The many faces of isolation
I love swimming in the ocean. There’s something about being alone, in the sea, floating and knowing that your feet can’t touch the bottom—it’s as though there’s only you and your breath, buoyed by the gentle hands of water.
So when the Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo invited me to the 2025 National Conference of the Movement for the Safety and Welfare of Women Journalists (We-Move) in Boracay, I jumped at the chance. It was an event timed for International Women’s Day and sponsored by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the International Media Support, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, all of which have worked on protecting women journalists.
There were many familiar faces at the conference: a few of the journalists there had been my Science Reporting students back when they were finishing their master’s degree, others were my fellow faculty members at the Ateneo, and still others were bylines and names I had heard over the years.
They were all women, all real, all battling the daily challenges that come with being a journalist in the country.
I was part of a lineup of resource persons under this year’s theme of health and wellness. The topics included the options available for women’s health care, the importance of yearly checkups, and the cracks and kinks of our broken health-care system. To cap the conference, I was assigned to teach a belly dance workshop.
I taught posture as well as isolations. In dance, isolations include movements confined to one part of the body; in belly dance, this often involves the use of only one muscle to drive motion. Isolations are the building blocks of belly dance: they allow beginners to feel where their bodies are in space, to sense what their muscles can (or shouldn’t) do, to feel where their limbs should be stronger or where their tension and stress have built up.
Belly dance is mindfulness: every dance is a combination of strong posture, technique, stage presence, and intentional movements that match the texture of the music. Belly dance is a dance that takes time, reflection, and storytelling. The woman who dances it does not come to forget her struggles: she brings herself to the dance, her beauty and her ugliness, her weakness and her strengths, her memories and her dreams.
Doing isolations is a luxury, I’ve found, because one needs time to do them—and time is something that journalists do not have in abundance. Women journalists feel the brunt of this even more clearly: some of them have to take care of families and elderly relatives, others have to juggle multiple jobs in a profession that is valued in idea but not in compensation, and still others have to work on deadlines that span the range of yesterday and right now.
In my 90-minute-long workshop, the journalists had to isolate themselves from the world, to remember who they were—all while isolating the muscles that had long been kept silent in favor of the next big scoop, the next big interview, the next big headline.
Many of the journalists in the room, however, had always been isolated. Some of them had pursued stories that ruffled the feathers of the powerful and corrupt. Others had covered hostage crises; war zones; the lives of families living in abject poverty in the farthest reaches of the country; the hidden worlds of the sick, the rejected, the oppressed, all living in crevices of the world where people did not dare look.
As isolation is a luxury, so has it been a scourge. As the talks of the conference showed, there are many far-off places in the country where no one has ever seen a doctor. Our health systems have not yet adjusted to what our country truly needs. Many health-care professionals still stay out of politics, not realizing that staying out of the public eye is in itself a political decision.
As isolation is a time to think and reflect, so is it a death sentence for many.
And yet our women journalists have not stopped telling their stories.
In between sessions, I went down to the beach. I chose a part of the island where there were fewer people, where the sands were rough, where the waters rolled and roiled, where the waves rose and fell like walls of black silver.
I swam out into the deep, until I floated, and could see nothing above me but a blue sky with clouds, could hear nothing but the rush of air in and out of my lungs and the waves crashing into my ears.
I could see the shore, and I knew I could swim there, but I chose to stay: isolated, alone, far from my friends and colleagues, in the deeper waters where the waves were strong and the ocean bottom was meters away.
There, with no life vest, no means of rescue, no other swimmers, was silence.
That, perhaps, is what has driven our women journalists.
In the isolation, in the places where the depths of stories have not yet seen the light, sometimes, there is the deepest of peace.
And it is in that peace that they can hear most clearly, and write most vividly, the stories of the voiceless.
