Since I can remember, I’ve wanted to live in New York.
The aspiration lives in my earliest memories, like when I was around five years old and my father brought home a colourful atlas with pages detailing the ‘Big Apple’. Every city has a symbol, and New York’s was an apple. Years later, I learned that my home city, Beirut, is also called an “apple”. But even so, I suspect I might love the “Big Apple” more.
I am Batoul, a journalist in her early twenties who got paid for the first time at sixteen and, after seven years of practising journalism, now holds the title of Senior Political and Human Rights Editor. Some consider the title an exceptional achievement for my age, but after all that I have “achieved”, it still feels small. It feels too small to move me any closer to my longstanding dream of a big life lived in New York City.
And yet, as these thoughts loop in my head, reality cuts through them with a sharper edge. Hovering above all this internal dialogue, quite literally, is another presence: the sound of drones and warplanes over the city of Beirut. Morning and night. A constant noise that settles into the body, something almost neurological.
The imminent feeling of sudden, ambush-like, obliterating death. Three years taken from my career in journalism. From my life in general. Three years that would have been enough to move me forward.
A war that has stolen years from my life and my career, years that were supposed to be my “prime”. My small victories, my first investigation, my first front page story, now live beside the awareness that everything can disappear between one deadline and the next. I didn’t need to go to the frontline to learn that journalists here don’t only die on assignment. They die in the kitchen, on their balcony, on an ordinary street, not as a “correspondent killed while covering a battle,” but as a line in a growing casualty list.
I have been a journalist since my mid-teens. Today, one week, I report on press freedom in Lebanon, and how journalists are summoned, threatened, and sued. Another week, I meet injured children brought from Gaza to Beirut, or walk through a camp where women describe a life built in ten square metres. Between these “big” stories are quieter ones: a woman denied protection, a disabled person abandoned in a crisis, a refugee stuck in a grey zone no ministry claims. What I am often really covering is survival.
From Syria to Gaza, from Sudan to South Lebanon and from other wars whose names appear on my screen like distant constellations, the carnage crawls into my day. I see almost nothing else in newspapers, on television, or on my phone. The idea of sudden, pointless death produces a steady nausea as I imagine a person burning, bleeding in the street, or being vaporised by a missile. I write this with the sound of warplanes above my building. This is the ground on which I practice journalism.
Over time, the line between my work and my life has almost vanished. When I write about displacement, it is not only as an observer; it is a scenario I rehearse in my own mind: what to pack if we must leave, who to call first, which window is safest? When I write about fear, I am also writing about the way my heart stops when family chats go suddenly silent. Journalism used to be my way into other people’s emergencies; now the emergency is already here, and journalism is simply how I describe it.
Before I speak to a woman under siege, bombardment, or displacement, my preparation as a journalist has two parts. The visible part is professional: reading reports, checking maps, and confirming facts. The invisible part is a quiet ritual: I write her name in my notebook to remind myself she is not just “a case” or “a source” but a person whose life is larger than the worst thing that happened to her. As a woman journalist in Beirut, my access is shaped by gender: in kitchens, stairwells, shelters, women tell me what they will not say in front of men, about abuse, fear, pregnancy, undocumented children, shame. In newsrooms and in the street, I fight to be taken seriously.
Why stay in a profession where colleagues are killed for wearing press vests, where journalists are targeted, surveilled, and censored? Because of the women: the young woman who spoke so that, if she disappeared, there would be proof she existed; the mother who asked me not to write her name but to write what was done to her son; the student in a shelter who did not know if anyone would care but needed someone to hear her. I have lost the right to ignorance; there is no “I don’t want to know.”
Press freedom and gender equality are not abstractions to me; they decide whether these women’s stories live or die. When journalists are silenced, their pain becomes rumour; when women journalists are excluded, the lives of women and girls vanish from view. Stepping away would mean leaving a front line of memory, of who is documented and who remains a private tragedy. I know my life is privileged, I have a home, a salary, a desk, and an editor, but my story is the thread that carries theirs into the record. Under drones and deadlines, I live between wanting a normal life and knowing that normal is a luxury, between dreaming of New York and waking to warplanes in Beirut.
So I continue to scroll, read, watch, and listen — not just as a journalist whose job is to stay updated but as a person with privilege who fears for these women and knows them deeply. I’m not exceptional, but I am one of many women worth writing and reading about. One of many young women in this region who refuse to surrender the narrative to those who bomb, censor, or erase. And if one day I do make it to New York, I know that the “apple” I dreamed of as a child will taste different. It will taste of Beirut’s stubborn survival, of Gaza’s shattered schools, of Sudan’s camps, of the women whose voices carried me there.