Living fragility
When I accepted my internship with Human Rights Watch, I pictured a summer defined by intensity: stacks of research, long days on accountability projects, and the adrenaline of working at one of the most respected human rights organizations in the world. What I did not expect was how quickly fragility would become the theme of my summer.
The pre-war apartment I stayed in looked charming from the outside, but inside it hid mold and asbestos. Within weeks I became extremely ill. What began as a cough spiraled into fatigue, breathlessness, and brain fog. I had to fly back to Canada for hospital treatment and returned to New York only to find myself still far from well. Even after the internship ended, the illness trailed into my first weeks of law school.
I had imagined myself tireless. Instead, progress was measured in small increments: finishing a draft despite exhaustion, piecing together notes when my concentration flickered, making it through a meeting when I wanted nothing more than to sleep. At first I saw this as weakness, but slowly I began to realize that fragility was not separate from human rights work. It was the condition in which it is so often practiced.
Work in fragile spaces
On the International Justice team, I learned that most of the work takes place behind the scenes. I drafted internal memos, tracked the positions of states and institutions, summarized developments for colleagues, and helped prepare strategy notes that distilled sprawling debates into clear, usable language. None of it was glamorous, but I came to see how much impact depends on this kind of background labor.
Human rights advocacy rarely advances in dramatic leaps. It advances through persistence: carefully documenting, refining arguments, and keeping issues alive when others want to shelve them. The spreadsheets, notes, and memos may look ordinary, but they are what allow advocacy to be sustained across months and years. This rhythm of slow, deliberate persistence mirrored my own struggle to keep working while sick. Progress was uneven, often invisible, but still necessary.
Where resilience really belongs
My illness also forced me to confront my own positionality. As a white law student interning for a Western NGO, I am far from the true center of resilience in this field. My illness was temporary, cushioned by the privilege of being able to leave New York for treatment and return to school. The real resilience belongs to the communities whose lives are defined by structural injustice yet who continue to demand accountability.
Too often, international advocacy risks casting those communities only as “victims” rather than as agents of their own dignity. One of the most valuable things I observed at HRW was the effort to resist that trap: to shape recommendations that reflected what rightsholders themselves demanded, to insist that survivors were not erased by the technical language of law. It reminded me that resilience in human rights is not about advocates appearing strong, but about ensuring that the agency of affected communities remains visible and central.
Lessons I carry forward
This was not the summer I expected. It was lonelier, harder, and more humbling than I had planned. But it left me with lessons I will carry forward. That resilience is not about erasing weakness but about finding ways to persist within it. That advocacy requires patience and discipline as much as urgency. That international law, for all its fragility, endures because of the communities who insist on its promise, not because of the institutions that claim to protect it.
When I left New York, I was still unwell. The first weeks of law school were exhausting, colored by the same fatigue that had marked my summer. Yet I also left with a deeper respect for what sustains this field: not the dramatic breakthroughs, but the persistence to keep going in fragile conditions.
The fragility I lived through this summer, in my own body and in the institutions I worked alongside, taught me to see resilience differently. Not as tirelessness, not as triumph, but as the ongoing insistence that fragility is not the end.