No, I'm not doing OK.

No, I’m not doing OK. 

That’s the hardest thing to say… especially for someone like me who prides herself on staying positive, being a caregiver, always getting my work done. A productive perfectionist. A byproduct of neoliberal values. Go go go. No time to be vulnerable. No time to feel anything. Stay focused on this project, that email, this lesson plan. If you get a lot done, you’ll feel better. Apparently, that’s an unhealthy addiction. An addiction to success pumps the same chemicals into our brains like alcohol or drugs. It also pumps blood into the neoliberal monster that has made us all commit our lives to profit and productivity, the handmaidens of “success.”  

No, I’m not doing OK. I can’t be in this meeting right now. 

The country where I was born, where most of my family and friends still live, has been blown to bits. The third most powerful explosion of a city in human history. First, Hiroshima. Then, Nagasaki.  Then, Beirut

And I sit here, as an emigrant, expatriate, refugee, whatever you want to call me, worlds and worlds away in my suburban house in my peaceful neighborhood and I feel like I need to jump out of my skin. I try to slow my breath like all the wise souls have taught me, but I actually hyperventilate. I try to sit still, but I want to pace. Maybe if I just walk and walk around the neighborhood, I’ll feel forward momentum. Take steps somewhere. To nowhere. 

Maybe if I research where and how to donate to support the victims of this magnificent example of human and political negligence, I’ll feel like I’m doing something. But, then I get stuck. The Lebanese pound has lost 80% of its value since October.  3,850 pounds per dollar for withdrawals from U.S. dollar accounts. If I collect and donate funds, will the value depreciate so much so that the money just gets eaten up by something more powerful than us? I don’t know where the money goes in that scenario… what happens to the difference between what I send and what is received. People say something about the Black Market or try to explain to me how the mind-bending financial crisis has affected the banks in Lebanon, but my mind goes blank when they explain it and I can’t wrap my head around their words. I am emotionally dysregulated, so my brain can’t process complex math right now.

No, I’m not doing OK. I can’t send this email right now. 

Last night, in bed, I couldn’t stop crying. And, the familiar refrain I’ve said since I was only four years old came back to visit me: I want to go home. I just want to go home. Over and over and over and over. Self-soothing or haunting? I don’t know. I think both.

The night before, my dreams were filled with images of the explosion. The indescribable waves of force that just charged through the city, engulfing buildings and all the living beings in those buildings. Over and over and over and over. The red force wave of toxic gases replayed itself. 

I could have lost my family. I could have lost my best friend and her one-month-old first child. My Baby Bean who I could only see through the screen of my What’s App, whose mom had been trying to keep it together with beauty and grace in the midst of a revolution, a pandemic, and an economic collapse, before the mushroom cloud blew out the windows in the apartment building where she lives miles and miles from the site of the explosion. 

And, all I can do is send What’sApp messages of broken hearts and prayerful hands to all my friends and family, and sit with my sister, mother and father wearing masks on their balcony or my deck. We stare off into space a lot. I watch my father’s eyes. How is he thinking about all this? This beautiful soul who had dedicated his whole life to promoting peace in his country, to reconciling opposing factions, to trying to find hope through love. How is my father—the man I have admired and followed around, watching him commit his life to humanitarian activism—thinking about all this?  Even though his cognitive memory fades, I know that the embodied memory is as powerful as ever. He, my sister, mother and I, are feeling this in our bones, our nervous systems, our throats, and that damn pressure in the chest.

Today, in my meditation practice, I tried to “sit with difficult emotions” and notice them and let them grow. What grew was the hole in my chest. It grew so much that I felt like I needed to hurl. 

No, I’m not doing OK. I can’t look at my course template and plan my lessons for the Fall. 

Survivor’s guilt is not an unfamiliar feeling to me. To any of us who are watching our country ravaged by an apocalypse, the feeling of guilt is profound. I should be there. I should be working with my hands, clearing rubble, making hot meals for the homeless and displaced, donating blood. I should be sitting there with my aunts and uncles, my precious cousins who I grew up with, my best friend and her tiny baby daughter, processing this catastrophe in my native language. Sitting mesmerized, but together. 

But now, I sit with my nuclear family, and we all feel helpless and frozen. And, our memories of bombs and machetes and decapitated heads and armed militiamen and underground shelters and massacres at refugee camps and the kidnapping and killing of my father’s father and the terror of the 17 year civil war-- these memories are unleashed in the hollowness of our silence. 

Do we even have the right to feel this bad? Come on. You’re being dramatic. Get yourself together. You aren’t there walking through rubble and overrun hospitals. You aren’t living in a country where the port that brings in 80% of the country’s food and produces 85% of the country’s grain has just been blasted into oblivion. So, stop feeling sorry for yourself. 

This isn’t pity for ourselves. This is pity for our nation. This is the intractable trauma that all Lebanese carry: citizens and expatriates. 

What can we do from this far away? If there wasn’t a global pandemic, I would get on the next plane. When is the next time we will get on a plane to go home? And, when we do go home, what will we find left of our country and its people? 

No, I’m not doing OK.  Like all Lebanese at home or abroad, I am a ball of every painful emotion you can conjure up. 

My mom says she prays that the Phoenix rises from the ashes. Let’s all pray for that. 

And, if nothing else, let the world see this tragedy as a lesson in the tremendous toll that corrupt oligarchy can take on a country and its spirit.