racism.” — Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’m tired of marching. I’m tired of demonstrating. I’m tired of putting my hands up, of lying face down on the ground, of screaming my pain in train stations full of strangers. I’m tired of chanting outside the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court. I’m tired of demanding our president do more, as if he isn’t just as bound as the rest of us. As if it couldn’t just as easily have been him, if he were alone on any given night.

I’m tired of clenched jaws and stiffened spines in front of flashing lights and sirens, and the nervous laughter when those sirens pass. I’m tired of my voice cracking when I talk to a protector, of straining my eyes to avoid glancing at his gun, of wondering if he sees me as a threat. I’m tired of the casual truisms. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” Small comfort when my existence feels like a crime.

I’m tired of the umbrage, of the perpetual final straws and unacceptables, of countless days spent waiting for guilty verdicts that will never come. I’m tired of staving off the grim intuition that the reason no convictions are returned is because this is what the law intended. I’m tired of denying that the system is working exactly as designed.

I’m tired of silence. I’m tired of the people who want to continue to live their lives, as though nothing were wrong, meeting the execution of citizens with a shrug. As though their lives were not corrupted by their silent sanction of our slaughter. And I’m tired of the fact that I can’t even put my words to paper without another life exploding on national television. May Philando Castile rest in peace.

I was tired, so I closed my eyes.

I tried to blind myself to Alton Sterling’s murder. But in shying from his reality, I did us both a disservice. I bent to the impulse that seeks comfort, instead of heeding the one that seeks justice. That was a mistake.

Seek justice.