The gruesome events happening in eastern Syria bogged me down today. Since I write reports about the Syrian conflict for my job, I need to know what’s going on in the eastern part of the country in quite a lot of detail. Most days when I log on to start work around 8:00, I open up my usual Syria news sites and conflict trackers alongside my work email and Microsoft Teams messages.

This morning I logged on earlier than usual for a 7:00 am meeting. (A downside of having colleagues across many time zones.) My colleague in Syria had sent a message to my team’s group chat about a killing that had happened overnight.

I won’t recount it to you in detail, because I don’t want the image that got stuck in my brain to get stuck in yours, but I will just say that it was about someone who had been killed and whose body had been mutilated in a grotesque, stomach-flipping way.

This is not uncommon in eastern Syria. The area is a power and security vacuum with frequent car bombings, assassinations of government officials, ISIS attacks, and clashes between tribes.

My colleague’s message, which was also not uncommon for our group chat, received two small thumbs up emojis on Microsoft Teams.

Despite that this was, horrifyingly, a somewhat run-of-the-mill update for east Syria, the twisted mental image got stuck in my head all day. It made my shoulders sag a bit and kept me from being excited about the things I had been hoping to work on today.

I’ve been wandering around a bit aimlessly. I made coffee. Ate a banana chocolate chip muffin. Laid down in bed for a little while. Got up, read my book on the couch (Know My Name by Chanel Miller – an incredible memoir).

I can never tell why most of the time I’m not (noticeably) affected by what I read, hear, and see in the Syria news, and then occasionally I am. It seems as though I am hugely affected every 29^th or 45^th or 63^rd time I read a gruesome story or see a photo of a bloodied body in Syria.

As though the stories accumulate invisibly inside me until they reach a critical mass: then strike.

I spend my days studying the eastern region of Syria which is a tinderbox waiting for a match. The infrastructure, schools, and hospitals there are devastated from the war and from being under ISIS control a few years ago. The Kurdish state-within-a-state government in control of this area is precarious and under constant threat from Turkey and Syria’s Assad regime.

People are actually going hungry. The Syrian pound has crashed and the economy has tanked. There are not enough wheat stores in the country to feed everyone. The widespread poverty has led to desperate measures. Young kids go to work in the fields alongside their parents. Investment scams have popped up everywhere (“if you give me this much cash, I’ll double it for you within 1 month”) and people have fallen victim to such scams because they are desperate for something, anything, to relieve the pressure they are under.

The trauma, the endless waiting for the war to be over, the just-getting-through-this-one-day mindset, is constant. And it’s what you don’t see in most of the media coverage about Syria.

Behind the story about the car bombing is always the untold story about the little boy walking to get bread from the bakery who just happened to witness it and ran home screaming in fear. These stories, by the thousands, all over.

There is always a jarring sense of dislocation in my daily work, in the juxtaposition between what’s on my screen and what’s around me.

I work from home in my little suburb of Boston. Later I’ll go snuggle and goof around with my eight-month-old nephew, my sister’s baby, who lives down the street from me. My sister’s husband said he’s going to drop off some homemade cheesecake later. My husband and I may go and meet a friend tonight to watch live music at club Passim in Harvard Square. And all throughout, my mind will flash back to the mutilated body.

Earlier today, I eventually gave up trying to focus and went looking for my water colors. I know now when trying to force my mind to a task is a lost cause, and I’ve learned to create space to process the difficult and ugly images and stories I come across at work.

My work laptop feels like a portal to some dark underworld where people walk around stressed out, miserable, afraid. When I snap the laptop shut and resurface, I sit blinking in my living room, calm and sunny and bright. I boil water for pasta, talk to my husband, lay down on my yoga mat to stretch.

I hadn’t water colored in ages. I pulled out my paints and painted little cards to invite my bridal party to be my bridal party, because – isn’t that funny – I’m also planning my wedding.

(My husband and I got married at the city hall in 2020; we are planning the party part for 2023.)

And isn’t that always the way of things: all of it happening at once, the dark and light, the gruesome news stories, the discussions of guests lists and caterers, all fighting to fit themselves into the space of a single day.