Words have always given me power.

They’ve given me the strength to express myself the way I want. While people might be struck speechless and have nothing to say, I always had something. Whatever emotion strikes me, I’ve had words to express it.

When I was angry, I wrote long essays in my journal, letting it all out until that anger subsided. When I wanted to express my love to my family or friends, I wrote them letters. I still remember the letters I wrote my mother on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s over the years. She hung them on her bedroom walls, in a home left far behind with no ounce of hope for return. Whenever I felt suffocated by something, words set me free as they poured out of me like butterflies flying from the inside.

“Sometimes I wonder how you can show so many emotions in your letters when in real life, you show so little,” my mother often told me, in an attempt to make me open up and talk. She knows me too well. She knows that I write to express myself and take too long to talk about what bothers me. She knows I used to find solace in words.

But lately, I do not.

Today, the chaos of the world has rendered me speechless. For the first time in my 22 years of life, I have nothing to say. Do words really matter when your people are being slaughtered by the minute? What is their value when you wake up every morning to the loss of a friend or family member? What are we writing for? For whom are we writing?

Mohammed Halimy, aka Medo, a young Palestinian influencer, spent the days he lived in a tent educating people about the genocide in Gaza. He took us on his planting journey, sharing videos he made while tending vegetables and melons outside his tent. He described this gesture of nurturing new life as a form of resistance. “I bring life to earth; they’re taking away life,” Medo stated, referring to Israel. After surviving 325 days of the ongoing genocide, he was murdered by Israeli shrapnel to the head that had first put him in a coma.

Hind Al-Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist, has reported on the Israeli genocide in Gaza since its first day, despite knowing that journalists are targeted and 170 of them have been murdered thus far. Hind was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. “What Nobel Prize when my people are being slaughtered?” Hind asked on her social media accounts. Where is the peace when the death of Palestinians has not stopped? What peace when 40,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered for the past 325 days in Gaza?

Today, words fail me.

I stand speechless before my people as they suffer from Israeli bombing, starvation, forced displacement, and the spread of diseases ordinarily managed by adequate health care and vaccination.

I have no words when my friend in the north complains about always being hungry. “I just wish to die with a full stomach,” she says. “I’m tired of having my stomach always growl at me as if I can help it!”

No words came out of me when another friend, this one in the south, described how while walking in the street, people around her carried the dead body of a martyr and everyone around her moved on with their days as if this were a normal occurrence.

I grew up hearing a famous Gaza proverb: “Ghazza is a graveyard for its invaders.” I now think that the proverb left out that Gaza is also a graveyard to its people, their dreams, and hopes of any good life.

When my sister Lama observed how composed I had become, able to deal with my grief and accept the death of my friends, I did not argue. How could I tell her that thousands of unspoken thoughts and words hide behind the facade she sees? But there is no point in saying them aloud.

I have lost the appetite to speak. The ones I would like to speak to are dead or displaced in faraway places. The world does not seem to care about everything we have been saying for the past 11 months. I’ve grown desperate and tired. I lose people I know daily, some acquaintances, others friends and family. How can I describe how deeply the death of an acquaintance, with whom I used to exchange simple pleasantries, has affected my heart?

I searched the dictionary for a word that describes this heartache and came up empty-handed. There is nothing to describe all of this. How can you describe the smell of death, the sight of torn-off limbs, or the screams of people as they burn alive from a bombardment?

I’m tired of questioning. I’m tired of having to tell the world that we Gazans are also humans who deserve life. I no longer want to say how beautiful Gaza was before the genocide, how she embraced her people in their happiness and sorrows.

What we Gazans really want now is for this genocide to end and to live in our city on our own terms, with all of its ruins and complications. I once read this quote on social media platforms after one of the many Israeli wars on Gaza:

“We are afflicted with the love of this country, we love it even if it is in ruins. This country belongs to us with its wars, its hunger, and its steadfastness, it belongs to us with its broken silence and its sad victory, and in the softness of emptiness and the noise of stillness, it belongs to us.”

Yet, here I am again, using words, as they are the only things that still belong to me. They are all that Israel hasn’t taken from me.