"Call me crazy!" - Sumar Sleem, Head of Mission in Lebanon and Syria

23.09.2024, Beirut

To no surprise, today was the day I hoped would never arrive. Maybe, I needed to push it down deep somewhere in the subconscious, but I just somehow knew that something inevitable was about to happen, something ugly was crawling in the shadows.

The past war shaped me in a very peculiar way, it was a drill that grew in me a compassion toward those who hold on and try to move on no matter what, to those who are willing to go far and beyond to change the balance of things.

Yes, the balance of things that governs every matter around here, from politics to economics to every aspect of this unusual life where the abnormal becomes the new normal, where living at the edge and expecting the worst at any given moment is the least to do.

I always tell myself that I don’t have the luxury to pause and reflect on how life went by but the truth is that somewhere inside there’s this urge to take a deep breath and then scream loud enough through the mountains, just scream and not say a thing because honestly I don’t know what to say at all.

Life went by and the abnormality it included amassed to a certain extent that I have to acknowledge that having a normal day would sound very alarming. Surviving the daily challenges would make living normally feel like a totally unthinkable horror.

Call me stupid but I wouldn’t exchange my life here for a thing. Having to drive through the streets everyday with most people pretending to be color blind when it comes to traffic lights, with cars parked in every possible way and people crossing as if they are carrying out a suicidal mission, with motorbikes flying around like wasps and people shouting and cursing, only tells me that I am at the right place.

Yes, I am in the right place because I know what it’s like to reach this level of frustration and anger, because I know what it’s like to try to go through the day with least damage incurred, because I know how it feels to be left alone and because I know how it feels to be the other person. I have been in their shoes in a way or another through the years and I know how hard and lonely it feels in such times.

Call me crazy, but I wouldn’t leave this hell because only in it I feel alive and only in this turmoil I can long for peace and I can understand what it means to love and to be loved.

I wonder what kind of person I would have turned out to be if I wasn’t living here but I already know that I don’t like that person and I don’t need to meet her.

I would rather have my heart aching and breaking every day around here than live in peace anywhere else in the world.

Call me sick but suffering with them here is thousand times better for me than having peace of mind abroad.

Don’t bother to call me names because I assure you I know that I am twisted enough to fall in love with this place with all its misery and will choose it again and again over a cold heaven in some other place on the planet.

It’s an unnamed syndrome that most probably I developed, yet I will seek no cure for it nor will I embrace any precautions, simply because I love the symptoms it causes me, they force me to be a human, a simple human with an aching heart and a twisted mind.