Let me start with something a little awkward. I have been sitting at this desk for a while now, trying to figure out how to begin a piece about trauma without sounding like I am competing in some kind of grief Olympics. Because I am not. I really am not. And if, by the time you finish reading this, you think I was, then I have failed, and I owe you another editorial to make it up to you.
So let me say it plainly before I say anything else: when something terrible happens anywhere in the world — a school shooting, a terror attack, a plane that should have landed and did not, a bridge that collapsed, a single life cut short in a way that should never have been possible — the pain is real. The films made about it are justified. The documentaries are necessary. The long, quiet articles in magazines with good paper and better photography, the ones that walk you through a single family’s grief for forty pages, those are a form of public service. I mean that. When a community loses people, the world should stop and look, and sometimes it even does, and that is one of the few things about modern life that still gives me a little faith in the species.
What I want to talk about is something else. Something quieter. Something that does not usually get the forty pages, or the Oscar-nominated score, or the tasteful slow-motion footage of candles being lit in a cathedral. I want to talk about what happens to the rest of us. The ones who live in the places where the news crews arrive, file two minutes of footage, and then fly back out before their hotel bill gets interesting.
I want to talk about our kind of trauma. The Lebanese kind. The Middle Eastern kind. The kind that does not come in a single, cinematic event but in waves, in decades, in whole childhoods spent learning to tell the difference between a door slamming and something worse. The kind that you are expected to dust off, because the alternative — actually sitting down and feeling all of it — would probably kill you, or at least make you useless for the rest of the week, and there is bread to buy and a cousin to check on and a generator bill that will not pay itself.
Here is the thing that has been bothering me lately, and I suspect it has been bothering you too, even if you have not had the time or the energy to put words to it. Today, as I am writing this, there has been another massacre. I am not going to name it, because by the time you read this there will probably be another one, and I do not want this piece to have an expiration date. You know the shape of it. Hundreds dead. Thousands injured. Buildings that were apartment buildings in the morning and geological formations by the afternoon. And the numbers scroll by on the bottom of some news channel somewhere, and a man in a suit on the other side of the world calls for calm, and then the weather comes on.
And we, the people actually living inside the story, are expected to do what exactly? Mourn efficiently? Grieve on a schedule? Get back to work once the ceasefire holds for what, seventy-two hours? Because the really strange part, the part that I cannot stop turning over in my head like a stone in my pocket, is that we mostly do. We dust off. We reopen the shop. We sweep the glass. We send the kids back to school the minute there is a school to send them back to. And the world looks at this and concludes, with a kind of admiring shrug, that we must be used to it.
Used to it. I want to sit with that phrase for a moment, because it is one of the most quietly insulting things anyone has ever said about us, and it gets said so often that it has stopped sounding like an insult. It sounds, by now, almost like a compliment. Look at them, so resilient. Look at them, so tough. Look at them, rebuilding Beirut for the — what are we on now, the seventh time? The eighth? I have lost count, and I live here.
But here is what I need you to understand, and I am going to say it as gently as I can, because I do not want to yell at you across the page: nobody gets used to this. Nobody. The human nervous system did not evolve to get used to this. It is not a feature of our biology to shrug off the death of a neighbor. What looks like getting used to it, from the outside, is actually something much more complicated and much more expensive. It is called survival mode. And survival mode is not the same as being okay. It is the opposite of being okay. It is what your body does when being okay is not one of the options on the menu.
I think the confusion happens because trauma, in the version the world is most familiar with, has a clear before and after. There was a life, and then there was an event, and then there was the aftermath, and the aftermath has a recognizable shape. People go to therapy. People write memoirs. People have a bad day on the anniversary. The whole thing fits inside a story arc that a screenwriter could structure in their sleep.
Our kind of trauma does not fit that shape, because there is no before. Or rather, the before is so far back that nobody in the room actually remembers it. I was born into this. My parents were born into some version of it. My grandparents, a slightly different version. You ask a Lebanese person to describe their peaceful childhood and watch their eyes do this small, complicated thing, because they are trying to figure out which years to give you. The years before the car bomb down the street, or the years after but before the assassination, or the years after the assassination but before the war that we do not officially call a war because calling it one would require paperwork nobody wants to file.
And because there is no clean before, there is no clean after either. There is just during. A very, very long during. You cannot have post-traumatic stress disorder, in the textbook sense, if the trauma has never agreed to become post. What you have instead is something for which there is no tidy acronym, and I suspect that is part of why the world has such a hard time seeing it. It does not photograph well. It does not make a good documentary, because documentaries need an ending, and we do not have one of those in stock right now.
Let me try a small thought experiment with you. Imagine, just for a minute, that every few years, for as long as you have been alive, a catastrophe on the scale of the worst day in your country’s modern history happened to your city. Not the news version. The actual version. The one where the people who died were people you knew, or people your mother knew, or people whose kids were in your kids’ class. Now imagine that after each one, the world expected you to be processing, healing, moving on, and also, by the way, running a small business, raising children, attending weddings, showing up to work on time, and being a charming dinner guest who does not bring down the mood. Imagine that the international coverage of your ongoing catastrophe was measured not in weeks but in minutes, and that those minutes were usually devoted to explaining, to a bored anchor, why the whole thing is actually very complicated and has roots going back to a treaty nobody read.
That is the shape of it. That is what I mean when I say our kind of trauma. It is not worse than anyone else’s — I want to be very clear about that, because the last thing I am interested in is a pain contest, and anyone who tries to win one is already losing — but it is differently shaped. And the shape matters. The shape is why the usual vocabulary does not fit. The shape is why, when a well-meaning person from somewhere calmer asks if you are okay after an incident, you sometimes find yourself laughing, and the laugh comes out wrong, and you have to explain that you are not laughing at them, you are laughing because the word incident is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
I want to say something now about the humor, because if you have spent any time with Lebanese people, or Syrians, or Iraqis, or Palestinians, or really anyone from this neighborhood, you have probably noticed that we are, on average, quite funny. Darkly, bitterly, spectacularly funny. And I have watched outsiders interpret this in two different ways, and both of them bother me.
The first interpretation is that the humor is proof of our resilience, our indomitable spirit, our inspiring ability to find joy in the rubble. This is the sentimental version, and it tends to show up in think pieces written by people who visited for a week. The second interpretation is that the humor is proof that we do not really feel things as deeply as other people do, that we are somehow hardened, that our emotional wiring has been recalibrated by exposure. This is the crueler version, and it tends to show up in the mouths of powerful men who need a reason to look away.
Both interpretations are wrong, and they are wrong in the same direction. The humor is not resilience and it is not numbness. The humor is a pressure valve. It is the sound a kettle makes before it explodes, and we are all, at any given moment, very slightly whistling. If we stopped making jokes, we would have to start screaming, and screaming is exhausting and it scares the children. So we make jokes. We make jokes about the generator. We make jokes about the politicians. We make jokes about the exchange rate, which is itself a joke, a joke the economy is telling us, and we are laughing along because the alternative is to sit down in the middle of the street and not get up.
I do not want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying we are secretly miserable all the time, putting on a brave face for the tourists. That would be just as false as saying we have adapted and are fine. The truth, as usual, is messier and more human. We have real joys. We genuinely love our food and our music and our ridiculous, beautiful language, with its three words for every feeling and none of them quite right. We love our mountains and our sea and the specific way the light hits the stone in the late afternoon. We fall in love. We have favorite cafes. We argue about which village makes the best kibbeh, and we are each, every one of us, absolutely correct about our own answer. We are not a people in mourning every second of every day. We are a people who have learned to hold joy and grief in the same hand, at the same time, without dropping either one, and if you think that is easy, I invite you to try it for a weekend.
What I am saying is that the joy is not the absence of the grief. The two coexist. They share an apartment. They take turns doing the dishes. And the grief is real, and it is constant, and it does not get smaller just because we have gotten better at carrying it. We have not gotten used to anything. We have gotten practiced. There is a difference, and it is the difference between a limp you do not notice anymore and a leg that has actually healed.
Now, about the resilience thing. I have a slightly complicated relationship with that word, and I want to share it with you, because I think you might recognize some of it. When someone calls us resilient, I know they mean it as a compliment. I do. I am not going to be ungracious about it. But resilience, in the way the word gets used about people like us, often functions as a kind of permission slip. It is a way of saying: you can handle this, so we do not have to help. You have bounced back before, so we will assume you will bounce back again. Your ability to keep going under impossible conditions is being treated as evidence that the conditions are not actually impossible, which means nobody needs to do anything about the conditions.
I do not want to be resilient. I did not audition for the role. Nobody in my family sat me down when I was seven and asked whether I would like to grow up to be an inspiring example of the human capacity to endure. I would have said no, thank you, I would prefer to be bored. I would have asked for the same childhood that kids in countries with functioning electrical grids get to have, the one where the biggest crisis of your week is a math test you did not study for. That sounds amazing. I would take that in a heartbeat. I would trade every inch of my hard-won resilience for one uninterrupted year of being mildly, luxuriously bored.
And I think this is the thing that does not come through in the coverage, when the coverage bothers to show up. The idea that we might not want this. The idea that resilience is not a personality trait we are cultivating, like a hobby, but a survival skill we have been forced to develop because the alternative was being crushed. The idea that behind every inspiring photograph of a Lebanese grandmother sweeping glass off her balcony, there is a grandmother who is very, very tired, and who would quite like to put the broom down now, please, if that is okay with everybody.
I promised you this piece would not be all heavy, and I am trying to keep that promise, so let me tell you something that I think is genuinely, almost embarrassingly hopeful. It is the reason I wanted to write this in the first place, and it is something I do not see anyone else saying out loud, so I will say it here and you can decide what to do with it.
Given everything — given the decades of it, given the constant hum of it, given the casual way our pain gets dismissed by people who should know better, given the fact that we have watched our children die and then been told by distant commentators that we must be used to it by now — given all of that, the real story, the actual miracle, is that we have not turned into monsters. That is the part nobody wants to talk about. That is the headline that never gets written. Because it should not be possible. On paper, by every rule of human psychology I have ever read, we should be a region full of people who have become the thing that was done to us. And we are not. We are, by and large, still here, still human, still capable of feeding a stranger, still capable of loving a child, still capable of falling apart at a wedding when the singer hits a particular note, still capable of being moved by kindness, still capable of kindness ourselves. That is not resilience. That is something much stranger and much more important. That is a daily refusal.
Every morning, millions of people in this part of the world wake up and, without even realizing they are doing it, choose not to become the worst version of what has happened to them. They send their kids to school. They go to work. They make their mother-in-law a coffee. They help a neighbor. They do not lash out at the stranger in the car next to them, even though they have every earthly reason to be in a rage that never ends. This is a moral achievement of such staggering, daily scale that I do not know how to describe it without sounding like I am exaggerating. I am not exaggerating. If anything, I am underselling it.
So when you hear someone say that we are used to it, or that we are somehow a people apart, a people who do not feel things the way other people do, I want you to know that what you are hearing is a lie. A convenient one, for the people telling it, because it lets them off the hook. But a lie all the same. The blood in our veins is the same blood. The love we feel for our dead is the same love. The way a mother in Beirut holds a photograph of her son is exactly the way a mother anywhere in the world holds a photograph of her son. There is no trick. There is no special Middle Eastern callus that makes it hurt less. It hurts exactly as much. We have just had to get very, very good at walking around with the hurt, because sitting down with it was never an option.
If you are reading this from somewhere safer, and I hope you are, I am not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt is useless and I do not want it from you. What I am asking for is something smaller and, I think, more possible. I am asking you to stop believing the story that we are fine. Stop believing the story that we have adapted. Stop believing the story that our grief is somehow quieter or less cinematic or less worthy of a slow piano score than anyone else’s grief. And the next time some well-dressed person on a podium refers to us as a people who are accustomed to this kind of thing, I am asking you to feel, in the pit of your stomach, that something wrong has just been said, even if you cannot immediately articulate why.
And if you are reading this from here — from Beirut, from Baalbek, from Gaza, from any of the places where the sky sometimes does things skies should not do — I want to say this, and I want you to know I mean it. You are not made of stone. You never were. The fact that you are still soft on the inside, after everything, is not a weakness you need to fix. It is, as far as I can tell, the most impressive thing about you. Keep it. Guard it. It is the part of you that they were trying to take, and they have not managed it yet, and I do not think they are going to.
We are not used to this. We will never be used to this. And the day we stop being able to say that out loud is the day we should all start worrying. Until then, I am going to keep saying it, and I hope you will say it too, in whatever rooms you find yourself in. Because the cruelest thing that can happen to a people in pain is to be told, politely and repeatedly, that they are not really in pain. And the kindest thing we can do for each other, across every border that tries to explain us away, is to refuse the lie together.
That is all I have got for you at this time. Go easy on yourself. Call someone you love. If you are in a place where the ground is steady under your feet tonight, notice it, because that is not nothing. And if you are in a place where it is not, then I am with you, for whatever that is worth, which on some days is not much and on other days is the only thing keeping any of us going at all.
Danny Ballan
Editor-in-Chief,
English Plus Magazine
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