Elizabeth Healey - Issue 34

I am a 24-year-old amateur writer currently based in Portstewart, Northern Ireland, where I’m completing a PhD in Geography. Originally from Derry, I studied at Ulster University in Coleraine and have remained on the North Coast to pursue both academic and creative work. My research focuses on place, memory, and emotional geographies — themes that often find their way into my prose.

My writing explores the quieter edges of human experience: displacement, belonging, mental noise, and the emotional weight of the everyday. I’m particularly interested in lyrical, character-driven prose that captures both personal stillness and the larger unrest of the world.

When I’m not writing or researching, I’m usually walking the coastal path with a Chai Latte from culture coffee , reading something sad and beautiful, or starting but never seem to be finishing another crochet project.

I believe in the quiet power of storytelling and in the idea that writing, even at its loneliest, is a reaching-out.

---

The Weight of Being Safe

At 2:37 a.m., I lay in bed scrolling, not because I wanted to, but because I didn’t know how to stop. I was supposed to be asleep hours ago. I had work in the morning, or something resembling work. But my brain was loud, and yet the world always seemed louder.

A headline stopped me mid scroll:

“Death toll in Gaza passes 30,000.”

I didn’t click the article. I didn’t need to. I’d seen enough. Children smothered in dust. Mothers screaming. Rows of bodies covered in sheets. Comments beneath the posts arguing, dissecting, dehumanizing.

There were days I felt as if I couldn’t breathe for the weight of it all: Gaza, Congo, burning forests, boats capsized with names no one bothered to print. And there were days I just ate a beagle in the morning, mindlessly returned emails, laughed at memes about burnout and pretended I didn’t feel the tremors around me.

Nothing in my life has really gone wrong. I grew up in a house with central heating and what felt like endless amounts of coco pops. My family loved me. I was never rich, but I was never hungry. Never cold. Never afraid someone would break down the door.

And yet, I carry a sorrow that isn’t mine ­and doesn’t belong to me.

I think I inherited it somehow. A second-hand sadness passed down like a piece of furniture, solid, silent, sitting in the middle of the room whether you want it there or not.

The sorrow manipulates its way to guilt, as if a virus spreading inside me, clinging and festering like damp. I felt guilty for the suffering I couldn’t stop. For the money I couldn’t or just didn’t donate. For skipping a protest because it rained. For switching tabs. For caring too much and doing too little. For caring too little and moving on.

I suppose I should feel lucky. And I do.

But there’s always that feeling of guilt, Gaza. Sudan. Yemen. The Congo. Afghanistan. The headlines come and go, but the grief lingers.

People say: don’t doomscroll, take a break, protect your peace. But peace feels like a luxury I haven’t earned. Who am I to rest while others dig graves?

I wasn’t born during the troubles, not even for the signing of the Good Friday agreement, yet I call myself a peace baby, a young person who grew up in Northern Ireland where the thought of peace was second nature and not something that could be broken or taken away.

I think of the life I could have had, even if I was born just 5, 10, 20 years earlier. I can bet growing here didn’t always feel like a Derry Girls episode with ‘’dreams’’ by the cranberries playing in the background wherever you walked, like some twisted alternative reality.

I should…I need to be grateful for the realities I could have lived, not just having the chance to grow up in a peaceful place but thankful for winning the geographical lottery. For being given the life of living with free healthcare, an education and many other things I could list for days.

So, what does it mean to live with that knowledge and guilt ? Of knowing when I go to bed, bombs fall. To sip a glass of wine while someone bleeds out in a stairwell.

I sign petitions. I share stories. I donate what I can. I write to MPs who do not reply. I go on marches where we chant beneath grey skies and hold handmade signs that droop in the rain. It feels small, not enough.

Sometimes I feel like I don't know how to live with all that and still function.

I used to believe, be the change you wish to see in the world. Not in a naïve way but in the belief that enough voices, enough hands, enough outrage could shift something. I still want to believe that.

A friend told me once: “You’re no use to the world if you let it crush you.” And without saying it aloud I felt as if it already had.

Sometimes I fantasise about fleeing into the quiet, the forest, the sea, a cottage in the middle of nowhere with no Wi-Fi and only birds for company. But even there, the guilt would follow. The knowing. The constant murmur of they are suffering, and you are safe.

I think maybe the trick is not to stop feeling. Not to let it harden or hide. But to carry the sorrow and grief gently, not as a burden, but as a tether. Genuine proof that we still have humanity, that we all still care.

Tonight, the sky out my window of my small but cozy seaside flat is bruised pink. A softness before rain. I see mothers holding the hands of children, the laugh of teenagers huddled outside the local chippy on a Friday night. Somewhere far away, wars are waging. Somewhere, someone is praying for morning.

I light a candle. Like my granny always did before I had an exam when I was at school. It feels small, maybe even foolish.

But still — I light it.

For  “the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince