The first time I encountered what later became known as WOKE, it didn’t arrive as a theory or a political posture. It arrived as recognition. A quiet yes. A sense that something I’d been carrying — unnamed, half-formed, often uncomfortable — finally had language. This wasn’t an intellectual agreement. It was a bodily one. A feeling of coherence. Of alignment. Of finally, this makes sense.

And that distinction matters, because what I was responding to wasn’t a question. It was a yearning.

A question can remain open indefinitely. A yearning can’t. A yearning wants rest. Resolution. Arrival. It wants to stop circling and land somewhere that feels whole. WOKE, in its early form, felt like it might be that place — not because it had all the answers, but because it acknowledged the right things were being seen. Power. History. Blind spots. Harm that had been normalised. For a while, that was enough.

But then it changed.

Not suddenly. Not maliciously. It was popularised. Scaled. Simplified. What had once been an orientation toward seeing became a position to occupy. Language hardened. Expectations formed. The edges sharpened. And the thing that had once answered my yearning began to feel… thin. Loud. Strangely brittle.

That’s when the internal conflict began — not as disagreement, but as grief.

Because it’s one thing to outgrow an idea. It’s another to realise that something you hoped would hold you can no longer bear the weight you placed on it. I wasn’t arguing with WOKE. I was watching it fail to do what I had quietly asked of it: to resolve something deep and unsettled inside me.

Popularisation exposed the limit.

To survive at scale, the movement had to become legible. Portable. Defensible. It needed slogans, positions, boundaries. But yearning doesn’t resolve through slogans. Coherence doesn’t come from consensus. And the more the movement tried to stabilise itself, the more it drifted from the very quality that had drawn me in — its capacity to hold ambiguity, complexity, and self-questioning.

I found myself stranded in an awkward place.

Still aligned with the original seeing. Still unable to deny what had been revealed. But no longer able to stand comfortably inside the collective expression of it.

That’s a lonely position, because movements don’t leave much room for mourners. You’re expected to either stay loyal or become oppositional. But neither felt true. Opposition would have been dishonest — a rejection of insights I still carry. Loyalty would have required a performance I could no longer sustain. So I hovered. Unsettled. Quietly disoriented.

And that’s the torment.

Not confusion. Not indecision. But the ache of unresolved yearning.

I wanted WOKE to be a place I could arrive. Instead, it turned out to be a passage. Something that opened my eyes — and then asked me to keep walking without it. That’s harder than never having believed at all. Because once something has touched a real longing, its absence is felt more acutely than its presence ever was.

What I’ve come to realise — slowly, reluctantly — is that movements cannot resolve yearnings. They can name them. Awaken them. Legitimate them. But they cannot complete them. That work is quieter, lonelier, and far less visible. It doesn’t come with language you can easily share or positions you can easily defend.

And perhaps that was always the mistake: mistaking recognition for resolution.

WOKE answered something real in me — and I don’t regret that. But it wasn’t the destination I thought it was. It was a mirror, not a home. A moment of seeing, not a place to rest. Letting go of that expectation hasn’t been clean or comfortable. It has felt like loss. Like standing with something unfinished and realising no external framework is going to finish it for you.

That may be the hardest part of waking up to anything meaningful: discovering that what you were yearning for cannot be outsourced to a movement — no matter how true its beginnings, no matter how necessary its interruption.

And so I’m left not with answers, but with honesty.

The yearning remains. The coherence I sensed still matters. But it no longer wears a name I can subscribe to.

And maybe that’s not failure. Maybe that’s the work.