Love at the Speed of Email

by Lisa McKay

  “So can I come stay with you in the Philippines for a while?” I asked.

  Mum sighed over the long-distance line.

  “I knew you should have done organizational psychology,” she said.

  “Mum,” I said. “Organizational psychology is boring.”

  “It’s not boring,” she said in a familiar refrain. “It’s what I would have done if I’d studied psychology.”

  “And you would have been very good at it,” I said, “seeing as how you’re naturally equipped for the post of benevolent dictator of a small country. But I am not you, and I think it’s boring.”

  “You think everything not extreme, dark, or dangerous is boring,” my mother replied calmly. “I don’t understand where you got that from. Certainly not from your father or me.”

  “I could just get a job in Australia,” I said, playing my trump card. “Probably the only ones left in my field now are back in maximum security or in the sex offenders unit. Or maybe I can stay with the police.”

  “Okay, stop it,” Mum said. “You can come and stay with us for a while. But what are you planning on actually doing?”

  Much as she clearly loves us, no one has ever accused my mother of suffering from empty-nest syndrome. On the contrary, I think she threw a party the day all three of us were finally out of the house.

  “I’m going to write a novel,” I said. “And volunteer with nonprofits and look for a job with a humanitarian organization.”

  In response to this, I now realize, my parents would have been perfectly within their rights to say, “Um, hello? We just put you through six years of higher education so you could leave your developed-world haven? Instead of getting a paying job, you want to move back in with us, volunteer in the slums, search out ways to relocate to Africa, and write a novel? Write a novel? What are you thinking? You don’t know anything about writing novels!”

  But they didn’t say that.

  They said okay.

  And I packed my bags for Manila.

  Zagreb, Croatia

  I spent five months in the Philippines trying to write my novel and working as a volunteer before I got my first job offer. The offer was for a professional internship in the Balkans, but not as a human rights advocate or an election monitor or any one of a dozen other roles I had thought I might fall into. Instead, the development organization that was interested in my resume seemed to actually want the psychology training I was so willing to leave behind, and I ended up in Croatia providing trauma-counseling and stress-management training to its staff.

  After six months of this, I knew two things: that my heart really was in humanitarian work and that I could do with some more training if I wanted to work as anything but a trauma specialist.

  Don’t get me wrong – I think trauma psychologists do amazing and necessary work. I just didn’t think I was a particularly good one. I’d picked forensics in the first place largely because it sounded mysterious and sexy. But it stops being a game very quickly when you’re trying to talk someone out of killing himself. Or when you’re standing in the emergency room beside someone who has just been in an accident and may never walk again. Or sitting with someone still covered in soot and ash who has tried and failed to save a baby from a burning car.

  In choosing forensics, I hadn’t quite realized I was signing up to be the keeper of people’s worst moments, fears, and impulses. I’d gotten more than I bargained for, and way more than I felt equipped to deal with capably at twenty-five.

  I knew that I did want to help people who desperately needed it, but I also wanted to do it in a way that wouldn’t so often leave me feeling completely out of my depth – simultaneously helpless and responsible for having some answers. So at the end of my six months in Croatia, in a second attempt to abandon the minefields of extreme emotion, I decided to return to school and pick up another degree that might better qualify me to work in actual minefields instead.

  Sydney, Australia

  Very occasionally there are moments in life when you can actually see a door swing open in front of you and everything changes in an instant. Reading the email that informed me that I’d been accepted to Notre Dame University’s master’s program in international peace studies was one of those moments.

  I was back in Sydney after my time in Croatia, working as a researcher on a child death review team. I was sipping a midmorning latte and reviewing a particularly terrible case when I heard the little chime announcing incoming email. I had to read it at least twice before I took it in.

  Along with twenty-one other candidates from eighteen countries, I’d been awarded a full scholarship and a stipend to cover living expenses. The program started in four months – could I be in Indiana by then?

  I thought this master’s program would be a fantastically interesting way to spend a year. I also thought it would open doors to jobs that were more traditionally humanitarian work. If I’d had to guess, that morning that found me peering through an open door at Notre Dame’s famous golden dome, I would have said I’d spend a year there and then move back to Africa.

  I’d have been wrong.

  South Bend, USA

  In many ways, the course I would follow after leaving Notre Dame was set during only my second weekend in Indiana.

  Over in the Philippines, my parents had figured out that I would be living just twenty minutes from friends they’d met years earlier in Indonesia. Mum and Dad rang me, very excited, to tell me that these friends, Wyn and Carol, had offered to be my in-country surrogate parents – starting with picking me up and taking me to church that weekend.

  “Thanks,” I told them. “Just to remind you, I am now twenty-six years old and perhaps a little past surrogate parents. But thanks.”

  I went, of course. My parents had been so thrilled to put the pieces together, and after the intensity of orientation week, getting out of the apartments was appealing. And the novel I was (still) working on was set in Ambon. Wyn and Carol had lived there for twelve years during their time in Indonesia. They were bound to be gold mines of information about this place I’d never visited.

  On the way to church that Sunday, Wyn asked what I’d been doing in Croatia that had led me to Notre Dame.

  “Huh,” he said when I was done explaining. “My brother-in-law has just set up an organization in California that helps humanitarian workers with stress and trauma. You should really talk to him.”

  No way, I thought, smiling and nodding. I’d come to Notre Dame to move away from that!

  But Wyn saw something and didn’t let it go. He introduced me via email to the president of the Headington Institute, and when I didn’t follow up he rang his brother-in-law and badgered him into contacting me himself.

  “You’ve got a great background for this work,” my future boss told me when we finally connected by phone.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but I’m really not sure if I want to work with stress and trauma again. And I won’t be done with this master’s for another eight months.”

  “Why don’t you think about it for a while?” he said. “I’m a patient man.”

  In the end, it was my classmates at Notre Dame who tipped the scales toward taking the job at the Headington Institute. Well, them and the fact that all other doors I tried to push on remained stubbornly shut.

  Someone I loved very much that year – loved in ways I often thought would break me – shared his private nightmares of Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor. But there were other classmates who talked openly that year, too. They told stories of war and loss, depression and loneliness, damaging collisions with new cultures, and their drive to create positive change in the face of it all.

  There was not a lot to do at night where we lived besides sit around together in one of the apartments in the complex we all shared, curled up on ratty old couches, drinking wine, telling stories, and chewing on similar questions over and over again.

  What drove us toward this work and kept us going?

  What was it granting us, c
osting, and changing?

  At this particular point in my own journey, I felt acutely lonely and more adrift than ever. But as I listened to my classmates talk of their own turmoil, hungry for answers and metaphors and safe places to store their experiences, I started to wonder whether this might be my niche after all. And whether, if I could learn more about how to help people grapple with their own inner turbulence, I might also find some tools for tackling mine.

  I would go to Los Angeles for two years, I decided. If at the end of that time I didn’t feel as if my work with the institute was worthwhile, I’d leave. I’d pursue human rights in Africa. Again.

  Nairobi, Kenya

  Eight months after starting my new job, I found myself kneeling on the cold cement floor of a dormitory bathroom in Nairobi. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes and tried to read my watch. It was hard to focus. Three hours since I had started throwing up. I’d given up trying to figure out whether it was malaria or plain old food poisoning. By 3 a.m. I was past that. I was just sure that whatever it was, I’d be dead by dawn.

  I was not dead by dawn, something I did not feel well enough to celebrate with anything but a trace of disappointed resignation. At 6:30 on a chilly Kenyan morning, I faced the fact that it was probably food poisoning, that I would probably live, and that in exactly two hours I was scheduled to be standing in front of twenty humanitarian workers from all over Africa, teaching about providing peer support after trauma.

  The first three days of this four-day training that I was facilitating had been … character-building. Character-building, as usual, being code for experiences that suck so much while you’re going through them that the most effective solace available is the firm belief in future noble and virtuous personal benefits. One good thing, though, was the location. Back in Africa for the first time in eleven years, I’d recognized the shape of the trees, flat against the horizon. The red dirt, the taste of warm Sprite from a dusty glass bottle, dark clouds of pollution billowing from every second vehicle, the awareness that I was a walking dollar sign – all were familiar from spending my teenage years in Zimbabwe.

  What was not so familiar was the role I now wore like an uncomfortable suit, that of an expert in stress and trauma management. Coming from Australia with all its insistence on uniformly sized poppies, being proclaimed an expert in anything never sits well. And I was finding the ironies inherent in being a supposed expert in this particular field at the ripe old age of twenty-eight difficult to ignore. But as soon as I stepped into my role with the institute, I began to relearn that important lesson I first grasped at sixteen when we moved back to the United States and I convinced my entire class that in Zimbabwe we’d occasionally ridden elephants to school and summered in a giant treehouse: Other people will believe almost anything if you say it with enough confidence and conviction. It’s just that I had always thought that being a “grown-up” would mean actually feeling that confidence. By the time I landed in Kenya, I was starting to think it just meant being better at pretending.

  “At least,” I consoled myself, “I must be getting better at the pretending.”

  Moses, one of the participants from Kenya, stopped me as I locked up the conference room one night. “Can you ever turn it off, the psychology, when you’re with your friends?” he wanted to know. “Or do you think like that all the time?” I knew what he was asking. During the past couple of years, I’ve encountered this over and over at dinner parties, in airplanes, basically any time I introduce myself and explain what I do. It usually boils down to one basic question: Can you read my mind? And one basic fear: Can you see my secret shame?

  My standard response is to tell people that my psychology specialty is forensics, so unless they have criminal tendencies they’re safe from my powers. When I really want to freak someone out, I’ll pause after that piece of lighthearted banter, narrow my eyes and look at them speculatively. Moses, however, was without guile, and I didn’t have the heart to try that on him.

  I paused, searching for a way to reassure him that his innermost thoughts were safer than he could imagine without making me sound completely clueless. He didn’t wait for my answer, though.

  “I think it must be very uncomfortable to be around you,” the 6-foot-3, muscle-bound giant said, beaming at me without malice, white teeth flashing.

  I walked away from him ten minutes later both flattered and disturbed. Flattered because someone, at least, thought I had some answers. To life. Disturbed because someone thought I had some answers. To life.

  This first trip to Kenya for work threw this paradox into sharp relief for me. It was my job, I suddenly realized, to understand how difficult, how dangerous and how incredibly enriching international humanitarian work can prove. It was my job to convince humanitarian workers that unless they consistently pay attention to caring for themselves while they’re working to care for others, they will be lucky to last for three years before returning home spent, disillusioned and possibly traumatized. It was my job to know that about a quarter of humanitarians working outside the developed world can expect to undergo a life-threatening experience during their assignment. And it was my job to know what could help when these most horrendous events – the carjackings, kidnappings, land mines, shootings and tsunamis of life – blindside us on a pedestrian Tuesday afternoon.

  On one level, I knew, I could do this. I had already lived in eight countries and traveled in many more. A passion for international humanitarian work was born the year my family moved to Bangladesh and I asked, with the innocence of a sheltered seven-year-old, whether God had run out of money halfway around the world. I had found that I could help people discover what self-care strategies might help sustain them in the face of the loneliness that can come with being far from family, the weariness that attends constant exposure to disaster, and the mental pressure of making decisions that mean some people receive lifesaving aid while others do not.

  Most of it is not rocket science. Even now I sometimes feel ridiculous facing some of the most dedicated and passionate individuals I have ever met and advising them that drinking too much is not an incredibly helpful self-care strategy and that they might want to consider journaling instead. But this is the sort of message humanitarian workers need to hear on a regular basis. Most start out in this field young, idealistic and vulnerable. When they find themselves working in an understaffed and undersupplied refugee camp facing more desperate people than they can possibly hope to help, it doesn’t take long before far too many take refuge themselves in alcohol, risk-taking, casual sex or cynicism in an effort to cope.

  On a personal level, however, I found myself during this first trip back to Africa wanting more, much more. What I really wanted to know was why. Why was there so much suffering in this world? Why did humans have such a talent for violence? How did I reconcile the divine omnipotence I was taught to trust in as a child with the pain and incomprehension of those whose lives had been torn apart by an earthquake, a famine, a tsunami, or other people? If God existed, if he were paying attention, why did he often seem so slow to act and so silent? And why had I been given so much while others had so little?

  But while I wanted the answers to these questions of meaning, they were the very answers I was most keenly aware that I did not have. Not in the way that would ever let me start a sentence with the word because and feel any degree of certainty in the answer.

  I consoled myself by remembering that most people I knew who believed that they had “those answers” were far more annoying than inspiring or comforting.

  Perhaps, I thought, it was more about understanding the questions that are raised than knowing “the answers.”

  Perhaps, I thought, one of these days I would say that and it wouldn’t feel like a cop-out.

  Los Angeles, USA

  My standard line when I arrived in L.A. was that I expected to be there about two years. In all honesty, this mantra came about more because I was unable to visualize anything concrete beyond a two-year horizon th
an because of any well-thought-out life plan. In fact, whenever anyone asks me where I see myself in five years, the first word that always pops into my head is Nigeria.

  I have no idea why. I have never been to Nigeria and had no particular yen to move there. Perhaps it is just shorthand for “So far in life I’ve moved internationally twelve times. Five years ago I could never have predicted I would end up in L.A. working with humanitarian workers. I couldn’t have controlled that process if I tried, yet it’s felt right. You really expect me to know where life will have taken me five years from now?”

  Some might say this attitude denotes a certain degree of emotional instability, core identity issues, and a pathological need to keep my options open.

  Some might say it indicates adaptability, zest for life, a high tolerance for ambiguity, and a realistic view of how much control we have over the future.

  Some might even say that it demonstrates a commendable willingness to stay open to divine guidance down the path of life and a remarkable spiritual maturity.

  Whatever it actually indicates, I blame it (as so many other things) in large part on my parents. They left for what they assured their parents would be two years, too. This was why, of all people to take my two-year mantra seriously, four years into my tenure in Los Angeles I was surprised by certain signs that they were doing exactly that.

  My mother may never hesitate to remind me that my own mental health (not to mention my bank balance) would have been better served by my pursuing a different branch of psychology, but to their credit, my parents have never lodged serious objections to my global meanderings. I know they probably worry sometimes, but the worst I’ve gotten over the years from Mum is a diffident “Well, it’d be good if you didn’t have to go to Haiti next week.”