Aid Workers on the Front Lines of a Ruptured World
Standing in the Rupture: The Burden of Bearing Witness
Aid Workers on the Front Lines
If you’ve been in international development long enough, you’ve felt it—the pull between worlds, the contradictions that don’t add up, the deep exhaustion that self-care can’t fix. We are told to be resilient, to adapt, to keep moving. But what if the problem isn’t us? What if the problem is that we exist at the edges of a ruptured world, standing at the fault lines of colliding realities?
A Life at the Edges
I’ve worked in international development for 20 years. I’ve seen good people burn out, not because they weren’t strong enough, but because they were absorbing too much. Because they stood in the rupture—where systems of power clash with lived reality, where policies designed in boardrooms unravel in the field, where idealism meets the limits of bureaucracy.
I became tired of watching the same patterns play out. Tired of the way international staff were centered while national staff remained unheard. Tired of burnout being framed as a personal failing rather than the result of impossible pressures. Tired of being told that resilience was the answer when we knew that the system itself was making us sick.
For those of us with power, we could speak up—a little. But we were met with institutional resistance, told to keep our frustrations to ourselves. And for those of us without power, the risks were greater. And then there are the paradoxes of guilt and shame that we're 'complaining' when we are such positions of relative wealth and privilege, compared to other colleagues, or the populations we serve. As Sara Ahmed notes in Complaint (Duke University Press), institutions are designed to suppress dissent. Speaking up makes you a target. So we keep moving, existing in a system that rewards silence and punishes those who demand better.
The Rupture We Stand In
We are not just aid workers—we are the FRONT LINES at the edges of worlds, including a world that is splitting apart. We exist at the intersections of other worlds, colliding, and we’re right in the thick of it. We see the widening inequality, the rise of fascism, the deepening fractures in our societies. We are often the first ones to see, and sometimes the only ones who seem to care. We hold these realities in our bodies, metabolizing suffering with nowhere to put it. We are expected to function in systems that are collapsing while pretending they still work.
Coloniality is not a thing of the past; it is a living structure that shapes everything we do. It determines who holds power, who benefits, and who is disposable. International development does not exist outside of this—it is embedded within it.
And yet, we are told to carry on. To take another resilience workshop. To practice self-care. To do yoga. To manage our emotions so that the system never has to change. We are meant to believe that the problem is with us.
Centering Ourselves—and the Need to Decenter
It’s important to acknowledge that as aid workers, we often center ourselves in these conversations. And in doing so, we reproduce the very challenges we seek to dismantle. Many of the communities we serve—including the more-than-human world and IBPOC communities—have been on the front lines, along with their allies, for generations. This is not new for them.
Some argue that we should "stop centering whiteness, aid workers themselves, their privilege" and instead focus on the millions affected. And they are right. But at the same time, we cannot minimize grief. Suffering is real, and it must be held collectively. There is space for all. The current system has given space to too few for too long. Our responsibility is not just to process our own trauma, but to seek out and prioritize the voices and needs of those who have been silenced.
The Trauma of Standing at the Edge
Trauma is suffering with nowhere to go. TRAUMA IS SUFFERING…..with no where to go. It builds in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in the spaces between what we know to be true and what we are allowed to say. It exists at points of rupture—where different worlds collide, where the gap between rhetoric and reality is too great to ignore.
And we are on the front lines of that rupture. I don’t mean international staff. I mean all of us who work in social justice, in roles of service, in engagement in a system that is supposed to improve the world, when often this is a “cruel optimism”. We stand where competing realities meet:
Where the language of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” coexists with the silencing of marginalized voices.
Where the rhetoric of humanitarianism meets the machinery of exploitation and extraction.
Where the call for systemic change is drowned out by the institutional need for self-preservation.
The humanitarian imperative to bear witness to suffering, putting politics aside, despite what we see, so as to provide unmet needs to others, especially when state systems are not meeting those needs.
This isn’t just external—it lives within us. We feel it in our bones, in the constant state of hyper-vigilance, in the way we struggle to rest. We are carrying the trauma of systems that refuse to change.
We Cannot Carry This Alone
One human body cannot hold all of this. And yet, we try. We absorb suffering from the field, from our colleagues, from the news, from the digital overload of a collapsing world. No wonder mental illness is rising. No wonder so many of us are physically sick. We are metabolizing trauma without a way to release it.
But trauma does not have to be a solitary burden. There are ways to hold it, together. There are ways to release, metabolize, and transform it—not through individual resilience, but through collective reckoning and relational healing.
We Are Here, Together
Do not minimize what you feel. Do not let the system convince you that you are the problem. The trauma you carry is real. The exhaustion you feel is real. The rupture you stand in is real. And you are not alone.
I refuse to watch brilliant, compassionate people disappear from this work because the system is breaking them. I refuse to let good hearts be swallowed by exhaustion and despair.
This is a calling. This is a song in the dark. I am a myth-teller, a healer, and a researcher. And I am here to say: you are not alone.
I am studying this system. I am making sense of it. And I will share what I find.
Let’s do this together.
I will keep writing.
https://www.beyondburnout.ca/