Love at the Speed of Email (3 page)

These are melancholy moments. These are days when I wake up
and wonder whether I wouldn’t perhaps feel happier, more fulfilled or less
restless on a radically different path. When I would really like to come home
to someone who’s vowed to be interested in how my day was. When I just want
someone to bring me coffee in bed or rub my shoulders uninvited.

Yet, right alongside these wonderings that sometimes
dead-end in visions of my dying alone at ninety lie other wonderings, other
fears.

After a nomadic life that has been largely defined by coming
and (always, inevitably) going, am I even capable of the sort of commitment
demanded by marriage and children and a place called home?

I touched on this confused tangle of longings recently with
a girlfriend for whom I was a bridesmaid a decade ago. Jane is now living on a
verdant pecan farm in Australia ten miles from my parents’ place, complete with
a sweet prince of a husband, two little girls, a dog, two cats, a horse, and a
veggie garden.

“You know, I want your life sometimes,” I confessed near the
end of our conversation.

Jane laughed. “My brain is turning to mush with no one but
the kids to talk to all day, and when you say that you spent – Eloise, I told
you to stay at the table while you finished your milk! Sit back down please –
when you say that you spent last week in Boston at a conference and you’re off
to New York next week,
I
want
your
life.”

* * *

“No,” I said to Travis in our kitchen in Los Angeles that
night after thinking for a minute or two about his question. “I don’t often put
a brave face on acute pain. I’m happy by myself.
Mostly.
It’s just that sometimes I wonder about a different life, you know?”

“Yeah,” Travis said, doubtless wondering whether he would
ever achieve his dream of making it big as a Hollywood director and be able to
quit his day job. “I know all about that. Write about that.”

Los
Angeles, USA

When it comes to wondering about a different life, mine is
not my parents’ story. Both of them grew up firmly planted on farms in
Australia. My father milked cows before and after school, wore hand-me-down
clothes, and still talks with emotion of the treat that it was to have roast
chicken on Christmas Day. My mother attended the two-room schoolhouse just down
the road from their sugar cane farm. Hers was a childhood full of chores, too,
but also of fishing in the river across the road and caravanning at the nearby
beach every summer. When my parents decided to attend university, they were
treading a different path from most of their peers. They were also leaving the
only homes they had ever known.

After a childhood of unfathomable stability, marriage to
each other at twenty-one, and seven years spent living in Canberra (a strong
contender for the planet’s most boring capital city)
,
I can understand why my parents wondered about a different life. I can
understand the allure of a radical new path. I can understand – though still I
marvel at their naïve bravery – why they decided to pack up their three young
children and move to Bangladesh to pursue development work.

My grandparents were less understanding. My mother’s parents
even suggested that if they
must
go,
we children should stay with them.

“Don’t worry,” my parents reassured them. “It’s only for two
years. Then we’ll be back.”

Twenty-one years and seven international moves later, my
parents finally relocated back to Australia. During their time away, they’d
weathered two government coups and several emergency evacuations and collected
more than their share of interesting experiences. They’d also raised three
global nomads who were equally accustomed to spending time in seaside resorts
and slums and who felt one part self-assured citizens of the world and two
parts outsiders pretty much wherever they went.

This is why I still don’t fully understand my own perpetual
wonderings about a different life – I have already had many lives in many
places. And the life I now live is the sort of life that my parents left
Australia hoping to find in Bangladesh.

I am the director of education and training services for a
nonprofit organization dedicated to providing psychological support services to
humanitarian workers around the world.
 
When I am not delivering workshops on stress, trauma, and resilience in
cities as divergent as Amsterdam or Nairobi, I find myself in Los Angeles. To
outside observers interested in this sort of work, I look as if I have it made
– a meaningful job with frequent travel and a home base in one of the great
cities of the developed world. And when I come across these outside observers,
often students who are longing to find an entrée into humanitarian work, they
all want to know pretty much the same thing.

How did you get your job? How did you get your life?

These, I am afraid, are entirely valid questions without
satisfying answers. I often feel as if these students are looking for a set of
instructions they can use to map out a clear pathway for themselves. What they
get instead, if I’m being honest, is a shrug. For the truth of the matter is,
I’m still not entirely sure
how
I got
this job, much less this life that can still feel as if it doesn’t fit me quite
right.

Sydney,
Australia

When I have the time to give someone the extended version of
the pathway to now, I usually begin the story in Sydney, around the time I
graduated with a master’s degree in forensic psychology. By this time, after
six years of learning to call Australia home and actually mean it, I had
figured out that a large part of my heart was still overseas and that I wanted
to be an international humanitarian worker.

At least that’s how I put it to my parents when I rang them
where they were living at the time to let them know that now that I’d invested
all this effort and no small sum of their money into psychology, I wasn’t sure
I wanted to be a psychologist anymore.

“Why not?”
Mum asked reasonably.

“I just feel like I really
should
be overseas,” I said, stopping just short of claiming divine
directive on the topic, “and I don’t want to work in prison again.”

I knew Mum wouldn’t argue with that second point. My parents
hadn’t been thrilled when I announced my decision to specialize in forensics.
Neither were they charmed upon learning that my first internship would have me
spending six months in the maximum-security unit of Australia’s largest prison
for men, and I doubt that my subsequent anecdotes about making knives out of
toothbrushes and smuggling drugs in tennis balls did all that much to reassure
them. They were much happier when I left the prison and moved on to my next
rotation, with the state police. Or, at least, they were happy until they found
out the types of cases we were regularly called in for: child abuse, sexual
assault, shootings, and particularly nasty homicides.

“So can I
come
stay with you in the
Philippines for a while?” I asked.

Mum sighed over the long-distance line.

“I knew you should have done organizational psychology,” she
said.

“Mum,”
I said.
“Organizational psychology is boring.”

“It’s
not
boring,”
she said in a familiar refrain. “It’s what I would have done if I’d studied
psychology.”

“And you would have been very good at it,” I said, “seeing
as how you’re naturally equipped for the post of benevolent dictator of a small
country. But I am not you, and
I
think it’s boring.”

“You think everything not extreme, dark, or dangerous is
boring,” my mother replied calmly. “I don’t understand
where
you got that from.
Certainly not from your
father or me.”

“I
could
just get
a job in Australia,” I said, playing my trump card. “Probably the only ones
left in my field now are back in maximum security or in the sex offenders unit.
Or maybe I can stay with the police.”

“Okay, stop it,” Mum said. “You can come and stay with us for
a while. But what are you planning on actually
doing
?”

Much as she clearly loves us, no one has ever accused my
mother of suffering from empty-nest syndrome. On the contrary, I think she
threw a party the day all three of us were finally out of the house.

“I’m going to write a novel,” I said. “And volunteer with
nonprofits and look for a job with a humanitarian organization.”

In response to this, I now realize, my parents would have
been perfectly within their rights to say, “Um, hello? We just put you through
six years of higher education so you could
leave
your developed-world haven? Instead of getting a paying job, you want to move
back in with us, volunteer in the slums,
search
out
ways to relocate to Africa, and write a novel?
Write a novel?
What are you
thinking?
You don’t know anything about writing novels!”

But they didn’t say that.

They said okay.

And I packed my bags for Manila.
 

Zagreb,
Croatia

I spent five months in the Philippines trying to write my
novel and working as a volunteer before I got my first job offer. The offer was
for a professional internship in the Balkans, but not as a human rights
advocate or an election monitor or any one of a dozen other roles I had thought
I might fall into. Instead, the development organization that was interested in
my resume seemed to actually
want
the
psychology training I was so willing to leave behind, and I ended up in Croatia
providing trauma-counseling and stress-management training to its staff.

After six months of this, I knew two things: that my heart
really
was
in humanitarian work and
that I could do with some more training if I wanted to work as anything but a
trauma specialist.

Don’t get me wrong – I think trauma psychologists do amazing
and necessary work. I just didn’t think I was a particularly
good
one. I’d picked forensics in the
first place largely because it sounded mysterious and sexy. But it stops being
a game very quickly when you’re trying to talk someone out of killing himself.
Or when you’re standing in the emergency room beside someone who
has just been in an accident and may never walk again.
Or sitting with
someone still covered in soot and ash
who
has tried
and failed to save a baby from a burning car.

In choosing forensics, I hadn’t quite realized I was signing
up to be the keeper of people’s worst moments, fears, and impulses. I’d gotten
more than I bargained for, and way more than I felt equipped to deal with
capably at twenty-five.

I knew that I
did
want to help people who desperately needed it, but I also wanted to do it in a
way that wouldn’t so often leave me feeling completely out of my depth –
simultaneously helpless and responsible for having some answers. So at the end
of my six months in Croatia, in a second attempt to abandon the minefields of
extreme emotion, I decided to return to school and pick up another degree that
might better qualify me to work in actual minefields instead.

Sydney,
Australia

Very occasionally there are moments in life when you can
actually see a door swing open in front of you and everything changes in an
instant. Reading the email that informed me that I’d been accepted to Notre
Dame University’s master’s program in international peace studies was one of
those moments.

I was back in Sydney after my time in Croatia, working as a researcher
on a child death review team. I was sipping a midmorning latte and reviewing a
particularly terrible case when I heard the little chime announcing incoming
email. I had to read it at least twice before I took it in.

Along with twenty-one other candidates from eighteen
countries, I’d been awarded a full scholarship and a stipend to cover living
expenses. The program started in four months – could I be in Indiana by then?

I thought this master’s program would be a fantastically
interesting way to spend a year. I also thought it would open doors to jobs
that were more traditionally humanitarian work. If I’d had to guess, that
morning that found me peering through an open door at Notre Dame’s famous
golden dome, I would have said I’d spend a year there and then move back to
Africa.

I’d have been wrong.

South
Bend, USA

In many ways, the course I would follow after leaving Notre
Dame was set during only my second weekend in Indiana.
      

Over in the Philippines, my parents had figured out that I would
be living just twenty minutes from friends they’d met years earlier in
Indonesia. Mum and Dad rang me, very excited, to tell me that these friends,
Wyn
and Carol, had offered to be my in-country surrogate
parents – starting with picking me up and taking me to church that
weekend.
 

“Thanks,” I told them. “Just to remind you, I am now
twenty-six years old and perhaps a little past surrogate parents. But thanks.”

I went, of course. My parents had been so thrilled to put
the pieces together, and after the intensity of orientation week, getting out
of the apartments was appealing. And the novel I was (still) working on was set
in Ambon.
Wyn
and Carol had lived there for twelve
years during their time in Indonesia. They were bound to be gold mines of
information about this place I’d never visited.

On the way to church that Sunday,
Wyn
asked what I’d been doing in Croatia that had led me to Notre Dame.

“Huh,” he said when I was done explaining. “My
brother-in-law has just set up an organization in California that helps
humanitarian workers with stress and trauma. You should really talk to him.”

No way, I thought, smiling and nodding. I’d come to Notre
Dame to move away from that!

But
Wyn
saw something and didn’t
let it go. He introduced me via email to the president of the
Headington
Institute, and when I didn’t follow up he rang
his brother-in-law and badgered him into contacting me himself.

“You’ve got a great background for this work,” my future
boss told me when we finally connected by phone.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I’m really not sure if I want to work
with stress and trauma again. And I won’t be done with this master’s for
another eight months.”

“Why don’t you think about it for a while?” he said. “I’m a
patient man.”

In the end, it was my classmates at Notre Dame who tipped
the scales toward taking the job at the
Headington
Institute. Well, them and the fact that all other doors I tried to push on
remained stubbornly shut.

Someone I loved very much that year – loved in ways I often
thought would break me – shared his private nightmares of Bosnia, Rwanda, and
East Timor. But there were other classmates who talked openly that year, too.
They told stories of war and loss, depression and loneliness, damaging
collisions with new cultures, and their drive to create positive change in the
face of it all.