A few days after the Bondi Beach shooting on December 14, 2025, I found myself in a quiet conversation with a Filipino friend here in Sydney. He was recounting how his Australian friends reacted to the news. How unsettled they were. How they kept refreshing the headlines, checking in with each other, holding their breaths at how close it all was.
For them, it wasn’t just another news item. It was a rupture, a crack in the picture of safety they had always assumed was solid.
And then my friend said something, gently and almost to himself:
“Sanay kasi tayo sa gulo.”
We’re used to chaos.
That line stayed with me.
He didn’t mean it in a way that glorifies suffering. He meant it with quiet resignation, the kind that comes from growing up in a country where instability isn’t just a chapter in history books but part of the atmosphere.
In the Philippines, we’ve learned to live through curfews, extrajudicial killings, blurred lines between crime and authority. There’s nothing normal about violence, but many of us learned early to carry on despite it. We don’t flinch as quickly. It’s a different kind of scar.
That’s what made this moment feel layered.
The grief was shared. But the shock — that part felt different.
For our Australian friends, the shooting shattered a sense of security. For many migrants, it simply reminded us that safety is always conditional — never promised, just hoped for.
And in those differences, there’s something we don’t talk about enough: the privilege of being able to expect safety.
To assume that systems will work.
To believe that bad things are exceptions, not patterns.
To feel that if something horrible happens, someone will be held accountable.
That’s not the reality we all come from.
As a migrant, you carry with you the muscle memory of instability. You learn to keep your guard just a little up, even in places that feel peaceful. Because peace, to you, is fragile. A privilege, not a baseline.
But there’s something else too:
You learn to build safety in other ways.
In the way your community shows up. In how your friends text you after hearing bad news. In the unspoken rituals of checking in and staying close.
Because at the end of the day, safety isn’t just about the absence of violence. It’s about the presence of care.
So we grieve for what happened in Bondi. We hold space for the fear, the confusion, the pain. We recognize how safety is experienced differently by each of us depending on where we’re from, how we look, who we love, and what passports we hold.
But even in that difference, there is something we can all offer freely:
Kindness. Empathy. Accountability.
If there’s anything we can learn from this, let it be this:
May we choose to be a little softer with one another. A little more patient. A little more human. Because the world will not always be safe. But we can try, every day, to make it kinder.