Nothing To Be Done?

My job comes with a heaping of uncertainty, which we can't afford right now. Have you considered your role?

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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At the park at the Turkish border. This Syrian woman’s son has scabies on his leg.

Today marks the third week in which I cannot walk. I fell in Seattle on the bright-blue morning of New Year’s Day and sprained one ankle and broke the other in three places. When it happened, I laid in the arms of a calming woman who had been nearby with her husband; he held my clearly broken ankle aloft until the ambulance came. It turned out they were named Wolfe too. Unrelated cousins who got me through a terrifying moment.

Having never broken a bone, the dislocation of my tibia nauseated me when I saw it on X-ray: The bone was a frightening distance away from being connected to my ankle.

I’m now healing, slowly. There are still about six more weeks before I can actually walk, so I sit and lie here, occasionally noticing my leg muscles wasting — a hard thing for an ex-swimmer, a woman who danced for 20-plus years. But that is a worry for a later time. As Estragon said: Nothing to be done.

What I’ve been doing since spending a week in the hospital is reading and watching movies. For some reason, the first week I was home, I was only able to read. Maybe it was a symptom of mentally curling up, protecting my wounded self. Regardless, I read a lot in normal times — a few books a week plus endless magazine and newspaper stories. But, as someone who finds one of the deepest senses of joy in life by writing, I’ve been barren when it comes to it. Writing this now is a breakthrough.

I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker titled “Cave Woman,” by D.T Max. It’s about a Spanish woman named Beatriz Flamini who set out to break the modern record of surviving in a cave, which had been 463 days. She went for 500. Max makes it clear, subtly, that despite the woman’s insistence that she’d had a great time alone in that cave for more than a year, recordings and other evidence show that she mainly suffered. The story made me consider my own life and purpose, and whether I’ve deluded myself into thinking that journalism for the public good — my deeply felt life’s mission — has been the best thing I can do for both myself and the world.

As I sit here trying to figure out how to pay my bills, I can’t help but wonder if it’s all been worth it. And, perhaps more disturbingly, whether it will it continue to be so.

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In the summer of 2013, I took a long and contemplative car ride to the Turkish border with Syria. Miles and miles passed with rolling hills and greenish-brown flatlands. I was traveling with a colleague from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a researcher for my project at WMC Women Under Siege, where we tracked sexualized violence in the Syrian conflict for the Women’s Media Center.

We wanted to go to refugee camps to talk to women (and men) who may have experienced sexual assault before fleeing Syria. Because of the inherent stigma about rape in the region, it was an arduous endeavor.

Upon arriving at the border near the Turkish city of Gaziantep (since leveled in the 2023 Syria-Turkey earthquake), we were told of a public park where 4,000 Syrian refugees were squatting with no assistance. Passing by the bizarre site of modern cars mixed with men with donkey carts, we found our way to the park where, yes, there were hundreds if not thousands of people living in makeshift plastic-and-cardboard tents. The day was infused with bright sun; it was sweltering, in the 90s. While my colleagues and I were sweating in our makeshift hijabs and light clothing, as during all my travels in the Middle East, I wondered how the women in front of me didn’t pass out in their dark, polyester abayas.

We stepped into the park with the intent to speak with Syrian women. But the women were mainly in the tents while the men walked about and crowded us.

“Who are you and why are you here?” more than one asked.

I asked my researcher colleague, a Syrian-American woman, to please tell them why we were there — that we were hoping to speak to the women about their experiences. (We didn’t name sexualized violence, partly because it might have upset the men and partly because it wasn’t the only thing we hoped to discuss.)

Things devolved quickly.

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“Do you have information for us?” the men shouted.

“Do you know when we will have water?” they asked. “When can we move to the U.N. camp? Do you have food for us?”

They’d heard rumors of a new and fancy U.N. camp near one at the borders in Kilis. But it was a myth.

“Do you know anything?” they yelled in exasperation. “Why are you here?”

I asked my colleague to explain to them that we were hoping to speak to the women and that, unfortunately, we didn’t have money or items or information to give them but that we were journalists and public health workers who hoped to gather information that we could then share with the world and get in front of the kind of people who can provide such services.

That was not a great answer, it turned out. A few men started yelling louder and others started pushing them back, apparently shouting that while we were unable to help in those ways, we should still be allowed to do our jobs. A fistfight broke out. I began to question why we were there and whether we had a justifiable purpose in even visiting the park.

As the violence intensified, my fixer grabbed my shirt collar and yanked me from the melee. We left after that.

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I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had in that Turkish park at the Syrian border. It was utter helplessness.

In the years just before this trip, I had found my niche in journalism: making public atrocities that need attention. It was my way of helping people who had little other recourse. I told myself over and over as I sat with refugees in houses that barely stood with just a handful of possessions that I was using the skills I had to hopefully better their lives.

I couldn’t offer medical aid. I couldn’t offer food or water other than enough for a moment. But I could write about their terrible situations and make the world aware of what these people were enduring.

That day in the park was a kind of ultimate test. I felt that what I do was not enough in that situation. We may not all be able to be aid workers or U.N. ambassadors or important politicians, but, that day in the sun, I believed that being a journalist was a sorry excuse for a profession. Maybe I should have just stayed home.

Maybe, I should just stay home.

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In his article in The New Yorker, Max writes of the Spanish spelunker:

After six months or so in the womb of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. She stopped trying to track time, because doing so had only added to her anxiety. She became neither hopeful nor despairing. “In the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you,” she told me. “‘A while ago I was born.’ ‘A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia.’ There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”

As I lie here immobile, I have tried to give myself over to the rhythms of inertia. I haven’t gotten there, I can say that with surety. But I have, upon considering my day in that Turkish park along with all the other stories I have pursued in war zones and precarious places since, thought a lot about whether it was — and will continue to be — worth it. It’s easy to say yes from the outside, and there are certainly moments I could point to in which it clearly has been. But there is a point in everyone’s life in which you have to consider the various ways you not only sustain yourself but contribute to the world, and, disregarding the personal toll of my work, I’m not right now convinced it’s enough.

All I’ve ever wanted is to do enough.

Losing my ability to walk, albeit briefly, has me wondering what I can do to help myself feel better. Not working has been a bludgeon to my sense of self. Right now, however, I’m not sure that throwing myself back into painful, difficult stories in which the outcomes are unsure and possibly deadly is worth the toll.

Then again, I feel like Flammini: “Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange.”

Aka whatever we do, we face hard times and, despite them, you move on.

Like Flammini, I won’t be in this unusual state forever. What I will be when I come out of it, however, may be something different from who I was when I went into it on the new year, filled with hope for myself and those I love and those who try hard to make the world a better place. 2024 is not a year for uncertainty. I plan to figure out what that means for me as soon as possible.

Have you thought about it for yourself?

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