It took seven hours before she gave me the phrase “survivor’s guilt” to describe what I felt. She, a former war correspondent who covered the Iraq War for more than a decade. Me, a young journalist working for a local newspaper during the height of COVID-19.
We were eating cheese and crackers at midnight. It had been months since I’d quit a job I loved, feeling somehow responsible for everything I’d witnessed and couldn’t change.
I used to write about local public K-12 education before the pandemic shuttered Florida. I also started writing about state virus data. For a year, I covered two breaking news beats and people were dying in both.
In Florida, we’ve lost more than 86,000 people to the virus, not even accounting for those who suffer the extremes of long COVID. In terms of death alone, the Titanic has sunk more than 57 times.
I look at my state and I ask myself: How is it, that, in the third year of the pandemic, we are banning books, banning history ⎯ and not trying to delight in what recovery we can manage?
***
At 25 years old in 2020, I was in a newsroom that had given me a place right out of college, where I made my way from being a part-time intern into serving as a full-time beat reporter.
I loved my job. I wrote about the successes of tutoring children coming to the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, transitioning from overseas refugee camps to local apartments with electricity. I wrote about a bus system meltdown on the first day of school. I wrote about school board meetings where officials debated the balance of after-school programs.
I loved the social passport I felt I had to walk up to someone to ask if they’d speak with me, share what felt important about education for themselves, for their children. I called district officials with these questions listed in a notebook and wrote stories that tried to capture that narrative of civic engagement. Change felt possible to accomplish every day.
When the pandemic officially entered Florida in March, I started writing about the nerves of district officials who were wondering how to manage the approaching crisis. In Florida, we’re used to hurricanes. Would this be similar?
I also started writing about state virus data — the number of confirmed cases counted locally, positivity rates, how local ordinances changed. Eventually, I wrote about deaths and slippery data counts. I woke up each morning looking at the same day ahead. Rising numbers seemed to be all that was different.
At first, the presence of the new virus so clearly impacted the education system in the Florida Panhandle county I covered that it felt like a simple transition to incorporate the virus into my reporting. What I could understand about how the virus spread, how it was counted, what numbers looked like locally, I could translate for parents, educators and families in the 12-hour days I worked. Schools already were using the same information to decide how they could function. How were classrooms being organized? How often were they being cleaned? What did air quality look like inside old buildings? These were the questions I was asking and the questions I tried to answer for the public.
Then three people from the same school died of the virus. Two were related, a mother and her son. A high school football coach texted me from where he waited in the hospital’s COVID unit. My neighbor, a nurse in a local intensive care unit, told me about bags of black blood they discarded from COVID patients.
I wrote over and over about how locals could test positive for the virus and it would be added to our county data, but those locals could be anywhere. The state only collected data assigned to a person’s county of residence. The data seemed unreliable. The world was unreliable.
Health experts didn’t know the effects of the virus. They didn’t know because no one knew, and a weary desperation infiltrated our politics. Yet that felt the most truthful to say at the time: I don’t know.
I figured what I could do was simply keep going. I wrote about district debates over the virus, four-hour meetings in the middle of the day with few, if any, medical practitioners present. I wrote thousands of words with no clear conclusions. I woke up early to catch the Florida Department of Health’s first daily report about case counts and deaths and stayed to monitor its evening report, which posted between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. I stayed up until 2 a.m. most Tuesday nights, wired after hours of school board discussion via Zoom. I waited and watched as speakers forgot to unmute themselves. I listened as they misapplied state data to their reasoning. Crisis response was shifting to trauma response. I recieved emails, sometimes voicemails, from people who criticized what I was doing. Some told me the dying was my fault. Some told me the panic was my fault. I wanted to cry.
Often, I lay on the floor of my kitchen instead and stared at the ceiling.
***
By the end of 2020, people 65 and older could be vaccinated. It was two weeks after my 26th birthday.
The surge of people scheduling an appointment overwhelmed our already deliberate local health department. When vaccines were available, the local health department’s phone system crashed. I wrote a breaking news story, then started fielding personal calls to my cellphone from people thinking I was the health department.
It felt, somehow, wrong. Like a premonition. I walked people through the online process. I felt obligated and I couldn’t just tell them, “No, I’m a journalist. You’re on your own.” I finally had answers.
I wrote a column at the end of the day and told people they could contact me if they needed more help. I thought this may help me in the next few stories, if people reached out with questions. As a practice, reporters put our contact information at the bottom of most of our articles. I was used to being contacted.
But by the next morning, I was flooded with what became hundreds of calls. I texted with dozens of unknown numbers — people I’d never put a name to — about where vaccines were available locally. I responded to people with what I hope was empathy. I asked how the people behind the unknown numbers were doing. I validated the stresses and anxieties of those I’d never talk to again.
I spoke to a couple who did not have internet access and so I filled out an online form for the Wakulla County health department to call them about their vaccines. Later, an editor and I would be questioned by our peers about whether this was an appropriate journalistic response, to “intervene” in this way.
I returned every call I received. Hundreds of voices. Thousands of questions, often the same ones. “Where is the form to sign up? Did I do this correctly? I can’t get through to the health department. My husband is younger than me, and I’m 65 — can he get vaccinated? What kind of documents do I need to prove I’m a resident?”
I turned into a help desk. I was called a hero. I hated being called a hero. I wanted to be told to rest, that I’d done enough. I wanted someone to tell me when to stop.
Several national news outlets interviewed me about “stepping in to serve.” I kept saying: This is what journalists do. We answer calls. We provide information. I wanted to say: There are consequences to being a “hero.” Say: I think I need help, too.
I spoke to one woman in her 80s about suicide. She couldn’t get through to the Leon County health department. She was overwhelmed. It was time to give up. I told her, simply, she couldn’t because I hadn’t.
But, honestly? I had given up much earlier. Soon, I’d realize a choice before me: saving my job or saving my life.
***
I remember sitting in my kitchen in my cozy apartment, the windows looking out onto a local park where I walked my dog twice a day, and feeling that something in my mind had just … broken. Like a bone had twisted too far. My entire body felt a wave of numbness. (This is called dissociation.) I could no longer feel, no longer connect.
At one point, I asked an editor about assisting with writing obituaries of the locals who were dying. I read the data on COVID each day. I knew — I counted them individually — the number of people from our town who were dying. I still sought connection, and to give faces to the numbers that pounded through my head.
Perhaps he thought I was competing with my colleagues for bylines and readership numbers ⎯ an ugly practice in newsrooms. He brushed off my request by saying, “There will be more than enough death to go around.”
***
I read my colleagues’ stories and felt we could do more to make something clear. What that something was, I can only begin to describe now. It was a mess of confusion.
I wanted to make clear to people that I felt something was wrong with our state, that in writing state data updates and obituaries, we were both trying to honor the dead and warn the living. That it didn’t have to be happening this way. That we didn’t have to be left to die on our own.
During it all, I tried to learn how to practice resilience. The word I read in news stories to replace hope, in helpful explainers that tried so hard to be empathetic. I learned how to make ravioli from scratch. I started taking Arabic lessons from a woman online in Cairo, Egypt. I started drinking too much because if I’d had a sip of alcohol, I didn’t write. And if I wasn’t writing, I wasn’t responsible anymore.
Days became distinguished only by the new horror and new loss. Meanwhile, other news didn’t stop: My newsroom wrote about a gruesome double homicide in town. A young woman and an older woman were kidnapped and brutalized. I drove out to the older woman’s house, knocked on her neighbor’s doors, and had to tell people in an apartment complex that she’d been kidnapped. I was alone while I was doing this. I stepped away from doors and spoke from behind a mask and tried to have my smile crinkle my eyes. I collected anecdotes about her from friends.
An editor told us triumphantly that our coverage brought in more than one million views to our stories.
***
I interviewed one family whose story I couldn’t finish. Their teenage son killed himself. The pandemic was too much, they guessed, mired in the grief of never being able to ask.
I drove with a photojournalist out to visit the family in the neighboring county. We walked through a field dappled with pecan or oak tree shadows. The family lived in a home on the corner of a field. The country quiet, the sunlight, the bouncing road, all of it reminded me of the rural town where I grew up.
I read the boy’s autopsy report. I learned which hand he’d used to pull a trigger. This could be me, trickled into my mind.
I quit my job not long after — on May 22, 2021 — and left the state. I was ashamed and consumed by guilt. I reached a point where I couldn’t read about education news, couldn’t read about the pandemic, couldn’t read at all. I’d had COVID twice. I would catch it once more. I hated myself for the people in my community I felt like I could not save.
***
Moni Basu listened to me for seven hours. I sat in her home during an evening thunderstorm in Tallahassee and ran through a mess of anecdotes, and feelings I didn’t have words to describe. I crossed my arms over my chest, or sat on my hands. My shoulders ached.
“It’s called survivor’s guilt,” said Basu, who covered the war in Iraq for CNN and at the time was teaching college journalism. It’s a feeling like a cloth slipping over your head. A veil you see through: the guilt of still being alive.
Basu had many answers. But what settled the pain in her mind and memories may not work for me. I would try anything. So, she gave me gratitude to hold onto while I continued the hard work of recovery.
She explained it: Gratitude in every simple action, such as brushing your teeth.
I am grateful for clean water and fluoride paste. I am grateful to have a toothbrush with soft bristles. I am grateful to have two minutes to spend cleaning my teeth.
Slowly, slowly, I started to regain control of my mind.
***
I found a therapist who specializes in trauma, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (or EMDR). We work through where emotions go in my body and how to work through them. I remember so much more of the pandemic than I used to. I can, though not always, talk about what happened.
I stopped drinking and started going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Some of the stories they talked about resonated. Some did not. You don’t need to say you’re an alcoholic to be there. My first time, I was swarmed by women in their 50s and 60s who insisted I take down their numbers. One texts me most mornings with a meme about what a beautiful day it is (or that it’s Monday again).
Slowly, slowly I have been able to rebuild myself and decide what is mine to carry. I continue to grieve — and grieve the person I’ll never be again — and I know that that’s OK. Every emotion has an end.
I have taken time off, disappeared from Florida, and am now home again. I revel in the connections I have to people who treat me with the kindnesses I had to relearn how to show to myself.
I can write again. I have not yet fully regained my joy of reading for pleasure. I take breaks and I stretch. I set boundaries and hold them, and make peace with the discomfort of maintaining them.
I haven’t given up, and I haven’t given up on journalism. The profession is vital to our democracy, and the democracies of our local communities. But journalists suffered during the height of the pandemic, and suffer, too, in what we witness and how we experience the heartbreaking stories we cover. To see the humanity in the stories we write, we must accept the humanity of ourselves.
I try to tell myself I’ve done enough, and now I believe it. I accept my limitations and delight in them, as they mean that I am still here. Gratitude is similar to hope in its buoyancy.
Every morning, I try for this: I am grateful for clean water and fluoride paste. I am grateful for what it means for the day.
