Claire Knutson
Professor W. Scott Olsen
Inquiry Written Communication 100
8 October 2021
Lynsey Addario’s Struggle to Balance her Personal and Professional Lives
It’s What I Do, a memoir written by Lynsey Addario, tells the story of her life and her career and how they are intricately intertwined. Lynsey is a passionate, hardworking war photographer. She’s traveled all over the globe, working in countries such as India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Cuba, Istanbul, Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia. Armed with only a camera, she fights to influence policy by revealing truths and telling people’s stories through her photographs. One of the issues in this book is Lynsey’s struggle to fit her personal life, especially romantic and familial relationships, around her passion for war photography. The work she does is dangerous, demanding, and often pulls her away from family, friends, and lovers. She has been kidnapped twice, gotten in a serious car accident, had many friends and drivers die from doing this work, put off marriage and children for years, and missed out on many important family events.
Many people, including Lynsey herself, wonder why she does this work. Why does she risk her life and sacrifice so much for a few photographs? It’s her passion. When contemplating this question, she explains “it makes us happy, because it gives us a sense of purpose. We bear witness to history, and influence policy…I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new everyday. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be” (15). This work is incredibly important to her and she believes that what she is doing can change the world. It enriches her life and teaches her so many things about others, herself, and different cultures. She’s aware of the risks and sacrifices, but to her, it’s worth it. She writes “when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine” (22). Though her work brings her immense joy, it also gets in the way of her trying to build relationships.
The first time there is a clash between Lynsey’s work and her pursuit of a romantic relationship is when she goes on a date with a musician. At the end of the night, he walks her home and kisses her, but they are interrupted by some of Lynsey’s photography subjects, yelling words of encouragement at her. These subjects are transgender prostitutes, from her first long-term assignment, given to her by The Associated Press. Lynsey has spent the last five months of her life photographing and getting to know these women. She does this to dive deep into their story, not just take a few surface-level photos and leave. She’s built friendships with them, which has allowed her a glimpse into their lives and more intimate, authentic photos. These women have gotten comfortable enough with Lynsey that they jokingly shout at her when they see her on the street. This interruption confuses the musician and he asks her again what she does for a living. Lynsey reminds him that she is a photographer and he questions if these are her friends. She says yes, and “the kiss ended there” (49). This is the earliest instance in the book of Lynsey’s work life conflicting with her romantic life. However, it isn’t only romantic relationships that suffer due to her career – her familial relationships are also affected.
At the beginning of 2000, Lynsey moves to India. While she is there, her sister’s husband passes away from lung cancer, and she regrets not being able to say goodbye to him. The same year, her mother is in a car accident and remains unconscious for three days. Her family doesn’t tell her because they know she is too far away to do anything. She writes, “I often lived with an aching emptiness inside me. I learned early on that living a world away meant I would have to work harder to stay close to the people I loved” (79). Though Lynsey’s work is important to her, it’s creating separation between her and her family. She’s unable to be there for her family in their time of need because her job has made her so distant. She’s struggling to intertwine her work with her personal life in a way that doesn’t compromise either.
Lynsey moves to Mexico City in 2001 with Marion, a reporter she stayed with while she was working in New Delhi. When tagging along on a mountain bike tour with Marion and her boyfriend, Lynsey meets Uxval, a young Mexican man guiding the tour. There is chemistry between them, but Uxval is engaged to another woman, so they part ways. Two days later, he shows up at her apartment and kisses her, then breaks off his engagement to be with Lynsey. She says “I was apprehensive about getting involved with someone who would break an engagement over a gut attraction to a relative stranger, but I was attracted to his decisiveness” (80). Her relationship with Uxval is romantic in a way she’s never experienced before and they have a lot of fun together, going on long walks and bike rides in the mountains.
However, their relationship is not without its problems. Lynsey’s job is still the most important thing to her and “photography drew me away from Uxval like a lover, and this was a simmering source of tension between us…There was no way to do my job without traveling, without physically being away from home. I never said no to an assignment – not ever” (83). She is still at the stage in her career where she is trying to establish herself as a photographer, so she takes every assignment she gets. These jobs frequently take her away from the home she has made in Mexico City with Uxval, which causes rifts between them. When the events of September 11, 2001 occur, Lynsey knows she has to leave to cover the story developing in Afghanistan, and Uxval is not happy about this. She says “this was the first time I had to decide between my personal and professional lives,” (85) and though she doesn’t want to leave Uxval, the choice is obvious. She writes, “I had watched the most historic event of my lifetime on a borrowed television set in Mexico City, and I wasn’t about to miss the second half of the story” (84). She knows where she needs to be. Lynsey flies to Pakistan, choosing her passion for her work over her passion for her boyfriend.
After Lynsey has been in Pakistan for nearly a month, working hard to capture the historical events that take place in the weeks following 9/11, Uxval breaks up with her. He writes her an email that says “I want a girlfriend in flesh and blood…not an Internet girlfriend” (98). Lynsey returns to Mexico City, abandoning the New York Times assignment that she has worked hard to get. Uxval takes her back right away, but doesn’t understand the sacrifice she has made to her career for him. His life is the same as when she left and she embraces it for a while, but when she has to watch another historic event through a TV screen, she regrets how far she is from the action.
I wasn’t sure whether I had made the right decision in flying back to Mexico – whether I wanted my personal life or my career to dictate the decisions I made, where I lived, and how I lived. But I knew that I felt unsettled, watching Kabul fall on the small TV we bought after the attacks of September 11. I was in the wrong place (100).
Lynsey is unsure of how to balance her work and her relationship, but she knows for sure that her career is what she needs to focus on. She needs to be where the action is, taking photographs. When she’s working, she doesn’t seem to miss Uxval or think about him very much, but when she’s away from her work, she longs to go back. When she returns to Mexico to spend Christmas vacation with him, they climb a mountain together and Lynsey is struggling to stay in the moment and enjoy her time with him. She says “images from Peshawar, Quetta, and Kandahar flashed through my mind. All I wanted was to go back to South Asia on assignment for the Times” (108). Even when she’s thousands of miles away from these places and with her boyfriend, she can’t stop thinking about her work.
Lynsey has a really hard time relating to Uxval and his friends. She lives in a different world than him. He parties until dawn, but she “can’t muster up the strength or desire to go out with people with whom I had little in common. By then most of my friends were photographers and journalists who shared my obsession with international politics, world events, and breaking news” (107). She and Uxval have different interests and this disconnect leads an increase of fighting in their relationship. Uxval is jealous of her job; he wants her to himself and hates that her career is stealing her away from him. Lynsey knows this and explains “I knew I could never be the woman he needed. I feared this would be true for every man. My work would always come before everything else, because that was the nature of the work: When news broke, I had to go, and I wanted to” (107). Lynsey is starting to realize that she isn’t the one for Uxval; her obligation to her work will always pull her away from him. She’s never had a relationship with someone who understands her passion and she’s afraid she never will. “Because of my string of failed relationships, along with the ever-increasing demands of my work, I was sure I would spend the rest of my life single” (200). She is convinced that there is nobody who will want to be with her despite her intense commitment to her career, and her relationship problems with Uxval are adding to this conviction.
Lynsey eventually finds out that Uxval has been cheating on her, and she breaks up with him. She takes the split hard, falling into a temporary depressive state, but soon pulls herself out of it by throwing herself into her work. She moves to Istanbul and focuses on her photography, capturing historical events such as the fall of Saddam Hussein. Uxval eventually convinces her to take him back and he moves to live with her in Istanbul. Their relationship is good again for a while, she’s happy to come home to him after work, but history soon repeats itself when she discovers that he is cheating on her again. This time she doesn’t care. She is lonely, doesn’t want to come home to an empty apartment, and her work is the most important thing to her, so she “accepted my relationship with Uxval for what it was” (138). Her crumbling relationship with Uxval leaves her looking for a better connection with someone.
While she is working in Baghdad, she meets Matthew, another foreign correspondent. Not only do they make a good photographer-writer pair, but they “share the same cultural references, the same sense of humor, the same enthusiasm for our work. It was effortless, unlike my disintegrating relationship with Uxval” (147). She dumps Uxval for good, telling him to go back to Mexico City, and declares “it was the first time in years I felt free” (148). This relationship has been burdening her for a while, and it is a huge relief to be released from the stress of being stretched between her career and her personal life. In Matthew, she sees someone who could love her without asking her to give up her passion, because he understands and shares it. Matthew, however, returns to a relationship back home and marries his first love. Lynsey knows that it wouldn’t have worked out between them and says, “Romantic feelings in a war zone were exaggerated by the intensity of every day…Our love never would have flourished anywhere but in Iraq” (166). Her brief relationship with Matthew and her lengthy relationship with Uxval show two different struggles with her attempts to balance a romantic relationship and her career.
In 2005, Lynsey meets Paul, the man she will eventually marry. Paul moves to Istanbul to be the new bureau chief for a news agency and Lynsey is asked by a friend to look after him. They become friends, spending a lot of time together, and talking on the phone almost every night. Paul calculates the best time to call based on her work and sleep schedule and she says “I
had never dated anyone who understood how my work and personal life were intricately bound” (201). Paul is proving himself to be different than the men she has dated in the past, and Lynsey really falls for him.
I had never dated someone I could envision marrying before. Paul, like me, was completely driven by his career…I never had to explain to him why I was away for several weeks out of every month or why I had to stay up on my computer, editing and filing late into the night. With every assignment that took me off to Darfur or Congo or Afghanistan, he simply said, ‘I love you. I am here. Do your work and come back when you finish. I will be here waiting for you.’ It wasn’t just that Paul was accepting of my work – he was energetically supportive, excited to help me plan my reporting, fascinated by the next possible story, and visibly proud of my accomplishments (203).
Lynsey’s relationship with Paul is something she hasn’t experienced before. He understands and supports her career and makes it easy for her to balance her work and their relationship. He doesn’t hold her back from going where she needs to. Because they both have demanding careers that they are passionate about, they “found familiar ground in the wilderness of our familial abnormalcy: our love of our work” (207). Back when she was with Uxval and forced to choose between her professional and personal lives, she states “some part of me knew, or hoped, that real love should complement my work, not take away from it” (85). She’s finally found this “real love” she was hoping for, a love that encourages her passion for war photography, and doesn’t get in the way. When reflecting on her relationship with Paul, Lynsey writes that she has found “the perfect partner, who fits effortlessly into the chaos of my life” (347).
After solving her struggle to balance her romantic relationships and her work, Lynsey is faced with a new challenge: pregnancy. A positive pregnancy test flips her world upside down and she’s terrified of how fast everything is changing. She isn’t ready to give up her life as she knows it – her work, her travels, her body. Feeling like one of her stories has a missing piece, Lynsey flies to Somalia in search for it. She’s aware that traveling to such a dangerous country could hurt her unborn child, but she’s filled with internal struggle between her career and approaching due date. “I was holding on to my identity, my freedom, what I had been working toward my entire adult life – as well as panic that it was all about to disappear with the birth of my child” (321). She’s trying to hold onto the life she had before, scared that she’ll have to give up her passion to be a mother.
When her son, Lukas, is born, Lynsey writes that she “felt a joy and love that far exceeded anything we had ever known” (330). She does her best to soak in this feeling and her first few months with her child, because she knows that she can’t stay away from photography and will have to leave him soon. She says “I must cherish my initial months as a mother, because it would be one of the rare occasions I could allow myself to indulge in nothing other than loving and caring for Lukas” (330). Though she has a great love for her son, it isn’t enough to keep her away from her passion.
She starts traveling again three months after she gives birth, and though being away from Lukas is one of the hardest things she’s ever done, once she’s behind the camera again, everything fades away. She has more difficulty leaving her family than she did when it was just her and Paul. She explains “I struggled, like so many professional men and women, to find that perfect, impossible balance between my personal life and my career. Inevitably one suffered at the expense of the other” (332). She’s always either missing out on photography opportunities or on Lukas growing up. Lynsey has always chosen her work over anything else, but she’s starting to reevaluate where her priorities lie. Now that she has established herself as a photojournalist and built a good career for herself, she no longer feels the need to say yes to every single assignment. She says “I was more selective about assignments after the birth of my son, and I weighed the importance of every story with every day that would keep me away from my family” (333). Early on in her life, her career was her number one priority and everything else, including her relationships, came second. Now, her family is incredibly important to her and though it hasn’t completely knocked her career out of the top spot, she’s learning how to balance them both being number one.
Lynsey Addario’s book, It’s What I Do, tells the story of her incredible life and how she has made a successful career for herself by pursuing her passion of photography. Doing so has required many sacrifices, often to her relationships with loved ones. Though she has had struggles to balance her personal and professional lives, she has built a life where she’s able to maintain an imperfect, but effective equilibrium between her family and career.
Works Cited
Addario, Lynsey. It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War. Penguin USA. 2015.