The hidden triggers in Linkedin feeds!

Those of us who move from traumatic places to peaceful lands cannot always bring our authentic selves to work, especially when our careers are thriving in hand. We move on. We build new networks and new experiences. We tuck the trauma in the narrow remaining spaces left outside of work. Until that is, we check our Linkedin feed.

Five years ago I was standing three floors in the underbelly of the medical education building of the American University of Beirut. A foreman was fiddling with a huge set of keys and a lock he claimed has not been turned since the 'troubles'. When he finally opened it, we gasped. There was a couch made into a bed, a gas cooker, some clothes, an old radio placed right next to the pillow. Everything was covered with three decades of dust. "What is this?" I asked. "During the war when the city was sliced in two," he answered, "some employees could not go home so they slept here. I believe this was the guy who took care of the anatomy lab."

Ahhh! I exclaimed in wonder. I have been living in California for the last twenty years, so this opening of doors and looking into the past of the city I was born in, it was like being on an archaeological dig, a door into a history I missed. The basement of that building, designed by Americans in the 60's, was built with very thick walls and independent water and ventilation sources, as what I can only assume was meant to be a nuclear bomb shelter. Little did the engineers know that during the Lebanese civil war, AUB's medical students would hide, study, and sometimes sleep there when they could not go home. They stayed up nights trying to excel on their tests. In the 1980's they left Beirut in droves, from that basement deep in the bedrock of the coastal city to fellowships and internships and later very successful careers in Ivy League institutions on the east coast of the USA. Looking at these rooms should've made me sad. But I remember smiling.

We were bringing them back!

My job was to renovate the old building so it can carry more students and professors. My job was to fill it to the brim with cutting edge technology: next-gen sequencers, multi-coloured FACS machines, confocal microscopes, irresistible lures for biomedical researchers. When potential faculty members came for the interviews I took them on tours, painting 'visions' of the heights their alma mater will reach in the next 5 years if they return. And return they did, in the dozens. Papers celebrated the 'reverse brain drain'. The building buzzed with their energy. They argued, vigorously, over space, equipment, and graduate students. The Lebanese who never left were distraught by the arguing, but I loved every minute of it. This is what academic infighting should sound like. Finally, first world problems!

That was five years ago.

Today I scroll through my Linkedin feed from a small peaceful city in the west of Ireland. Everyday, Linkedin asks me to congratulate one of them, the people we recruited, for leaving Beirut. It euphemizes it as 'starting'. Congratulate so and so for 'starting' at this prestigious medical center in Dubai, Qatar, Paris, Johns Hopkins, London...

Yet some of us see beyond the 'starting'. We know it is also a forced ending. The final step in dissolving a dream we were all so vested in meticulously crafting. Now my Linkedin feed has the perverse pull of the obituary page. I scroll through it everyday to see if another familiar face has transitioned from Beirut to rejoin the career-thriving. And there is always someone. Every post brings the sting of two conflicting feelings in me. I am truly happy for them. Facing a failed state with a crumbling infrastructure and a hyper-inflated economy, leaving is the right thing to do.

And yet...I am also very sad. Every 'starting' post reaffirms the dark future of a nation methodically stripped of its brilliant physicians, scientists and intellectuals. Every 'starting' post calls me an idiot for believing that rebuilding a foothold for science can ward off the onslaught of ignorance. I was there on the top of Maslow's pyramid, choosing fluorescent microscopes, blind to the hollowed base of needs of the masses outside.

Linkedin might not be the place for emotions, but it has been triggering so many for me. Seven years of my career working for something that is disintegrating slowly in my news feed. I click the clapping hands button and I look away. We are on another page of your CV now Samira, I tell myself. Those seven years have receded to a few bullet points on page 3. You look forward. You move on.

Last week in a job interview in Dublin, a lady asked me where I see myself in five years. An ocean wave rose from my chest to my mouth but I kept my lips shut. Dear interviewer, if you only knew what I was busy planning five years ago, you wouldn't ask the question.