Life Changing Times

Well, what a week.

I’ve been a humanitarian responder for 30 years, and I cannot comprehend 20,000 people dead.

Every single part of me is screaming to go and do something. Waking up multiple times in the night, wide eyed engulfed by the horror of what is happening.

No, of course it’s not about me. Nor my urge to ‘do good’. Nor the very real link to my past which is what has always motivated me. Nobody helped me, nobody spoke out for me and I will never let that happen to others.

It’s what’s driven me for these 30 years. And it’s what I’ve had to question and examine all the time – because the urge to help others can quickly become self centred. You are, in fact, not even seeing the others but rather only seeing yourself – you are vicariously saving yourself.

But I know this. I always have. And I’ve always named it, challenged myself, driven any number of therapists mad with the constant questioning. Checking my motives. Then examining them again and again. Because I have no right to help others unless I can help myself – that is the very least they deserve.

So I know now that the horror I feel, the acute despair, the visceral drive to go and act are real. My mentor, friend, boss once told me, when I arrived one morning haggard from the night of seeing and feeling the then starvation of people in a famine: ‘Sonia, if you don’t have times that you wake up at 2am in the horrors, you are in the wrong job’.

All of me wants to go to Turkey/Syria – the drive is immense. And I also know it’s the wrong thing to do right now – because that would be serving my need, my burning need to act, to do, to lead.

And I am not in a place where I can give my best. I’m mentally and physically tired from the last 12 weeks here in Iraq – sadly, for all the wrong reasons. But the state remains. This past 5 days was overdrive to make sure my team were OK after the (minor, but real) earthquake here.

I would love to say that I realised this and did not say yes when asked to join various teams – but of course I said yes. I did manage caveats, I did say others would be better placed, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say no the second time I was asked.

However, fortuitously, others were there first so I didn’t have to go – I said I would be available for 2nd and 3rd phases. After I have gone home next week and rested, recuperated and got myself on track.

Sometimes, the most appropriate thing we can do is to say no. The people of Turkey and Syria deserve those that come in to respond to be on their A game – I’m currently a D at best.

I’m doing a lot behind the scenes and I’m doing it well. And I’m owning my own deep disappointment in myself that I’m not there – and seeing it for what it is.

Waking up with the horror, allowing myself to feel the tiniest bit of what people are going through and staying still, feeling it, for now is enough. Sometimes running to respond can become a way of avoiding just that – and we need to feel it.