And why I lied to my colleagues about the cause of my exhaustion.

This is part 2 of 3 in my series on burning out from humanitarian work a few years ago. Read Part 1 here: When I Finally Got Overwhelmed By My Humanitarian Job

A week or so after I got back to Amman, when I felt I could no longer ignore him, I gritted my teeth and called Alaa. I dreaded talking to him but, as usual, it wasn’t as bad once we started talking as the dread itself had been. (Isn’t that always the way?)

We exchanged small talk. Tidbits of news. He told me there were two scholarships he wanted to apply for: could I please help him with the applications because they were in English? I said, sure, send me the links and I’ll look at them as soon as I can.

It came up that I’d left my job at RWG. He said, “Oh, no wonder you have been so busy. You’ve gotten a new job which keeps you busy day and night, whereas with RWG you were only working until 5:00 and then you were free afterwards.”

I cringed at the implication that I was “free” when I worked at RWG, and his assumption that I was now busier, which I would have to correct. Dear reader, I’m ashamed to tell you that I wanted to tell Alaa that I had a new 24/7 job which would prevent me from talking to him ever again. Instead I said, “Yes, I left RWG, and actually I’m in between jobs now.”

“Oh!” He said. “That’s great. Then you are super free!”

***

How can you explain you are burnt out to someone who is burning you out?¹

This reminded me of when the Zaatari team – Salma or Hamza or Odei – would tell me I looked tired. (The type of tired that Turkish coffee cannot fix even when they serve it by the gallon.)

“You look really exhausted,” they would say. “Are you okay?”

I wished to say, “No, I’m dead. You guys have finally killed me with your trauma, your war stories, your morbid jokes, your trying-to-put-on-a-brave-face-but-you’re-actually-dying-on-the-inside thing, your dusty ugly home, its distance from Amman, your confusing and complicated nature, your fast Arabic dialect, your tense body language, and your gaping gulf of need.”

Instead I would say, “Yes, I’m good. Let’s make some coffee. I’m sleepy this morning. Tareq and Samir are putting a lot of pressure on me in the office, and yesterday I stayed late working on some reports…”

When working at RWG, I spent half my time in Zaatari camp and the other half in the Amman office. When in the Amman office, if any coworkers expressed concern (Arabs are often blunt in a way that always surprised me: “You look terrible” is apparently an acceptable thing to say to a colleague)² I could honestly tell them that Zaatari was exhausting me.

But when I was in Zaatari, if anyone expressed concern, I’d lie that the Amman office was exhausting me.

How can you tell people they are exhausting you? It’s not their fault. They had the extremely bad luck of having a civil war break out in their country during their lifetimes. You can’t blame them, and besides, no one wants to hear that he or she is exhausting.

To tell them so would be to break down the empathy environment we had so carefully constructed at our youth center. To puncture the bubble. The empathy environment says, “Dear God. Just tell me whatever it is that is making your face look like that.”

“You are exhausting me,” does not fit here.

Besides, we weren’t running the type of humanitarian operation in which the beneficiaries who came to the youth center would exhaust us and then we’d complain about them to our colleagues and peers afterward.

I lied about the cause of my exhaustion and guzzled unhealthy amounts of Turkish coffee because the people exhausting me were friends, colleagues, and “beneficiaries” all at the same time. I saw them every day. They knew me really well. They knew I was tired, and they probably knew I was lying about why. But what could I tell them?

***

So it is with Alaa these days. He texted me the links as promised – scholarship applications to two universities (to which he has not been accepted).

I’m not happy that he now assumes I am super free. This is the paradox of my current situation. I am at once free, too free, and not free at all. Yes, I have time. My days are slower paced than ever before. And I feel less exhausted than I felt six months ago. But I’m not free for you, Alaa, and I can’t help you immigrate to Canada.

Something has been nagging at me about my frustration with Alaa. I tell him in my head, “These scholarships you send me are not relevant to you; where are you finding them? Are they being circulated on Whatsapp by other Syrian refugees, who, like you, are still clinging to some hope of resettlement and dreaming of something that will take them out of their bleak situation?”

I tell him in my head, “I can’t help you apply for a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen because you haven’t been accepted to the University of Aberdeen…so you are ineligible.”

What’s nagging at me is that my frustration is not really directed at him. These mental arguments dissipate and give way to the harder truth: I’m at a loss to explain the behemoth of the international refugee resettlement system to my friend Alaa.

Or Canadian immigration for that matter, or the labyrinth of higher education scholarships for refugees. I hardly understand these things myself.

***

Alaa reaches out to me a few times a week and asks for occasional help – usually with something in English. But even this small amount of interaction, in my current state, is too much for me.

If I said to Alaa, “I’m not free,” he wouldn’t believe me, since I told him I don’t have a job right now. In one sense it would be a lie; I am more free now than I’ve been in years. I don’t have to be in an office/camp five days per week; I can schedule my time how I like and go where I please during the day. It’s a huge blessing.

But I am also less free now than I’ve been in years. My mind and heart are not free to give to people to whom I used to give so willingly. A few years ago, I answered every time Alaa called, responded every time he texted, and hosted him for dinner at my house sometimes, cooking him Spanish rice. Once he came over and taught me how to make his mother’s shishbarak, my favorite Syrian dish – meat dumplings in garlic yogurt sauce. He’s an incredible cook.

I wasn’t yet exhausted in those days. I gave freely and abundantly of my time and energy to Alaa and many others. Now I can’t keep up that same level of giving. Or any at all, apparently. Receiving a message from Alaa – one that I don’t even have to respond to – feels like getting a thousand-pound weight dropped on my chest while lying down.

That’s another thing. Do I “have” to keep up my friendship with Alaa?

This post is part 2 of a 3-part series. Read Part 3 here: How To Set A Boundary Across Cultural Lines (Or Not)

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[1] The word burnout can be defined in different ways and is thrown around so much that it seems to have lost any meaning at all. I’ll quote Trauma Stewardship by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky to help illustrate what I mean when I use this term. (This book had such an impact on me that I’m going to write a separate piece about it.) “There is a difference between feeling tired because you put in a hard day’s work and feeling fatigued in every cell of your being…The kind of tired that results from having a trauma exposure response is a bone-tired, soul-tired, heat-tired kind of exhaustion – your body is tired, your mind is tired, your spirit is tired, your people are tired. You can’t remember a time when you weren’t tired.”

When I first read this, I got chills all over and I thought, “That’s exactly it. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t tired.” This was about three years into my Zaatari job, and four months before I quit.

[2] Another thing they’d say was “Wijhik asfar” which loosely translates to “You look kind of sick” but literally translates to “Your face is yellow.”