I have been told that I am “too much” throughout my life. I suppose I agree with this assessment, because I conversely have always looked around me and felt deeply that the people around me were “not enough.”

I don’t mean “not enough” in the sense of being people worthy to be around and assimilate into my life and heart. But rather, people around me have largely seemed apathetic, unbothered, unconcerned and disinterested. The things I can see, the injustices I observe all around me with fury and dismay, it seems they cannot. Or possibly, they do see them and can somehow choose to hold it all at a comfortable distance.

Much like the pedestrians I see slowly cross in front of my car, without a single glance toward me, confident without evidence that I will stop, people move blandly through the world without any apparent awareness that anything is or could be amiss.

In contrast, when I cross a street, I start scanning traffic several feet before the curb, and even if I have the right of way and a blinking pedestrian crossing light urging traffic not to crush me, I still wait until the drivers make eye contact with me, shining my phone flashlight back and forth until I am certain that I have been seen. Even then, after I risk everything to step out into the crosswalk, I am not calm again until I have successfully completed my crossing. I can’t fathom the level of disinterest in life (or confidence that things will certainly work out) that would lead me to just step out into traffic without ever once glancing to see if death is bearing down toward me.

I move through life with a similar heightened awareness of the urgency of making sure everyone around me is safe. I have a constant battle to try to calibrate my sense of outrage and injustice to match the benign and tepid temperature at which most adults seem to operate. I have a real struggle tamping down my perception of the oncoming horrors bearing directly toward me and all of us like a doomed runaway train. I can’t figure out how to pause the scream one makes when free-falling in a hurtling cable-less elevator to focus on something as banal as the weather and other meaningless pleasantries, rather than frantically pressing buttons and bracing for impact.

I often feel that my eyes and brain perceive life as though a black light is cast over all people, operations, businesses, systems, and interactions — and somehow I can see the spray of organic matter bled from invisible arteries, spattered over every person and surface. Yet no one else seems to see it, and this both frustrates and frightens me.

I can see the other people serenely comparing prices on bananas, walking down the street, absently browsing at vintage stores, all of them speckled with the gore of countless cuts and gashes endured either by themselves, or people in proximity to them — yet they are oblivious. I am frightened because behind the crowd, a pyroclastic wall of certain and painful death snowballs inevitably toward them, and I can see it. I am also frightened because I cannot stop seeing it.

Many Black women, 92% of whom voted to protect the most vulnerable and prevent the inevitability of the collapse of an empire, feel this way. Black women walk around this world, eyes wide open, appalled and outraged at the deliberate and collective efforts to harm and disenfranchise marginalized populations.

Until recently, we believed that our labor and effort to shine lights and jar others out of their apathy, and our widespread application of our intelligence and collective knowledge toward progress, would eventually wake up those around us so they could join us in our centuries-long fight. We endured the pain of never being able to risk blinking or looking away, lest those we love be harmed while we sat around resting our eyes and our hearts. Until November, it never occurred to us to step blandly into oncoming traffic.

But now Black women at long last have collectively decided to protect ourselves from the glaring and relentless blaze of an actively dying sun. We have decided to switch off our flashlights, turn our heads away, and unfocus our eyes. We have decided to counteract the searing pain of perception by taking ourselves away, distanced far enough away to finally be able to work on perfecting the ability to watch the world burn with eyes placid and indifferent.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column.