I started my journalism journey as a refugee in Indonesia. At that time, I was living in a state of prolonged uncertainty, like thousands of other refugees stranded across the archipelago. We had fled war, persecution, and violence in our home countries, only to find ourselves in another form of captivity: legal limbo. We were not allowed to work, study, or freely move. Our lives were put on hold indefinitely. And yet, the institutions responsible for our protection continued to produce reports, fact sheets, and press releases that spoke about us without ever speaking to us.

That is when I picked up my pen.

While in Indonesia, I actively wrote on refugee human rights. As a refugee myself, I was trying to share my stories and the stories of my fellow refugees. We were literally banned from rebuilding our lives. We were stranded in what many of us came to call "green limbo"—a condition where we are neither detained nor free, neither assisted nor abandoned, but suspended in a bureaucratic nowhere.

Many refugees lost their lives during this prolonged waiting. Many more gave up, overwhelmed by uncertainty and suffering from severe mental health crises. I witnessed friends slide into depression, others attempt suicide, and some simply disappear from the community without a trace. The institutions that claimed to protect them documented their cases in files and databases, but their humanity, their names, faces, and dreams rarely appeared in the official narratives.

The Gap Between Narrative and Reality

As I was reporting and writing on this crisis, I always knew that our stories and voices were not truly considered in the policies and strategies that governments, NGOs, and refugee organizations designed for us. Those policies hardly ever addressed the reality of refugees on the ground. The result is what we now see across the world: protracted refugee crises, with millions of refugees still living without basic human rights, unable to live a dignified human life in their host communities.

As the number of refugees continues to grow each day—driven by the war in Ukraine, conflict in Sudan, violence and persecution in Myanmar, the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, ongoing instability in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and insecurity across the Sahel—the suffering of refugees remains an endless cycle. Yet the policies do not change. The reports continue to be written. The conferences continue to be held. And refugees continue to be spoken for.

What Writing Taught Me

Through writing on the refugee crisis and writing for refugees, I learned something that changed my understanding of forced displacement entirely. I learned that the refugee crisis is not primarily a crisis of displacement. It is not a crisis of numbers or resources or border security. The refugee crisis, at its core, is a crisis of representation.

The international refugee regime itself has made displacement a crisis through the narratives it writes on behalf of refugees. These narratives frame refugees as vulnerable, passive, and dependent. They speak of "beneficiaries," "populations of concern," and "cases to be processed." They reduce human beings to categories. And it is on the basis of these narratives—not on the basis of refugee voices—that refugee policies are designed and implemented.

When policies are built on distorted or incomplete narratives, they produce distorted and incomplete outcomes. This is why refugees remain in limbo for years. This is why mental health crises go unaddressed. This is why children grow up without education and adults without work. The system does not fail despite its narratives; it fails because of its narratives.

My Research: Comparing Narratives

I wanted to find out how these narratives differ from each other and how they contribute to power relations in the global refugee regime. So I recently completed my Master's thesis in Migration and Diaspora Studies at Carleton University. My thesis focused on refugee self-representation: how refugees represent themselves versus how institutions represent refugees. My research has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Refugee Studies, in an article titled "Refugee Journalism in Indonesia: Self-Representation, Resistance, and Writing across Borders."

I aimed to identify the differences between narratives produced by UNHCR, IOM, and other organizations and narratives produced by refugees. I analyzed two sets of texts. The first set included refugee-written texts: journalism articles, testimonies, first-person narratives, and social media posts. The second set included institutional narratives: publicly available reports, fact sheets, situation updates, and press releases produced by institutions.

For my case study, I selected Indonesia as the focus of my research. Indonesia is a non-signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which means it does not provide formal legal status to refugees. This creates a governance system characterized by prolonged legal limbo, restricted mobility, and lack of work and education rights. Additionally, refugee governance in Indonesia is largely delegated to international organizations such as UNHCR and IOM, making it an ideal site to compare institutional narratives with refugee self-representations. The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified existing structural inequalities, providing a critical crisis moment to examine how these two forms of narrative diverge.

What I Found

The findings were striking. Institutional narratives consistently framed refugees as objects of assistance—passive, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Their language was technical, depersonalized, and focused on service delivery. Refugee-produced narratives, by contrast, framed refugees as political actors—active, demanding, and capable of organizing, protesting, and advocating for their own rights.

Refugees wrote: "We built our own school." "We demanded medical treatment." "We organized a protest."

Institutions wrote: "Refugees require protection and assistance." "Vulnerable populations need support." "Beneficiaries were provided with cash assistance."

These are not just different ways of saying the same thing. They are fundamentally different ways of understanding who refugees are and what they are capable of. One narrative produces dependency. The other asserts agency. One narrative justifies the status quo. The other demands change.

Why Writing Your Own Story Matters

This is why it is so important to write your own story. When refugees write, we reclaim our humanity. We move from being objects of institutional concern to being subjects of our own narratives. We show the world—and ourselves—that we are not simply victims waiting for rescue. We are people with histories, hopes, skills, and political demands.

Writing our own stories also serves an accountability function. When we document being denied healthcare, excluded from vaccination, or left without support, we create evidence that institutions cannot easily dismiss. Our testimonies fill the gaps that institutional reports leave empty. They expose the distance between policy promises and lived realities.

And writing our own stories builds community. When refugees read each other's words, we realize we are not alone. We learn from each other's strategies of survival and resistance. We build solidarity across national, ethnic, and linguistic differences. In a system designed to isolate and manage us individually, collective storytelling becomes a form of collective power.

A Call to Action

To my fellow refugees, activists, and change makers: Write even if no one is reading. Write on your phone, on scraps of paper, in WhatsApp groups. Write because your story matters and because the official story is never complete without your voice. You do not need permission to tell your own story.

To researchers and policymakers: Read what refugees write. Not as data to be coded, but as knowledge to be taken seriously. Do not simply extract quotes that fit your frameworks. Engage with refugee narratives as legitimate sources of insight into what is wrong with the current system and how it might be fixed.

To humanitarian institutions: Create real spaces for refugee participation. Not token consultations, but genuine power-sharing. Fund refugee-led media. Hire refugee journalists. Include refugee representatives on your boards. And most importantly, change the narratives you produce. Stop writing about refugees as passive beneficiaries. Start writing with refugees as co-authors of their own futures.

Conclusion

I started my journalism journey as a refugee in Indonesia because I could no longer bear the silence. I wrote because the gap between what institutions said and what refugees experienced was too wide to ignore. I continue to write because I believe that changing the narrative is the first step toward changing the system.

The refugee crisis will not be solved by more reports, more conferences, or more technical solutions. It will be solved when refugees are recognized as political actors and knowledge producers. It will be solved when we can write our own stories—and when the world finally reads them.