We Started a War. My Nervous System Has Something to Say About It.

This aspen grove is one organism, assisted by a vast mycorrhizal network.

Hello, Friends—

I’m sitting with feelings that many of you are probably also experiencing—the specific, nauseating disorientation of living through moments that keep exceeding my capacity to process them. Disgust. Anger. Grief. Disorientation. We started a fucking war. Not metaphorically. Not as a last resort after exhausting diplomacy. Instead, with the casual, swaggering and careless energy of men who’ve never reckoned with what war does to actual people.

Underneath my anger is something harder to name, a kind of vertigo. It’s as if the ground I grew up on, the ground of certain shared assumptions about community and decency and basic obligations we have to each other, has simply dropped away. The structures I thought were holding things together either are no longer there or were never as solid as I believed. Either way, I’m left with my immediate life, my family, my community—and a grief I don’t quite have words for.

As a scientist, when I’m drowning, I reach for frameworks. So, I’ll offer you one—not because it makes this better, but because it helps me understand what’s happening in my own body. And maybe it will help you understand what’s happening in yours.

What Your Body Already Knows

The feelings I’m describing are not overreaction. They are not hysteria nor political hypersensitivity. They are your nervous system accurately reading the situation.

Psychologists who study moral emotion have identified disgust as one of our oldest and most fundamental social immune responses. This is not disgust caused by say, bad smells, but moral disgust arising when we witness violations of care, fairness, or human dignity. It is involuntary and somatic, felt in the body before it’s processed by the mind. And it exists precisely because humans are social animals for whom the breakdown of cooperative norms is genuinely, biologically dangerous.

The disgust you feel as you watch powerful men make decisions about other people’s bodies, other people’s children, other people’s lives—with what appears to be zero felt consequence—is not irrational. It is your social immune system identifying a pathogen.

The disorientation is something slightly different. Philosopher Martin Heidegger described a state he called unheimlichkeit (or uncanniness, literally “not-at-home-ness”)—the rupture that occurs when the unspoken structures that make daily life coherent and navigable suddenly give way. You haven’t lost your values. Instead, the external structures that were supposed to reflect those values back—institutions, norms, the implicit social contract—have either collapsed or been revealed as never having been what you thought. This is a grief not of personal loss, but of a world you thought you were living in.

And then there’s the anger. Psychologists who study emotion describe anger as a specific (and appropriate) response to perceived injustice when harm is being done by people who could choose otherwise. Your anger is not dysregulation. It is moral clarity.

Why This Feels Different If You Are a Woman

Many men are feeling what I’m describing—the disorientation, the grief, the rage. These experiences are not exclusive to women right now. However, I think for many women, there’s an additional layer, a more visceral incomprehension.

When the Epstein files surfaced and the full architecture of what those men did, who protected them, and for how long, became visible, I heard women describe a response that went beyond political outrage. It goes something more like: I cannot locate myself in the same species as this. It isn’t anger, exactly, but something more primal—an inability, at a bodily level, to simulate the interiority of a person who looks at a child and sees a resource.

That inability is not naivety nor sheltered idealism. It is a measure of distance—a genuine gap between two different ways of orienting toward other people.

That same gap seems to be contributing to the way the war is landing for so many women. The casualness of it, the posturing, the complete absence of any visible reckoning with the reality of bombing real people and real places, all of it feels so foreign—so out-of-body—it’s exceedingly difficult to process. That these decisions are being made by people who appear to experience other human lives as abstractions, as variables in a dominance calculation, again evokes disgust.

Here’s what I want to share: We are not imagining this difference. We are perceiving something real.

The Operating System

Here is the framework I keep coming back to.

What we are watching—the war, the Epstein protection networks, the dismantling of care infrastructure, the rolling back of reproductive rights, the contempt for institutions designed to distribute power rather than concentrate it—is not a series of separate events. These events are expressions of the same underlying operating system.

This operating system runs on a few core assumptions: that power is properly held by the strongest, resources flow toward the dominant, other people’s lives are legitimate costs in the pursuit of individual or national advantage, and the work of maintaining relationships, caring for the vulnerable, and thinking across generations is, at best, someone else’s job.

It is, in the most literal sense, the logic of survival of the fittest—not as Darwin actually described evolution, but as it has been popularly mythologized: competition as the fundamental truth of existence with dominance as its natural outcome. (While most people attribute the phrase to Darwin, it was actually coined in 1864 by the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer read Darwin’s work on natural selection and immediately extracted from it a social manifesto: that competition is the fundamental truth of existence, dominance is its natural outcome, and this is simply the order of things. Darwin himself was more complex and cautious, and more interested in cooperation than the myth allows. But Spencer’s version was more useful to people with power—and it stuck.)

Yet—and this is what I’ll dig into next week with the science to back it up—that operating system is not, in fact, how the most resilient and complex life systems on earth actually work.

Beneath almost every forest runs a community of fungal threads—the mycorrhizal network—through which trees share nutrients, water, chemical warnings, and resources. These are not competitive or hierarchical arrangements, but instead cooperative relationships. When a tree is dying, it releases its remaining resources into the network, feeding what comes next.

The most sophisticated animal societies on earth—those of elephants, orcas, bonobos—are organized not around the dominance of the strongest male, but around the accumulated wisdom of older females. The orca grandmother, decades past reproduction, leads her pod to salmon grounds she has navigated for half a century. When she dies, her grandchildren are 4.5 times more likely to die in the following two years, not because she was the strongest, but because she knew things no one else knew, and she gave that knowledge freely.

This is what the natural world, at its most complex and most resilient, actually looks like. It is nothing like what we are watching in Washington right now.

What I’m Holding Onto

What is happening in our nation is downright horrific. Your grief is real, your anger appropriate, your disgust an expression of your immune system doing its job. Your disorientation is an accurate perception of someone watching their entire way of being in the world dismantled in real time.

The values that are being violated right now—care, reciprocity, long-term thinking, the dignity of every human life—are not weak nor naive. They are, as I’ll show you next week, the principles that the most successful and enduring systems in the natural world are built upon.

The impulse many women are feeling—to turn toward each other, to build something closer, to stop spending energy maintaining systems that do not maintain them—is also, as it turns out, exactly what the science of survival looks like.

More on that next week.

Breathe. xo Wendy

And…the follow-on:

Women Are Opting Out. The Animal Kingdom Has Something to Say About It.