Hunger to Understand

When I was in high school, we had just moved into a modest two-bedroom apartment—the four of us—nestled in a nicer middle-class neighborhood. My mother worked long hours at a factory piecing together the fabric that went on baby car seats. After years of living in a neighborhood with regular muggings and drug dealers on the street, this felt like an upgrade. A breath of safety.

I was maybe fifteen or sixteen—I can’t remember exactly. We were given an assignment in English class to write a paper on a topic of our choosing. I chose to write about violent men—specifically, men who abuse their wives and children. I wanted to understand their psychology. What drove them to beat another human being? Why the need to control, to dominate, to humiliate—the very people they once loved, the people they were supposed to protect?

I researched it earnestly. I remember the hunger to understand. The search for something to make sense of it all. Maybe to understand my dad. Maybe to see if there was a possibility of salvation, of redemption. Or maybe it was just a little girl’s hope.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that hunger again—only this time, the sorrow runs even deeper. I’ve been quietly crying, without warning, without words. I find myself watching videos about Gaza—children starving, blown apart. Families gone in an instant. I see citizen footage of ICE agents roughing up lawmakers, detaining nonviolent immigrants, dragging people into cages who have committed no crime.

I asked ChatGPT:

Why do humans need to oppress, dominate, humiliate, and be violent?
Why do we commit genocide, ethnic cleansing?

I want to understand. I need to.

Looking back, I understand her now. She thought if she could map the violence—trace its origins, chart its psychology—maybe she wouldn’t have to carry its weight. Maybe understanding could be a shield. Maybe intellect could soften what her heart wasn’t yet ready to hold.

I feel for her naivete. Her sincerity. Her drive to make meaning. What I want now is to hold her and tell her it’s okay to cry. That the pain doesn’t have to be rationalized. That feeling it might be the very thing that sets her free.

She didn’t have the space in her young heart to hold that much truth. To see the full weight of what her father had done—or what he carried inside himself.

My father had been raised like a prince, and with pity, after losing his own mother at an early age. He was brought up by his older sister, who was a child herself. When life disappointed him—when rage built up—he used the tools he had learned: oppression, domination, humiliation. He tried to break my mother in front of her children.

“Hurt people hurt people.”

I tried to make sense of it. I read, I reasoned, I analyzed.

But sometimes, no amount of intellectual or psychological clarity
can touch a heart still aching.

Sorrow doesn’t need solutions—
It needs space.
It needs to rise.
It needs to be felt.

Sometimes there is no understanding to be had—only the sorrow to be felt. The grief to be released. The lessons to be slowly, painfully absorbed.

I’ve spent years trying to understand my hunger.

Sometimes, I think the hunger is the understanding.