I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
—Mary Oliver
(This is the second in a series I’m writing as I process how to be a person who cares about others in a war-torn, complicated, chaotic world; here’s Part 1. TW that this whole series, though moving toward hope, talks about trauma, depression, and anxiety, among other things.)
I got coffee with my brilliant, wonderful friend Constance Dykhuizen last week. We met at a bakery that has quickly become my go to meeting place. It’s central in Austin, has good food, and plenty of parking—a rarity in this city that is growing too fast. It had been several weeks since we’d seen each other, but we do what we always do when we meet: we went deep immediately.
One of the things I learned about myself a long time ago is I’m not great at being vulnerable (I can already hear my friends snorting at this understatement of the century). As any writer can tell you, sometimes it’s easier to write vulnerably (you know, sending it out in a newsletter) than it is to actually BE vulnerable across the table from one person. And yet over the years, through Constance’s own ability to bring her full self to our friendship, and her insightful questions about what’s really going on in my life, I’ve found she’s one of the people with whom I can truly be vulnerable. And I’m a verbal processor, which means I sometimes don’t know how I really feel about things until I write or talk about them.
The question I posed for this series is “how to do this work for a long time without losing yourself.” As I told Con that day, this is not some kind of catch phrase or cute idea. This is one of the central questions of my life. It’s the thing that’s driving me, I’m realizing, the fear I’m processing by writing all of this down.
Some days—alright, many days—I’m afraid of losing myself.
On one hand, this might mean becoming mired in the grief and the despair (burnout, depression, secondary trauma, and more); this is a real possibility and one I’m right to be concerned about.
On the other hand, losing myself might mean becoming someone who shrugs her shoulders and scrolls past, who can’t bring herself to care anymore. That possibility frightens me too. As I’ll keep saying in this series, I’m only speaking as someone who has the privilege of being distant, who can choose to walk away from injustice, which is a crucial distinction. One of my favorite writers, Anne Helen Petersen, summed it up beautifully this week (in a post about Taylor Swift, naturally):
“we are generally good at seeing injustice, and we are generally bad at giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice. What most reliably moves us to act is personal stakes, and the absence of them makes it easy for us to ‘move on’ from causes that other people have no choice but to engage in every day of their lives.”
Though this quote is part of a longer point she is making (it’s worth reading the whole post), the idea applies to anyone who becomes aware of injustice that does not affect them personally. That distance is key: without “personal stakes,” facing massive injustice becomes a choice many of us can quickly “move on” from.
And when she says, “giving up our own sliver of societal power in order to rectify that injustice,” I felt like she was speaking only to me: it both scares me that I won’t do that and—if I’m being really honest—scares me that I will.
I’m going to come back to those fears in the next few posts. But first, the question I posed needs some definitions. I’m going to start this week with what I mean by “do this work.” For me, that work is writing and reporting on large-scale injustice.
My work began by telling the stories of refugees and asylum-seekers. As I moved from being a professor and writing center director to being a journalist, I also wrote about people who migrated because they wanted a better life; I found that the distinctions between the immigration categories of ‘asylum-seeker’ and ‘economic migrant’ are often a matter of semantics. I started trying to understand where we got the ideas that inform our border policies, and then my work became about uncovering injustice in the past. My research for We Were Illegal was personal (related to some of my family history), but it was also regional, national, and global.
Years of researching, writing, and reporting has changed my life completely. When I say “doing this work,” for me, it means having the endurance, compassion, critical thinking, research skills, and drive to keep going in this writing. Like many journalists, I see my role as being a witness first and foremost.
Other people might have a different idea of what it means to “do this work.” I think there are implications of the ideas I’m talking about for nurses or doctors or teachers or lawyers or interpreters or case workers or so many others who work in or around unjust systems. I don’t want to define this for anyone, so if what I’m processing here resonates with you, take a minute and write a comment and talk it through with us.
But for me, I can best define my own work as being a writer who bears witness.
I started this post with a Mary Oliver quote I heard years ago that took my breath away. It was in 2015, at a writing workshop led by Lauren Winner; I repeat those lines to myself all the time.
For me, “doing the work” begins with a kind of holy heartbreak that is critical and life changing. As Oliver put it, your heart will “break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.” Like everyone, I don’t like to be sad; I’d rather be happy or content. But at some point in the years when I first learned about refugees, when I first truly understood the scope of the genocides and displacements and persecutions that had been happening for generations but that I only learned about as an adult, my heart was broken. That’s the only response a human can have, I think.
That initial moment of heartbreak was the start, but I am trying to learn how to live with a heart always broken open to the world around me.
How do we do that work? How do we keep from closing off and closing in? How do we listen, support, care about, advocate for, rage on behalf of, and love those who are made vulnerable by massive, horrific injustice? And how do we do it as long as is necessary?
Because it cannot just be people affected by injustice who speak out about it. Distance is, in many ways, an illusion. As the Jewish-American activist and poet, Emma Lazarus, wrote: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
As I was processing with Constance last week, I realized that bearing witness has upended my career, transformed my worldview, affected my friendships, transformed my belief system, and turned everything I thought I knew about the world upside down. That’s my baseline for how to “do this work.” It’s not a momentary awareness that we “move on” from. It will absolutely change our lives—as it should.
I hope it always, always changes mine.
I’m not writing because I have all the answers, but because I’m trying to figure this out for myself. I’d love to know what you think. If this series is resonating with you, leave a comment below and feel free to share. What does “doing the work” look like for you?
Coming up next week: Carolyn Forché, Walter Benjamin, and the “Angel of History.”
Thank you for writing this and yes, it resonates with me whole-heartedly. We walk alongside people who have come to our city as refugees and are now calling this place home. We have a small non-profit that at the center is about connection building. Trying to connect those in our area to people who are new to our area. The stories are hard, the emotions are real and it breaks my heart. Finding that balance of keeping a soft heart but not being overwhelmed is something I wrestle with a lot. Jessica, you actually spoke online at a conference we held during the Pandemic., It was for a Refugee Highway Partnership Regional round table, Your words impacted me then and they continue to impact me today. Thank you!