About eight years ago when I was still fairly new to the reporter game in New York City, these two journalists I knew were killed while working in Libya. One worked for a wire service and the other was freelance and they ended up in the same carload of reporters doing field reporting. Long before they became immortalized by the world’s media as handsome, dashing, brave poster boys for journalism, they were my colleagues, friends, and sort of professional heroes.

Their abrupt exit from the world left an indelible mark on me. Journalism – something I used to see as straight and narrow – now seemed like both the cause and the cure of the worst pain I’d ever felt. Instead of scaring me off, it made me more driven.

I don’t know what the stories we’ve reported on as journalists have done to us as human beings, but I do know that silence isn’t an option.

News of my friends’ death came to me in a way that might seem strange and almost mercenary to someone not in this profession. An editor from a journalism industry magazine I reported for got in touch with an assignment. First, he asked me to confirm that my friends were dead. Then there was a newspaper assignment with a midnight deadline the day the news of their death broke. It was my introduction to a skill every good reporter carefully cultivates: the ability to swallow glass and still make deadline.

It is part of the awful code written in blood between journalists. If one of us goes down, those left behind are honor-bound to do right by the story.

Later that night at my Brooklyn apartment – several months pregnant with my son and first child – I wept to my husband. Then I sat down and wrote the newspaper article. Despite the confusion and pain filling my psyche, I filed solid, accurate copy on deadline. But when I woke up the next morning, I didn’t make it past the foot of my bed for at least 30 minutes after recalling the previous day. I just laid back down on top of the covers, curled up in the fetal position, and wept.

For months during my first few seconds of consciousness every morning, it felt like waking up into a nightmare. I remembered the sequence of events all over again. I often thought I saw their faces in the crowds in Manhattan, moving and bobbing through the ocean of humans on a subway platform or waiting at a crosswalk, looking out over the crowd toward me. When I tried to talk to others about how I was feeling they’d say, “You’re pregnant, try to relax. Don’t bring extra stress on yourself.” One of my best friends, another reporter, said she thought she saw them, too.

I agreed to write about my colleagues and friends for other publications that approached me. If I didn’t do it, someone else would, and I worried it would be someone who loved them less. Eventually every major publication in print and online did run something about their legacies.

I was invited to a gathering of fellow journalists and friends at a Manhattan midtown west bar that’s long been a popular watering hole for reporters. I felt like an impostor, and couldn’t bring myself to join. In hindsight, being around those more seasoned journalists was probably exactly what I needed.

New York City is hard, but it is still the media industry’s biggest and best tribal village in the world.

There was no formal service, so the fellow-hallucinating-in-grief friend joined me to say goodbye in our own weird way. We stopped by the bar and left handwritten cards. We didn’t know the families, so we addressed the cards to our departed friends and trusted whoever got them to do right. It was like delivering a message into an abyss.

Since then, I’ve sort of become an expert in how journalists are targeted for doing their jobs. Spoiler: it’s often super violent. Now I have a reputation as a journalist skilled at writing about other journalists and the media industry.

Every time I want to quit this profession, I have this mental exercise I do. I think of my friends and colleagues back in New York City and beyond – alive and dead. I think of their faces and laughs, of the stories we’ve reported together, of the adventures I hope are yet to come. Of the triumphs left to win on behalf of those who have no voice. I think of my friends who departed Libya with their eyes closed, and tell myself to, “Carry on with the job, because they can’t.”

There is still strength in numbers, no matter how many of us they kill.

Motherhood

My son, who is now seven years old, was born in the autumn, the day before Halloween. I was totally unprepared for life with this new person, this little force of nature who became my sidekick. Children have a way of putting things into perspective, so I tried to branch away from journalism with a travel guidebook on the region for an established publisher.

During a yearlong period of living with my husband and new baby in Jerusalem, I started reporting again for my old newspaper when Hamas in Gaza and the Israelis started fighting. Hamas volleyed rockets out, the Israeli army unleashed hell in, out and over.

I didn’t understand how parents could live like that with their children, on either side.

The rockets got close to Jerusalem, and the sirens blared as the Iron Dome protection system counter-fired and made most explode midair. They said. I think it took two or three weeks for me to stop jumping every time I heard a garbage truck bang or a car hit a pothole. Back in New York City months later, the Boston marathon bombing freaked the entire city out, including me.

I started to feel more familiar with the feeling of living and functioning with terror and the threat of death looming.

Deliberately seeking out suffering

By the time my son was two years old, I had started to change the way I work as a journalist. Instead of responding to tragedies and injustices passively, I sought out human suffering in the hopes of telling stories accurately, grippingly, and with dignity.

I began to work as a crime reporter for a daily newspaper in New York City, and was often joined by one of two staff photographers.

There was a knife-wielding child murderer on the loose in Brooklyn, in a community just a couple of train stops away from mine. There were shootings, stabbings, fires and death by fire, murders, violent rallies, explosions, crashes, victimized women and minorities, collisions, drownings, police shootings, beatings and abuse, guns…so many guns, sobbing mothers, broken men, massive drug busts. There were the police and firefighter funerals, seas of blue uniforms punctuated by a casket wrapped in an American flag. Sometimes it was more than one casket.

There was Eric Garner, a black man suffocated by a white police officer, Ferguson, and so many months of Black Lives Matter. There was dodging bricks, rocks, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters. There was running from the sound of gunfire and barking police dogs, no matter how distant.

At this point, I was about five months pregnant with my daughter. She is now almost four years old.

My daughter was used to late-night drama in the womb from our reporting adventures, but one night we had to take a surprise ambulance trip to Brownsville, Brooklyn. It was for an emergency gall bladder removal. We were saved that night – and then a second time at the same hospital – when my daughter was delivered by emergency C-section one month before her due date. The doctors said we were about 15 minutes away from not making it.

In the span of about a year I had brushed up against death and destruction repeatedly in my professional life. Then I had almost died twice myself.

It was the first time in my career that I started to wonder if I was in the wrong business.

Limits

When my daughter was about 10 months old, our family went back to Jerusalem for my second travel guide to the region. After I finished, I went back to fulltime freelance reporting.

My perspective had shifted significantly after the life and death experiences of the past few years.

In Jerusalem, I struggled to find colleagues among other foreign correspondents who were willing to open up or put out a helping hand. The healthy competition, support network, and camaraderie among journalists I knew so well from New York City wasn’t present in Jerusalem.

That abyss of support drove me to pursue more offbeat stories. I tried to write about anything but the regional conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

I reported on parkour. Street musicians. Hanukkah doughnuts. But the teenage parkour guys told endless stories about border police threatening to shoot them for doing flips off Jerusalem’s Old City walls. An editor added a subhed about the conflict to an otherwise fun feature about the city’s street musicians.

I couldn’t escape conflict.

That part didn’t bother me, though. I wasn’t being allowed to tell worthwhile stories in the midst of an efficiently managed war.

No justice, no peace

One Friday in mid-2016, another American foreign correspondent and I drove my 1992 Subaru with Israeli plates and one anarchist Israeli passenger (don’t ask) into a village in the West Bank called Ni’lin.

There are villages with longstanding protests where frequent clashes erupt in that area. Still, I had no protective gear of any kind, a common risk I’d long taken and seen most other reporters take. Wearing a vest, helmet, or mask in case of rubber or real bullets, tear gas, bricks and other projectiles can be the difference between life and death.

My colleague that day had a helmet and a vest, though the vest wasn’t even thick enough to stop a .22 caliber bullet. He had opted out from the additional detachable portions that hung down to protect his groin. As I started to shoot photos, I thought about my friend dying in Libya from a groin injury, and wondered why this guy had even bothered with the helmet.

As we crested a little ridge, a man spiraled past us downhill with a tripping run in the opposite direction. His arms were flailing as he half-ran and half-slid downhill over the dry, loose rocks. His face had an expression I have only seen when uncontrollable danger is present. Suddenly another man, then a few more appeared, this time with little carpets and protest instruments like Palestinian flags in their hands. Everyone was heading to some nearby homes.

Then a group of men burst out screaming and yelling from a cloud of smoke. They were coming up from a small, sloping wadi near the town’s mosque, squinting at the sun.

Everything clicked at once: the carpets were prayer mats, the clouds were the most concentrated amount of tear gas I’d ever seen, and a roaring noise in the distance was the Israeli army.

Suddenly the sunny, quiet Friday afternoon was all smoke, explosions, and the awful sound of men screaming.

There was more running, now it was me, the other journalist, and the anarchist. I blindly scrambled uphill toward the vest a few feet ahead of me that read PRESS in white letters on blue. The anarchist peeled off with her friends. Disoriented over what to do next, I suddenly felt a freaked-out electricity that only sparks when a crowd of people are collectively scared, but ready to stand their ground. Israeli army trucks seemed to appear out of nowhere and stop about 60 yards away. The monstrous contraptions had honeycomb-like clusters of green barrels grouped together on a swivel.

“It’s a tear gas gun,” I heard a voice yell toward me. “We need to run!”

I had already turned to move, but canisters were pelting the dusty rocks just a few feet ahead, making them bounce. Rule number one: never get stuck inside the throw zone of tear gas cans. It quickly becomes hard to get out of the cloud of toxic, choking smoke.

There were about a dozen smoking tins on the ground, their sickening fumes puffing into the air like angry little dragons.

I heard a boom as a second volley of tear gas released. They sort of whistled through the air. I looked up as several silver canisters flew overhead, the sun glinting off of them.

Just for a millisecond I thought of my kids – something I’d trained myself not to do when working – and fumbled straight into a tear gas cloud. There was no cover and I had to struggle into the back of a village ambulance.

A young villager sat facing me as we both gasped for control of our lungs, breathing in the fumes of alcohol rubbing pads to counteract the poison in the gas. I tried to stop thinking about my kids, but I’d already realized how unprepared I was for this bizarre Friday skirmish on a dusty hillside.

The only way I could figure to keep my head on straight was to keep pushing the shutter on my DSLR. My hands shaking, I focused my camera on the other patient in the ambulance.

“What a jerk,” I thought of myself in that moment, but it was better than losing my shit. Shooting pictures helped me breathe again.

The funny part is, I’m not even a photographer. But the part of my brain cultivated to function as a journalist in dangerous circumstances took over again, quelling my maternal instincts into submission until it was safe to relax again later.

I quickly hopped out and found my colleague, who was going out of his mind with worry after seeing me get into the ambulance.

We continued to split up and come back together for a few hours. My colleague captured video of a family running in fear from their home after tear gas canisters exploded through a window and into a bag of clothes.

A teenage group of village boys trying to use slingshots (not very skillfully) on Israeli soldiers were confronted by some local unofficial peacekeepers with metal pipes. As I crouched in a small neighborhood intersection taking photos, a couple of cars ripped around the corner and screeched to a stop in the middle of the street. Three angry men in their prime got out and headed straight for the teenagers without skipping a beat. I kept hitting the shutter button on my camera and getting photographs. The boys scurried off so fast it looked like startled cartoon characters spinning their feet in place.

Then I saw the smoke. The village’s olive trees were on fire.

Several of the beautiful, old trees in the groves adjacent to town burned like wicks stuck obstinately in the brown, dusty soil. It was sickening, especially because I love trees most of anything in the natural world.

The local fire department arrived with their small truck and crew, and tried their best to put out the fires. Other men tried to use buckets. I couldn’t stop thinking about how nobody would care about this story. There were too many others like it happening. Always have been.

The next day, a Saturday, I sat in a park in a daze with my kids and my husband’s family. I was surrounded by Israeli families laughing and playing and ignoring the huge “do not feed the waterfowl” sign next to a large pond. Everything that had happened just the day before seemed like a bizarre dream. It wasn’t a subject for conversation, either. It never was. Nobody wanted to hear about the stories I reported on. And in that part of the world it can be dangerous to even have the appearance of taking the wrong side.

I never talked about that day with anybody, really. But not long afterward, it contributed significantly to my decision to become an environmental journalist and editor at Mongabay.

A new path

There were other impactful moments in the West Bank before I took the leap to becoming an environmental journalist. In hindsight, those moments taught me countless valuable lessons.

They were lessons that I could never have learned in a classroom, newsroom, or New York City.

There was the face-to-face interview with the mother, brothers, and sister-in-law of a man who murdered an American tourist from Texas on a balmy evening in south Tel Aviv. There was waiting in a terminal while the Israeli army swept my car for bombs before allowing me across the border and home to Jerusalem. I’d spent the day alone reporting in 100 degree-plus heat, in a car without air conditioning on unfamiliar roads in the West Bank where GPS doesn’t work.

There was the day I got trapped in a village behind boulders dragged by the Israeli army to block the road as a form of collective punishment for violence. There was the interview with the mayor of a West Bank village that kept veering back to what he believed was common ground for Arab and American peoples: the vital need for gun rights. There was the rubble of the multiple houses I picked my way through after they were demolished by the Israeli army, again as a form of collective punishment.

I never saw contrition in the people targeted for collective punishment, only rage and a new motivation to stand up against what they felt were grave injustices. The concept of “an eye for an eye” seems to have been invented in the Middle East.

It was that very rhetorical nature of reporting, working, and living in the region that began to drag me down: everything was a crisis, and every crisis was a re-run of what had come many times before. I also couldn’t earn enough as a freelancer, tend to all the details of freelancing, and take care of my family.

Then along came Mongabay with an announcement that they were hiring a Forests Editor. That was about two-and-a half years ago.

Flowers and butterflies

I wish I could say that after entering the fray of the environmental journalism world, the work became simpler, less violent, less heartbreaking. None of that has happened.

Mongabay is on a mission to save the world’s tropical rainforests before they are logged out, poisoned by mining, stripped of vast biodiversity by poachers and business exploitation of flora and fauna. That mission has necessarily informed my work as a journalist. As a result, most aspects of my professional life have become more complex and layered. For instance, much of my daily work involves logistics and support for reporters whom I assign to work in the field all over the world. Now I am the one left behind worrying when the assignment is given.

Mongabay has proven to be a deeply rewarding ecosystem of its own to work within. It has brought me to something many journalists only dream of achieving in the span of their careers: sustainable, meaningful work.

In mid-2018, I ran into a problem, though.

Our dispersed global team has no office and we all work from wherever we are at any given time. That’s mostly been from my home office.

Flare-ups of traumatic stress in my personal life collided with the long-term unresolved impact of repeated professional exposure to trauma, death, and violence. I started to experience symptoms typical of traumatic stress disorders like PTSD.

A lifelong lucid dreamer who has always been able to recall dreams in vivid detail, I stopped dreaming. Sleep was no longer restful, but just a series of unconscious, blank moments in between the half a dozen or more times a night I’d wake suddenly wondering what time it was. The smallest noise would make me start. I had less and less energy to put into interacting with my children, and instead found myself being hypervigilant about their safety and physical well-being. I started to get cold easily and feel disoriented in the most familiar situations. I was often tired but rarely felt rested.

It felt like my brain had a sparkplug loose, but it didn’t occur to me that I could do something to fix it.

Tribe

The turning point came unexpectedly sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas in late 2018. A journalist and mentor I’ve known for years recounted the violent loss of a colleague earlier in his career in a Facebook post. I was shocked.

I had spent time with this person talking about professional experiences many times. I had interviewed him for a magazine article or two on the industry. I’d been to his home and seen his photography projects spread out over a table. I’d met his wife. Over more than a decade, he had often shared really solid advice and insights. I knew he’d reported on the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980’s, but I’d never heard this story.

After reaching out to other mentors and colleagues, I realized that the Baby Boomer generation of journalists never did figure it all out. They just figured out how to survive. It was an unnerving thought that made me feel exposed – and worse – hopeless. I had been counting on the lessons I’d learned from them for career longevity.

I’d rather go out as an OG, not a burnout.

But it took hearing that one bloody story of a reporter shot in the chest in a jungle in El Salvador and knowing not one, but two of my mentors had been there, to realize something key. I do not have all the tools I need to survive in this job yet.

Ever the reporter, I checked out about a dozen research-based books and workbooks from my local library on traumatic stress, PTSD, and related disorders (hello, autoimmune diseases!). One day not long ago, a successful survivor of long-term, repeated exposure to traumatic stress magically appeared with an outstretched helping hand. I am finally working on taking down walls I’ve built up to protect myself from more trauma. I started conversations with reporters I’ve sent out on risky assignments to create space for them to be open about their experiences and struggles.

Hearing how others cope and thrive can illuminate dark corners in our minds.

I want to be a journalist far past a reasonable retirement age. For right now that means getting smart about facing and dealing with the trauma that so often comes with the job. The work isn’t going to change or adapt, so we reporters have to.

Along the way, much the opposite of what I used to believe about vulnerability has proven to be true. I’ve learned that just the act of talking or writing about traumatic experiences in the past tense can be healing. I have learned that my mentors aren’t invincible, but human, and there’s strength and resiliency in that. I’ve learned that journalists need to give each other much more short- and long-term support. Sometimes that means making a phone call, even though there is never time.

We are a global tribe, after all. We should act more like it.

How different would my experience in that West Bank village have been if I’d had a flak jacket, helmet, or gas mask and someone to talk through the day with afterward? We should never have to sacrifice or deny our humanity in the name of getting the story and making deadline.

Today, the sun is shining (literally) and I’m excited to see what comes next. Not just in my role as an editor at Mongabay, but in journalism overall. I hope our shared need to survive and thrive will help us build a bridge to a new, better day. Or at least a more open day. We just have to remember to stick together, help each other, and believe there is room for both the story and our hearts.

Banner image: A foreign correspondent working in Ni’lin, West Bank in 2016. Photo by Genevieve Belmaker/Mongabay.

Genevieve Belmaker is a contributing Forests Editor for Mongabay. You can get in touch with her on Twitter at @Gen_Belmaker.

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Genevieve Belmaker Editor

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ConflictEnvironmentEnvironmental JournalismInsiderJournalismResource ConflictIsraelUnited States

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