I wish I could start this post with another woeful elegy to my time with the EFJ and living alone in Brussels. Honestly, I had planned to do so, and was waiting for the perfect moment to sit down, collect my thoughts, parse through notes app entries and the hundreds of photos I have taken over the past 6 weeks. Well, I waited too long. Last night, as I was making the all-of-three-minute walk from the bus station to my apartment, my phone slipped out of my hands as I tripped on the curb, and fell straight into the sewer. It's gone now. All I have left is my laptop, printed out boarding and train passes, and a paper map to navigate my final few days abroad in Amsterdam. So for now, I have no photos I can access from my laptop, and the notes entries are stored, for the most part, in a journal app I don't have on the laptop.
I guess that means, in terms of skills, I should probably begin with resilience. In a way, this totally unprecedented (in my life) development presents a wonderful opportunity. I cannot assess my last five weeks based on the documentation I have carefully curated in anticipation of packaging the experience into a blog post. All I'm left with is the memories and impressions that remain with me on the most organic and visceral level.
The kind I could only cultivate in non-academic, non-professional settings, contrary to the customary challenges I have encountered for most of my life. It's a completely different muscle my time in Brussels has trained me to develop, and one that was predominantly earned through repeated difficult or unfamiliar interactions with strangers that ended up blossoming into either fruitful relationships or meaningful lessons. I can't pinpoint exactly how I've become resilient, because truthfully, every new challenge makes me feel like I am no prior hardship could have ever fully prepared me for the next one. But what I can speak for is the paths I've pursued in Brussels that have led me further to this lofty goal of becoming a "resilient" person.
It was forcing myself to practice my rusty French at Librebook, despite my internal critic suggesting I had no intelligible linguistic abilities, that opened me up to wonderful conversations with the store owner about his passion for books, his experience integrating in Brussels' international environment, and his fork-in-the-road career decisions. It was reaching out to strangers I found on LinkedIn, at bookstore events, or who lived down the hall from my office, and insisting on having a coffee with them (in a non-networking capacity)--despite the many awkward conversations that ultimately resulted in no further meetings or follow-ups--that immersed me unexpectedly into people whose lives were previously scattered across the world with no trajectory of intersecting with mine. Once, I reached out to a Ukrainian journalist working at Bloomberg, who told me how much it mattered to him that he return to Kyiv to be a reporter there, despite the constant and only worsening assaults on the city and his legal inability to leave the country upon his return. Another time, I asked the girl working at the Lisbon Council across the hall from the EFJ to drinks after work at my favorite local cafe (it was especially gratifying to feel familiar enough with the neighborhood once so foreign to me, to show my "favorites" to the new girl). Over a massive funnel of Belgian fries, she shared countless stories about her travels to South America, the Balkans, and East Africa, and about her philosophy that travel--particularly to places frequently overlooked and underrated by mainstream tourism--is critical to living a truly examined life. It was so refreshing to find someone so determined to step outside of the narrow worldview many westerners/Americans have that only the mainstream European travel destinations are worthwhile to visit, and to reevaluate travel as an opportunity not just for rest or sightseeing, but as genuine learning about the histories and cultures of the expansive world we inhabit. That first conversation quickly transformed into daily, hours-long hangouts over World Cup games, Nepali momos, and train excursions to local Belgian towns. When we said goodbye to each other, we promised to make a trip together hopping through Romania, Montenegro, Croatia, and Albania, countries we have spent extensive time discussing and listening to the music of as a result of the work we've done in our respective internships. I don't know if that was just the kind of empty promise strangers float as a friendly way of saying goodbye, but something tells me we will find our way back to one another, somewhere halfway across the world.
At a networking event at Maison MediaLab my boss invited me to with Brussels-based Eastern European correspondents, I bonded with a young Belorussian woman who confessed to me that after living in the city for a year, she still did not like Brussels. While I told her my experience was largely positive, we quickly found common ground on the topic of catcalling and the harassment of women in various cities we've lived in. The conversation soon transformed into a psychoanalytical discussion of the motivations of catcallers, hypothesizing that they harass women not because they legitimately envision a romantic future with the woman but because they use it as a display of power, a way of soliciting reactions that reinforce their control over them. (Perhaps that's an obvious take, but I'll admit it's one I didn't really consider previously). I was amazed at how we came to discuss such intimate and deep-hitting topics just minutes into our first interaction, both of us not fully speaking the other's mother language. It was a completely chance encounter that ended just as soon as it began, as my boss swept me along with her to meet a young Moldovan journalist whose work intersects with my own journalistic interests. Yet the depth of the conversation we shared felt like that space made it uniquely possible, two young women bonding through their belonging to a city they cannot yet call their own, speaking languages they do not fully call their own, surrounded by a community that is not their own yet remains united by an unspoken bond--as journalists, as Ukrainians, Moldovans, Belorussians, and other Eastern Europeans whose heritage is indelibly marked by a common thread of domination and subsequent reclamation.
On one hand, I have found that the beauty of Brussels often lies with the cultural and linguistic differences that its residents are so devoted to voicing and sharing, all of them moving through the city with avowed purpose and in a simultaneous state of passing. Belgium is notorious, in the scheme of history and by its own citizens, for being an "artificial country": constructed as a middle-ground between the Netherlands and France, housing competing languages whose divisions continue to sow both tension and diversity across the nation's cultural landscape. But in that moment, I understood there was also immense beauty in the unspoken commonalities that subtend the backdrop of every interaction: in heritage, in identity, in gender, or whatever it may be, that passers-through can recognize in each other's eyes that need no naming in order to breathe life to a however-fleeting connection.
Perhaps none of these things are real signs of resilience, but instead of openness to human connection. Maybe, resilience is just another word for the callouses you gain when you throw yourself into unknown situations, learning vicariously from the stories of others and learning yourself which stories you had all along to share with them. Resilience is the wisdom and the toughness you realize you now have, because you were so committed to simply putting yourself out there and believing earnestly in the goodness and possibility of human connection. It is the mental fortitude and experiential learning you acquire to be able to navigate truly hard situations in the future.
While all of these learning experiences came outside of my actual internship, I could write pages and pages about the resilience I have observed from my coworkers at the EFJ who will continue to inspire me, as long as they remain committed to the constantly vulnerable, precariously regarded mission of free journalism. And if I have learned anything from them, it is that their devotion to the ideals of freedom of expression, truth, and equity have followed them since the start of their careers and will undoubtedly never cease to guide them beyond retirement.
My boss Renate has been particularly inspiring to me for having devoted the past 30 years of her life to the EFJ (initially, when it was part of the International Federation of Journalists, and then as the Director of the independent EFJ). Her warmth and openness to new interactions is palpable the moment she steps in a room: she greets new faces with a familiarity that she not only knows them, but truly sees them, and approaches each conversation with an ostensibly earnest interest in learning more, despite her breadth of her own knowledge and life experience. It is clear that she prizes the value of life experience, of travel, of rest, of family, and of love above most things, and encourages her own employees/coworkers to imagine a life beyond the rigid hierarchies and hustle so ingrained in the American workplace. At the same time, her devotion to free and pluralistic journalism permeates her entire life being without consuming her or producing a sense of dread or existential anxiety. She can recognize the precarious state of journalism in Europe today without allowing it to guide her internal compass or redefine the work she has dedicated to the field for decades. Her dedication to honoring her own, and the team's, innate humanity is precisely what makes her such an effective leader.
If there is anything Renate and my coworkers have shown me, it is that true leadership, and truly good work, is innately human. To them, there are no statistics or movement through hierarchies that can measure success. On our final day, I was saddened to find that during our all-staff meeting, the team, discouraged by recent news about authoritarian crackdowns on independent journalism/journalists throughout Europe, were frustrated while brainstorming what tangible metrics of the EFJ's success in the past year that they could advertise for their upcoming Public Service Media campaign (which has been the focus of most of my internship work!). To me, it has been so clear that no number or deliverable could ever capture the profound impact of the EFJ and of my coworkers' efforts. Speaking with the EFJ partners in meetings and socials, it is clear how at ease and warm my coworkers make journalists facing death threats, mass layoffs, and newsroom funding cuts feel, and how truly supported they knew they were in the EFJ's hands.
My coworker Camille (who was very sadly on holiday for most of the duration of my LiA but returned for my last week) showed me the ropes of her Mapping Media Freedom Alerts, which documents every case of journalist endangerment across Europe (be it manipulative legal action, digital threats, physical attacks, and more). After every alert she had me write for the tracker, she would check in with me with utmost sincerity, asking if I was okay reading about the truly haunting dangers journalists across Europe affronted. Camille shared openly with me that while she had grown comfortable--desensitized even--writing these alerts, she believed that her body was storing the secondhand emotional trauma of reporting on abuse after abuse. She told me to honor the gravity of every situation I documented, recognizing that work like this should not simply be seen as "work," but as true emotional labor that merited taking the time to process, to breathe, and to decompress. While I was genuinely comfortable doing this work and did not feel I needed to take extra time to process, I was touched by her heartfelt support not only of the journalists whose stories she dedicated every day to making visible and understandable, but of me, a random intern she knew for all of two weeks.
And on my last day, the team took me to lunch and each wrote a sincere message in a card to me, before gifting me a book of surrealist short stories chronicling the experiences of a Ukrainian wartime journalist; they knew exactly the kind of book that would pique my intellectual and professional interests at the same time. I have full faith that if they treat every union, journalist, and partner with the same compassion they treated an intern they knew for six weeks (and it's not really an if), the EFJ's impact is exponentially larger than they had imagined in that meeting.
There is a lot of talk about success being measured in numbers, pragmatically, with clear deliverables and actionables and spreadsheets and decks and powerpoints. But I have seen that truly successful leadership is the love and empathy my boss and coworkers stirred in me, for the EFJ team and for the community of journalists across Europe, persevering despite every systemic and personal message telling them to quit. If anything could give me hope about the future of journalism, it is my coworkers at the EFJ.
I will be sure to update this with photos when I get the chance. Losing my phone, by the way, may have been a blessing in disguise.