and reawakened a desire to become a scholar myself. However, after a traumatic previous experience in academia that left me with severe panic attacks in 2010, I could not make that step back to the academic world. At the same time, I could not leave the field. The ethnographic literature focuses so much on entering the field, replete with accounts of access, either giving prescriptive advice or describing the processes reflexively (Delamont, 2016). Leaving the field has received much less attention, both from an emotional perspective and a life course point of view (Caretta and Cheptum - Area, 2017). For me uncertainty prevailed. In an era of mass mobility that entails so much human suffering, academic work often seems self-indulgent and somewhat removed from the immediate problems facing participants. Arthur Frank (2001) questions whether we can research suffering because it is not a concept but a lived reality that resists articulation. He writes, ‘suffering is the unspeakable, as opposed to what can be spoken; it is what remains concealed, impossible to reveal; it remains in darkness, eluding illumination; and it is dread, beyond what is tangible even if hurtful.’ (Frank, 2001, p. 355). As Mary Bosworth and Blerina Kellezi (2016b) have reported about their research inside detention centres in the UK, I, too, found it hard to reconcile myself to the aspirations of research participants for the research to make things better for them; their suffering I could not come to grips with. The guilt at being unable to help research participants is not uncommon (Dickson-Swift, et al., 2007; Lofland, 2016; Oakley, 1981). In the final throes of interviews one of the women said to me, ‘I am happy to speak to you. You are very gentle. You help me forget my problem’ (Chioma, Nigeria). That some women felt better after discussing their experiences with me helped alleviate the guilt (Gerlach, 2018). The growing methodology literature on emotion and trauma agrees that the emotional consequences of research are rarely discussed. However, hiding our emotions can constrain our ability of truly understanding what we are witnessing. As Markowitz eloquently argues, ‘our fear, doubt, grief, rage, horror, and detachment, our shivers and shakes, and our paralysis and frenzy lay bare our humanity when we are confronted with the cruelty, despair, and suffering that humans can inflict on each other.’ (2021: 95). In drawing back the veil on the emotional process of research, I demonstrate how the interpersonal and institutional contexts of research, as well as ontological and 54