Resurfacing: Lessons of a graduate school spring

Postcard from a Boston spring: Blossoms and post-Marathon love

I wish there were a way to pick up digital conversations where one left off, as though the internet were a best friend who lives on a different coast. I wish I felt no responsibility to connect the dots of narratives, to tell the story of what happened between then and now. The relevant 'then' is the Boston bombing, which was the last time I was able to write anything that did not require a footnote. The bombing took all my words away and grief filled the spaces in between.

Spring came. Everything bloomed the day after the bombing suspects were apprehended. It felt like the universe winked at Boston, like it decided that the city had had enough pain and had earned its blossoms. I have always had trouble with sudden transitions that require shifting from agony to jubilation, so I stumbled my way from the manhunt to the dancing, the snowmelt to the flowers.

This was the spring that I fell in love with anthropology (anew) and with qualitative research methodology. In a meta-kick of academia, I have thoroughly enjoyed not only the content of my research, but the process of teaching myself how to conduct it. My desk is crowded with Designing Qualitative Research and Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes and Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork and I keep longing for more hours in each day to ingest all the learning. Or perhaps for more focus, since after a long stint of concentrated effort, my mind gravitates more readily to daydreaming and napping than to research diagrams and conflict analyses. Despite the fatigue, I am growing increasingly comfortable with my emergent identity as a researcher: I am drawn to narratives of the human experience, as told by individuals themselves. As Sfard and Prusak write, "storytelling is integral to understanding lives and all people construct narratives as a process in constructing and reconstructing identity."

My own scholarly and professional identity has been largely shaped by gender and the analysis of its effect on human experiences of conflict, injustice, and suffering. The past few months have been full of finding inspiration in the work and lectures of academics and practitioners whose paths I would be elated to follow. Hearing Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Dara Kay Cohen, and Kimberly Theidon discuss gender and armed conflict, Hannah Riley Bowles explain the gender dimension of job negotiations, or Chris Jahnke train women in public speaking filled me with ideas and left me desiring hours of sifting through life stories. I have always been curious about how individuals ended up on the life path they are traversing: Are their doing their life's work? How did they know this was their life's work? Why this, and not something else? And what were the missteps, kinks, and resets along the way?

These are some of the questions I have been asking myself while I have been robbed of my words. I have spent some time lately longing for multiple lives, so that I could devote a whole lifetime to being an anthropologist on the ground in conflict zones and then another life to being a photographer in much the same settings, and then yet another life to being a teacher and a scholar and a mentor, and yet another life to writing books and weaving stories. Can a girl cram all these selves into a lifetime? And if she can, should she or will the very act of cramming cause life to burst at the seams and forever deprive her of mindful presence?

Mindful presence evades me these days. I still get glimpses of it -- mainly when I am sitting on porches drinking lemonade with darling friends. I used to dream about lemonade and porches when life was entirely colored by snow, and it is -- finally -- lemonade and porch weather. Somehow, though, my thoughts wander elsewhere -- to Toronto, where I will be presenting my wartime sexual violence research in a week, to Colombia, where I will find myself once again later this summer, to Greece, where I wish I could find myself once again later this summer, to Pakistan, which is occupying my professional thoughts these days, to leisure, which is elusive.

Perhaps this has been why I am struggling to write. Writing requires of me a sense of feet-on-the-ground that has not characterized the past few weeks, marked instead by hype and sleepless fleetingness. There is a lot of goodness in this world -- a lot of goodness in my world right now -- and I wish for life to slow down so I can wrap my heart around it. During my first year of field work, I had made attaining mindful presence one of my goals and, foolishly, thought that once I had mastered it, it would be the kind of skill that would stay with me forever. I breathed presence that year. I was present through late-night conversations in Cairo, car breakdowns between Damascus and Aleppo, witnessing a birth in Uganda, losing my beloved stuffed panda in Sudan, stumbling over my Spanish in front of Colombian ex-combatants, and surviving a volcanic explosion and hurricane in Guatemala. I promised then to wed myself to the here and now because it felt good to slow down a racing mind, to limit one's thoughts to the scenes unfolding right in front of her, rather than letting them live in the memory of the past or anticipation of the future. Moving back to the United States this year was full of blessings, but mindful presence was sacrificed in their name. The search continues, but there is a part of me that worries that a quieter mind is not possible here for me, that my 'field self' breathes more readily and laughs more easily -- that I like that girl better.

I raised my hand a lot this spring, in part because of fear of reneging on my commitment to keep that hand raised. I asked a lot of questions, many of them in writing, most of them accompanied by footnotes. Whose memory matters? How are women's experiences of mass atrocities remembered and memorialized? Why is a gender-sensitive approach to symbolic reparations significant for achieving the goals of transitional justice in the first place? How does the construction of masculinities and femininities affect women militants' identities in the Colombian armed conflict? And -- with help from Kimberly Theidon -- what are the narrative obligations we impose on communities of victims? Each question has birthed another, recalling Rilke's reminder to "learn to love the questions themselves." I love constructing a question, just as I love building a research paper sentence by sentence, but I also long for sentences that do not end in quotation marks. I wish to be the kind of academic and practitioner that can slowly, cautiously, humbly begin her way beyond "we don't know."

The word 'longing' has appeared in this reflection more than it typically does in my writing. It has been a spring of yearning, bookmarked by a tandem bicycle. Elijah and I share an affinity for unusual means of transport, as is evidenced by the fact that the only ones we own are an inflatable kayak and a tandem bicycle. On the day after my spring exams ended, we walked past this bicycle and instantly knew we needed to own it. A muffin and a few pedals around Teele Square later, it was ours. In a fit of "sentences that can only by uttered by hipsters," (#whatistheworldcomingto) we are addicted to the tandem bike. There is something refreshingly beautiful about seeing the world together, hitting the pedals at the same pace, trying to steady ourselves at the start line and negotiating every dismount so that our left feet can hit the pavement at the same time. We know no moderation when it comes to tandem cycling; last Saturday alone, we biked 36 miles to Walden Pond and back. Thoreau's cove and the journey to it are exactly the stuff of yearning.

Postcard from a Boston spring: A tandem bicycle, Walden Pond, Fresh Pond, and exhales

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Boston bombings and the hierarchy of suffering

When I was an undergraduate, some of my peers engaged in a sport that can only be described as competitive under-sleeping. "I only slept five hours last night," one would say. "Oh! You must be so well-rested. I slept for two hours." "One hour and twenty minutes!" "I slept negative 17 minutes last night." Everything was an arms race: Who studied the most and who studied the least? Who slept the most and the least? How long could one go without food or a bathroom break? Depending on whom you asked, the extremes of these spectrums would be points of pride.

When I was an undergraduate, Boston became the closest point I would recognize as home on a United States map. Shortly after the completion of my studies, I left the US to work in conflict and post-conflict areas with women affected by war. Five years after that first graduation, I have returned to Boston to make it a home anew -- to make it a site of learning, growth, and community.

I am no stranger to violence. I have witnessed it unfold, heard it at a distance in the night, documented its aftermath. I have studied its multiple faces. One of the lessons I have learned through this work and study has been that I cannot be desensitized to violence, suffering, injustice, or atrocities. It is irrelevant that the Boston bombings were not the first explosion at a place I called home; it is further irrelevant that I allegedly "know what to do and how to be in a crisis."

The competitive arms race of absurdity that I experienced as a college student has a way of resurfacing among some practitioners in conflict zones. "Oh, you got scared of the gunfire outside our compound? Haha, I guess I just got used to it and didn't even hear it." As I wrote in September, we often confuse emotional responses and vulnerability with being an amateur, criminally lacking thick skin. I am neither interested in the thick skin, nor in the competition of who has the most scars, who has the harshest memories, who has survived more acts of violence.

A strange version of this 'hierarchy of suffering' has surfaced in response to the Boston bombings. Some friends and colleagues have pointed out that hundreds of people die in conflicts worldwide every day and "only 4 died in Boston and we've been hearing about it all week." Indeed, they are right: Nearly 200 people died in a Boko Haram attack in Nigeria this weekend; nearly 200 people died because of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. Over 70,000 have died in the Syrian civil war so far. The scale of human suffering, natural disaster, and man-made injustice and violence is unimaginably large -- and, I argue, so should be our compassion.

There are conflicts, disasters, and injustices in this world that are dramatically underreported, under-examined, or misunderstood -- and, in ways that fuel my faith in humanity, I spend my days surrounded by people committed to redressing this. Yet, the existence of a tragedy that has resulted in more deaths than the one that occupies our minds presently does not mean that our heartache is misplaced. Neither "competitive grief" nor "competitive compassion" are sports I ever wish to play.

Measuring atrocities, disasters, or other tragedies by the number of deaths may provide us with a quantitative measure -- but that, too, is an incomplete story. What about the victims of sexual violence in Syria whose experiences are not reflected in the 70,000 deaths? What about the underreported instances of sexual violence? What about those who have been forcibly disappeared worldwide?

What about all the other kinds of suffering and pain that are not captured in the numbers that we choose each time? Four people died as a result of the Boston bombings and manhunt for the suspects. How many amputees? How many injured? How many emotionally traumatized? What about the impact of violence on those who were not directly and physically affected by it, but whose sense of identity, community, or daily life has been disrupted?

You could argue that even by the widest possible count of 'victimhood,' the events in Boston this week still do not compare to _______. You may well be right. But I argue that the hierarchy of suffering robs all human stories of their dignity. We each grieve for different losses, in scale and in kind. Our hearts are large enough to extend compassion to Syria and Sichuan, Boston and Bamako. There is not a fixed pie of empathy of which we are capable; there is no risk of running out or distributing it unfairly.

There is, therefore, no place for judgment or competition in grief and in the expression of compassion. An expression of pain for Boston does not need to be one of ignorance for the pain of Elsewhere. Boston's pain is not superior to or greater than the suffering of any other community. It is also not lesser than it. To some, it is more surprising, more shocking, less expected, or better covered in the media -- and one could make a case for any of these adjectives. But this does not mean that compassion is not warranted for it, or that individuals whose hearts are centered on Boston do not care for injustices outside a bubble that was violently burst. I wish not for the kind of grief, compassion, and empathy that one has to defend or surround with caveats.

This week, my heart aches for my Boston home.
It also called back memories of Jerusalem, and of Gaza, and riding into Aleppo in a car that sat atop a tow-truck bed, and bars in Uganda before that bombing, and muffins in Sudan, and cafes in Colombia before that other bombing, and late-night walks through Guatemala on the night before someone placed a bunch of decapitated human heads outside public spaces as a signal to the rest of us.
I have no memories of China, or of Afghanistan, or Nigeria, or Haiti, or Burma, for I have never been there -- but I extend empathy to those seeking to recover from injustice, violence, natural disasters, or other suffering.
And, still, this week, my heart aches for Boston, knowing that empathy can be partial and compassion is anchored in our memories -- but also knowing that empathy and compassion can be infinite if we will  them to be.

Boston: Stories of compassion in the wake of tragedy

Earlier today, explosions rocked the Boston Marathon, resulting in deaths, injuries, and widespread fear through the city I now call home.

I have never quite known what to say in the wake of a tragedy and my inclination has always been to say very little and, instead, to watch, to hope, to hold humans in my heart.

As phone calls and text messages started pouring in, the irony was not lost on us or on most of our friends that we have had to do this before: The shock after a bombing, the cycle of calling and texting, the confusion, the indignation at injustice. The brain has a way of linking these experiences together and every image of the blasts in Boston calls back the sounds of blasts in Uganda and Gaza and Bogotá and Jerusalem.

We are safe, and blessed with love -- and, as we heal, we count those blessings.

Boston is a home so full of compassion that the Red Cross blood banks are full, only hours after the events transpired.

Boston is a home so full of compassion that some marathoners ran straight from the finish line to the hospital to donate blood.

Boston is a home so full of compassion that Bostonians are opening their homes to stranded runners, spectators, and their families who may need a place to stay for the night.

Boston is a home so full of compassion that in my graduate school community, within minutes of the explosions, students created a spreadsheet to track down runners and spectators, offered one another rides to get out of the blast zone, tracked down those who were momentarily unaccounted for, and held one another in kindness as we struggled to process what happened. Boston is a home full of humbling compassion.

The Atlantic is compiling these stories of kindness here today, and it is to these that we turn for hope in the wake of tragedy.

So now we wait.
We share meals and feed one another.
We watch TV together because companionship alleviates pain, and we turn it off when solace and quiet serve us better.
We resist the inclination to judge or to jump to conclusions or to spread rumors.
We photograph the beautiful sunset, or walk our dogs, or fold the laundry, in search of beauty or normalcy in the face of injustice.
We shower our first responders with gratitude, and we are thankful for those who keep us safe and informed under these circumstances.
We hold the wounded and those whom we have lost in our hearts, and open our hugs to those still in shock or grieving.
We mourn together, as a community.
We look for the light in our collective home.
We ask questions, with patience through the slowness of the answers.
We extend compassion. We love. We keep our hearts soft, stirring for hope and for the stories that will continue to fuel our faith in humanity.

An interview with Stephen Ritz: Greening the Bronx

Stephen Ritz considers himself the luckiest man in the world. As he narrates in his TEDxManhattan talk on his experiences as a teacher helping to green the South Bronx, his gratitude stems from being able to engage students in questions of health, nutrition, wellness, and sustainability while creating employment possibilities that mitigate environmental concerns.  Ritz’s students are among the most marginalized in New York City, hailing from the poorest Congressional District in America. It became Ritz’s goal to teach these students how to grow healthy food in a sustainable way. Ritz is now heading Green Bronx Machine, a not-for-profit corporation awaiting 501(c)(3) approval, whose aim is to “grow, re-use resources, and recycle- our way into new and healthy ways of living; complete with self sustaining local economic engine.”

Ritz shared his insights in his contagiously enthusiastic manner at the Columbia University Earth Summit on March 29, 2013. I had the pleasure of catching up with Ritz as part of the Summit and learned more about his hopes and ideas for the future.

ROXANNE KRYSTALLI: You have been working on building up the presence of edible green walls throughout the Bronx, and "changing lifestyles and mindsets". How have you seen the dynamics in your classroom transform?

STEPHEN RITZ: The underlying principles in my classroom are collaboration and coalition rooted in design-based problem solving; kids cannot work by themselves or with each other towards anything positive with a closed fist. This involves ensuring that on a daily basis, there is always something engaging and productive for them to do that makes them feel great and worthwhile. Inherently, this work requires people to come together, to work together, to suspend judgment, to listen, to advocate, to have faith, to have patience and most importantly TO NURTURE! 

For the full interview, please visit Bold and the Columbia Earth Summit website. You may follow the Green Bronx Machine on Facebook. Happy greening!

Remembering warmth

I am the person who is perpetually cold on airplanes. I fly to the Equator wrapped in a pashmina, to a desert in a coat. The layers are a necessary hug in the middle of transition, as though I need to hold myself tight to face the new winds.

And then there is always that moment of stepping out of the airplane and into the warmth. The shedding of the layers, of skin that does not feel necessary anymore. The return to warmth has always felt like a release, like a return to self. For four years, while I was working in the field of gender and armed conflict, I shuttled from desert lands to countries straddling the Equator. My bones forgot winter. When I first landed in Boston, I did so with a nostalgia for the seasons and a commitment to celebrating them.

Celebrate I did. I photographed fall with the curiosity of what Mary Oliver calls "a bride married to amazement." I was born for colored leaves and crisp mornings, and for summer seas and pebbles, and for winter icicles hanging from trees. As I wrote in my latest column on The Equals Record, experiencing and documenting the passage of time has always held a certain fascination, even if there is no surprise involved to this exercise: fall will come, and spring will, too -- all evidence to the contrary.

I may have arrived here having forgotten winter, but I have lived it so intimately this year that all of me feels like winter. I feel the wind chill when there is none, I have come to expect its greeting when I step out of the front door. As such, when I stepped out of an airport into warm air last week, memories came rushing back, not only of climates and places, but also memories of myself wrapped in warmth.

There is something to be said about our warm-weather selves. They abandon shoes in favor of sandals and cherish the sound of flip-flops on marble. They like lemonade and porches. They wake up to wind chimes and mirror the lightness of dream-catchers. They dream more. They say 'yes' with lightness. They have one more drink, one more idea. They linger to look at the sunset or the morning light. They find the light more easily in the first place.

Here is a glimpse into my own warmer weather self, a remembrance of light and lightness, a wink at the  whimsical self that can seasonally emerge out of the darkness.

 

Creative advertising

A life lived in color

 

And then someone turned on the fountain...

... and the whole world became a squeal. 

Blessed light

In fear of spring

In late July, as I was photographing a friend's hands clasping pebbles from a Greek beach, I pronounced myself a "summer person." I did so with the awareness that being Greek and being a "summer person" was, practically, a tautology, but I declared myself one with certainty regardless: "Definitely a summer person," I said, and I was off to the water once again.

By late October, as I was pointing my camera up at a red tree whose leaves reminded me of everything I missed about New England autumn, I had changed my mind. "I'm a fall girl, I declared."

Not even for the sake of a writerly analogy can I pretend that by mid-February, as I was trudging through the post-snow slush, I was a full convert to Boston winter. And still, something about the sound of synchronized snow shoveling interrupting the piercing quiet after a heavy snowstorm that resonates with me. Elijah caught on to how fickle I was with my attachment to seasons and remarked, "You are, apparently, an all-seasons girl. I don't want to hear it. You love summer, and you love fall, and you love winter."

And then there was spring.

I felt it today, that familiar anxiety of spring, as the world was in mid-thaw, snow droplets dripping into gutters. For more about my apprehension with spring, and the rawness this season triggers, wander over to today's Eternally Nostalgic column at the Equals Record. 

The value of a gender analysis

How I spent International Women's Day 2010: Facilitating a workshop in Colombia on women and leadership

There is a passage by Cynthia Enloe, in her foreword to Carol Cohn's excellent compilation Women & Wars, that summarizes much of the type of inquiry and conviction that motivates my work. Enloe writes:

"That is, gender analysis is a skill. It's not a passing fancy. It's not a way to be polite. And it's not something one picks up casually, on the run. One doesn't acquire the capacity to do useful gender analysis simply because one is "modern", "loves women", "believes in equality", or "has daughters." One has to learn how to do it, practice doing it, be candidly reflective about one's shortcomings, try again."

On PolicyMic today, I explore some of the questions that hit closest to home for me: What is a gender analysis? What is its value? And where do we begin? Wander over here for - some, only some - of the answers.

The homes that inspire nostalgia

This essay appeared first as my Eternally Nostalgic column on the Equals Record this week.

We first met when I was on the cusp of nomadism and she was on her return voyage.

I was about to embark on my first true field work in conflict management. I did not know it then, but that year would hold memories of Egypt, Uganda, Colombia, and Guatemala. Her journey stretched from Liberia to Indonesia and Boston to the Hague. We both swam in the pool of conflict management professionals, spoke with our hands, loved every baked good we met, and shared a passion for wander and wonder. In many ways, she inspired my own path with her courage, whimsy, curiosity, and attachment to service and to making impact. Meeting her kindled my faith in humanity—and sparked my consequent overuse of the term.

We are now sitting at her dining table in Washington, DC, five years later. She and her loved one built the bench atop which I am perched, and everything else in the house too. Even if she hadn’t given me her house number, I would have picked it out among its companions. It is the most colorful house in the street. Everything in it is a colorful product of love too, carved with care out of wood, nailed together, splashed with the hues that matched their personalities. “We built the bed in which you are sleeping,” she says smiling. People dream better in home-made beds. They ought to.

She is a different kind of adult than I am, I think to myself. A whole other league of adulthood, the kind that comes with one’s own photographs hanging from her walls (in frames, I should clarify, since my own amateur photos hang frameless and in disorder). I scratch her cat’s belly, as we talk about the conversations we used to have when we first met. We are still connected by those same threads, by conflict management and service, by a wanderlust for Iceland and the Bolivian salt flats alike. We joke about our loved ones’ addiction to cycling, we revisit talks about neuroses that field work in some of the world’s most active conflict zones could not mitigate. Peeking into her life makes me nostalgic for permanence and leaves me longing to caress wooden surfaces with an appreciation for the art that transforms them.

I used to live here too once, but the girl I was when I lived in Washington is different from the girl who returned to it now. It was the before era: before field work, before I knew that a lot of my life would unfold on the road or in conflict zones, before I grew attached to cameras and stories, before I had discovered much of what I now consider my life’s work—in many senses, before I experienced what I now consider my life’s many blessings. When I left Washington, I left with excitement, not out of frustration with its admittedly elevated sense of self-importance, but out of a craving to leap to the next phase of life and the novelty it had in store. And much as my memories of Washington were full of light and merriment, I did not consider it the kind of home that would inspire nostalgia.

Teetering in heels outside the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I recognize bits of the self I was then: I was an obsessive list-maker, and I still am. I was the kind of girl who could write down thirteen to-do items, and cross them all. Part of me still enjoys ticking the boxes, literally and allegorically. In other senses, I have shed layers of skin since I left Washington. I have embraced uncertainty and developed a new comfort for it. I have appreciated vulnerability; in brave moments, I have deliberately put myself in vulnerable places with an understanding of their merits. I have marveled, marveled ferociously, demanded marveling. I have made more room. I have not carved furniture, but I have carved out space for loving, dreaming, and marveling.

And now that I am back, this time for a career trip with fellow graduate students interested in conflict management, I am marveling at a home that inspired more nostalgia than I thought it could. In between career panels and site visits, I duck into my old neighborhood bookstore. I used to stop there every single day on my walk home from work, even if nothing in the shelves had changed. The bookstore was a ritual I kept, a nostalgia-inspiring ritual that planted the seeds of marveling. Between a lunch and an informational interview, I pop into Teaism, wanting bubble tea. I giggle when I remember that they call it ‘pearl tea’ here. My memory had edged this lexicon out. Taryn and I sit side-by-side at Hello Cupcake, devouring cream cheese frosting. Dan and I have breakfast at Busboys and Poets. Halle and I share an almond croissant and cappuccinos at Dolcezza, which was not there when I last was. Some of the women by my side have been constant presences, on email and in teahouses, at a distance or side-by-side. Some of them are new to this memory, having sprung from shared field experiences, correspondences, school orientations, or serendipity.

This marriage of the worlds feels less foreign than I had anticipated. I practiced nostalgic eating, nostalgic bookstore browsing, nostalgic walking, nostalgic subway riding. Life was not Instagrammed when I had left Washington; all of it looked less romantic. It was not yet possible, as Cheri Lucas would say, to “enhance the mundane”, “to disguise the mediocre.” Surprise nostalgia is a privilege because it is as though a former home springs from the depth of your memories to claim its place in your life, to demand to be remembered lovingly. Or, at the very least, to be remembered—which, in my life, is by definition a loving act.

The rituals of writing: How I write, with help from Zadie Smith

At a time when "no human realm is unironized or not belittled", it strange that the label 'writer' still inspires awe. These are the words of Zadie Smith at a Museum of Fine Arts lecture titled "Why Write?"

Zadie Smith fills an entire auditorium with her presence, even though she jokes that she is British and, therefore, "does not speak off the cuff." I want to have a glass of wine with off-the-cuff Zadie Smith, but for now, I settle contently for scribbling everything she says and noticing the craftsmanship of her words. "Writers feel acutely," she offers. "Writing can be an echo chamber of complaint. Writers forever feel neglected. They romanticize other eras. Epoch envy." I was bred to disdain generalizations; any sentence that begins with "women all..." or "humans..." or "Greeks..." is met with my raised eyebrows. And yet, I can hear her generalize about writers and their feelings and nod in submissive agreement, compelled by assonance and rhythm and internal rhyme.

She examines various explanations for our attachment to writing.
"Write because you can't help it."
Write out of "an Olympian tautology: because I am a writer."
"Write because you desire to see things as they really are."
"Write as an antidote to pointlessness, because you care about the small matter of sentences."
"Write because writing looks like freedom. Because it is a kind of freedom."

She weaves others' words into her discourse on writing, from those of Alexander Pope to James Wood to David Foster Wallace to Nabokov to Orwell. I realize that Zadie Smith likes to place her narrative in the company of others; some of her writing, especially in Changing my Mind: Occasional Essays is so full of block quotes and allusions that it is hard to discern where the literary criticism ends and her own creation begins. Perhaps, for Smith, writing cannot exist in isolation; perhaps, like history, it requires context.

When she ends her remarks, I start to breathe again, noticing that her delivery inspires the kind of awe she thought may be obsolete in an irony-laden world. I expect her to walk offstage; instead, she sits on a stool, drinks water, and asks if anyone has any questions. She re-wears humanity. Someone asks her if she has any writing rituals, and she laughs gently.

"My students fetishize a creative life," she says, and I picture being Zadie Smith's student. "To me, it's just what you put on the page. The rest is blah." She notes that she does not have a talisman, "just a cheap IKEA table facing the wall." And, "if it's a ritual, I always write in Garamond."

Zadie Smith may dismiss the rituals of writing as a type of showmanship, but I - a fellow Garamond-lover - have always been attached to ritual and calligraphy alike. I sound my writing out: I whisper every word as I type. This is why, regardless of whether I am writing an academic paper on sexual violence in war zones or a personal essay on nostalgia, I cannot write in a library. I wear my writing on my face. I squint, bite my lip and inner cheek, run my tongue over my front teeth, wear the effort. I speak the words out. Writing sounds like something to me, and only by whispering it do I know if it feels and reads right.

I write in multiple tabs. As an avid reader, and an English as a Second Language speaker, there are many words I have met that have a different meaning in real life than that etched in my head. I like the unusual combinations, the adjective that you wouldn't typically seat next to a particular noun. And so, in the multiple tabs, I google, just to check. Does 'ferociously' have to have cruel connotations or can it also mean 'fiercely, vigorously?' Is it 'different from' or 'different than'? I love the unusual and unused pairings of words, but I need to know what they usually mean, how they are meant to be used.

I write sentence by sentence. Each of them is important to me. I cannot wrap my mind around a full paragraph or a whole essay; my ideas are usually born out of a sentence or a phrase, out of the smallest scale in which words can play with each other. In the many notebooks that have traveled with me, I jot down these kernels of essays-to-be, hoping to revisit them later and make a story out of them. Many are 'just' scribbles, some are unfinished drafts, few become full-fledged essays. I do not lament the unfinished drafts, and rarely do I return to them. I know which the stories are that I long to tell, and I'm patient and peaceful with the stories that get lodged somewhere between the vocal chords and the keyboard.

My writing sometimes feels like chanting, full of repetition and rhythmical run-ons. Precision is important to me and, in that sense, I embrace Zadie Smith's treatment of writing as a craft. And yet, in non-academic writing, I also embrace what Microsoft Word would tell me is a fragment worthy of a squiggly green line underneath it. I write in hyphens and commas, in mirrored sentence structures and recurring words. I write in the way life unfolds: in motifs, patterns, in dances of regularity and surprise interruptions.

There is no sense of sequencing to my writing. Until it is done, I cannot eat, sleep, or go on living. I will squint and whisper words and type until it is all on the page. I write in gross spurts, in chunks of time uninterrupted and unpunctuated by anything but words. When the time comes to edit, I look for the errant or excessive commas, the bit of repetition that lingers from the deliberate towards the excessive. I cut words, but never whole paragraphs. Wordiness never quite bothers me, as long as I feel the need for all of them. I will edit, word by word, until it all feels like me, until I can picture a reader who knows me well hearing my voice utter the words he is seeing.

There is a part of me that tries to edit out the Eternal Sunshine, the misplaced optimism. It used to be that I could not tell a story without placing a positive spin on it in the end, as though I could not live with conflict without catharsis, sadness without closure, without that "crack in everything that lets the light in," as Leonard Cohen would put it. In that sense, I write in the same way that I live. When the words feel too rosy, the adjectives too outsized, I cut. I look for the simpler, truer ones. And if they, too, are sunny, I make my peace with the sunniness. Sometimes there is sunniness brimming from places that demand their place in the light.

Anchoring love in memories

When I was growing up, my mother insisted that "respect cannot be forced; it must, instead, be inspired."

She may as well have been speaking about love.

My notion of love is grounded in place, anchored in memories of the self I was when the heart fluttered readily and of the life that made it come aflutter. I remember what I was wearing, I remember the documents I was editing when I was g-chatting inconspicuously in another tab. The slight nausea in anticipation of the moment when the distance would end, and he would parade through the airport doors. The need to remember how to be with one another again, in proximity and in the flesh, not protected by laptop screens thousands of miles apart.

Backlit Cairo love. [Photo of me by Hugo Massa]

I remember what loving in Egypt felt like: dusty, furtive, tasting of 'shai' and 'asir faroula' and 'sheesha toufach', with the strong Arabic 'ch' at the end that I could never quite muster. It felt clumsy and young and shy and full of wondering and wandering. It was the love of owning exactly one sheet, and not even having it cover the whole bed, resulting in one of us always ending up on the bare mattress by the morning. It was a love backlit by Cairo and feeling present and exhilaratingly young and jumping up and down in that apartment with the chandeliers and Egyptian flags while singing our hearts out to Queen and Beirut and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Uganda was for solitude and emails - shy, like the love from which they had been born. Emails typed into a Word Document, while the battery and electricity lasted, and sent days later. Uganda was 'boda glow' to me: the orange tint of thrill and dust that one inadvertently adopted after riding the motorcycle taxis to the IDP camps. It was the birthplace of telling stories about love, of trying to find words to describe what happened, and looking for words in the present and the future - shyly - not just past tenses.

Colombia felt like red hair. The Middle Eastern and East African darkness did not survive the equator and suddenly I was the red-headed girl in Bogota. Colombia was for relearning: relearning how to shed layers and show skin, shed walls and call everyone a 'princesa' - because they were, because they inspired affection. Colombia meant counting steps and swaying hips on slippery floors and mouthing words to songs I did not know with the comfort of knowing that they were, more often than not, about 'el amor.' It was the place at which to fall in love with work, and with love itself. Its terraces inspired throwing plans to the wind, in favor of drinking coffee and playing the guitar and convincing oneself earnestly, perhaps for the first time in life, that where there is love - love for work, for humans, for yourself - everything else will work itself out. It was not a bum-like love, the kind that was once reserved for hippies; on the contrary, my Colombia was steeped in stories of trauma and ghosts of violence.

And yet, when I think about Colombia, I remember love. It is a testament to the soul of a place that it can be remembered for love and light and lightness, even when these co-exist alongside gut-wrenching horror.

Guatemala was for not knowing. There was Cafe No Se - literally, Cafe I Don't Know. Days and days of silence, and wondering, and diving heart-first into work that assails the most resilient of hearts. It was nostalgic and reflective and full of volcanoes and lakes and waterfalls that quieten a mind with their magnitude. It was for admitting to the stories I loved, and to my attachment to stories and their process of creation. Guatemala looks like a tiny jade ring I bought myself to remember a year of firsts, of open hearts and conviction that I was in the right place(s), doing what felt right to me, doing what time would show is, in fact, my life's work. I have worn that ring every day since it came into my life, as - in Mary Oliver's words - "a bride married to amazement."

Jerusalem was a love on the floor. Neither of us can remember exactly when we decided that we could live without furniture, but we did. It turns out, a couch-less love is still love. It unfolded on tile floors in the evening, between plans and dreams of a future that felt elusive. It tasted like my falafel stand, his kebab stand, my lemon popsicles, his potato bourekas. It spoke in yet another foreign language, it gestured vividly, it shrugged when it couldn't find the words. It was blessed with beautiful light and with thousands of steps. It was a love of hundreds of walks.

"I wish I could pack you in my suitcase." It is the most uttered sentence of farewells. As we found, love packs clumsily and unwieldingly. The most grounding pieces of it, the anchoring memories, are outsized and unpackable. And should you be able to stuff them into a duffel and drag them across the world with you, just as you did with your earthly possessions for four years, know that when you put the suitcase away, the love will emerge wrinkly and in need of smoothening. It will need to be anchored in new memories. You have traded out the tile floors for wood, and the floor for - gasp - furniture. You have traded out falafel for burritos, arepas for burritos, everything for burritos. It sounds like Pandora and Spotify and infinite choice of ambiance now, not like the call to prayer or the Tito el Bambino bellowing out from taxis, or even like gunshots in the distance. You are developing a new palate, a new taste and sound and feel of love that suits the community in which it is now embedded.

You let go of some pieces, long for others. And you carry other pieces with you: the tiny jade ring, the poem that was on that wall,  the unquenched desire to always be feeling everything and forever be seeking something at which to marvel.

And some things you keep: the Colombian horse shoe, now in its - and our - Boston home.

That Valentine's Day in Colombia, you stumbled upon a horse-shoe on the street. 12 hours and an atrocious sunburn later, you would be giggling on a park bench, full of wine and mirth. A horse and carriage would stop in front of your messy selves and the man asks you if you need a ride. You know you cannot possibly afford a horse and carriage, not in Cartagena, not without vomiting. The horse and carriage man insists. You give in. The wine gives in. You ride home in horse and carriage. "Are you in love with her?," he asks the person giggling next to you. "Of course I am," he responds. "How could I not be?!" At the end of the ride, we paid the equivalent of a symbolic dollar because we were riding in a community in which love is a currency in itself. The details are fuzzy. I remember insisting that no, sir, you cannot treat us to a horse-and-carriage ride, not here, not on Valentine's Day, and I remember losing the argument, and I remember hearing the horse ride away.

You let go of some pieces, long for others. And you carry other pieces with you. The horse-shoe is hanging on the side of our Boston bedroom door, as an ode to that Valentine's Day, those giggly selves, and to merriment. 

For all the tables we have danced on

“It is always important to dance.”

This phrase recurs in my friend Jonathon’s book, as a life philosophy that merits reiteration.

I had never thought of dancing as something that invites the adjective “important” until I moved to Guatemala, where Jonathon and my friendship was born. My Guatemala was steeped in importance and imperatives, in trauma and injustice. It was an outsized kind of importance, the kind that shows you the limits of your knowledge and highlights the boundaries of what you can do to understand mass atrocities and serve their survivors. At no point did I feel qualified for the tasks required of me in Guatemala; and even if in some universe, I were qualified to perform the tasks themselves, no part of me was prepared for the emotional weight, vicarious trauma, and ceaseless heartbreak.

It seems curious, then, that Guatemala was where we danced. We danced with vigor and with no shame, with no reservation and with gusto—every single time, with gusto. We danced on beaches and atop volcanoes, in living rooms and on coffee tables. Perhaps that was the place that inspired Jonathon to posit that “it is always important to dance.”

In my homeland Greece, dance is barely a contact sport. Fingers may graze each other, but for the rest of it, you are on your own. You are fully responsible for wiggling your own shoulders, moving your own knees, swaying your hips, without the help of hips glued onto your own. Much of what I love about dancing in Latin America calls back to my original conception of dancing. While salsa and merengue inspire more affection than my native Syrtaki, they evoke jubilation and look like hugs in motion. It is perhaps these preconceived notions of mine about dancing that made “grinding” an enigma when I arrived at an American college campus at the age of 17. My idea of dancing involved synchronized skipping around, jubilant bopping, wiggling and nodding along and smiling, endless smiling—and maybe doing all that atop a table or two, yelling Opa! for good measure.

Rediscovering that obscure genre of dancing in Guatemala felt like a homecoming—a realization that when the workday came to an end, others would wish to join me for a round of salsa or a wiggle on top of a table. Others felt, like Jonathon did, that “it is always important to dance.” The Guatemalan table-dancing marked me in ways that became impossible to forget, delivering another imperative: to continue dancing, with gusto, everywhere.

There's been a little bit of wiggling in life lately, and a whole lot of whimsy. You can wander over to The Equals Record to read the rest of this tale. And maybe to dance a little, too. 

Brave new year

The first day of 2013 came with a lifetime first: seeing snow on the beach. And with plants, blowing in the wind.

In the summer of 2012, Susannah Conway published her first book titled This I Know: Notes on Unravelling the Heart. In this memoir, Susannah charts the journey of her grief after her partner's sudden death, as well as shares her creative process and the ways in which it facilitated her recovery. The book is close to my heart and has jarred me awake in many ways -- not least of which is through its title.

When I think about how I would end a sentence that started with "This I know:", I can rarely get past the colon. This is, presumably, not because of a lack of wisdom; rather, it stems from shyness to unabashedly lay claim to knowledge. As the second semester of graduate school is beginning, one of its primary themes has been the need to tell a compelling story -- and to put our full weight behind it. And yet, the more immersed I become in knowledge, the less confident I am of my grip on it.

Over time, I have grown wary of specialists and experts. In an Equals Record column earlier this year, I had written:

"The longer I have worked with women affected by conflict worldwide, the more I have uncovered the boundaries of my knowledge. The universe of concepts I do not understand and of life I cannot make sense of keeps expanding. It would be out of step for the titles and labels to keep narrowing. “Specialist” and “expert” do not fit. Do not even get me started on “guru.”

As such, it is not the prestige of expertise I long for - but the comfort of knowledge and the confidence of laying claim to it. On New Year's Eve, seated around a table, a number of friends and I were discussing words and concepts that we hoped would define our experiences in 2013.  I kept cycling back to "brave" and its synonyms: courage, bold, dare. There is an ostensible contradiction in the idea of someone who worked in war zones and was steeped in vicarious and immediate trauma up to her collarbones longing for courage and imploring herself to be brave.

Yet, in my mind, this contradiction is falsely constructed. The courage required to show up to work in northern Uganda or Sudan or Guatemala is very different than the one required to click "publish" for a piece you really care about or raise your hand in a classroom -- and keep it raised, as Sheryl Sandberg would ask. It is further distinct from the courage required to lay claim to knowledge, to lead with "this I know", to speak unwaveringly. And, crucially, a lot of my own 'conflict zone' courage is manufactured; it is produced, almost at the push of a button, to ensure that I keep showing up, serving, and delivering. As Marianne Elliott writes in Zen Under Fire, her seminal memoir about her involvement with the UN in Afghanistan,

"It is time to talk honestly about the emotional and psychological impact humanitarian work, especially human rights and protection work, is having on people. The rhetoric of 'resilience' needs to be unpicked and stripped of its connotations of toughness. True resilience, in my view, includes the ability to allow our hearts, as Daoud Hari puts it, to supply the emotion for people who have none remaining. And it requires the support to talk, freely and without fear of judgement, about the impact that emotion will inevitably have on our own well-being."

There is much I cherish about this passage, including its acknowledgement of the role of emotions in service-based work and its nuanced view of courage and resilience. And even though Marianne was speaking of the emotional minefield of humanitarian work, her insight translates nicely into the more personal battles of our lives. When I reflect on some of my goals for the year, there is a consistent theme of keeping my hand raised, pressing publish. Speaking up, fearing less. Claiming what I know. Applying, throwing my name in the hat. All of that requires an amount of courage that seems to have evaporated out of me recently, and which I am determined to seek anew.

I have been living in caveats lately. I am drawn to disclaimers: "I am not an expert in this." "I am not sure." "I do not know." While caveats inspire humility, they are also crippling. I do not wish for the sort of existence that is punctuated by certainty; in many ways, certainty can be the opponent of curiosity. I do not long for the complacency of expertise in knowledge, for it can be the enemy of inquiry.

I do, however, wish for a steadier hand, and a voice that trembles less. Let 2013 be the year of raised hands.

Thoughts from the girl who goes: On place, planes, permanence

An experiment in putting my feet down, in permanence - Photo in John Lennon Park - Havana, Cuba. "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

If there were assigned roles to airport farewells, I would lay claim to the part of the girl who is tearing up on the walkway to the gate. I have been that girl time and time again, wearing every article of clothing that did not fit in checked baggage and carrying on my shoulders every book and memory with which I could not part. Despite the moving walkway sweat and sniffles, and much like a high school student auditioning for a play, I have thought that the parts in the drama of airport farewells are unequal: It has always been easier to be the girl who goes, than the person who is left behind.

"I am sick of watching your backside fade into the distance," I was once told. I have been privileged to always leave one home in search of another, one project in anticipation of the next, to depart from one community with the knowledge that I am en route to the next one that will host me. And every time, the person I have left behind has had to return to the home we once shared, empty of my belongings, and move on with life by making independent memories that are not anchored by my scent, my notebooks strewn everywhere, my obsessive need for the bed to be made the second the last human crawls out of it. It is a privilege to be able to go in the first place, to feel wheels detaching from the ground, to leave and to arrive, and know new beds and nod in recognition when the pilot says "If this is your final destination, welcome home." It is a privilege to know that there is more than one place at which you can feel those words to be true for yourself.

I have not boarded a flight since August 1st. To put this in perspective, in 2010, I boarded 43. This is the longest period of time in four years for which I have stayed planted in one country without crossing its borders. When I arrived in Boston after a dizzying nine flights and one final work assignment in Mexico, I craved this sort of permanence. I wanted to put the suitcase away and feel rooted in ways that would not be challenged by the first wind of wanderlust. In many senses, I have satiated that desire. After not owning anything that could not be packed in a suitcase for four years, Elijah sent me a link to a popcorn maker yesterday. A popcorn maker -- not a microwave, not a pot with oil and corn kernels. A specific popcorn maker, teleologically and exclusively designed to, well, pop corn. Nobody boarded a 4 AM propeller plane to insert-conflict-zone-of-choice with a popcorn maker in tow, so in many senses, the link to this unlikely device has become the latest emblem of permanence and indulgence, of the redundance and accumulation that comes with making a less transient home.

That very accumulation is troubling. When I arrived here, a different symbol of permanence had etched itself into my memory: nails in the wall. I wanted the kind of certainty of staying at one place that merited a hammer and nails and cork boards and coat hooks. All of the above lend gravitas to a home, as though they signify that its resident will live here too long for thumbtacks and is too attached to the process of creating a home to live among bare walls. Had this home-making process stopped at nails-in-the-wall, I may have been exhaling more easily.

And yet, it rarely does. Stuff invades. There is stuff under the bed "for storage," stuff under the sink, also "for storage," stuff on the landing to the basement, stuff in the basement - yes, you guessed it, "for storage" - stuff that is on its way to the basement, but never made it, but really, should be kept "for storage." In a fit of post-finals energy and aggressive cleaning in late December, I started clearing space and decluttering. I told a friend then that I felt crowded by my stuff, by stuff in general. Note that I am the kind of girl who will hold on to the ticket stub for a movie that carried a little extra significance, the boarding pass that served as a bookmark, the receipt for a great meal in a country thousands of miles away six years ago. In other words, I am continuously dancing on that contradictory balance beam of wanting to hold on to the tokens of memory while needing minimalism, lightness, and space to make new memories and exhale.

The question I am living in as the new year starts is how to clear space. As I suspected when I was in the middle of the shredding and tossing, I am not crowded by books and ticket stubs alone; realistically, my earthly belongings are still trim and minimal. What is perhaps more challenging in this journey of making a home and reacquainting myself with permanence is carving out room for all the selves that seek to inhabit it. This is a question that spans all realms of my life: My academic interests range from gender and conflict to transitional justice to non-violent civil resistance to the role of documentary and narrative storytelling in the sphere of mass atrocities. This site is home to reflections ranging from love and storytelling to PTSD to field work to travelogues to, again, mass atrocities. How does one make peace between the self who is invigorated, heartened, and disheartened by her research on gender and mass atrocities, the woman who loves to read and write academically about transitional justice and peacekeeping, and the girl who loves to share photographs of red leaves in the fall and thoughts on airport goodbyes?  These identities often compete for attention, or falsely pose themselves as mutually exclusive. A blog reader even emailed me a year ago, unsolicited, to offer that if I have "academic or professional aspirations", maybe I should write more about "international development and war" and less about "love and travel."

For me, this is not about more or less. This is not an experiment in the perfect recipe of writing, working, or living. Rather, it is a question of peace and authenticity, a question of space -- of carving out space for various interests, dreams and ambitions and accommodating the ways in which they sometimes pull me in different directions. I am shedding layers and belongings these days, discarding what is weighing me down, making room on the shelves. At the same time, I am holding on to parts that still feel true, to ticket stubs that still mean something, to the identities that co-exist, however imperfectly.

For now, one different direction in which I am being pulled is being the girl who stays, rather than the girl who goes. My newsfeeds on social media are overflowing with images from my friends' winter travels. A staff member in my graduate program asked us to share photos of our wandering during the break and the stories came rushing in. For once, I have nothing. My stories all unfolded in the same zip code as the graduate program itself. I hiked in the local forest, went sledding for the first time on the university hill, saw the puppy I was watching color the snow yellow. Watching the rest of the images pour in is nagging me a bit, knowing that I thrive on wander and wonder, that the road makes me feel alive, that I derive tremendous fulfillment from my work with communities worldwide, that sitting still in one place for too long can render me restless. But I am learning permanence now, if you will, and part of that requires making peace with the part of me that will always, always want to be the girl who goes.

Milestones of 2012

I have always been attached to the process of documentation and the rituals of recording memories. Different notebooks have held disparate thoughts across eras of my life, with their pages threading together class notes on violent conflict in Africa to poetry to to-do lists to workshop outlines to endless nights of worry. For the past four years, I have lived out of a suitcase, shedding belongings and an attachment to 'stuff' and hoarding memories instead. The notebooks have been the only possessions of mine that have traveled everywhere, truly everywhere, stretching suitcases till they bloat. And even though they now sit neatly on a shelf in Boston, there was no arrangement or system to how they were organized. The only rule was that every page had to be filled before a new notebook was commissioned to be my wandering companion.

January 16, 2012 was the beginning of a new notebook, for no reason other than its predecessor running out of pages. On that day, I copied down Mary Anne Radmacher's "Living Eulogy":

Under that, inspired by Katie, I started making a list. Every year, Katie tracks goals she'd like to meet before her next birthday. Page 1 of this new notebook mirrored that format and, below Radmacher's poem, I started outlining my own hopes for 2012.

Some were laughably simple, almost thrown in there the way you write "laundry" or "grocery shopping" onto a to-do list: for the painless joy of crossing those items off. #12 on my list was "throw a party." There had been plenty of parties in my nomadic life. There was the table dancing in Guatemala -- ceaseless dancing on tables, it seemed. There were the nights in Cairo when we all gathered in that penthouse apartment and sang our lungs out to Queen. I remember the night Elijah walked me to Tahrir to hail a taxi and I could still hear Bohemian Rhapsody in the background. But then the moving, the ceaseless moving, took its toll and the parties were mostly farewell parties, for me and for others. #12 on the list was not (just) about buying Solo cups and cheap wine. It was about being embedded in a community long enough, feeling its grounding enough, to host snippets of it in my home "just because." Not because anyone was leaving, not because it was a birthday. Because it was community.

And there were parties. #12: done.

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. You see, this one correlated to #25: Learn to shoot my camera on manual. I "knew" how to use my camera on manual. I taught photography workshops for crying out loud. But it always felt a little foreign. The photos always felt nicer on 'automatic' - as though anything nice in life ever came out of automatic. The night photos, in particular, always felt shaky. All of me felt shaky at times this year. Shooting the camera on manual, dragging it along and having the weight of its strap tug on my shoulder at night, was a challenge not because of its mechanics, but because of my own wobbliness. And then Milos happened. Greece and I have the kind of relationship that melts anxiety, such that this photo can be taken, such that elbows can sit steady and skirted legs can plant themselves firmly on salty ground and hair can billow in the wind and I can hold my breath long enough to defeat the blurriness.

Milos, Greece - August 2012

#15: Take a night photograph I am proud of. Done. It is not a particularly original image. Add a cat into it, a skewer of souvlaki, and some cheesy reference to "Greece is for lovers", and it's a generic postcard. But it is clear, unshaken, and taken by me, and that makes it a cherished first. Done.

Then there were the trickier dreams. #21: Create a home. This is not a to-do item of the "laundry" and "grocery shopping" variety; it is not the kind of goal one can fulfill by focusing hard enough or trying harder or by finding the perfect rock on a Greek island onto which to perch her elbows to take a not-blurry night photograph. The irony behind this wish is that I did not expect it to be fulfilled until the fall came, and the suitcases were unpacked and put away, and I lived in Boston with the ability to firmly derive my identity from being a graduate student. 

Jerusalem snuck up on me. It insisted on not being ephemeral. It demanded lasting love. It required commitment: the purchase of the space heater, the unavoidable conversations with everyone on the street from the baker to the laundromat operator. The evaporation of any desire to avoid conversation. I did not think 2012 would hold two homes, but it did. Some would argue that the very existence of multiple homes speaks to the lack of a solid, meaningful one -- but, in this case, I'll take the polyamory.

I cannot pronounce #21 done; no home is ever 'done', the process of making one is never complete -- let alone the process of creating and sustaining multiple homes in one's heart. But #21 is the kind of item I would never like to cross off a list and pronounce 'done' in the first place. I simply wanted to know it was possible.

Some of the items on my 2012 wishlist stand unfulfilled, but I am determined to give them another try. See #14: Keep an ideas notebook. I have a noisy brain, the kind that I am trying to make peace with, rather than silence. Particularly in moments of euphoria, ideas zoom through it and most of them remain uncaptured, evading me in the moments of calm when I try to revisit them. When Kim sent me a notebook with "Ideas" scribbled on its cover in February, it seemed like the perfect moment to slow down and start jotting down the thoughts born out of elation or enthusiasm before they become too fleeting to ground. The pages of that notebook are still blank. I still want to try in 2013, because I want the mornings after ideas to be just as alive and enlivening. #14: not done, decidedly not done. But still salient enough, necessary enough to stay on the wish list for another year.

Then there were the wishes that remained unfulfilled, but I am willing to let them stand as such. They either became less relevant as the year passed or I grew readier to live without them. I never entered a contest (#7) with my writing or photography in 2012, nor did I send 12 handwritten letters (#24). I wrote new columns in 2012 and I published photo-essays, but I never quite went through with clicking submit and having my work evaluated by a panel of seriousness. I penned endless cards and thank you notes and Christmas wishes and Congratulations on your marriage, but 12 handwritten letters never quite happened. I could dissect why that was, I could investigate the desire behind those items in the first place, but they do not burn brightly enough any more to necessitate that. As such, #7 and #24: unchecked, peacefully so.

Unlike those items, there were those at which I failed abjectly, and disappointingly. #1: Worry less. In my final Gypsy Girls Guide column, on January 3, 2012, a mere day after my birthday, I wrote that I wanted 2012 to be the "year of the exhale." I knew then, as I know now, that a human being cannot go on worrying at the level and meticulousness that I do. I was aware that it was time to let go of some of the anxiety, of the post-traumatic stress, of the grief, of the intensity of conflict zones, of the emotional minefield of work that I did not know (or want) to do unemotionally. I wrote then:

It is not journeys I long for this year. It is not novelty or fireworks I crave, though I welcome all of this into my life and am open to it if it comes. In 2012, I am willing a quiet mind. In 2012, I want to banish Ray LaMontagne for Damien Rice and his belief that I can “look into my eyes and see that noone will harm me.” Some former smokers say that months after quitting smoking, an exhale comes and they breathe deeply, making it all worth it. In 2012, I am living for the exhale.

2012 endowed me with journeys, novelty, fireworks -- and some exhales, too. But I was naive to think that those would come without more moments that cut an inhale short, trigger a gasp, or make me hold my breath till I turn blue in the face. Exhaling was beautiful and needed, but if I am to keep writing, and reflecting, and living with intention - as Mary Anne Radmacher would have it - then I need to learn not only to wish for the exhale, but also to master creating it myself and living patiently with the moments that render it elusive. I failed at worrying less this year. In the scheme of life, this is a more costly failure than having failed at other items on the wish list. I am slowly realizing that in my life, item #1 from year to year will continue to be Worry Less, until it, too, is rendered unnecessary. Until this wish has been scratched off the list, edged off by other priorities, sufficiently conquered, or - perhaps more realistically - until I make peace.

A version of this column will appear on The Equals Record next week.

Favorite books of 2012

A glimpse into one of my shelves in Boston, complete with flashcards and library books.

The Saturdays of my childhood involved my father picking me up from gymnastics practice to take me to my favorite bookstore on Aristotelous Square in Thessaloniki. I used to pick out my favorite Enid Blyton novels, sometimes as many as five at a time. We would then buy sunflower seeds and take the bus home. Thus would commence hours of reading, interrupted by my mother imploring me to shower and eat something other than sunflower seeds. Only after reading a whole book would I stop for actual dinner, at which point my mother would ask with bewilderment "How many pages did you read today?!" My father always stopped her, trying to instill in me the sense that pages do not matter. "We do not read for the number of pages. It is not a race, not a competition."

Much has changed since then. Harvard, and graduate school, have been constant races of who-has-more-pages-to-read-than-whom. "Death by reading," I wrote tongue-in-cheek in September. My father is long gone, and Aristotelous Square is, optimistically, an ocean and two plane rides away. My love for reading, Saturday afternoons, and sunflower seeds, however, remains intact. Goodreads has become my favorite way to digitally keep track of the books I have read and new books I wish to read in the future. It, too, has fallen prey to the reading arms race, asking "what page are you on?" every time I log in and stacking the books I have read in a year. There are even challenges for the more competitive among us. "Read 52 books a year: one per week!", proclaims one of them. 

When I enrolled in graduate school this fall, I vowed to only add books to my Goodreads shelf if they were books I would have chosen while browsing through a bookstore. It seemed unfair to add every book on every syllabus to my "Books I Read in 2012" shelf. The collage that emerges is one that feels true to life: collections of essays, memoirs, reflections on photography, travelogues, love, conflict theory, social justice, feminist literature, more essays. Here are some favorites among them. 

Favorite assigned reading: For a group project on Rwanda in my Politics of Violent Conflict in Africa class, I had to read Scott Straus' The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. It encompassed two qualities I seem to be drawn to: methodical and heartbreaking. In addition to the groundbreaking methodology on assessing individuals' motivations for participating in genocide, the book supplied me with one of my favorite excerpts of the semester. Since I read it, it has leaped onto Post-It notes and blog posts, and it encapsulates many of the questions - personal and academic - that I, too, live in:

"I never expected to be in Zaire or Rwanda or to cover raw violence, but once I witnessed such events, I could not let go of them easily. Eventually my trauma formulated itself as an intellectual question: Why does violence of this magnitude happen?" 

Favorite memoir: Calling it a memoir is, practically, cheating. In a very strict sense, Susan Sontag did write this life story of hers. And yet, a memoir implies a sense of agency and choice that she did not exercise post-mortem. David Rieff, Sontag's son, published a series of her journals and notebooks, with the caveat that "what I do know is that as a reader and a writer my mother loved diaries and letters -- the more intimate the better. So perhaps Susan Sontag the writer would have approved of what I've done. I hope so at any rate." For him, for her, for the reader, Reborn: Susan Sontag's Journals & Notebooks (one volume in a series of her published diaries) is a leap of faith. There is a moth-to-a-fire quality to being intrigued by the writing. Sontag haunts with her intelligence, insight, and layered consciousness. She makes it hard to read her words at night, in bed, with the book crawling under the pillow when I fall asleep -- my preferred mode of indulgence. Perhaps that is because so many of her thoughts are disquieting, or disquietingly familiar:

6/19/1949: "Yet the past is no more past because it was delimited within a particular geographic area from which one is now irrevocably departed, than if it were all lived in the same place..."

[...]

2/13/1950: "I believe in more than the personal epic with the hero-thread, in more than my own life: above multiple spuriousness + despair, there is freedom + transcendence. One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong + fruitful."

Recommended -- but to be read in a chair, if you do not want your loved one to ask, "Darling, do we have to sleep with Susan every night?"

Favorites by virtue of the place at which I read them: I can imagine a universe in which I would not be attached to these books. If my friends were to tell me that these books are not, in fact, that special, I could believe them. But sometimes you cannot divorce a narrative from the place at which you were first exposed to it, sometimes you cannot separate the book cover from the setting and the words from your life's context.

One such book this year was Andre Aciman's Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, which feels like sand flicked onto legs by children running into the sea. Aciman narrates his experiences in Italy and, though entangled at times in flowery descriptions,the book is full of insight on home and away, wander and wonder.  My highlighted passages, with a side of sunscreen, included:

On place and rituals: "Sometimes the history of provisional attachments means more to us than the attachments themselves, the way the history of a love affair stirs more love than the affair itself. Sometimes it is in blind ritual and not faith that we encounter the sacred, the way it is habit not character that makes us who we are. Sometimes the clothes and scents we wear have more of us in them than we do ourselves."

On writing, place, memory: "Writing might even bring me closer to this street than I'd been while living there. Writing wouldn't alter or exaggerate anything; it would simply excavate, rearrange, lace a narrative, recollect in tranquility, where ordinary life is perfectly happy to nod and move on. Writing sees figures where life sees things; things we leave behind, figures we keep. Even the experience of numbness, when traced on paper, acquires a resigned and disenchanted grace, a melancholy cadence that seems at once intimate and aroused compared with the original blah. Write about numbness, and numbness turns into something. Upset flat surfaces, dig out their shadows, and you've got dreammaking."

On joy, place, memory: "It is a transposed and counterintuitive joy, joy by proxy, the vicarious, artificial joy of finding in one place things lost in another."  

Since college, I have been copying my favorite passages from the books I read into notebooks, as a depository of inspiration to dig through when I need it. I copied 25 passages out of Aciman's book this year, more than any other book I read for pleasure. Tellingly, this was a year of reflecting on place and memory, nostalgia and home, writing and intimacy, and the intersection of these explorations.

Other books I associate with the places at which I read them:

On the beach in Halkidiki, with sunscreen spray on the Kindle: Love Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, edited by Nura Maznavi and Ayesha Mattu. This was an interesting project, as it brought together 25 Muslim American women to reflect on love, sexuality, religion, spirituality, family and social prescriptions. It was perhaps an incongruent read for the bikini-filled beaches of Greece, and not necessarily one of the most moving books of the year for me, but a lot of it resonated, called back memories, and made me smile on the universality of love.

On the plane to Tel Aviv: Palo Alto, James Franco. This one felt like a less original take on The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Plus, I could not get the image of Franco eating his own arm in a movie out of my head while reading.

On the plane to Khartoum: Man Walks into A Room, Nicole Krauss. In the middle of the night in bed in Jerusalem: Red Book, Deborah Copaken Kogan -- eerily and familiarly, about Harvard alumni reunions. On the plane to Mexico: Girl in Translation, Jean Kwok. In the middle of the night in bed in Greece: Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love and War, Annia Ciezadlo.

Favorite books related to my work and passions:  Every time I accept a work assignment in a new conflict-affected area, I turn to books to not only learn about the conflict itself but also to jar my imagination of the place I am about to behold and the communities in which I am about to parachute. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that much of this year's reading has been thematic.

There were the Sudan books: A re-read of Alex de Waal and Julie Flint's Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, a fascinating account of Sudan-related policy in Rebecca Hamilton's Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle To Stop Genocide, heartbreaking and inspiring memoirs and essays in Jen Marlowe's Darfur Diaries, Halima Bashir's Tears of the Desert, and Daoud Hari's The Translator. They were the kinds of books that were read with a knot in my throat, and a constant desire for that crack in everything that lets the light in, as Leonard Cohen would have it.

There were the books that appeared on syllabi and that called me to re-read them, or to fall in love with them anew. Mazurana, Raven-Roberts, and Parpart's Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping should really be part of the canon for anyone interested in this topic, as should Cynthia Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. The latter may seem outdated at times, and should be read as a companion to Enloe's more recent work.

Marianne Elliott's book on the personal dimensions of humanitarian work in conflict areas, on the intricacies of conflict management and international development in war-affected communities, and on the challenges to mental health that this work presents has been eye-opening and has felt like home. Marianne recalled her years of service with the UN in Afghanistan with a candor and vulnerability that moved me to pieces. It is slated for a US release within 2013, and I will likely profile it in greater detail closer to that date, but for now, do order Zen Under Fire from New Zealand.

Finally, for anyone interested in civil resistance and non-violence, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-violent Conflict continues to be an incredible guide to the subject, and a phenomenal example of data analysis on violent and non-violent conflict.

Favorite surprise: Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things. Reviewing this for The Equals Record earlier this year, I wrote:

The problem with reading in tiny spurts, with eyes half-shut from fatigue and thoughts of humanitarian law swimming in your head, is that such mental states are not conducive to enveloping yourself in an imaginary universe and allowing it to sweep you away. They do not create the necessary conditions for magic; magic requires time and a desire to give in to a plot, regardless of bedtimes, alarm clocks, or beckoning libraries. Perhaps this is why I so appreciated Cheryl Strayed’s ability to create magic out of directness, to bear beauty out of her honesty. This book was the product of an advice column Strayed wrote (anonymously, at the time) for The Rumpus under the moniker “Dear Sugar.” One of my favorite Dear Sugar columns gave this collection of essays its name. Read that column here, and dive into the book with—as Strayed puts it—”the courage to break your own heart.”

Books on my holiday reading list: Every December, I indulge in purchases of books to read over the holidays. This December was the first in 4 years when I was able to return to the Harvard Book Store, at the corner of the street I lived as a college student. This year's holiday reading list, compiled in part from the Remainders basement at this bookstore and from gifts by beloved friends:

Losing my Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way, Richard Branson. This was a gift from Kate. If you look like you are 15 years old, as I sometimes do, it is an embarrassing book to read on the subway around nosy fellow riders who not read past the colon. Looking forward to insights on entrepreneurship and life decisions.

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz. Another book with an alarming title -- this time for boyfriends who may be browsing the bookstore with you. I fell in love with Diaz through The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so I knew I had to read this when it came out.

A Man Of Parts, David Lodge. He has perfected writing about academia and its blurry lines between life and work, propriety and exhilaration. I haven't revisited his writing since reading Small World a decade ago, so when this appeared in the remainders pile, it had to come home with me.

Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag. Self-explanatory, really.

Love at the Speed of Email, Lisa McKay. Another gift. Think my friends are trying to tell me something about reflecting on love, the digital world, and correspondences? A stress manager for humanitarian workers (yes, really -- I need to befriend this woman!) reflects on loneliness, companionship, and love.

To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, Rebecca Walker.

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, Orhan Pamuk.

Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, Kaya Oakes. Another one out of the remainders pile at Harvard Bookstore, with the feeling that it would make a great travel companion.

Maiden Voyages, Mary Morris. Morris focuses on women travel writers and I was hoping this collection of essays would quench some of the wanderlust. Now afraid it will merely rekindle it.

Favorite digital discovery: Even though this post focuses on beloved books, I had to include my two favorite digital discoveries. "Uncommon" describes itself as aspiring to be a front porch for the internet. In its own words, "Uncommon is a slow web community that celebrates the things we love. It's a place for wonder and whimsy -- a trampoline, not a rabbit hole." It came into my life through the lovely Diana Kimball at a time when I was reflecting on the joy of front porches and its free weekly newsletter always fills me with reflection, whimsy, and beautiful words.

For the full list of books I read in 2012, and the books on my to-read shelf, visit me on Goodreads. Please note that none of the links in this post are affiliate links and I do not receive revenue from Amazon for including them. And now I'd love to hear your favorite reads of 2012 -- which books have stayed with you?