The Empathy Deficit: Rebuilding Human Connection Through Emotional Strength

iris bellamy

Iris Bellamy is a mixed-race writer, editor, and cultural essayist whose work explores the quiet intersections of identity, memory, and resistance. Raised in the high desert of Santa Fe and shaped by diasporic lineages, she writes with one hand in the past and the other reaching forward. Her voice is lyrical but grounded, emotionally honest, and deeply curious about what it means to belong — to a body, a place, or a moment in time. Iris's writing often centers queer mental health, overlooked subcultures, and the intimate politics of everyday life. Her essays have appeared in Midnight Garden, Velvet Dispatch, Bloom Lit, and across the pages of her former Substack, The Soft Hour. When she’s not writing, she can be found wandering bookstores, playing cello badly but with feeling, or drinking herbal tea while dreaming up new ways to break and remake narrative form. She currently lives somewhere between a desert memory and a mountain wish, and believes rest is resistance, softness is strength, and that a well-placed sentence can change a life.