How to live in a world that continually breaks your heart?

On being a vulnerable observer

For my dear friend Fahad, who witnesses when I cannot.

At the weekend, my husband, my son, and I snuggled up on the couch to watch the first Avengers movie. My son, who has only just begun to explore this fictional world of superheroes, was enthralled. This was my second viewing of the film. I had seen it in 2012 when it came out. I know. 2012. How is that even possible?

I was struck this time by something that Mark Ruffalo says as Bruce Banner. While discussing the need to get suited up to head off to battle, he says, "Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armour. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

And I thought, my gosh, that’s it. That’s what it’s like to live in the world right now if you have your eyes wide open. You feel like an exposed nerve. Like a beacon for all the horrible things humanity has to offer, big or small.

It is so hard to sit here behind the screen when you want to throw your arms around so many people. You want to offer them comfort, you want to shelter them from the wreckage of their lives. If I can’t stop The Horrors, shouldn’t I at least bear witness to them? I feel that it is an obligation, my duty, and I know there are many other people who feel the same way.

As a student and a researcher I was taught to maintain boundaries between academic intellectualizing and the emotions I might inherently feel as I did my research. But as I’ve outgrown the tutelage of the academy and slipped from beneath the wings of those who have helped to create me, my boundaries with the world have become curiously permeable. The light slips in. The emotions slip out. The scientific paradigm calls for me to be distant and objective, but this feels personal. Parents in Gaza are picking up pieces of their children as I pick up LEGO off my floor and I cannot be distant and objective. But for the will of God go I.

Say what you will about social media, if it does nothing else, social media has at least become a platform through which people can share their world with us. What might have remained unseen or unspeakable can be shared publicly; can be distributed to others to witness. It allows us to, as Palestinian writer and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan says, remain undistracted and undeterred in our witnessing. It broadcasts for us the tragedy of a people so that we might know.

Bearing witness is a term often used in psychology to refer to the sharing of experiences with others. In Canada, a legal witness is someone who is not incompetent to give evidence by reason of interest or crime. To bear witness is not without a cost. Research is beginning to demonstrate that trauma can be experienced vicariously by consuming news or social media about tragedies. Secondary trauma can lead to increased stress and anxiety, disturbed sleep and nightmares, and post traumatic stress syndrome. The frequency of consuming media increases our risk of developing media-generated secondary trauma.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly reminds us that the work of witnessing requires nourishment. That it “requires us to allow ourselves to feel helpless until we renew our resolve, until we recommit, over and over again, to reading, enumerating, acting.” It also means we need to ask ourselves why we are viewing the content that we are. Hala Alyan reminds us that many people feel immense guilt if they look away. Regardless of distress that might be felt, she says many people dismiss it, feeling that there is “no distress or despair that can come close to what’s being experienced on the ground right now.”

Alyan reiterates that “the act of witnessing can be a heavy one…It’s a necessary one, but it can take its toll and lead to burnout if it’s not managed correctly. It can lead to compassion fatigue, which is a way of saying that caring about other people can come with a physical, emotional, and psychological cost. Especially in this case, when people feel tremendously helpless, that witnessing is absolutely laden with trauma.”

One day when talking with my old boss, I mentioned that I had genuine fear of the election results. He shrugged and said he used to be like that, but he knows that all things go in cycles and that I shouldn’t worry. Of course he wasn’t worried. It is never his rights on the line, his body is never a contested space. He is never at risk. Right now, this is how it feels as a White woman to talk about the violence in other countries, in other spaces, and places. I am my old boss. I have no skin in this game.

Is this why it engenders in me a sense of complicity that my government does not act in a way that I would want it to act to represent me? That soft words and soft politics feel like a betrayal on my lips? But my word means nothing without action and I have little means for that. I am not my government. I am not so rich as to be able to pressure my government. So I make available my eyes, my mind, and my heart.

I see so that I know what is happening in my name and in the name of my country.

I remember so that when the story is eventually sanitized for mass consumption, I will know that there are gaps.

I feel so that I can mourn the destruction we help create through war and exploitation.

So I reveal myself in my text. I become personal. I have never felt so powerless as to watch The Horrors and be filled with impotent rage.

What is it to be human and stand in front of the magnitude of human-caused loss and not turn away? What evolutionary adaptation must we make to be able to do this and not be overcome? And is this an act of rebellious reciprocity? To witness others and to see them peering back at us. To see through the simplified story, the weakness of the arguments and to still see the humanity of those who are being Othered? For if it is rebellious to rest and rebellious to feel joy, then surely too it is rebellious to bear witness? The personal is political, is it not?

Ruth Behar, author of the exquisite The Vulnerable Observer, writes in Beacon Broadside, “Not only is our world vulnerable, but we’ve all become vulnerable observers as we move about our lives concerned about the next catastrophe. The pandemic has shown how entangled we all are with one another. It is no longer possible to pretend to be a distant, detached observer, whether of other societies or our own. Never has it been so urgent that we envision the world that could be, a world that values life, justice, and wellbeing for all.”

I love the hope that Behar has in us, as humans, to spend our attention wisely. Encouraging us to be vulnerable, recognize the ways in which our lives are intertwined, and why that should matter to all of us. In some ways it feels aspirational, but in others, it feels like hope.

Recently I wrote about attention in the context of doing nothing. Here I would like to revisit the notion of attention, but in its engagement with morality. Behar’s argument for us to tap into our vulnerability, to bring ourselves to the page, as writers and researchers, and to view our world differently aligns well with Simone Weil’s exploration of moral attention. This is what is referred to when you hear Zelensky asking nations not to look away, when activists say, All Eyes on Rafah. Moral attention requires that we open ourselves up to the realities of the world around us.

For Weil, attention was inseparable from compassion and “suffering with” those that we are observing. To do this, however, is to open oneself up to vicarious trauma. Moral attention to Ukraine and Gaza, the devastation wrought by hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the countless other ways and places that humans are imparting violence on one another suffers under distraction. This distraction, or fatigue, or numbness causes witnesses to stop watching, to spread their attention too thin, to look away. This is often what aggressive parties want. They want us to turn away, to find another crisis to attend to, ensuring that public support begins to falter.

Trying to keep the tragedies front and centre. Trying to ask people not to look away, photographers publish what they see. Photographers argue that to capture is to protect, for posterity, in the truths of the visual image. A literal snapshot of a moment in time that is comprised of so many more moments that we will never see, the context for which we may never clearly know. Virginia Woolf writes that such images cannot help but bring the divided together. But do they?

David Shields published an aggregated series of war photographs in a book called War is Beautiful in 2012. In an interview with Vice he says, “The genesis of the book was in October 1997 when the Times went color on the first page. It seems to me, looking back, that two or three times a week I’d be stunned, riveted, disgusted by these really beautiful images. I’d look forward every morning to what—for lack of a better term—I’d call my war porn: these images of ravishingly beautiful war.”

The book itself is full of war photographs that were used in the New York Times. Shields starts to question the editor’s choice in photograph, finding some to be so much more beauty than war and worrying that depicting war in this way is more propaganda than it is horrifying. What then is the responsibility of the professional observer of war? Is beautifying the photographs meant to depict/represent war too far from the truths of war to be considered an artifact of the time and a historical document? In the face of beauty over horror, are we protecting the public from engaging with their vulnerability?

What then does it mean for us and for professional photographers that so much of the footage we now see is unfiltered and unvetted, uploaded as it is to social media and shared widely by regular people? And is this a better way of providing our moral attention to war? An unsanitized, real-life, living through it perspective that has not been composed or looked at with an eye to the aesthetic?

I suppose where I am landing on this is to ask myself what is the responsibility of my attention and to what? What is my responsibility as the writer to those who read my words? Can I consciously take sides, while maintaining an understanding and a softness for the aggressors? How can I ask others to see, and think, and feel The Horrors knowing that it is detrimental to our collective mental health, but it is also the bare minimum that most of us can do? To see it. To think it. To feel it. To give credence to the experience of other realities different from my own. To be vulnerable in a world determined to make us hard.

I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know anything at all anymore.

n xx