هذا النص ليس رسالة إنتحار لكنه محاولة للتعبير عن الجزء المكبوت والذي لم أمتلك قط الشجاعة لإظهاره، وبعد إن إنتهت جميع محاولاتي لإنكاره وبات إخفائه مهمة مستحيلة لم يعد أمامي سوى حل واحد، الإعتراف به ورؤيته مع الإيمان بأنه جزء واحد ولم يصل لحد أن يستحوذ على عقلي كله ووجودي كله.

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لطالما كان من الصعب جداً علي أن أعترف بالمشاعر المظلمة، وهذا ماجعلني أعاند أصلاً في تصديق أي شيء ماعدى فكرة الإستسلام عن الحياة أو التوقف عن المحاولة في أي شيء، لا أعرف لماذا تحديداً إختار فان جوخ أذنه لتعاقب على رغبته الشديدة في الإختفاء لماذا الأذن تحديداً؟ بالنسبة لي أحب جسدي ولذلك لا أفكر بإقتلاع أجزاء و إنما أفكر أكثر في محو وجودي كله وأن يبقى جسدي قطعة واحدة متماسكة غير مقطعة لأجزاء، بنفس الطريقة التي أحاول فيها طول الوقت أن تكون جميع أجزائي موجودة ومرئية في العالم الخارجي وهذا بالتحديد السبب الذي يجعلني أعترض جميع أنواع السلطات، كأنها فطرة عميقة بداخلي تعكس رغبة قوية في أن أكون مقبولة بالكامل او موجودة بالكامل دون الخضوع لأي نوع من انواع السيطرة او السلطة، وان لم يكن ذلك ممكنا إذا أفضل أن أقتلع الروح من الجسد لتذهب لمكان اخر أكثر إتساعاً.

وكأني أضيق ذرعاً بالجدران بحدود الجسد، بالقمع الخارجي، بالإمكانيات المحدودة، ورغم أني أسعى للتمكين ولجعل صورتي الكاملة موجودة على أرضية الواقع لم أفهم قط لماذا بداخلي يوجد هناك أجزاء لا يمكنني قبولها؟ لماذا لم أقدر أبداً على النظر مباشرة تجاه هذا الجزء الذي يريد وضع حد لوجودي على هذا الكوكب ؟ لماذا أخشى بشدة الإعتراف بهذه الطاقة المظلمة والمتجسدة كمثلث برمودا ولمذا أشعر بالخجل اصلاً من ان أقول بصوت عالي : لم أعد أريد الإبقاء على حبل المحاولة؟

ربما لأن الذات المتخيلة التي قبلتها ك سمة لشخصيتي مشبعة بالألوان والأمل والتماسك والقوة والشجاعة فلم يكن هناك مجال لقبول هذا التناقض الشديد والبعيد تماماً عن مركز الوعي الذي أحمله وأعرفه. وكأن هذه النسخة تحمل معها ايضاً جميع العلاقات في حياتي ومع إختفائها وسيطرة الظل لن يتواجد شيء او شخص او حلم او حتى فكرة. ماذا سيكون مصير الأجزاء الأخرى اذا تقبلت هذا الجزء؟ هذا الجزء الحاد والمدبب وكأنه زجاج متحطم لأجزاء كثيرة وصغيرة تحاول جرح جلدي وأخشى ان تجرح الأخرين من حولي، لذلك ابالغ في إخفائه خشية مني على جلودهم جميعاً ، وخشية مني على نفسي من نظرة الدهشة في أعينهم أو نظرة الخوف والقلق، لا اريد أن يحميني أحد من نفسي، لا اريد مواصلة الإنكار ولا اريد أيضاً الوجود.

إستوقفتني كلمات سيلفيا :

‘Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun’  

– The Unabridged Diaries of Sylvia Plath

هناك جوع يقتحم أضلاعي ومسامات عقلي وتلافيف الخلايا ويتفاقم يوماً بعد يوم، هذا الوحش الجائع يكبر بالتدريج بعيداً عني دون أن يستمع لي، يرفض الإنصات لي ويقترب أكثر من أذني وحلقي ويدي، اكثر الأماكن حميمية وقرباً من التعبيرات التي إخترت أن أتواجد من خلالها؟

اذني تسمع حلقي يعبر يدي تصور وترسم، لم يكن الفن يوماً بالنسبة لي عملاً او حتى شيءً اريد من خلاله الظهور، كان بالنسبة لي حبل النجاة الوحيد من هذا الوحش، بهذه الطريقة أنا أحاول الفرار من هذا المصير المحتوم.

احاول خلق إحتمالات كثيرة من خلال فمي، أشكل الكلمات أعبر أكثر، اتكلم بوضوح، اطالب بالوضوح، استمع بوضوح لكني ومع الوقت اختفي خلف الظل، يعميني الظباب، يشتد البخار الخارج من ظل الشبح ويخفي ملامح وجهي، يحاول إستبدال وجودي كله ليكون هنا، هل هي أمنية عميقة؟

بالتأكيد إن قررت يوماً سماع هذا الشبح لن يكون هناك محاولتين، ولا نصف محاولة ستكون مرة واحدة أكيدة، دفعة واحدة ،تماماً كقدومي للحياة .الخروج من عنق الزجاجة دفعة واحدة.

النوبة الأولى للجنون :

إنها المرة الأولى التي أفقد فيها عقلي، بعد أسبوعين من اللحظة التي إعترفت فيها برغبتي لإيقاف كل شيء، وكأن زر التحكم الكوني لمسار النجوم في حياتي رهن إشارتي الشخصية.

أنا الأن أفقد عقلي دفعةً واحدة، ويتحول فيها عقلي من مستمع صبور لمتمرد خارق الخطوات يتفتت في أنحاء الكوكب.

كل خلية في عقلي تحرك يديها لتصل لمكان محدد لوحدها، متخلية تماماً عن بقية الإجزاء وكأنها جميعاً تنتمي لكوكبة بعيدة عن فهمي وتوقعي الإنساني.

أمسك ب يدين صديقتي فير قادرة على التنفس، هكذا ببساطة افقد سلطتي أمام الأفكار السريعة بداخل عقلي، تيار عصبي يتحرك بسرعة من خلال جمجمتي كل مرة أفتح فيها عيناي هناك أعين كثيرة تحدق بي اخشاها واشبح ببصري عنها وأنظر لزوايا الغرفة، أنظر لوجه صديقتي لوهلة لا أتعرف عليها ولا على نفسي ولا على الغرفة ،أسمع صوت كل فكرة وهي تحمل سوطاً قاسياً كأن كل أفكاري عفنة،كأنها جميعاً محاطة ب السموم، تزداد نوبة الهلع وأنا أرى ملايين الأعين تحدق بي تحرك أصابعها تجاهي وتتهمني بشيء غامض لا أعرف ماهيته.

وضعت رأسي فوق المخدة وأنا أنظر لداخلي مغمضة العينين أحاول تتبع صوت صديقتي، تكرر بجانب اذني " أنت ب أمان لن يحدث شيء لك ". أعيد نفس الكلمات بداخلي لا يصدقني عقلي أغمض عيني أكثر وأشاهد لأول مرة جسدي يخرج تماماً من جسدي! لأصبح شخصاً اخر يراقب هذا الجسد من مسافة بعيدة، لا أدرك شيءً غير أني اصارع وأحاول بشدة البقاء بداخل الجسد لكني كظل خفيف أبتعد عن الأرضية التي استند بها على ثقلي كله، أشاهد الأفكار كل فكرة حقيقية وقوية بطريقة لاتسمح لي بالشك أو التردد.

متى يستوعب العالم بأننا جميعاً جناح فراشة، أرق من النسمة. أشد شفافية من ضوء الصباح وأكثر شبهاً ب الشرنقة الصغيرة التي تغطي أثر الفراشة

العود العازف فوق سطح المبنى يغطي جلدنا معاً يترنح يمنة ويسرة يراقص الخلايا بداخلنا دفعة واحدة

نسكب النبيذ على شفاهنا الرقيقة والتي تكلم قلوبنا مباشرة.

النبيذ الأحمر وقلبي وقلبك جميعنا واحد

الزجاج الجارح لأصبعي يجرح أيضاً ثقب أذنك

الكلمة التي تقولها لترميها في وجهي صباح البكاء" تبكيك أنت أيضاً".

ياله من عالم معتوه " معتوهون جميعاً لكننا نحبُك صوفاً من عاج نغطيه فوق ال أنا. نصدق الترهات نعود للرقص !

تنكسر ضلوعك إثر نصف كلمة

تُقتلع أعينك خلف صوت عالٍ

تتكسر أسنانك إثر غضب واضح على ملامح محبوبك !

نحشد الجيوش نسلح الشعوب

نتصرف كأن العدو هو نحن والعالم تحت رحمتنا

نحن العدو

نحن الضحية

نحن ايضاً من نتجرع سم الرصاص الذي وزعناه على الجيران

ترهات، ترهات، ترهات كثيفة ! جميعها تسقط فوق خدودنا

ترهات لنتوقف هنا!

كش ملك.

I wrote these lines before I understood what they were trying to tell me:

How could I carry both of us with love
when each morning
I struggle to pull my own body from the bed?

How could I offer you
all the tenderness
running through my veins,
when I am still learning
how to be gentle
with the body I live in?

I am afraid to reach for you
before I learn
how to hold myself.

Not because I love you less,
but because my exhaustion
has grown heavier than my heart.

For a long time, I thought this exhaustion belonged only to my relationships. I thought it explained why I sometimes struggled to love, to reply, to show up, or to be present. But over time, I realized it had quietly spread into every corner of my life. It wasn’t only about love. It was about the way I moved through the world, the way I kept running, the way I filled every silence with another task, another conversation, another memory, because I was afraid of what I would find if I ever stopped. This is not an article about burnout. It is about the fear of stillness, the endless effort of surviving, and the strange comfort of finally asking what might happen if, for just a moment, we stopped trying so hard.

There are days when I simply do not want to try. It is as simple as that. I do not want to pull myself out of bed. I do not want to force myself to walk around. I do not want to make breakfast. I want to cancel every plan I made with friends, not because I no longer love them, but because there are days when even existing feels like more effort than I know how to give. Those are the days when I finally stop running from the darkness that has been following me for as long as I can remember. Most days, I spend all my energy trying to outrun it. I stay busy. I fill every empty space. I push myself beyond my limits. I convince myself to become more than I can carry. I make friends. I care for them one by one. I answer every message as soon as I can. I help anyone who needs me. I love. I keep trying to love. I keep trying to become someone who is always available, always present, always capable of giving a little more. I keep making an effort, not only in work or in my career, but in every relationship, every conversation, every opportunity life places in front of me. I keep learning, building, creating, accepting invitations I never planned for, saying yes to experiences that appear unexpectedly, constantly going with the flow, constantly opening myself to more things happening around me. From the outside, it might look like enthusiasm for life. But I have started realizing that much of it comes from somewhere else.

It comes from fear.

I am terrified of sitting still long enough to meet the darkness I have spent years escaping.

I am afraid that if I stop moving, it will finally catch me. It will swallow me whole. It will erase everything I have spent years trying to build. I am afraid that if I allow myself to fall, I will never become the same person again.

Sometimes I ask myself what would happen if I truly collapsed. Who would pick me up? What would be left of me after that fall? Would I even recognize myself? Then another fear appears. Life moves quickly. Everyone has their own worries, their own responsibilities, their own pain. What if the people I love are simply too busy by the time I fall? What if they continue living because life asks them to? What if I disappear for a while and discover that everything has continued without me? I am afraid of losing the connections I have spent years building. I am afraid that love is fragile enough to disappear if I stop feeding it with constant effort. So I keep trying. I keep replying. I keep showing up. I keep giving pieces of myself because somewhere inside me I believe that if I stop, everything I love might quietly disappear.

Even on the days when I cannot carry myself, I still find myself thinking about the people I love. I worry about them. I wonder if they are okay. I wonder whether I should answer the messages I still do not have the strength to answer. I feel guilty because I cannot be present. Then I notice something that has become impossible to ignore. I almost always have enough energy to look outward. I have enough attention for other people, for work, for gatherings, for conversations, for spontaneous plans, for opportunities, for keeping relationships alive, for opening myself to more experiences, more memories, more stories. Yet I rarely make space for anything to arrive inside me. I keep opening doors toward the world while leaving almost no room within myself. My life becomes full, but I remain crowded out of it.

Sometimes I wonder if what I am feeling is giving up. But perhaps it is not giving up at all. Perhaps it is becoming exhausted by the endless effort of forcing life to happen. There is something unexpectedly beautiful about the idea of no longer pushing myself every minute of every day. Not giving up on life, but giving up on forcing it. Giving up on believing that everything depends on how hard I work to make it happen. Giving up on carrying every relationship, every opportunity, every dream on my own shoulders. Allowing myself to remain in bed when my body asks for rest. Allowing myself to eat later if I cannot eat now. Allowing silence to exist without immediately filling it with another task, another conversation, another distraction.

What if we stopped for a while?

What if we looked honestly at everything we consume in order to avoid ourselves? More love. More sex. More food. More friendships. More conversations. More work. More plans. More experiences. More movement. More noise. What if, instead of reaching for more, we simply sat still? What if we waited until the spark returned by itself instead of exhausting ourselves trying to manufacture it? What if we entered the shadow instead of escaping it? What if we became curious enough to ask why the energy disappeared, why one place inside us keeps bleeding, why sadness keeps returning, why one sentence, spoken casually and perhaps even jokingly, can strike us so deeply that we begin questioning an entire relationship, our place in someone’s life, and even our own worth? Why did that particular sentence hurt so much? Why did it touch something so much older than the moment itself?

I have always run away from that kind of work. I could never answer many of the questions my therapist asked me. Not because I did not want to answer them, but because remaining with those questions felt unbearable. I listened to people speak about healing. They all said the same thing. Journal every feeling. Write everything down. Return to those pages later. Read them again. Meet yourself there. But I never stayed long enough. I never consistently wrote anything. I kept running instead. From one place to another. From one project to another. From one story to another. From one memory to another.

I thought I was collecting experiences because I loved life. Now I wonder if I have been collecting evidence instead. Evidence that I was alive. Evidence that I existed. Evidence that I loved, created, laughed, suffered, and kept going.

Somewhere inside me lives an irrational fear that one day I might lose my mind completely, that I might shatter into a million fragile pieces and no longer remember who I am. If that day ever comes, I want something to hold on to that is not another human being. I want memories. Photographs. Places. Conversations. Art. Stories. I want proof that I have been here before. Proof that I have survived before. Proof that no matter how deeply I disappear into darkness, I have also found my way back into the light.

None of this feels logical, yet my body believes it with complete certainty. It feels like running through a forest while a lion is chasing you. While you run, you instinctively grab fruit hanging from the trees. You notice rats crossing your path. You catch glimpses of beautiful snakes moving quietly through the grass. Everything enters your vision for a second before disappearing behind you. Yet you never notice the flowers beneath your feet because survival has narrowed your world. You never notice the light filtering through the branches.

You never hear the birds singing because the only sound loud enough is your own heartbeat echoing through your chest. Your body no longer asks whether the lion is still behind you. It has forgotten how to ask. It only knows that it has to keep running. And perhaps that is the most exhausting part of all. Not that something once chased you, but that after enough years you become someone who keeps running even when you no longer know whether anything is still there.

So for all of that I think sometimes trying can lead to : Epidemic of Exhaustion.

And I don't want that today ,so I wrote this while not doing anything at all.

You can hug people without ever touching them. You can love them without saying a single word. I did not know this for most of my life.

For a long time, I believed love had to be obvious. I thought it needed to be seen, heard, and recognized only in the ways I knew. I thought that if I loved someone, I had to tell them repeatedly. I had to show them. I had to prove it through actions large enough to leave no room for doubt. Love, in my mind, was something active. It required effort, movement, consistency, and a willingness to keep giving. It was a language made of words, gestures, explanations, and constant reassurance. Looking back, I realize that it was also a heavy language to carry.

Because this was the only language I knew, I often found myself confused by the reactions of others. I wondered why some people moved away when I moved closer. Why my abundance of words sometimes created distance instead of connection. Why there was surprise in their eyes when I expressed affection so openly. At times, I even wondered if I was speaking a language that others had never learned. I thought I was offering love. I did not realize that love is not only about what we give, but also about whether we understand what another person is able to receive.

As the years passed, I began learning a different language. A quieter one. A language that asks less of performance and more of presence. A language that taught me that sitting beside someone after they have completely fallen apart can be an act of love. Not fixing them. Not advising them. Not searching for the perfect words. Simply remaining there while they gather the scattered pieces of themselves. I discovered that there are moments when silence carries more tenderness than language ever could.

I learned that a person can receive countless hugs without ever being touched. That care can travel through patience, through attention, through staying when there is nothing left to say. Sometimes the greatest comfort comes from knowing that someone is willing to witness your pain without trying to rearrange it. There is a kind of love that arrives quietly and settles beside you without demanding anything in return.

I also began to understand something that once felt impossible for me to accept: words are precious because they are limited. We do not need endless declarations to make love real. Sometimes silence says, “I am here.” Sometimes silence says, “You do not need to explain yourself.” Sometimes silence says, “I love you,” more clearly than any sentence ever could.

What surprised me even more was realizing that distance can speak its own language. For most of my life, I believed that love meant staying. Staying through discomfort, through uncertainty, through every possible ending. I thought remaining in someone’s life was the highest form of devotion. But growing older has taught me that love is not always expressed through presence. Sometimes it is expressed through restraint. Sometimes it is expressed through accepting that our capacity has limits.

Friendships end. Relationships end. People change. Circumstances change. What once felt natural can become difficult to sustain. I used to see these endings as failures. Now I am beginning to see that some endings are acts of care. There is tenderness in acknowledging what you can no longer give. There is honesty in refusing to promise more than you can sustain. There is respect in recognizing when staying would require you to abandon yourself or ask another person to abandon themselves for you.

I never imagined that leaving could be an expression of love. Yet some goodbyes contain a depth of care that words cannot fully describe. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is step away before resentment replaces affection, before exhaustion replaces generosity, before a relationship becomes a place where neither person can remain whole. Sometimes saying goodbye is not a rejection of what existed. Sometimes it is the final act of honoring it.

The older I become, the more I realize that relationships are sustained by awareness as much as they are sustained by love. Awareness of our impact on one another. Awareness of timing. Awareness of our limits. Awareness of when our presence nurtures and when it overwhelms. Awareness of when to move closer and when to step back.

This awareness creates a different kind of connection. One rooted not in intensity, but in understanding. Not in proving how much we love, but in learning how to carry that love responsibly.

Perhaps emotional maturity is not about learning how to love more. Perhaps it is about learning how to love with enough honesty to recognize what a moment requires from us. Sometimes that means holding someone close. Sometimes it means sitting quietly beside them. Sometimes it means giving them space. And sometimes it means letting them go while love remains, unchanged in its sincerity, even as the relationship itself comes to an end.

What pulls me away from my practice is not distance, not lack of tools, not even time. It is something that lives inside my body and takes hold the moment I try to move toward the image.

The visual was my first language. Before writing, before reading, before I even knew that a camera existed, I was already building stories. I lived inside them with precision. I shaped details, gestures, expressions. I created entire worlds while sitting alone in my room or wandering through quiet spaces. As an only child, I spent long hours without company. My mother tried to fill that space. She played, she told stories, she brought other children when she could. But most of the time, I was alone. And in that aloneness, imagination became my way of staying alive. I did not feel the absence. I replaced it.

Growing up in a small city in Somalia called Galkayo, made everything narrower. There was little access to culture, to art, to any visible creative life. I did not see people doing what I felt inside me. I did not see examples that could hold or guide what I was becoming. Then the internet arrived, slowly, unevenly. Through it, I discovered PDF books. That discovery shifted something essential. I began to borrow other ways of seeing. I could step outside the perspective I was raised with, the one that insisted on fear, on limitation, on a fixed understanding of the world. I allowed myself to carry more than one point of view. That multiplicity gave me space. It gave me breath.

But when I return to the question, what is stopping me now, the answer is clear and difficult. It is pain.

Not a passing pain, not something that visits and leaves. It is a pain that occupies most of my day. It interrupts, it delays, it absorbs. Hours disappear without trace. I reach the end of the day and try to account for it. I find almost nothing. One task completed, maybe two, sometimes three. The rest of the time feels as if it has been taken by something that does not allow me to remain conscious inside it. A kind of internal collapse. I go inward and I stay there longer than I intend.

This inward movement is not calm. It is heavy, immersive. I drown in my own emotional landscape. I cannot interrupt it. I cannot press a stop button. It unfolds with its own logic, pulling memory, sensation, fragments of experience into the present until they feel immediate and continuous.

Imagination, which once protected me, became more complicated. The worlds I built were vivid and detailed. They held me when reality felt empty. But later, I understood that those worlds did not exist outside my mind. That realization carried a quiet violence. What once gave me relief began to show its limits. I could not remain inside it forever, and returning to reality did not feel like a safe transition.

Now, when I approach photography, I recognize that my fear is not of the image itself. It is of my way of seeing. The camera is direct. It does not filter. It does not allow me to hide behind interpretation in the same way writing does. It presents what is there, and it also reflects what I bring into it.

When I listen to other women speak about their lives, their stories do not stay external. I absorb them. They move through me and begin to interact with my own memory. Sometimes they trigger flashbacks. Moments I once believed were imagined or unclear reveal themselves as lived experiences. I begin to recognize that I was not only imagining. I was remembering without knowing.

In those moments, the boundary between my pain and theirs disappears. I cannot separate them. Their words reopen what I carry. Their experiences echo inside my own history. It becomes difficult to remain present, to listen without being pulled into my own past at the same time.

This also affects my attempts to study and work. When I chose to become a midwife, I believed I was moving toward something meaningful. I wanted to understand women’s bodies and health so I can be someone who does something needed in the other people's life . I wanted to be part of making their lives less difficult. I also believed that learning would give me a sense of control over my own experience. But in practice, I struggle to remain present. When lectures focus on the body, especially the female body, I begin to dissociate as if it' remains all the memories of crossing my boundaries or the repression I go through in my personal life.. The subject is not neutral to me. It carries associations, memories, sensations that I cannot easily regulate. I drift away. Sometimes I fall asleep. Sometimes I simply leave internally while my body remains in place.

Dissociation became a way to escape. It allows me to step out when the intensity becomes too much. But it also takes me away from what I want to build. It interrupts continuity. It fragments my attention, my effort, my time.

There are moments when I try to escape the pain by changing environments, building friendships, engaging in other activities. At times, I even try to present a version of myself that is less affected, more stable, more aligned with what is expected. But this does not remove what is inside. It only postpones it.

I have come to understand that I cannot avoid this pain entirely. Avoidance delays it, but it returns with more force. The only way it shifts is when I allow it to exist, to be seen, to take form.

This is why writing feels safer. Writing creates distance. It allows me to shape experience, to choose what to reveal and what to conceal. I can edit emotion. I can remove what is too sharp, or place it in a structure that makes it bearable. I can stand behind the words.

The image does not offer that protection. It is immediate, exposed, precise. It confronts both the subject and the person behind the camera.

And yet, despite this, I am drawn to it.

Because something in me recognizes that the same intensity I fear is also the source of what I want to express.

لا أحد يخبرنا عن الشك في الرحلة، وعن كيفية تشكل مساره الفني بالكامل،يبدوا بأن الغالبية منشغلين بتأكيد الصورة الخارجية التي يحاولون حمايتها أمام العالم، كيف يخلق هذا الشعور المتزعزع فناناً ويحمله من فورة البدائية حتى يصل إلى اليقين فيما يفعل؟ أو ربما لا يوجد يقين من الأساس

قبل مدة كنت جالسة مع صديقتي، وهي فنانة ورسامة تعبر عن حساسيتها تجاه العالم بريشة رقيقة وعميقة. أخبرتني كيف أن المجال الفني مليء بأشخاص يضعون أنفسهم أمام المجتمع بصورة واثقة، ومتأكدة من كل ما يفعلونه في طريق الفن. ومع أن الفنان الحقيقي غير معانق لليقين، لكنهم يثيرون الشك في نفسها بسبب تلك الثقة.

وأنا الآن أبكي بعد منتصف الليل، مستلقية فوق كنبة في بيت صديقة أخرى. لا أعرف ماذا أصابني اليوم، لكني ممتلئة بالشك.
لا أعرف ماذا أكون! شاعرة أو مصورة، فنانة معاصرة أو مجرد هاوية. كم مر من الوقت وأنا أحاول تلمس الطريق؟ ثلاث سنوات هي المدة التي أحاول فيها بناء هذا البيت، طوبة فوق طوبة، ومع ذلك لا يوجد شيء واضح. لذلك أصبت الليلة بالانهيار التام. أريد أن أفهم، أن أثق بعملي. أريد أن أقول بثقة مطلقة ماذا أكون، وما هي المهارة التي صقلتها ورعيتها بماء الحب والغضب.

لا أعرف من أين تأتي لغة الشك في داخلي، وبالرغم من ذلك لم يكن هناك قط فنان قابلته وخضت معه حواراً حميمياً، إلا وأخبرني بأنه لا ينظر لعمله بعين الرضا التام، ولا يحس بأنه يفهم طريقه. ورغم التعريفات الرنانة، يعود ليلاً لقوقعته، يطرح السؤال نفسه: ما هو دوري في هذا الفن؟ أين أقف أنا منه؟ وما هي المصطلحات التي أحتاج للتخلص منها، ليتسنى لي إيضاح الفكرة الأصيلة؟

متلازمة المحتال هي حشرجات نفسية، يشعر صاحبها على أثرها بأنه مزيف وغير حقيقي. وفي علم النفس تصنف على أنها مشكلة تحتاج للحل، بينما أنا أفكر الآن بأن هذا الشعور هو السبب الوحيد الذي يساعدني على خلق معنى جديد. وبالرغم من السأم الذي أحس به، بسبب احتياجي الشديد لليقين والتأكد، أو على أقل تقدير لوضع قدمي فوق سطح ثابت، لكن الثبات لم يكن يوماً صديقاً لصاحب الأسئلة.

الوجهة التي أعبر بها، أو أعبر عنها، آيلة دائماً للسقوط. مع ذلك، يبدو أن الضباب حقيقي الملمس، ومعالم المدن التي سوف أسافر لها تقف تماماً خلف غشاوة الشك التي تأكلني من الداخل.

أفكر أكثر بالشعلة التي أبحرت معي؛ الكتاب، أو الشعراء، أو حتى الملهمون الذين صادفتهم في كتبهم وحتى مخطوطاتهم. لم يكن أحد منهم يقدر على الوصول إلى استراحة العصر، حيث يضع كل أقلامه وفرشاة الرسم جانباً ويقول: لقد وصلت.
مايا أنجلو بالنسبة لي هي عرابتي السرية، ومع أن الأمر لم يعد سرياً، حيث أني أشعر أحياناً بأني أقرأ اسمها وأكرر على نفسي فكرتها أكثر من الأسى نفسه. قالت ذات مرة: “لقد كتبت أحد عشر كتاباً، وفي كل مرة أفكر: أوه، سيكتشفونني الآن، لقد خدعت الجميع، وسوف ينكشف أمري.”

وخلال تذكري لكلماتها تلك، يغزوني شعور بالبلاهة! كيف أحاول محاربة سنن الطبيعة من خلال عدد الأيام والأنفاس؟
في الواقع، لا أعتقد بأن الرحلة كانت بدايتها السهوات الثلاثة تلك. الرحلة بدايتها كانت تلك اللحظات التي عاقبتني بها معلمة اللغة العربية لأقف أمام الجميع وأقرأ لهم القصة. ورغم صغر حجمي، وقفت تحت السبورة، وبصوت عالٍ وفصيح، قمت بقراءة كل حرف.

القصة كانت موجودة حين ضحكت صديقة والدتي، ووضعت يدها على جبيني، وهي تقول: “سوف تكونين كاتبة، أنتِ بلا شك كاتبة”. والقصة كانت مستمرة أكثر حين كنت أكتب قصصاً قصيرة، وأرويها لصديقات زوجة والدي وصديقات أختي.

القصة كانت دائماً تتسلل نحوي حين كتبت لأول مرة شعراً بمناسبة زواج أختي. هل لدي أخت؟ نعم، واحدة فقط. كان زواجها المساحة الوحيدة التي يمكنني أن أثبت لها بأني أختها. كتبت شعراً، وجهزت حفلاً، ووقفت على المنصة، وسجلت لها بالمسجل الصغير كل حبكة المسرحية، واختتمته بإلقاء القصيدة.

أرسلت الشريط مع المسافرين لتصل الرسالة إلى لندن. مع ذلك، لم أفلح في إثبات شيء. لم أقدر على ردم الحفرة، ولا على خياطة الجرح. كل شيء أصبح مزعجاً أكثر من اللازم.

شككت حينها بقيمة ما أكتب. وما هي الفائدة إذاً؟ لم أقدر على شراء أخت لي؟ لم أفلح في أن أكون الابنة الجيدة، ولم أقدر على تأكيد شرعيتي في هذا الوطن. ما هي قيمة ممارستي للفن إذاً؟

اذا لم يكن جسراً يعالج جروحي على الأقل هل من الممكن ان يغير شيءً في شكل العالم المقفر؟ او أني ايضاً سوف أكتفي بإستيعاب القبح ورؤيته تفصيلاً بمحاذاة الجمال؟

As much as it can be a meaningful experience to get to know yourself, there are parts of that process that are not enjoyable.

I am starting to see that what we call “ourselves” is not always who we truly are. It is often shaped by other people, by our environment, and by the way we were raised. All of this adds layers over the real person, or over the person we have the potential to become.

I am realizing that growing up in an environment where there were no clear boundaries between you and others has had a strong effect on me. In that environment, people could cross into your space, comment on your life, and act as if they had the right to do so. There was no clear line separating what belongs to you and what belongs to others.

Because of that, it has become difficult for me, especially in relationships, to understand what my rights are in an emotional aspect and what they are not specifically in the beginning of conditions. There is a lot of emotional intensity in this. I sometimes find myself meeting someone new, someone I do not know well, yet, and expect things from them that they cannot realistically offer. Or I expect them to know me very well with out me butting myself out there.. Not because those expectations are too much in general, but because it is too early. You cannot expect people to act in the same way you were used to receiving things from people who know you very well for years.

And in that defense I can’t escape the effort it need to invest in every relationship individualy ..

In the Somali community, there is a strong sense that everyone is like family. People are involved in each other’s lives, and everyone feels they have the right to comment or interfere. I am not saying that I consciously treat people that way. But on a deeper, unconscious level, I approach people with the same blurred boundaries I grew up with. This can feel overwhelming to others, especially at the beginning of a relationship.

Realizing this about myself was not easy. One of the things I dislike most is being a burden to others or placing too much weight on them. At the same time, expectations themselves can become a kind of burden that needs to be released.

To say it clearly, sometimes I expect things from people without putting in the effort to build a relationship first. I act as if they should naturally place me in a certain position in their lives without me asking for it. This reflects how I experienced my environment growing up, where people expected a lot from you regardless of how close they were to you or what they had done for you. Or even considering the dynamic that you have with them , and without them releasing This is becoming a form of misplaced entitlement.

But discovering that is actually giving me a chance to manage the way I act on my relationships, and to even have a chance to look deep in the system that I chose to broke to become the person I want to be.

At the same time, I am discovering something within me that feels both unsettling and undeniably true.

For a long time, it was a heavy struggle to face the darker parts of myself. To look directly at what I was taught to call flaws. To admit that there are sides of me that do not fit the image of goodness I tried so hard to maintain. Then a friend once asked me a simple question: what is wrong with being a little bad sometimes?

Now I find myself confronting jealousy.

I always knew I could feel it in love, the familiar kind that clings and fears loss. But this is different. This is jealousy toward those who receive what I have longed for. Toward those who are given opportunities I once reached for. Even toward people I love. Even toward those closest to me.

To stand still and watch that feeling rise, clearly and without denial, feels almost absurd. I never thought it belonged to me. I never imagined I would carry it.

But I do,We all do.

We carry every feeling, the ones we accept and the ones we try to deny. The difference is not in what we feel. It is in whether we are willing to see it, to hold it, and to place it where it belongs instead of pretending it does not exist.

In the meantime something else is surfacing. My anger.

I buried it for years. I chose silence when I should have spoken. I let moments pass when I should have responded. I avoided conflict when I should have defended myself. I refused to be the difficult one in the story, even when the truth required it.

There were many moments when I did not say what needed to be said. When I did not hold others accountable. I told myself I was choosing peace. I told myself I was above it, as if I were something other than human. As if I could forgive endlessly without ever asking whether I truly could.

Both jealousy and anger are things I was taught to see as evil. I learned to reject them the moment they appeared, to feel shame for having them at all.

At the same time, I was constantly compared to others. I was made to feel that I could never measure up, that I could not be as good, or as worthy, or as acceptable as the people around me. I was told, directly and indirectly, that I could not be the daughter others seemed to be.

When it came to anger, I was not allowed to hold it. I was expected to apologize, even when I was not the one at fault. I had to kiss my aunt’s hands and say sorry, even when they were the ones who were wrong.

That kind of dynamic leaves something deep inside you.

You learn to turn against your own feelings. You learn to silence what rises in you. And in trying to reject a system that felt unfair, you end up rejecting parts of yourself without realizing it.

You think you are hating what was done to you, but some of that hate turns inward.

Now I reject that.

I want more. I feel hunger for what I have not yet received, and that hunger brings jealousy with it. I turn that energy into working on my art. I feel the urge to protect myself and those I love, and that urge carries anger.

I will not reduce myself anymore.

I will not remove parts of who I am in order to be acceptable. I do not want perfection. I want presence. I want every part of my humanity to stand forward, even when it contradicts itself, even when it feels messy, even when the lines blur.

We say we love people fully, yet we pull back the moment we see their darkness. We hesitate. We withdraw. Because we can’t do that for our self we can’t break down the layers, one by one and accept that human can be expanded and wounded and wonderful in that way.

So I let go of ideals and stand in confrontation, fully exposed before myself.

One of the deepest struggles I have carried in this life is how often I take responsibility for things that were never mine to hold. I find myself responsible for other people’s emotions, as if it were my duty to carry them gently through their storms, and I find myself believing that if something is not working, then it must be mine to fix. It took me time, too much time, to understand that this is not my role alone, that no connection, no relationship, no shared space between two souls can survive on the effort of one.

Yes, I understand people. I can offer love, patience, and a sense of safety that feels like home. But I am human too, and somewhere along the way, the weight of carrying too much begins to pull at me, quietly at first, then all at once, until I feel myself resenting everything I once held so tenderly.

So I began to see love differently. Perhaps loving someone is not always about meeting them halfway, but about meeting them exactly where they are, without trying to move them, shape them, or save them. And if where they stand is a place I cannot exist in, then maybe the most honest thing I can do is to leave it as it is, untouched, unchanged.

To sit with myself and ask: do I really want this? Am I truly capable of continuing in something that does not feel safe, or whole, or right for me? And if the answer is no, then I do not need to force it. I do not need to carry it alone. I do not need to save what was never mine to save.

It sounds simple when spoken aloud, but I have lived as something else entirely. I have been a mother to the people in my life, a mother who loves without condition, who gives chances without question, who understands in silence but does not ask to be understood, who forgives without waiting, without being acknowledged, without being seen, a mother who creates something beautiful, yet is never met inside it.

And beneath all of that, there was a quiet truth I could not ignore: a huge part why I was doing doing all of this is because I wanted to be chosen.

There will always be a part of me that longs to be important to the people I love. That part is real, and I do not deny it anymore. But it will no longer be the reason I stay. It will no longer be the reason I tolerate what does not feel right. It will not silence my voice, nor convince me to ask for less than I need.

There is something both painful and loving in recognizing what I am capable of, and understanding that not everything deserves that capacity. That, too, is love, a strong, grounded, unwavering love for myself and for others.

I love you, and that is why I may leave your life, with grace, and with warmth still in my heart. I love you, and that is why I will speak of what I cannot accept. I love you, and that is why I will not carry your emotions as my responsibility, I will ask you to stand within your own accountability. I love you, and that is why I will not soften the truth just to make it easier to hear.

And when I see you hiding from yourself behind my back, when I see you turning me into a refuge so you do not have to face your own depths, I will step away, not out of anger, not out of rejection, but because I love you. And I refuse to offer anything less, or anything more, than my full humanity in the sacred space we once shared.

So if the way I once knew love was through mothering people, through chasing, through trying to be chosen, then the way I choose love now is different. It is more honest.

I choose to love myself by knowing my limits, by understanding my needs, and by no longer abandoning myself in the process of holding onto others. I choose to trust that nothing meant for me will be lost, that nothing real will disappear simply because I chose to stand where I am honored.

Life does not collapse when we let go. It expands.

And I am beginning to understand that life is full of choices, and full of blessings. That not everything I release is a loss, and not everything I hold onto is meant to stay.

If something does not align with me, then I can let it go peacefully, without resistance, without forcing, without turning it into a question of my worth.

I can leave it as it is, and still walk forward with an open heart.Because letting go is not the end of love. Sometimes, it is the most honest form of it.

It is a river, I cried.

It is a river, I screamed. It is a river.

A child across the road looked into my eyes,

and said after me, no, it is an ocean.

I slept that night. I woke the day after.

I called the bird to my window.

I looked around.

And I found the ocean that had taken my bird away.

And the bird itself was becoming color,

multiplying into light,

challenging the sun,

yellow, red, orange, blue.

All the piano voices

gathered themselves together,

rose from their silence,

and descended to dance on the floor.

I wrote this poem, and inspiration came to me while I was living a beautiful moment of soul awakening :

Sadness accompanies me into the closed rooms of love,

It gently soothes me upon the couches of affection,

It rests upon my throat amid the lovers’ kisses.

It reproaches me when my mind drifts far away

Into paths that never acknowledge sadness,

Like your eyes, for example,

And the clumsy smile my mouth releases,

Drawn upon my eyelids that have not tasted sleep for long.

Drowsiness overcomes me against my will

Without me knowing

An equation that would place me before the cannons of questions.

Sadness accompanies me upon my shoulder as I dance in your arms,

Then it slips away, standing at last in the corner,

Staring at me for a long time.

I see it ,But it does not take me with it.

When it comes to love, I find myself uncertain, curious, and utterly clueless all at once. I used to believe I understood it. I thought I was one of those people who could actually define love despite having my own walls, despite trying my best not to get involved, not to open the doors, not to let anything escape the cage I built around myself. And still, I believed I had some understanding of this extraordinary creature called love.

I cannot claim to have lived longer than others I am not even tired of life yet. But what is age, really? It is nothing more than a number. And yet, we measure our experiences through it. When a person goes through specific struggles, particular challenges, and becomes deeply focused on them, everything else begins to feel unfamiliar almost foreign. Not because it is too complex to define, but simply because it has never truly been known.

Do not misunderstand me I do not mean that I have never been close to people, nor that I lack my share of experiences. I have loved before. I have cried after love, and I have cried for many other things. I have wept deeply, screaming to myself that it would be the last time I would ever love.

And I do not wish to diminish what I felt back then. It was real, in its own way. Yet somehow, it now feels as though whatever I once knew was not truly what I have been searching for or at least, it is no longer what my soul calls for at this stage of my life.

I find myself, quite unexpectedly, saying: I do not understand this.

As you can sense from my words now, I am in a state of shock not merely because this is a significant moment, though it is but because it feels like discovering that I do not even know my own name. And how could that ever make sense? It cannot. It was never meant to.

And yet, as someone who has always seen herself as a lover of love, to admit such a stark truth such a sobering awakening is nothing less than a quiet collapse of certainty. A voice within me says: you are clueless. You know nothing about this.

Love is not control. It is not something you simply declare or decide It is not dating, nor going out, nor dressing well. It is not cuddling, nor kissing, nor the sensations that move through the body.

All of these may be beginnings or illusions. Sometimes they are desire. Sometimes they are need. But then… what is love?

As Rumi once said:

We are emptiness, and nothing fills us but love.

We are darkness, and nothing illuminates us but passion.

So before you dare to admit the emptiness that lives within you,

before you come to terms with the truth that you are both nothing and everything at once,

before you truly encounter yourself

how can you ever hope to meet another?

Every time I begin antidepressants, something inside me resists. It is not just discomfort it feels like a quiet rebellion of both mind and body, as if my entire being refuses to let these foreign chemicals settle into me. They do not soothe me; they unsettle me. They make me feel more unwell than the sadness I was trying to escape, as though I am being pulled further away from myself rather than guided back.

And yet, alongside that resistance, there is another voice faint, but persistent. It tells me that I can endure a little longer than before. That I can hold on a little stronger than I used to. So I lean into the sadness, not to surrender to it, but to meet it. I whisper to my soul, urging it to stay awake, to not dissolve into the weight of it all.

This has always been my way, even before I fully understood myself. I challenge my limits relentlessly, as if there is something within me that refuses to settle, that constantly demands more more depth, more meaning, more truth. Not just from the world, but from myself most of all. I stretch my own capacities to their edges, sometimes beyond them, as though I am searching for something I cannot yet name.

Strangely, this hunger does not extend to people. From them, I ask very little less than what might even be considered the bare minimum. I keep my expectations low, almost nonexistent, as if that is the only way to remain untouched, unhurt.

I have placed myself inside a cage of my own making. For years, it protected me. It gave me structure, safety, distance. But now, it no longer fits. I have grown, or perhaps changed, and the walls that once sheltered me now feel too close, too tight, too suffocating.

Let me return to the past for a moment.

There was a time when I loved deeply friends, lovers, connections of all kinds. I trusted with a kind of innocence that felt infinite, as if there were no tomorrow to fear, no future in which things could fall apart. It was as though we were made from the same origin, sharing something indivisible, something whole as if we were not separate bodies, but fragments of the same existence, held together within one world.

That innocence did not simply fade it hardened. It became something sharp, something stubborn. It was as if it turned against me, cutting into my own throat, leaving my voice trembling, my words unsteady, and a quiet pain flowing through my veins.

And then, without warning, the walls began to build themselves from nothing. Slowly, deliberately rising from the ground up, as if they had always known they would exist.

One wall spoke clearly to me: plant thorns along your edges, protect yourself.

So I did. I learned to grow sharp where I was once soft, to guard what I once gave without hesitation. I chose to dig deeper into my own desert, to remain there alone, far from the fragile possibilities of being hurt again.

The other wall carried a colder truth. It made it clear to me that we are not the same that people can harm you in the most cruel ways, not always out of hatred, but in the quiet pursuit of their own benefit. That sometimes, in choosing themselves, they will choose your pain without even looking back.

And I understood that lesson deeply.

So the walls continued to rise stronger, higher, more certain. And I stayed within them, not because I could not leave, but because I had learned, in my own way, that survival sometimes means becoming unreachable.

But instead of letting that desert become my grave, I resist it just as I resist the antidepressants. I refuse to dissolve into anything that asks me to disappear, even if it promises relief. There is something in me that pushes back, every time, testing the limits of my own existence, my own being.

And what that means, for me, is this: I refuse to grant that kind of power to a few broken examples of humanity. One, or two, or three, or four moments of cruelty do not get to define the whole. They do not get to rewrite what I believe life can be, or what I am capable of feeling.

So I stand there, in between neither fully inside the walls, nor fully outside them. Questioning, resisting, searching.

I told my heart:Teach me something, baby. Let me see beyond what I have already learned the hard way. Let me unlearn the fear without losing the wisdom it gave me. Let me find a way to exist that is neither blind innocence nor guarded isolation.

Let me feel without collapsing.

Let me trust without disappearing.

Let me open the door without tearing the walls down all at once.

Because somewhere within me, beneath all of this, there is still a quiet belief fragile, but unbroken that there is more to this life than survival.and i chose to stop being angry from the world.

I was one of those people who fell in love easily.

Not in a dramatic, movie-scene way. No running in the rain. No violins. Just a quiet, internal “oh no… here we go again” kind of love.

Every time it happened, I genuinely believed it was different. I would text a friend, trying to sound calm but completely failing, and say, “Okay but this time is not like the others. I swear. This is something else.”

They would laugh. Not in a mean way. In a “sweetheart… we’ve been here before” way.

And honestly? I couldn’t even argue properly. Because from the outside, it probably did look the same. New person. Same glowing eyes. Same poetic crisis.

But from the inside, it never felt recycled. Each feeling had its own flavor. Its own story. Its own electricity.

I’ve never been someone who flirts with everyone or collects attention like trophies. I don’t even know how to be charming on purpose. What I do know is how to notice people in a way that gets me emotionally attached before I even realize what’s happening.

The way someone gets quiet before saying something vulnerable.

The softness in their face when they talk about their childhood.

The strength hidden inside their gentleness.

That’s it. That’s all it takes. My heart is already writing poetry.

Most of the time, nothing actually happens. I don’t confess my feelings. I don’t try to turn it into a relationship. I don’t drag anyone into emotional chaos. I just… feel. Silently. Intensely. I write about them. I imagine conversations we’ll probably never have. I observe them like they’re a beautiful painting I’m not allowed to touch.

Very dignified. Very dramatic. Entirely inside my own head.

But at some point, I had to sit myself down and admit something slightly embarrassing.

I wasn’t just meeting people.

I was meeting them while secretly carrying a whole pre-built love story in my pocket.

And sometimes, after one deep conversation or one moment of eye contact that lasted two seconds too long, I’d go home and gently place them in the leading role.

“This is it,” I would tell myself. Like a director who cast the movie before reading the script.

It came from a sincere place. I wasn’t trying to fool myself. I just really, really wanted something meaningful. Something alive. Something that made my heart feel awake instead of just functioning.

Then life — as it does — started humbling me a little.

I began learning how to feel things without immediately building a future around them. Revolutionary concept, I know.

I started noticing how fast I would jump from

“I like their energy”

to

“This could be the love of my life.”

Zero steps in between. Just emotional parkour.

And while watching myself with a bit more honesty (and a bit less romantic background music), I realized two big things.

First: whenever I “fell in love,” life suddenly felt brighter.

Music sounded better. My days felt lighter. I was kinder, softer, more patient with people. The world looked more interesting, like someone had secretly adjusted the contrast and saturation.

For the longest time, I thought that glow came from the person.

It didn’t.

It came from me being emotionally open. From my heart being activated. From my senses waking up. I was the one bringing color into my life I just kept giving the credit to whoever happened to be standing in front of me.

The second realization was a bit more uncomfortable.

I saw how much I depended on that feeling. How I looked for someone to project it onto whenever life felt dull or heavy. How I sometimes called something “love” when it was actually longing, projection, or emotional hunger wearing a romantic outfit.

It was like picking fruit before it’s ripe. You want sweetness so badly that you convince yourself it’s ready. But when you taste it, it’s still hard. Still sour. Not because the fruit is bad just because it needed more time.

And for the longest time, I didn’t realize something even deeper.

I had no clue that the sweetness I was searching for in someone else was something already planted inside my own soul from the very beginning. Something bigger than one heart. Bigger than one person. Bigger than any single relationship I could ever build my world around.

It wasn’t something I had to chase.

It was a way of being I had forgotten I knew.

What I was really craving wasn’t just romance. It was aliveness. Openness. That feeling of being emotionally awake and connected to the world.

And every time I thought someone had “given” that to me, it was actually my own heart responding, stretching, lighting up.

That realization didn’t feel like a thought. It felt like a quiet inner awakening. Like something inside me sat up after a long sleep and said, “Oh. You were looking in the wrong direction, but your longing wasn’t wrong.”

So now, I’m learning something new.

I’m learning to let feelings be feelings without turning them into life plans. I’m learning to enjoy admiration without building imaginary futures. I’m learning to let attraction exist without deciding it must become love.

And I’m learning to fall in love with life itself with my friendships, my writing, my small daily rituals, my solitude, my curiosity so that when love does come, it’s not carrying the full responsibility of making my life feel meaningful.

I don’t want love to feel like oxygen I’ll die without.

I want it to feel like shared air something we both bring, something that moves freely between us.

I still fall a little. I still get that spark. I’m still me.

I just don’t hand my whole emotional universe to the first person who makes my heart do a backfli.

Growth. But make it romantic.

And maybe, just maybe, I’m learning how to be the kind of presence for myself that I was always searching for in someone else.

It began quietly, almost without drama, the moment I noticed that what I thought about myself, about others, about the world, was not necessarily the truth. It wasn’t a shocking realization, more like a subtle crack in something I had always trusted. As if the floor beneath my inner life had shifted just enough for me to feel it. I wasn’t wrong on purpose. I was simply seeing through a lens that had been forming for years, made of memories, emotions, disappointments, and small fears I never named.

From there, I started to live inside my mind. I watched everything instead of touching it. I analyzed instead of feeling. I told myself I was becoming more aware, more conscious, more awake. In truth, I was slowly learning how to stay safe. Distance became my shelter. Thought became my refuge.

I learned how to step back from every moment, to look at people as patterns, as behaviors, as psychological stories. It gave me a strange sense of power. If I could understand everything, maybe nothing could hurt me. But what I didn’t realize was that every conclusion I reached was still shaped by something older, something quieter: fear. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being left. Fear of being seen too clearly.

Fear began to speak in my voice. It told me who was dangerous and who was safe. It told me who loved me and who was pretending. It told me when someone was distant, envious, uninterested. I thought I was reading reality, but most of the time I was only reading myself.

The moment I truly stepped back from my own mind was not liberating at first. It was disturbing. To realize that the voice you have always trusted is not neutral, that it carries old wounds, old survival strategies, old stories that no longer belong to the present. My mind was not lying to me, but it was not telling the whole truth either. It was trying to protect me from a world that no longer existed in the same way.

We speak easily about projection when it comes to others. We say they see us through their fears. But to see that I was doing the same, that I was meeting people through my past instead of through who they actually were, was a quiet kind of heartbreak. How many moments had I already lost to misunderstanding? How many connections had I already shaped before they even had a chance to breathe?

At some point, self-improvement entered my life like a promise. It gave me language for my pain. It gave me tools. It gave me clarity. But slowly, without me noticing, it also gave me a way to avoid life. I began to explain instead of experience. To interpret instead of ask. To retreat into understanding instead of staying in the rawness of not knowing.

I stopped meeting people and started studying them. I stopped having conversations and started building inner theories. It looked like wisdom from the outside, but inside it was loneliness dressed as intelligence. I was so busy understanding the world that I forgot how to be in it.

This is where the begins for me. Not as a rejection of thought, but as a return to something softer and truer. I do not want to live only in my mind anymore. I want to meet life where it is alive, where it is uncertain, where it is still capable of surprising me.

I am learning to listen again, not just to my thoughts, but to what moves beneath them. To the quiet sense of knowing that comes when I am present with another human, not when I am analyzing them from a distance. I am learning that intuition is not loud. It does not argue. It does not defend itself. It simply knows.

Once, I loved life with an open heart. Then I fell into a world of constant improvement, where everything became something to fix, to measure, to understand. I am not going back to ignorance. I am going back to intimacy. To the fragile, imperfect, unprotected experience of being here.

I will still think. I will still reflect. I will still search. But I will no longer confuse my fear with wisdom, nor my thoughts with reality. Life does not happen inside my head. It happens between me and the world, in the space where I dare to stay open.

And that is where I am returning.

أكتب لك، صديقي الحرف، وأنا أحمل الأيام تباعًا على كفّي، ورغم غرابة ملامحي على سطح المرآة، أستعير أحيانًا ملامحك لتعيد إحياء ذاكرتي التي تبني لنفسها غرفًا سرّية.

من هنا يبدأ كل شيء، من هذا الوقوف الطويل أمام الداخل، ومن هذا الإصغاء الذي يشبه الاعتراف.

أفكّر بكلّ الذين أحببتهم، بالذين غادروني ولم أغادرهم، أفكّر بالذين أحبّوني ولم أدرك كنه الشعور الذي يحملونه تجاهي. أفكّر في كلّ الطرق التي كان من الممكن أن آخذها، والقصص التي كان من الممكن أن أعبرها، لكنني انحرفت عنها نحو اختيارات أخرى.

أفكّر في الذين ما زال قلبي يحمل أماكن تواجدهم معه؛ ينمو قلبي ويكبر ويتّسع ويحتفي بالملذّات والإحباطات، لكنه يُبقي على أماكنهم كما هي، يتورّد حمرةً حين يأتي على ذكرهم، ويتحمّس بعد أن يعرف شيئًا جميلًا أحاط بهم.

أفكّر بالليالي التي بكيتها ندمًا على شعور ما،وعلى أثره ورميت مخدّتي من فوق الطابق الثالث، وشققت قصيدتي إلى نصفين، وهربت بعيدًا عن اتصالاتهم، وهاجرت بحرًا أسبح عكس اتجاه الريح، لأعود أدراجي بعد سطر واحد من قصيدة تذكّرني بنبرة صوت تعزّ عليّ، وكأنها ديوان شعرٍ مسترسل النواحي.

أبحر يمينًا وشمالًا، أعود، أحفر أصابعي، أرسم لوحة، أجلس بجانبها أيامًا، أغوص بالانشغالات، أفتعل الانتفاضات، أستثمر في الهروب الكبير.

لأعرف بعد هذا كلّه أن المياه تعود إلى مجاريها، وأن معدن النهر في دمي يحمل ذوقًا واحدًا وطعمًا لا يزول، وأن عبثًا أحمل حقائبي نحو الغياب، لكنني أعود للحضور في جميع القصص التي أختارها.

إنه التفكير، يا صديقي الحرف، التفكير في كلّ الحروب التي كان افتعالها يشغلني عن حقيقة واحدة: أنني لست أكثر من رِقّة عودٍ تحمل نغمتها السماء، وأن البذرة الشفّافة التي تكوّنت منها روحي تعرف كيف تدور حول الأصل، وتعرف إلى أين تعود.

لهذا السبب تحتفظ القُبلات بطعمها، ويبقى البلل الرقيق من شهدها مطبوعًا على الخد، وتبقى النظرات خريطة لا تغيّر مسارها، والتنهيدات التي كُتمت خوفًا من أعين المتطفّلين هاجرت سرًّا ليتردّد صداها في آذان المحبّين.

القصص كلّها تبدأ من نشوة الخوف والهرب، وتنتهي باعتراف التعب، ونهاية الفرح بدايةً لذاكرة لا تغيب.

قمتُ هذا الصباح ليس على عجل، لأول مرة بتمهّلٍ شديد. بقيتُ فوق الفراش طويلًا أحدّق في السقف. ماذا يمكن أن يكون هذا الصوت المحدِّق من فوقه؟ أرهفتُ مسامعي بصمتٍ وانتظارٍ لم يكن طويلًا.

في هذا الحيّ الهادئ، الخالي من البقاليات الصغيرة، لا يوجد صوت واحد في الصباح أو حتى المساء يثبت أي أثرٍ لإنسان. هذا الهدوء وغياب الصوت منحاني شعورًا بالعزلة المزدوجة.

أخرج من المنزل وأذهب إلى أماكن صاخبة، أعيش الحياة اليومية وأُتمّ مهماتي، ثم أعود. بحثي لم يجف، وما زلتُ تائهة.

كيف من الممكن أنني قضيتُ قرابة الثلاثين عامًا دون أن أدرك لمرة واحدة أبعاد الضحكة؟ دون أن أكون متيقظة إلى حدّ تذوّق نبرة الصوت الرمادية؟ كيف مرّ كل هذا العمر دون أن أشتاق للصفحة التي قرأتها قبل أيام، وأن أعيد السطر نفسه أكثر من مرة؟

كيف فاتتني تفاصيل التراب وصوت وقع الأقدام؟ وكيف مررتُ سابقًا من طرق الحماسة ليعود هذا النفس بعد عمرٍ من الغياب؟

كيف حسبتُ أن القلوب يمكنها أن تعوّض الغوص في معنى الحياة، وأن الطموحات تكفي لنسيان العطش المعرفي القابع في عمق الروح، من دون أن يكون الهدف شهادة تقدير أو حتى حفل تشريف؟

كيف أشعر بالامتلاء لأول مرة بعد أن أفلتُّ المحاولة تجاه كل شيء؟ وبعد أن أرخيتُ بداخلي ستائر التمسك وشغف الحضور؟

وهل من المعقول أن أشعر بكل هذا الفيض المتدفّق رغم أنني أبعدتُ يدي عن توقّع المطر، وعن رفع سقف الأمنيات؟

تهجّد صوتي،

تبدّل لوني،

وشيء في خارطة العمر توجّه نحو صحراء الروح، ولم يعد شبعًا بماء الأرض ويرقات الصباح، بل اكتفى بقطرةٍ من ماء السماء.

انا ياصديقي تمتلكني رغبة مظلمة بالتحرّر من كل الأشياء التي تجعلني إنسانة صالحة؛ أن أفقد صوتي مسمّى التوازن، وأن أُبعد عن جلدي حميمية المودّة، وأن أغوص أكثر في الخط الفاصل بين الخير والشر.

أن أكون أنانية دون اعتذار، وأن أرفع صوتي بشهادة اعتزاز بالقسوة، وأن يصبح كل ما أقاومه منسابًا كالماء، ويتفكك الغضب تحت خاصرتي بصوتٍ واحد لا تراجع عنه.

كيف يكون الإنسان حقيقيًا إذا كان خائفًا من نفسه؟ التهكّم المرّ في فمي اليوم نتيجة المقاومة؛ مقاومة أن أفعل كل شيء بطريقة صحيحة ومثالية، وأن أكون أقرب إلى «الصحيح» من الخطأ.

وكيف تتمّ مراسم الفرح إذا لم تنكسر أغلال المنطق وتُذاب بعدها حصون التمهّل؟

حين أفكّر بالأخلاق التي أتّبعها في ردّات فعلي تبدو فضفاضة، وأشبه بأي شيء سوى حقيقتي الداخلية. ليس لأنني أحمل عفنًا لا يُشفى، بل لأنني لم أتعلم حتى الآن التدرّجات الرمادية لطبيعة الإنسان.

كيف تتكوّن التناقضات أصلًا؟ ربما باكتمالهما معًا.

في العادة أُخبّئ ملامحي خلف الكحل والآيلاينر والملابس المرتّبة، أُبالغ في تنسيقها، آخذ وقتًا كافيًا لاختيار السلسلة والحلق، أختار نوعين مختلفين وألعب بألوان الخواتم. أتأكد جيدًا من صورتي الخارجية، وأُخبّئ خلفها كل المشاعر.

أخرج من حقيبتي شخصيتي الاجتماعية، أنشر الابتسامات وأُبعد عني شبهة الرتابة، ورغم عدم رغبتي بلمس جسد أحد، أحتضن تلقائيًا كل من يمر من بابي، وأضحك على نكتة لم أفهم مغزاها أصلًا.

هكذا أرتدي الأقنعة: واحدًا صلبًا لمن أحب، وآخر مراوغًا لمن أتّقي شرّهم، وثالثًا مرحًا لكل العابرين، وللأصدقاء قناعًا شفافًا لا يُبدي كل شيء، لكنه يُظهر جزءًا من الحقيقة.

لا يمكنهم فهمي بالكامل، لأنني لا أعزمهم على موائد السخط، ولا على ليالي العناء، ولا أشارك تفصيلة الوعكة الصحية التي أبعدت ذاكرتي خلف الخزانة. أمرّ سريعًا من أمام التعابير، أشوّه القصة بنفسي وأرويها كمشهد لا ينتمي لي. لم تكن هذه التقاطعات عمدًا، بل صورة مُضلِّلة لعقلٍ يريد الهرب من النظر مباشرةً إلى الواقع.

ذات مرة قالت لي صديقتي التي لم ألتقِها قط، لكنها تعرفني لحدٍّ ما:

«لطالما كنتِ شخصًا يرفض أن ينظر إلى الحقيقة كاملة».

لم يكن كلامها لومًا، كانت تُنصت جيدًا لأفكاري التي تقف في المنتصف لكنها طبيعة البشر لا يمكننا إستيعاب أبعاد ظلال الأخرين، ولايمكننا أن نختصر فكرة فهمهم او حتى ان نصل لشيء من الوضوح يمكننا من تقدير عوائقهم، كل محاولة تدور وتعود إلى الدائرة.

تُكمل أمرًا لتبدأ آخر، كنصٍّ يُسكب من كأسٍ واحد. لم تكن الرحلة عشوائية كما تبدو، بل نظامًا دائريًا يعود في كل مرة إلى بدايةٍ مجهولة.

أما الأن ياصديقي انا اقف على قارعة الطريق، اذوب مع الاخر وأختفي بداخل الصوت، لم يختفي التوهان لكني لم أعد أنتظر الإجابة.

مع كامل المحبة والود

٢٠١٦/١٢/٢١

I don’t know how I manage it, but in the most difficult times, I appear as if I’m okay. When there is a storm in my chest that keeps me from moving my body, I say I’m fine. I take up little space in the world, as if my presence should not be larger than the ground beneath my feet. Not a step ahead, not a step back, just the exact spot where I stand. That is how I move through life. I believe everyone has the right to exist, yet when it comes to me, I can barely say out loud that I am here. I can barely admit that I am alive.

There are days when I become paralyzed to the point that I cannot move. Everything becomes heavier and darker. In these moments, instead of softening toward myself, I doubt my own worth. The voice inside grows louder, telling me that something is wrong with me, that I should be doing more. I cry when I remember how easily I can be kind to others and how difficult it is to offer the same to myself. But now, even if it’s still uncomfortable, I’m trying to build a place where my own kindness can live. It’s not easy. Every step costs energy. Every small act of care feels like lifting a stone with my bare hands.

Still, I’m learning that my purpose is not to fix everything. It’s to stay true to what’s real inside me, even when that reality is messy. The pain is not only in what happens, but in how I keep knocking on doors that are not mine, how I keep planting myself in soil that refuses me. I waste energy trying to make things grow where they never belonged to begin with. And when I finally stop, I realize that the only thing I can control is how I live with what’s inside me. But even that is not simple.

Some days I wake up and feel as if I’ve been thrown into something I didn’t choose. I didn’t receive the warning. I just opened my eyes and I was already here, inside something I cannot name. In the middle of the river, half awake, not swimming, just trying not to disappear. I don’t know which direction means safety, which one means breaking. My body moves not because it knows how to live, but because it cannot stay still.

The world around me speaks in ways I can’t always understand. The voices of the rocks, the silence of the air they don’t save me, but they keep me company. They remind me that I might lose parts of myself, forget faces, forget versions of who I’ve been before I ever understand them. That this, this confusion, is the middle. The part without a map. The part where identity doesn’t hold steady.

I’m told that pieces of me will vanish and I won’t even have the memory to grieve them. That some things I called mine will never come back. That I might never be able to welcome all of myself because I’m too small to hold me. So I don’t swim. I just float badly. I don’t rise. I stay alive by accident. I move like confusion, not becoming. The mountains ahead don’t inspire me—they intimidate me.

Sometimes I dance, but it’s not joy. It’s my body shaking out of fear, of not knowing where to stand. And I keep asking myself, how can I let people close when I don’t even know if I’m staying or disappearing? How can anyone understand my world when even I can’t stand inside it?

I remain half-formed. My skin feels tired. My eyes reveal panic. Hesitation sits in my breath. I am not surviving well. I’m only not gone yet. And the shadow doesn’t follow me, it clings to me. Because I still don’t know how to walk away from what owns me.

I used to think that the fight was with the outside world. That if I changed what was happening around me, I’d feel safe again. But the longer I live, the more I understand it’s about the inside. It’s about the stories I carry, the programming I learned when I didn’t know I was learning. The hardest part isn’t healing, it’s meeting the people who created those inner voices and realizing that being myself has nothing to do with them changing.

I’m trying to stay present in the chaos. To stop labeling every moment as progress or failure. To let things be unfinished. I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to earn my existence, that being here is already enough. But it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to slip back into that dark corner of my mind where I doubt again if I belong in this world.

So I speak softly to myself, sometimes out loud, sometimes in silence. No one is going to arrive to tell me that I’m welcome. No one is going to name me important. I have to do that myself. And even when I don’t fully believe it, I say it anyway. That I’m here. That my chaos is welcome. That my breathing counts.

Maybe you are somewhere in this middle, too. Maybe you’re also half-formed, half-alive, still floating. If you are, I see you. I don’t have answers. But I know that staying, even when you don’t know how, is already a kind of survival.

Mybe you are wildflower too.

I always wondered what my gift was. For a long time, I thought it was writing. Or maybe helping other people. Or being in the hospital, taking care of children and their mothers. But now, I see it more clearly. My gift is hope. I am someone gifted with hope.

No matter what happens, no matter where I am, and no matter how far life falls apart, there is always a seed of hope living in me. And it’s not the kind of hope that hides behind nice words or empty optimism. It’s not about pretending to be positive so people don’t think you’re broken. It’s the kind of hope that moves your life forward, quietly but powerfully. It works beside you when you are trying your best, and it stays even when you’re not.

Hope became my shadow. It walks with me. It sits beside me. It whispers every time I think about giving up. And when I say I can’t do it anymore, it laughs softly and replies with full confidence, Darling, we both know you’re not giving up.

Hope has become chronic in me. It never leaves.

I remember a day at the hospital. It was almost five in the evening, the end of my shift. We were moving patients to another section because the rooms needed to be disinfected after an insect infestation. I was making sure everyone felt safe and comfortable in their temporary rooms. One woman was in pain, and I had been with her for more than six hours. My shift was over, but the next team hadn’t arrived yet. I couldn’t leave her alone.

She asked me to take her to the delivery room. There were no other women close to labor at that moment, so I stayed with her. I placed her on the wheelchair and we reached the delivery room safely. The doctor was checking on her, and I stepped outside to ask her relatives for clean clothes. We didn’t have enough supplies, and we always needed families to bring something for the mothers.

While I was reaching for the clothes, my hand still holding the other woman’s hand, a bomb exploded. The sound was deafening.

But instead of running away to save myself, I ran inside toward her. I knew that the mirrors in the delivery rooms could shatter from the blast, and if they did, she or the baby could be hurt. Hope spoke to me again, calmly and clearly: We’re going to her. She will be okay.

When I reached her, every mirror in the nearby rooms had shattered except hers. She was safe, terrified but alive, pushing through the pain. We helped her deliver her baby safely. Afterward, the other midwife started yelling at me, saying I was reckless. I stayed quiet. I was too focused on what had just happened.

Later that night, I learned that the bomb had hit the hospital wall. Soldiers were passing by, and someone had attacked them. Parts of the wall had fallen inside the hospital. It was tragic.

But in the middle of all that destruction, a baby cried for the first time. And I realized that hope had kept me alive that day.

There were many days like that days when there was no reason to believe in anything, and giving up was the logic decision to make, But I always had hope.

Another day, a woman was brought into the hospital, screaming in pain. She hadn’t done any tests yet. The woman who came with her said the baby was dead, about four months old. When a baby dies inside, the risk for the mother becomes higher. Infection, rupture, danger everything becomes possible. I screamed for help, but no one came.

Still, I couldn’t move my legs to leave her alone. Hope whispered again, It’s your responsibility. She will make it.

Two hours later, she was safe in her room. I looked at the doctors, at the nurses, at everyone around me, and I felt anger. I hated their emptiness. I hated how they looked at people as if they were only bodies. I hated how they moved like machines, without presence or care. They were experienced, skilled, but they had no hope.

They wanted to survive, to stay distant, to go home and live a life outside the hospital. But how much of life can you really live if your heart stays closed for twelve hours a day?

I left that job. I couldn’t stay surrounded by people who were so alive on paper, yet so lifeless in spirit. They were better trained, faster, and sharper than me but I had hope. And hope made me human. It made me listen. It made me stay present. It made me see the person, not just the patient.

Hope was my compass.

In the new City I live in , I faced another kind of fear. One night, I had to cross a huge highway alone. I hadn’t yet learned how to read the rhythm of the traffic. The cars didn’t stop for anyone. The lights were blinding, the noise endless. In the middle of the road, I froze. My body refused to move. Then I heard it again. Hope. That same quiet voice. Move. You’ll make it. You’re not dying tonight.

And I did.

That is what hope does. It doesn’t promise that life will be easy. It just tells you to take the next step, even when the ground shakes beneath you.

So when I meet someone who is lost, crying over a life that feels unbearable, I see their light before they do. I tell them, You will move on from this. And I mean it. people doesn’t believe me sometimes because they think it’s an empty words, but as soon as they look to my eyes, and they listen to my words with their heart, they can tell how serious and honest I am.

Hope, in my language, is not an illusion. It’s not pretending. It’s a force. It’s what lets me see beauty when others see only darkness. It’s what keeps me human when the world goes numb.

Hope is the most beautiful gift I’ve ever received. It lives in me. It speaks for me. It saves me, again and again with love.

Sometimes all we need is a reminder. A reminder of our nature, of the past that formed us, and of the future we long for. These are not fragments that can be separated. They live together, like three strands woven tight: the self, the others, and the vision of what might come.

I often see humans like water. A drop cannot be broken apart into smaller lives. The atoms remain bound, complete. Humanity feels the same. We live body beside body, cities rising out of our closeness, countries breathing through the presence of countless lives. Every street carries the sound of someone’s footsteps, every wall hides someone’s story, every place is filled with this one fact: we are surrounded by one another. We long, each in our own way, for a future where our lives matter.

Yet when I look deeper into reality, I feel a rupture inside. Panic creeps in. The light I carry within feels fragile compared to the weight of the world outside. Darkness gathers fast, pressing in, growing vast. The more I open my soul to love, to kindness, to truth, the less my mind knows how to make sense of the cruelty I see. For all the times I relied on my intelligence, it fails me here. It cannot explain why destruction is chosen when care is possible.

A friend once told me about people in Morocco being punished for feeding street cats. I could not hold the story in my mind. It was too strange, too empty of reason. I repeated it, but the words felt wrong in my mouth. No part of me could accept it as logic. That moment shook me. It forced me to ask, is this what it means to be human? Or is it the shape we have twisted ourselves into?

I refuse to believe this is the final shape of humanity. What we call dysfunction is only a crude beginning. Yes, it was a spark, but sparks are meant to ignite growth, not to define it forever. We were meant to evolve into something more, to use time not only to build machines and borders, but to grow into beings who know how to live with one another without fear.

This is why I return to reminders. I remind myself it is okay to be exactly who I am, even when the world insists otherwise. I remind myself there is no one like me, and I was never meant to be like anyone else. I remind myself that beauty exists in the space between people, even when cruelty tries to erase it. And I remind myself that not everything can be explained by the mind. The spirit carries a vision that the mind cannot cage.

We are shaped by what we have lived. Our scars are not just wounds, they are maps that carry us to wisdom. To grow means to face what we once believed and step into something larger. Healing is not an escape from the past, nor a cleansing of what we would rather forget. Healing is an embrace. It is a way of carrying the story of a human who endured, who faltered, who rose again, who continues.

For years, I thought healing meant erasure, a scrubbing away of everything I had lived. But I know now that true healing is integration. It gathers the broken pieces, sets them back into the body of the self, and lets them become strength.

One night, after finishing the ordinary work of the day, I lay down in the silence before sleep. Something inside me shifted. It was not an emotion, not a memory, not an outside force pressing in. It was certainty, clear and undeniable. I was fully present. I was sure.

The thought came sharp as light: it is possible, it is near. For the first time, deep in my core, I felt it as fact. My dreams are real. My wishes are not far.

Visions unfolded: standing on a stage, holding my book in my hand as I signed it for others. Smiling beside the one I love, fingers linked, knowing that love is real and steady. Traveling to places I had only ever imagined, watching the world open its doors. Each vision glowed, but not like a fragile dream. They carried a stronger light, the light of certainty.

That night I knew: I had opened a new door. A door not to fantasy, but to another reality already being built.

And so I return to hope. Because what are we without it? Hope does not erase the pain of the past, but it releases the shame attached to it. Hope turns scars into stories, and stories into bridges.

But healing, whether personal or collective, is never solitary work. Yes, you can grow inwardly, but growth needs spaces where your pain is not constantly poked open. Healing needs rooms where eyes do not follow you in judgment, where words do not cut you back into the past. Alone, the work remains fragile. Together, it becomes lasting.

The world needs this too. It needs spaces that meet the true needs of human hearts. Because the world, like each of us, cannot heal from its darkness alone. Darkness will not vanish on its own. Healing arrives through joint effort, through connection that needs no announcement or definition.

Maybe this is the real shape of humanity, the one we are still growing into: people who remember, who integrate, who dream, who hold one another through the weight of living. Not flawless, not pure, but alive in the work of becoming.

Sometimes everything can shift in a single moment. My writing was never about compliments, or only about understanding others. It was always about myself. I wrote to understand who I am and how I move through the world. To discover the space I need, and the space others might need. Writing was my way to live more fully, to hold my own joy while leaving room for someone else’s joy. It was never just about reading or writing. It was about being present, acting, and living inside the story, not outside it as a silent observer.

And this is where I find myself now, facing a shift I can no longer ignore. One day I woke up with tears on my face and laughter in my chest. I don’t know what exactly is going on with me, but I know something has shifted. I keep whispering to myself: it is the time. Not tomorrow. Not later. Now. The time to stop running. The time to stop pretending I am withdrawing, when in reality I was only creating new ways to escape. The time to close the unnecessary doors. To sit back in the room of my soul. To let myself be there, fully.

The last two years I kept myself away from the only place that needed my care. I was everywhere but home, and I don’t mean the physical walls I live in. I mean the home inside of me, the one I left abandoned while I gave my energy to others, or distracted myself with endless noise. Even self-discovery became another performance. I was analyzing, reflecting, writing, convincing myself that I was “doing the work.” But all of it was just more voices, more clutter. Another way to keep myself busy, another way to avoid the silence.

And now, almost suddenly, I am realizing what life is. What responsibility is. What it means to take accountability. I see how I built an image of myself that was not all me. I wanted to be the person who always carries everything, the one who is right, the one who sees others’ flaws so clearly so I could fix mine. I thought that was responsibility. But it wasn’t. It was only avoiding my own share. It was expecting the world to hold what I refused to hold.

As an only child, I never understood balance. I never learned how responsibility is divided. I didn’t know how to leave people their part and take only mine. I carried what was not mine. I dropped what was mine. I was a people pleaser and at the same time making everything about my feelings and how I see the world. Nothing was balanced.

Now I am learning to say: I didn’t know. I was wrong. I am sorry. I am this, and this, and this. I am not finished. I am not perfect. But I am willing to see. And I am willing to hold what is mine.

If one day I ever become a mother, I will not raise a child who thinks the world owes them everything. I will not take every burden from their shoulders. And I will not going to through on them things that I should deal whit it I will give them the space to discover, for them to live in there on stories .to fall, to try again, to give their own meaning to the world. I will let them see that freedom always comes with responsibility. That everything has a price. That nothing real in this universe comes without giving something back. This is how life has worked for billions of years. And this is how we must live too.

I think about the ways I kept escaping myself. About how I used to love reading until I turned it into pressure. Starting books, never finishing them. Forcing myself to read when I had no space inside me for the words. I want to return to the kind of reading where I dissolve into a story, where I can live in two worlds at once—mine and the book’s—without abandoning either. I want to feel that hunger again, not because I wana run from anything, but because I want to live fully in the words.

I don’t want to be hollow. I don’t want to be just noise or a pain and hardship. I want to walk through a day with nothing planned and still feel whole. I want to love someone and not care if they love me back, only to be proud of myself for loving. I want to be the kind of person who creates lives after lives, not to escape emptiness, but to keep fullness alive. I was that person one day and it's not impossible to return to my nature.

And I want to belong to myself exactly as I am. With messy hair. With dry skin. With a soft belly and a lazy back. With flaws that I don’t have to hide from. I want to be enough in silence, without analyzing, without turning every weakness into a spotlight.

Maybe it’s because I was sick the last few days, maybe it’s just that the clock inside me has finally struck its hour, but I feel a strange quiet now. The noises in my head are gone. What is left is simple, almost clear. This is the moment. The moment to stop running. The moment to sit with my shadows. The moment to return responsibility to where it belongs. The moment to stay with myself. To breathe. To learn. To simply be.

The change is happening. I recognize it when I can speak about myself without worrying how others might take it or what they might think. It showed itself when I promised to wake up early, and I did. When I wanted to run away from my feelings, but instead sat with them. When I allowed myself to stay inside discomfort and saw that this was not punishment, but growth.

I felt it when I separated paranoia from reality, when I gave each thought its place, no more and no less. I felt it when I managed to stay present without ignoring what I carried inside, when I made space for my feelings to exist alongside the moment. I noticed it when I lowered the anxious voice so I could hear the real one in conversations. I celebrated when I stopped feeling guilt for not understanding everything, even a joke, and still let myself laugh. I found joy in not being ashamed of what I don’t know.

Perhaps the real change came when I admitted I know nothing about life, and that my role is to learn, to explore, to be. I saw it again when I wanted to repeat old mistakes, but chose differently, without guilt. I started trusting my choices, even if not perfectly, and I felt proud of that.

Now, I can look in the mirror and feel proud of the person I see. A human being with complexity, wounds, shadows, and questions. someone once called me self-centered. Back then, it felt foreign, even absurd. I didn’t have a self to center. I only knew how to dissolve into others, into emotions and intensity, to feel like I existed. But today, I finally have a self. A source. A vision. A center.

The irony is that I now laugh more easily. I realize I had taken life far too seriously, while chemicals and hormones played their tricks. Today, at least for a while, I am breathing. Mentally resting. Letting kindness guide me through this growth.

So when someone tells me, even after a quick call, “you’ve changed,” I laugh with all my heart. Not to control the child in me that still craves validation, but to embrace it. For them, maybe it feels like they’ve lost the person they knew. For me, it is the opposite. I finally see myself. And I smile knowing the world can see it too.

It was happening too when someone complimented me,saying the right words, the words I used to etch into my skin,to carry as if they were everything.This time, I didn’t hype it.

I didn’t treat it as if it was exactly what I needed.

I appreciated it, but I left it where it belonged.A word. Nothing more. Nothing less.In my dictionary,I know I will keep searching for what comes next.

That moment was crucial.

Because finally, approval from others no longer holds meaning in my language.

I don’t know what exactly I feel, but for as long as I can remember there has been this void, this emptiness, this yearning. I kept moving, trying, chasing, hoping that something would finally make me feel valuable. I wanted to matter. I wanted to be important. But I never felt that I truly mattered to anyone in this life. Not to my family. Not to my friends. Not to my lovers.

The only thing I believed in was the idea that I could work on myself enough to matter to me or to the world. But even that slipped away, because I didn’t know what it actually meant to matter. I didn’t know what it looked like, or felt like. I didn’t realize that almost every effort, every choice, every pursuit was driven by the quiet desperation to be validated by someone or something outside of me—career, creativity, relationships, success.

And it left me with this severe loneliness. The kind of loneliness where I could imagine dying today and believing that it would change nothing. That there was no one in my life for whom I was truly essential. That is a brutal place to live.

What feels even heavier is the realization that it took me nearly 29 years to see this clearly. For the first time, I feel inside my own skin, because now I can finally name it: every step, every decision, every moment was shaped by the desire to matter. To be loved. To be seen as irreplaceable.

It was never about lacking self-esteem or not believing I was a good person. It was about something deeper. A hunger for the intimate recognition that goes beyond achievements, beyond usefulness, beyond what I could offer. I longed to be important simply for existing. And I never felt that. Not once. Every bond I built seemed fragile. Every connection came with an exit sign. Every wall I constructed crumbled overnight.

What shocks me most now, as I write this, is how long I carried that loneliness without truly noticing. It grew quietly inside me, consuming me from within, while on the outside I was busy chasing things I thought could fill it. Love. Success. Belonging. All of it was an attempt to convince myself I was important. But I was always vanishing in the background, a shadow of a past I couldn’t let go of.

And the truth is this: no words from others, no promises, no gestures, ever reached me. People told me they loved me, that I mattered, that they cared. But my mind could never receive it. I could never believe it. And that is the saddest part. So here I am, sobbing in bed, realizing the depth of my loneliness. Shocked at how deeply it grew in me, how much it has shaped my life, how much I tried to silence it with external proof of worth. But today, at least, I can name it. I can sit with it. I can finally say, Yes, this is how I feel. And that recognition, as painful as it is, feels like a beginning.

Carefully, like a surgeon inside my own head, I felt the pain rising. The headache pressed upward as if it wanted to cut the veins inside my skull.

You’re not going to die, I told myself. But even if I did, tonight would hold, at least, one reason. For once, a small, gentle moment where I finally felt I existed. Where I finally felt valuable.

I was the headache in my own head, driving me mad, stripping me of words. Yet, for that moment, I was inside my skin. For once, I lived. I existed. And if death comes and takes me elsewhere, then so be it. Because at least tonight, I was here.

In the end..

I have come to see why it feels so difficult for many of us to offer love and care in a true and lasting way. When you cannot recognize your own worth, you lose the ground from which generosity grows. You keep drawing from others to stay alive, and each act of giving leaves you emptier, until even the smallest gesture feels like a burden.

But something shifts when you realize that love is not scarce. That within you there is a well that never runs dry. From that place, giving is no longer an effort. Care becomes as natural as breathing, and your actions flow without calculation or expectation. You love not to prove, not to please, but simply because love itself wants to move through you.

This is what I have begun to understand in my own breaking open.

I don’t know if it’s the country in our minds or the realities that exist.

But homesickness is real. It’s the moment you realize that no place, no person, can take you away from what you crave or what you love. I believe our souls remain tied to certain places on this earth. Every soul feels that kind of belonging to a piece of land.

Maybe healing is not only about saving your own life. Maybe it carries something bigger, something that moves beyond one person. Healing can reach others. It will reach others. And when it does, you become the link the bridge of that repair.

And that is why I love Somalia.

I love Somalia, and I hate that I had to leave. It feels like being bound to a lover who breaks your heart, who can be toxic and unbearable, yet no matter what he does to you, the moment you are away, you want to return. You feel as if you were never taught anything else in life except how to love him.

I spent ten years in Mogadishu thinking of leaving. I had plans, I prepared, I did everything I could. I worked hard, studied hard, pushed myself into things I did not like, into paths that were never truly mine. All of it was for one purpose: so I could leave, so I could secure a future, so I could find a legitimate way to go somewhere, even if only for a few years.

And then I left. From the very first moment, I felt numb. Yes, I found something new. My chest finally felt a place to rest. Something in me felt safe. But at the same time, I was no longer feeling. I was no longer evolving. I was not making the realizations that once mattered to me. I was not thinking deeply about the things I cared for. That numbness became my way of grieving. That emptiness became my way of processing the emotions that come with goodbyes.

When I was growing up, leaving was part of every conversation with people my age. Someone would say, “If I find no other way, I’ll take the hardest path. I’ll go by sea, with strangers, even if it means disappearing.” Another would say, “I’ll marry a man with a foreign passport, just so I can get out.”

Now that I am on the other side, I ask myself a question I never thought I would. The freedom we search for, the new homes we build, the safety we try to hold on to—are they ever enough to replace the belonging we feel in our own country?

In Somalia, no city ever made me a stranger. No town ever closed its doors to me. Despite all our differences between those who stayed, those who returned from abroad, those who visited briefly, or those who were forced back we share something unshakable. The moment we are in the same room, we know how to find one another. We know how to talk, how to argue, how to criticize, and just as naturally, how to support.

An old woman might greet you with warmth, not knowing your father’s name, not knowing where your mother was born. But the moment she learns that Somali blood runs in your veins, she trusts you. She opens her home. She does not lock her doors. And from the moment you step inside, her house is yours.

Yes, we fight each other. Yes, sometimes we destroy one another’s lives. But still, when we are far from home, we search for each other. We avoid strangers but secretly long for familiar faces. We resist admitting how deeply we miss Somalia, how deeply we love it.

When someone takes another culture, or thinks differently, we often say to them, in anger, “You are not Somali.” Yet we know, in our hearts, that it is the cruelest thing we can say. We know it cuts deeper than anything else. Because there is nothing more painful for a Somali than being told you do not belong.

I was not born in Mogadishu, or Kismayo, or Garowe. My family fled Somalia for safety, and now I too have left for safety, and for healing. But I know this with certainty: everything I build, every fruit of my labor, will one day return to Somalia. Because that is where it belongs. Because that is where I belong.

One of the reasons we so often seek love, acceptance, and validation from the outside world is rooted in a belief often unconscious that someone out there loves us more than we love ourselves.

From the very beginning of our lives, we’re taught that those who first cared for us our parents, siblings, relatives know what’s best for us. That they know our needs better than we do. We’re programmed to believe that someone outside of us always knows what is right or wrong for us, what we need and what we don’t. We’re taught that peace, safety, and love come from others not from within.

But that kind of peace the one that depends on external sources is what slowly kills the soul.

When the spirit begins to awaken, we find ourselves seeking validation and love elsewhere, outside the family and systems that shaped us. We believe we are not enough because we weren’t enough for those who “loved” us more than we loved ourselves. And so, we search for that missing love in other people, other places. Why? Because we were taught that love is something to be earned, granted, or withheld by others. That someone else can know exactly what’s right for us, even more than we can. So by that act, we are seeking for wisdom, knowledge, and guidance.

But what happens when the soul longs for something radically different from what those who raised us want for us?

That’s when a deep inner conflict begins.

The soul whispers its truth, but the mind trained in survival fights back. It says: “There’s no way you could possibly know better than them. There’s no way you can want something they couldn’t understand or approve of. If they didn’t see it, it must be wrong.” And so the mind declares the soul mistaken.

But the soul persists. It screams, it pushes, it aches. It carries a purpose the mind has not yet understood. And in the middle of that battle, the body suffers.

The body, the vessel of the soul, is also the home of the mind. And when these two forces collide, the body becomes the battlefield receiving mixed signals, flooded with stress hormones, anxiety, sleepless nights, and confusion. The mind raises alarms: “This path is dangerous. You are betraying your roots.” But the soul reaches for the body, again and again, gently insisting: “There is another path. Trust me. Let me show you.”

And so, the war within begins.

My body became the exhausted army, trying to defend my soul and protect my mind at the same time. It was an invisible war if someone had been sitting next to me, they would’ve never known that I was silently crumbling inside. That I was doubting my worth, or even wondering whether I deserved to be alive. Because the roots I came from no longer welcomed me. And my soul had already begun its journey to a place my mind couldn’t locate or name.

Even those who were meant to guide me those who claimed to love me had no idea what it meant to be in a war every moment of every day. For them, the answer was simple: “Just be who we want you to be it’s how we survived.”

Their way of surviving began long before I was born. And maybe, for them, it worked. Maybe they’ve spent so long living in their minds that they can no longer hear the quiet longing of their own souls. So when I stepped outside the script, they felt threatened. And when they tried to shape me into something more acceptable, they didn’t always use words. Sometimes, it turned into hurt.

They mistook the voice of my soul for foreign influence. They believed my thoughts had been hijacked, that I was lost in ideologies that didn’t serve me. And they thought they had to rescue me because their version of love always came with conditions. Love, for them, meant control. In order to save others.

The louder they spoke, the louder my mind screamed in confusion. And in the middle of all this noise, my soul could barely breathe. Still, my body kept reacting anxious, restless, aching because even if the soul’s voice was buried, the truth of who I was couldn’t be silenced forever.

In a world where we’re conditioned to become copies of one another same beliefs, different names, same pain, different countries it’s easy to forget that our souls were never meant to follow the script. It became easy for the world to mistake the machine’s voice for the Creator’s voice.

But that machine? It’s not divine. It’s human. A tired, fearful human who wants you to go back to sleep because sleep is safe. But you can’t fall back asleep. Not now.

Something inside you has awakened.

Something deep within you no longer aligns with what you were taught. You’ve begun to remember what they tried to erase: that no one not even those who raised you can love you more than you can love yourself. And no one else knows how to care for you better than you do. Because you carry the wisdom of the divine, you have the exact guidance you need and by experience in life, you are allowed to make mistakes to learn to rewrite the stories again and again and again..

When that truth finally settles into your bones, the fear of abandonment dissolves. The pain of not being “enough” loses its grip. You become your own home. And from that place, you can finally offer others what you’ve always longed to receive: presence, care, and love that doesn’t require control.