When a Festival Turns Into Fear: Talking to Our Desi Families About Seattle
- Parita Sharma
- Jul 28
- 3 min read
Yesterday, families went to Bite of Seattle the way so many of us go to a mela back home — for the food, the music, the simple joy of being outside with people we love. By evening, that joy had turned into gunfire, screaming, and a two-year-old fighting for his life in a hospital bed. Three people didn't make it home.
If you're reading this from Washington, or from anywhere in the US, and something in your chest has felt tight since you heard the news — you are not overreacting. You are having a completely human response to a completely inhuman thing.
Why this hits different for us
For a lot of desi families in America, "going out" already carries a quiet calculation that our parents back home never had to make. Which mall. Which parking lot. Which event has "too many people." We've absorbed this vigilance so slowly that we've stopped noticing we're carrying it — until a day like yesterday makes it impossible to ignore.
And there's a specific ache for immigrant parents in this. You left ghar to give your children a safer, bigger life. When a festival — a Sunday outing, the most ordinary thing in the world — becomes a mass shooting, it doesn't just scare you. It quietly challenges the promise you made to yourself when you got on that plane.
That grief is allowed to exist alongside your gratitude for being here. They are not opposites.
What trauma actually looks like this week
You don't have to have been at Seattle Center to be affected. Trauma travels through community, through group chats, through the video you didn't mean to watch three times. In the days ahead, it's normal to notice:
Trouble sleeping, or waking up checking the news again
A shorter fuse with your kids or your partner
Not wanting to go to the next event, even a small one
Feeling guilty for feeling shaken when you "weren't even there"
A strange numbness — feeling like you should be more upset than you are
None of this means something is wrong with you. It means your nervous system registered a threat to your community and hasn't finished processing it yet.
This list is meant to help you recognize what you might be feeling — it isn't a diagnosis. If any of this feels heavy or doesn't ease up in the coming days, please reach out to a mental health professional.
Safety is not the absence of fear. Safety is knowing you don't have to carry the fear alone.
What actually helps right now
Say it out loud, in whichever language it comes easiest. Many of us grew up in homes where fear was managed by staying busy or staying quiet. This week, try the opposite. Call your mother. Tell your husband you're scared. There is no shame in it — only relief on the other side of it.
Watch how much you're consuming. Checking the news once for facts is different from refreshing it forty times for a sense of control you won't actually get. Set a limit, especially if there are children in the house watching you watch your phone.
Let your kids ask questions — and let yourself not have perfect answers. "I don't fully understand why this happened either, but I am doing everything I can to keep you safe" is a complete, honest, good-enough answer.
If you were there, or someone you love was, please don't carry it silently. Seattle's Victim Support Team and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) exist for exactly this. Reaching out is not weakness. It's the same courage it took to build a life on a new continent.
A note to the aunties and uncles reading this
I know many of you were taught that mental health is something you push through, not something you talk about. But grief you don't speak becomes anxiety your children inherit without knowing where it came from. You don't have to do that generational work alone, and you don't have to do it perfectly. You just have to start.
If this week has left you or someone you love shaken, SEVEE CARE offers sessions with therapists who understand the specific weight of being desi in the diaspora — the guilt, the distance, the vigilance nobody warned you about. You can browse and choose your own therapist, wherever you are in the world.
Parita Sharma Founder | Expert Psychologist | CEO, SEVEE CARE
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