This was one of the many issues I personally had with one of my close friends back in 2023, when the war on Gaza started and it seemed that we could not find a proper way to check in except through Instagram videos and posts. It’s true that a social media message reminds us that a friend is thinking about us, but come to think about it, back in 2001, when a friend from school wanted to reach me, they would have to chase me through the regular landline. What happened to that?

One of my favorite words in Arabic, my language of birth, is the word Kifik/Kifak, also known as “How are you?” One word, simple letters, and it holds so much care and love. And while we do know that sometimes such words are used as an opening to emotionless conversations, they still hold a special value: the value of being asked how you’re doing in the midst of a very busy world.

But somewhere along the way, conversations stopped beginning with “How are you?” and started beginning with whatever the sender needed to say. And I find this to be very strange, not because it signifies anything specific in the communication itself, but because for the past four years, my husband and I, for example, have always started the day by asking each other how we are doing and how we slept. And the first thing we also ask each other when we meet after a long workday is simple: how are you doing? It’s a warm conversation starter; there’s no denying that, and we both discussed it recently and realized that despite it not revealing anything of essence about our night/day, it made us both feel very heard and cared for.

And while we don’t need to anticipate or expect the same level of engagement or care from the world, there’s something very weird about dropping the “how are you?” from conversations. It strips any dialogue of its warmth and humanity, and if even work colleagues take the time to type it in an email or Slack message, I find it very strange that we are using it less in our personal lives.

Maybe what bothers me the most is that we seem to have confused being in constant contact with actually being curious about one another. We send each other Reels, memes, posts and random updates throughout the day, and technically, we are communicating more than ever, but how much of that communication is really about the person on the other side? There is a difference between sending someone something because it made you think of them and actually stopping to wonder how they are doing. “How are you?” creates that little opening in a conversation for the other person to exist before we jump into whatever we came there to say.

I spent sometime researching ‘intentional communication’ in August and it made me realize the many communication flaws we all have, I’m planning to do something about that in September, the question is: will you?

As I write this newsletter from the comfort of my Istanbul living room, during my fifth summer in Turkey, I find myself reflecting on everything these years have taught me.

I was probably the last among my close friends to leave Lebanon. For years, I resisted the idea of moving abroad. There were periods when I genuinely believed I would grow old in Beirut. Life had other plans. In 2021, I packed my life into a few suitcases and moved to Istanbul. As someone who speaks Arabic, English, and French, I assumed language would never really be an obstacle. Surely one of them would get me through wherever life took me.

Five years later, I still don’t speak Turkish. While I can list plenty of reasons why; including the time, energy, and commitment learning a new language requires; the truth is that not speaking it has taught me some uncomfortable lessons about what it really means to build a life somewhere new.

1. Independence looks different when you can’t speak the language

One of the hardest things to accept was how much I suddenly depended on other people. Back in Lebanon, I could navigate bureaucracy, argue with customer service representatives, negotiate contracts, make appointments, and solve problems on my own. Moving abroad stripped away much of that confidence almost overnight. Even simple tasks sometimes required help from my husband, a friend, a neighbour, or Google Translate. Nobody talks enough about how frustrating it is to go from feeling fully capable to feeling like you constantly need assistance.

2. You can live somewhere for years and still never fully fit in

There is a difference between being welcomed and belonging. Turkey has given me friendships, stability, safety, and family. Yet there are still moments when I’m reminded that I wasn’t raised here, don’t share the same cultural references, and occasionally miss the jokes, traditions, or conversations happening around me. You learn that belonging isn’t always something you eventually achieve. Sometimes it’s something you negotiate with for years, especially when you’re trying to build a life beyond the expat bubble. Those communities can offer comfort, but they can also become an echo chamber, which is often the opposite of what we hope for when we choose to leave the familiar behind.

3. Language isn’t just communication; it’s access

The biggest thing I’ve missed isn’t conversation. It’s access: access to local news, neighbourhood gossip, public debates, everyday humour, and the countless small cultural references that make a place feel alive. When you don’t speak the local language, you don’t just miss words; you miss an entire layer of society. You can spend years living somewhere while only experiencing the version of it that has been translated for outsiders.

At the same time, living in a country as politically intense as Turkey has made me wonder whether ignorance really can be bliss. After growing up through Lebanon’s endless crises, there have been moments when not fully understanding every headline or political debate has probably spared me a layer of stress. Still, that protection comes at a cost. Even when it offers a little peace, you can’t help but feel that you’re only seeing part of the picture.

4. Moving abroad doesn’t solve the parts of yourself you were trying to escape

Whether you’re running from something or simply running toward something new, a change of country rarely changes who you are. When the opportunity to move presented itself, I was leaving behind a career that had become emotionally exhausting, but I was also trying to figure out who I wanted to be. At thirty, I felt completely lost. The pandemic had left many of us questioning everything, and I was no exception. After years in journalism, I found myself wanting the exact opposite of what I had always chased. I wanted to become invisible.

Getting on a plane by myself didn’t provide the answers I was looking for, nor did it magically fix the parts of my life that felt broken. Those answers came much more slowly through therapy, uncomfortable self-reflection, difficult conversations, and time. Moving abroad changed my surroundings, but the real work of rebuilding myself had to happen wherever I happened to be.

5. Home becomes a much more complicated word than you expected

Home used to be a place on a map. Today, it feels more like a collection of people, routines, memories, and versions of myself that exist across different countries. Beirut will always be the city that raised me. Istanbul is the city where I built my adult life. Somewhere between the two, I’ve learned that leaving one place doesn’t mean you stop belonging to it, just as putting down roots somewhere new doesn’t immediately make it feel like home.

Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson of all. Moving abroad didn’t teach me how to stop missing home; it taught me that it’s possible to carry more than one home within you at the same time. The feeling never becomes simpler, but it does become easier to live with. Maybe that’s what starting over really is: not replacing one life with another, but learning to make room for both.

This year marks the fourth Father’s Day since my dad passed away. Every year, I discover the strange ways grief reshapes itself. Perhaps my best coping mechanism is that I have become remarkably good at pretending this day does not exist. I scroll past the posts, ignore the reminders, and move through the day as though it were any other Sunday.

My worst habit is probably the same one.

I rarely talk about Father’s Day anymore. Somewhere along the way, it quietly disappeared from my vocabulary. Maybe that’s grief too: not forgetting, but learning to place certain emotions on a shelf because carrying them every day becomes too heavy.

Naturally, I won’t dedicate this entire newsletter to loss. Not because I don’t miss my father or think about him often, but because some forms of pain become less about remembering and more about learning how to continue living alongside them.

Still, today feels like a good moment to wish a happy Father’s Day to all the fathers who show up for their children every day, and to quietly remember my own dad. To me, he was everything I could have hoped for in a father and more. I hope that wherever he is, he is living another version of life to its fullest.

On a much lighter note, my book club is meeting for the second time this evening to discuss our June pick: The Only One Left by Riley Sager. I can confidently say that this book caused a small collective crisis within our Seasonal Shelf group. Sleep schedules were disrupted, theories multiplied by the chapter, and more than one reader messaged me saying they couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait to hear everyone’s final verdict tonight.

Earlier this week, I returned to Istanbul after spending a long weekend at my in-laws’ summer house on the Turkish coast. And if there’s one recommendation I’d make for this summer, it’s this: choose the quieter destination, not the place trending on TikTok, not the restaurant you’ve already seen in twelve Instagram reels, not the beach club everyone suddenly decided was “the place to be.”

Choose somewhere smaller. Somewhere slightly overlooked.

Over the past few years, technology has made travel easier, but it has also made many destinations feel strangely identical. We arrive armed with saved posts, Google Maps lists, and perfectly curated itineraries. We know exactly where to eat, what to photograph, and which viewpoint will perform best online before we’ve even arrived.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped discovering places and started consuming them.

Located on Turkey’s northwestern Aegean coast, overlooking the Greek island of Lesbos, sits the small town of Küçükkuyu. It’s not flashy. It isn’t trying to become the next Bodrum. There are no endless queues for viral restaurants or luxury beach clubs charging city prices for the privilege of a sun bed. Instead, there are fishermen returning in the morning, family-run restaurants serving whatever was caught that day, olive groves stretching toward the hills, and long conversations that happen simply because nobody is in a hurry to leave.

It reminded me that some of the best holidays are the ones nobody is posting about, and perhaps that’s exactly why they remain so special.

Just 45 minutes from Küçükkuyu sits Assos, one of my favorite places on the Turkish coast. Perched high above the Aegean Sea, the ancient city dates back more than 2,000 years and was once home to the philosopher Aristotle, who founded a school there after leaving Athens. Today, visitors can still walk among the ruins of the Temple of Athena, which overlooks the sea and offers one of the most beautiful views in the region.

What I love most about Assos, however, isn’t its history; it’s the feeling of the place. The stone houses, narrow streets, and slow pace make it feel untouched by time. As the sun begins to set and the crowds thin out, it’s easy to imagine centuries of travelers standing in the exact same spot, looking out over the same stretch of sea toward the island of Lesbos.

The same feeling follows me on a quick 24-hour trip to Bozcaada Island. Like many places on the Turkish coast, Bozcaada has become more popular in recent years, but it still manages to preserve a sense of slowness. The island rewards wandering rather than planning. Some of my favorite moments weren’t on any itinerary: getting lost among the whitewashed streets, stopping for an extra coffee in the town square, and watching the sunset without feeling the need to document every minute of it.

Perhaps that’s what I have been craving lately; not necessarily a specific destination, but a different way of traveling. One that leaves room for spontaneity, boredom, surprise, and the possibility of discovering something that wasn’t recommended by an algorithm.

Things I Loved About the Northern Aegean

One of my favorite things about spending time on the Turkish coast is how little planning is required. Unlike city life, where every meal seems to require a reservation and every outing feels scheduled, summer towns encourage spontaneity.

A few things I loved during this trip:

• Early morning walks along the waterfront before the heat arrived.

• Watching ferries and fishing boats move across the water toward Lesbos.

• Long Turkish breakfasts that somehow turn into lunch.

• Fresh Aegean olive oil with nearly every meal.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from this trip is that summer does not need to be expensive, glamorous, or particularly photogenic to be memorable. Sometimes all you need is good food, good company, and enough time to finish a book.

What I’m reading this summer

Our Seasonal Shelf book club is wrapping up The Only One Left by Riley Sager, and if you’re looking for a page-turner to pack in your beach bag, this is it.

Without giving too much away, the story follows Lenora Hope, a woman accused decades earlier of murdering her family, who now lives in a crumbling cliffside mansion. The atmosphere is deliciously creepy, the twists keep coming, and the ending managed to surprise even the most seasoned thriller readers in our group.

Up next, we’re voting on our July read, and the contenders currently include:

• Every Summer After by Carley Fortune

• Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner

If you’re a member of the book club, I have a feeling this vote might become surprisingly competitive.

A couple of books I have read throughout the past few summers that feel fitting and I suggest you pick them up for your next beach day: One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle and The wedding people by Alison Espach.

Outside of book club, I’m also in the mood for what I like to call “summer books”stories that are immersive, slightly nostalgic, easy to sink into, and best consumed with an iced coffee nearby. If you have recommendations, send them my way.

Things I loved this week

🎧 Listening: Listen for the Lie on Audible by Amy Tintera, this book was made to be an Audiobook especially that one of its main element is a podcast.

☕ Drinking: Iced coffee, despite repeatedly telling myself I would switch to something more hydrating.

📖 Reading: Everyone’s messages and theories about The Only One Left in our book club chat.

🌅 Watching: The last episode of Widow’s bay, which sent me into a spiral of needing something to fill the gap immediately, and everyone is now recommending that we back to Twin Peaks!

📱 Avoiding: Travel content that makes every destination look identical.

💭 Thinking About: How much more enjoyable travel becomes when we stop trying to optimize every minute of it.

That’s the art of an unplanned summer, it isn’t about finding hidden destinations at all, maybe it’s about resisting the urge to optimize every experience and leaving enough room for surprise.

And with that, I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your Sunday. Whether you’re by the sea, in the city, or somewhere in between, I hope you find a moment this week that feels unplanned, unhurried, and entirely your own.

Not because I haven’t spoken about harassment before, but because after experiencing it on several occasions throughout my life, I still find myself questioning whether I am “allowed” to call certain experiences harassment at all.

A week ago, I got into an Uber.

Thirty minutes later, I found myself standing on the side of a highway in Istanbul, documenting a license plate while my legs trembled beneath me.

The driver had spent the ride swerving dangerously through traffic, talking aggressively to himself, hitting both the steering wheel and his own face, and appearing to drift in and out of focus. Then, twice, he attempted to place his hand on my leg.

And yet, even now, part of me continues to negotiate with what happened. Does harassment begin when a hand actually makes contact with your body? Is an attempt enough? Is intention enough? Is fear enough? Women spend an astonishing amount of time asking themselves these questions, trying to determine where discomfort ends and violation begins, as if there is a precise line separating the two.

The methods may differ. The circumstances shift. The cities change. The years pass. Yet the feeling that settles into your body remains remarkably consistent. Somewhere between fear, shame, hypervigilance, and survival, women learn lessons that are never formally taught. Looking back on the different experiences that have shaped my life, I have come to realize that what stays with me most is not the incidents themselves, but the invisible skills they force us to develop.

We learn to conduct risk assessments in seconds

One thing women are rarely taught, yet somehow become experts at, is conducting risk assessments in seconds. The moment I realized something was wrong with the driver, my brain began performing calculations I had not consciously asked it to make. Could I get out? Was I overreacting? Would confronting him make things worse? Should I call someone? How far was I from home?

At first, I tried to rationalize the situation. Aggressive driving, unfortunately, is not uncommon among some taxi drivers in Turkey. I kept my AirPods in and opened a conversation with my best friend while monitoring Google Maps and my route home. But the moment we entered the highway, I realized this was something different. The driver appeared either under the influence or in the middle of some sort of psychological episode. By then, getting out of the car was no longer realistic. We were on a major highway, moving at high speed, suspended in that strange space where your instincts are screaming at you but your options are limited.

I sent my live location to my husband and continued tracking where we were. By the time we approached the 15 July Martyrs Bridge, my panic had doubled. The driving was getting worse, and I could no longer simultaneously manage Uber, WhatsApp, Google Maps, my location, and my own fear. At one point, the driver appeared to be dozing off. At another, he was hitting his face while muttering to himself.

In a moment of desperation, yes I opened an AI app and typed a sentence I never imagined I would write: “I am with an Uber driver who appears unstable and potentially under the influence.”

The response was surprisingly practical. It advised me to remain calm while we were still on the bridge, wait until we approached the exit area, reminded me that there is a police stop at the exit, and encouraged me to ask to be dropped off by saying that my husband was nearby and would pick me up. It also generated a sentence in Turkish for me.

And that is exactly what I did. I smiled, I remained calm, I reassured him that everything was fine and asked to get out. He agreed. The second the car door closed behind me, my legs nearly gave out.

As I stood there documenting the plate number while the vehicle disappeared into traffic, I felt something I have felt before. It was not only fear. It was the exhaustion of realizing how much invisible labor women perform to keep themselves safe.

We learn that vigilance becomes part of our personality

Long before Istanbul, there had already been too many moments teaching me how quickly ordinary situations can become unsafe.

There was the Lebanese army officer at the Lebanese-Syrian border who stood in front of my colleague and me in his underwear while we were trying to reach a reporting destination in the Bekaa Valley. There were the countless reporting trips where I wore a fake wedding ring simply because belonging to an imaginary husband felt safer than belonging only to myself. There was the constant mental juggling act that many women journalists know intimately: conducting interviews while simultaneously monitoring exits, assessing risks, managing egos, softening your tone, and calculating how to leave a situation if it suddenly turns uncomfortable.

I often joke that journalism made me hypervigilant. The truth is that womanhood got there first.

In 2013, I was walking home in broad daylight when a man followed me on a motorcycle, jumped off, grabbed me from behind, and ran away laughing. In the chaos of his escape, he stumbled while trying to get back onto his motorcycle. I remember running toward him almost voiceless, hitting him repeatedly with my purse before he finally managed to flee. The police later identified him as a mentally challenged individual. Nothing happened. No accountability. No consequences. No justice. For months afterward, I learned how to walk as if I had eyes on the back of my head.

After enough experiences like these, vigilance stops being a behavior. It becomes a reflex. You stop noticing how much energy it consumes because you have carried it for so long.

We learn that visibility comes with a price

By 2020, the nature of the threat had changed.

I had become a public-facing journalist whose work, opinions, and life were increasingly visible online. Around that time, I connected professionally with a well-known journalist and writer whose public reputation was built on intellect, influence, and published work.

What began as professional communication gradually crossed into something else. The messages became excessive. The boundaries became blurred. Without invitation or consent, he began sending highly sexual content that left me deeply uncomfortable while maintaining just enough plausible deniability to make me question my own discomfort.

I cannot discuss the details because the legal process remains ongoing. What I can say is that after several women and I decided to speak up, we found ourselves pulled into years of legal proceedings. One of the most difficult lessons women learn is that speaking up is rarely the end of the story. Sometimes it is only the beginning.

We learn that reporting harassment can become its own burden

People often ask why women stay silent, why they hesitate, or why they do not report incidents immediately. The question assumes that reporting is a straightforward act. In reality, reporting often becomes its own ordeal.

In 2022, when a man exposed himself to me on a street in central Istanbul, I walked directly into a nearby police station. The officer listened briefly before asking me why I was still outside at that hour. I remember feeling something inside me immediately shut down. I left, went home, cried in the shower, and tried to forget the encounter.

Years earlier, when several women and I pursued legal action against another man who had harassed us, we spent hours sitting in a police station waiting to provide statements. Hours explaining, recounting, documenting, and reliving events we would have preferred to leave behind. The process felt less like seeking justice and more like proving that we deserved to be taken seriously.

Perhaps that is what struck me most last week. After finally reaching the police station near the highway and explaining what had happened, I realized how familiar the feeling was. I was exhausted. Not only from fear, but from the anticipation of what comes after fear. The paperwork. The explanations. The waiting. The uncertainty.

The emotional labor of convincing institutions that something happened to you and that it matters. I remember standing there after walking nearly ten minutes under the afternoon sun to reach the station, still shaken from what had just happened, and feeling less like someone seeking help and more like a problem waiting to be processed. It reminded me of every difficult interaction women have with systems that are technically designed to protect them but often seem exhausted by their very presence.

The truth is that accountability demands a tremendous amount from women. It demands time, emotional energy, patience, evidence, explanations, and often a willingness to repeatedly revisit experiences we would rather forget. By the time many women decide not to report, it is not because they do not care about justice. It is because they understand the cost of pursuing it.

We learn that survival and justice are not the same thing

After more than a decade in journalism, years of reporting in difficult environments, and seven years of training journalists on physical safety and survival, I would have liked to believe that I was uniquely prepared for moments like these. Instead, I learned something much simpler: You can spend years teaching people how to survive dangerous situations and still find yourself trapped in the same vulnerability as every other woman sitting alone in the backseat of a car.

That realization has stayed with me more than anything else.

Uber eventually informed me that the driver would be suspended, and I hope that is true. Beyond that, I do not know what comes next. I do not know whether my report will lead anywhere. I do not know whether anyone else has reported him before, or whether someone else will report him after me.

What I do know is that every woman I know carries a private collection of stories like these. Some are small. Some are life-altering. Most never make it to a courtroom, a newspaper article, or even a police report. We are often asked why women hesitate to come forward, why they stay silent, or why they choose not to report. The better question might be how many times a person can be asked to relive fear before silence begins to feel like self-preservation.

I wish I could end this essay with a satisfying story about justice. Instead, I can only end it with relief:

I made it home. And some days, that still feels like more than it should.

I had carefully planned a wellness day off on Friday, the kind of day where you convince yourself you are finally going to slow down, romanticize your life a little, and do something self care related. Honestly, I think I accidentally gave myself the evil eye, because the taxi ride back home turned into one of the most traumatic rides of my life.

The driver appeared to be under the influence, the driving became increasingly aggressive, I slowly realized the situation I was trapped in while we were already on the highway, and somewhere in the middle of all that panic, he also attempted to touch my leg. The whole experience ended with me spending over an hour at a police station trying to explain what had happened in broken Turkish, but that is probably a story for another time. Needless to say, I was in absolutely no mood to write anything light or particularly fun afterward.

But this piece about finding the right therapist has been quietly brewing in my mind for a while now, and somehow it feels fitting to write about it after a week that reminded me, once again, how fragile our nervous systems really are.

My relationship with therapy started long before I ever sat in front of a therapist. Growing up in Lebanon in the late 90s and early 2000s, mental health existed in this strange exaggerated cultural space where therapy was never discussed as something ordinary or preventative or even healthy. Therapy belonged to dramatic movie characters, exhausted housewives in foreign films, men having public breakdowns, or the vaguely mysterious relative everyone whispered about during family gatherings after they had “started taking pills.”

There was never a simple or emotionally intelligent language around mental health. The lines between therapist, psychologist, and psychiatrist were completely blurred together into one terrifying category. In many households, going to talk to someone automatically meant something was deeply wrong with you. And somewhere between overhearing adult conversations and watching the way certain people were discussed with pity or discomfort, many of us quietly internalized the idea that seeking help was somehow synonymous with failure.

Ironically, the topic of mental health entered my life more seriously through journalism. The more time I spent reporting, traveling to refugee camps, crossing tense border areas, interviewing traumatized people, witnessing armed clashes, and absorbing stories that no human nervous system was designed to casually consume, the more obvious it became that this work was going to leave a mark on me psychologically, no matter how “successful” the stories themselves were.

At some point, I started attending psychosocial safety trainings connected to journalism and emergency work, and for the first time, therapy stopped sounding like something abstract and cinematic and started sounding practical. Necessary, even.

Still, deciding to actually go was another story entirely. In 2018, I found a therapist for the first time. I drove to her office, parked outside, sat there for almost twenty minutes, and never got out of the car. I tried again another day and did the exact same thing. Eventually I gave up and drove home. Looking back, I think people underestimate how psychologically huge that first appointment can feel, especially if you grew up in cultures where therapy was associated with shame, instability, or “serious problems.” Sitting in that parked car honestly felt more emotionally exposing than many of the dangerous reporting environments I had worked in before.

In 2019, a brutal breakup pushed me to try again. One thing that genuinely helped was talking openly to friends who were already in therapy. Not in a performative “mental health awareness” way, but in a normal, casual way; asking them practical questions:

What type of therapy do you do? How did you find your therapist? What happens during sessions? Do you just cry the entire time? How do you know if someone is a good fit?

I also remember speaking to a close friend who happened to be a therapist herself, not professionally but simply as someone I trusted enough to explain why the entire process felt emotionally intimidating to me. That conversation helped demystify therapy in my head. It made it feel less like entering a psychiatric institution and more like entering a structured conversation with yourself. Eventually, through trusted recommendations, I found my first real therapist, the one I finally managed to get out of the car to see.

Since then, through relocations, burnout, heartbreak, career changes, identity crises, and one therapist who genuinely turned out to believe in black magic and spiritual manipulation (I wish I were joking), I have now experienced three different therapists during three completely different versions of myself.

And honestly, finding the right therapist feels far closer to dating than people admit. You are essentially choosing someone who will witness the least polished, most emotionally confusing parts of your inner life: Chemistry matters, warmth matters, timing matters, even their tone of voice sometimes matters.

One of the biggest things I learned is not to treat the first session lightly. People often approach therapy consultations as if they are the ones being evaluated, when in reality you should absolutely be evaluating the therapist too. Go prepared with questions. Ask about their methods, how they structure sessions, whether they are more conversational or analytical, how they approach anxiety, trauma, burnout, relationships, or whatever initially brought you there.

And perhaps most importantly: pay attention to how your body feels around them. Do you feel judged? Rushed? Managed? Infantilized? Or do you feel emotionally safe enough to continue speaking?

I also learned that you do not need to fully understand your “therapy goals” before starting. When I started with my current therapist in 2024, I initially thought I was going there mainly to discuss body image issues. A year later, we somehow find ourselves discussing ambition, burnout, depression, success, grief, childhood dynamics, emotional exhaustion, relocation anxiety, and the strange loneliness of adulthood.

Therapy rarely stays inside the neat category you originally assign to it. Another thing nobody really tells you is that the first few sessions can genuinely feel awkward. You might spend weeks feeling unsure whether this person is “your person.” And that is okay. Sometimes you only realize a therapist is not the right fit one month in, after your nervous system has had enough time to react honestly instead of politely.

One thing I’ve also learned over the years is that if your therapist constantly agrees with everything you say, it might be worth asking yourself whether that is actually the approach you need.

A therapist’s role is not to blindly validate every action we take. Our feelings? Yes. The emotional experience behind them? Absolutely. But therapy, at least in my opinion, becomes truly transformative when it creates enough space for us to examine our own behaviors honestly, without immediately collapsing into shame or defensiveness.

The best therapists I’ve had were not the ones who simply reassured me that I was always right, they were the ones who gently paused certain narratives, asked uncomfortable but necessary questions, and helped me notice patterns I could not fully see on my own.

Good therapy often feels less like receiving advice and more like having someone carefully moderate the ongoing conversation you are already having inside your own head.

I also personally feel uncomfortable when therapy sessions become centered around diagnosing other people. Of course, discussing the actions of others is completely normal, especially when their behavior affects your emotional wellbeing, relationships, sense of safety, or self-esteem. But I think there is a difference between processing your experience with someone and spending entire sessions trying to clinically label everyone around you.

And honestly? If the therapist themselves constantly pushes the conversation toward diagnosing absent third parties, I personally start feeling like the session is drifting away from its actual purpose. At the end of the day, therapy should ideally bring you closer to understanding yourself, not turn into an investigation board about everyone else in your life.

And maybe this last tip is oddly specific, but please ask about cancellation policies early on. If you are someone who tends to get anxious, overwhelmed, avoidant, emotionally exhausted, or prone to “cold feet,” understanding the therapist’s flexibility ahead of time genuinely helps. Some therapists operate very rigidly while others understand that mental health itself can sometimes interfere with consistency.

One of my therapists once allowed me to occasionally cancel sessions simply because I emotionally could not handle talking that day, and weirdly enough, that flexibility made me trust the process more instead of less.

I think the more sessions I attend, the more I realize therapy is not about becoming a perfectly healed version of yourself, it is mostly about finding someone who helps you organize the emotional noise of being alive a little more gently.

In a world where many of us spend our lives performing competence, independence, productivity, and emotional stability, there is something deeply relieving about having one room where you no longer have to pretend you are coping perfectly, where you can fully let go.

Of course, this post was never going to end without book recommendations that fit the mood, so here are four books currently sitting somewhere between therapy, mental health, burnout, emotional survival, and trying to understand what modern life is quietly doing to our brains and bodies.

Two were recommended by my therapist, one by my husband, and one is my own personal recommendation:

• The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel Van Del Kolk) — my recommendation, and honestly one of the most important books I’ve read on how trauma, stress, and emotional experiences physically remain stored in the body. I’m currently reading it again, especially after the Friday I had.

• Lost Connections (Johann Hari) — recommended by my husband, and one of those books that completely reframes how we think about depression, anxiety, loneliness, and modern life (On my TBR).

• Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (Johann Hari) — recommended by my therapist, for anyone who feels like their brain has been permanently altered by notifications, social media, doomscrolling, and the internet’s endless assault on our attention spans (On my TBR).

• The Gifts of Imperfection (Brene Brown)— also recommended by my therapist, a softer, gentler read about shame, vulnerability, perfectionism, and learning how to exist without constantly feeling like you need to earn your worth through productivity (On my TBR).

If this is your first time here, welcome to my world. LuTalks is a newsletter about books, identity, internet culture, creativity, and trying to romanticize adulthood while simultaneously surviving it.

Somewhere between Paris métro stations, therapy sessions, Slack notifications, and impulsively buying more books than I can realistically finish this month, I accidentally started a virtual book club, which honestly sounds like the kind of sentence I would have romanticized reading online years ago.

My friends and husband have been encouraging me to do this for over two years now, but I always hesitated because I genuinely believed that a sense of love and community could only truly be attained in person, and if you’ve been here long enough, you probably already know that I was lucky enough to experience that kind of community through our Minoa book club in Istanbul, yet to me, something still felt missing.

So during one gloomy day in March, as the month was ending and so was my Tuesday therapy session, my therapist asked me a question after I had spent a solid 45 minutes talking about how I felt like I didn’t really “own” anything in my life, she said: “Luna, why don’t you start your own book club?”

And somehow that simple question ended up altering the trajectory of my entire spring, because once she said it, I suddenly realized that I already had the community, I had already spent years building friendships and conversations online with women whom I had come to know both virtually and in real life, and who would probably love to be part of something like this too.

I think one of the main reasons I wanted to start this book club is because I’ve been feeling increasingly disconnected from creativity lately, not necessarily from consuming it, but from feeling like I actually own any part of it myself. Creativity alone, at my age, in the region where I live, and with the passport I hold, does not exactly provide the kind of stable future people expect you to build your adulthood around, even though all I really want to do half the time is read books, write essays, overanalyze fictional characters, and romanticize cafés for recreational purposes. And honestly, a full-time job has never fully felt like ownership to me either, because jobs come and go, jobs are dictated by systems and deliverables and team calendars and expectations that rarely leave enough room for how we actually want to move through the world, and while I’m deeply grateful for stability, I also think many people in their late twenties and thirties are quietly grieving the creative versions of themselves they thought adulthood would make more possible rather than less.

I also think the internet has completely distorted the way many of us perceive creativity, because somewhere along the way creativity stopped being simply about making things, reading books, writing stories, starting niche little communities online, or dressing dramatically to go journal in a café, and instead became something that also had to be profitable, aesthetic, optimized, sponsored, camera-ready, and publicly validated.

And when we constantly consume content from people who seem to have somehow transformed creativity into an entire lifestyle and career, where every random Tuesday afternoon appears cinematic and every trip somehow turns into a campaign, it becomes difficult not to compare our own realities to theirs, especially when real life often looks far less glamorous and far more like emails, burnout, laundry, long commutes, difficult passports, and trying to squeeze creativity into the quieter corners of exhausted evenings.

The Seasonal Shelf is a slow reading club inspired by seasons, atmosphere, emotionally immersive books, and the idea that literature should accompany our lives rather than simply distract us from them, and so far we are around 20 women, give or take, which honestly already feels surreal to me. One of my favorite things about it so far is how naturally our conversations became larger than the books themselves.

During April and May, we read Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, a family-centered literary novel inspired by Little Women that explores love, grief, emotional inheritance, and the complicated ways people attempt to save one another, and while everyone agreed that the writing itself was beautiful and emotionally immersive, the real discourse in our group chat ended up revolving around -SPOILER ALERT- the ethics of Sylvie and William falling in love after William divorces Sylvie’s sister Julia.

To many readers, this plot twist felt shocking, but what fascinated me most was how differently everyone perceived the situation depending on culture and upbringing, because as Middle Eastern women, many of us immediately started comparing the plot to our own cultural norms, where this type of relationship is generally only considered socially acceptable if a spouse passes away and a sibling later becomes an “eligible” option afterward, which I still personally find slightly unsettling.

So naturally, the discussion became far less about the novel itself and far more about morality, relationships, family expectations, grief, and the invisible cultural rules we grow up internalizing without even realizing it, which is honestly exactly the kind of discussion I secretly hoped this book club would create. Right now the group is mostly women, and many of us are Arab women living across different parts of the world, but I’m hoping to slowly make it more international over time, especially since we read English-language books and all discussions are moderated entirely in English.

It’s also a seasonal book club, which means I shortlist books based on the emotional mood and atmosphere of each season, and right now it feels like half the internet is collectively romanticizing the aesthetics of the 80s and 90s and attempting to have what people are now calling a “Slasher Summer.”

If you’re wondering, our June voting options ended up being The Only One Left by Riley Sager and The Butcher by Jennifer Hillier, and The Only One Left won, which honestly feels incredibly correct for the current cultural mood! I’m a big fan of the writer, Sager’s book “Home before dark” was one of my most enjoyable spooky seasons reads back in October.

After finishing Hello Beautiful and before fully diving into our official summer thriller era, I picked up two more books from my personal May and June reading list: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke and The things we never say by Elizabeth Strout, the writer of one of my favorite pandemic reads, Olive, Again.

‘The things we never say’ is exactly what you would expect from Elizabeth Strout if you’ve read any of her previous work, quiet and deeply observant and emotionally intelligent in that very specific way where small conversations somehow reveal entire emotional histories underneath them that often discusses grief and loneliness.

But the book we really need to discuss is ‘Yesteryear’ which I genuinely think is one of the books that surprised me the most this year. The premise alone sounds almost satirical: a traditional American “tradwife” influencer suddenly wakes up in the brutal reality of 1855, and somehow the book manages to be funny, disturbing, socially observant, and increasingly existential all at once.

As I was finishing it, I genuinely did not expect to love it as much as I did, because what initially felt like a slightly gimmicky premise slowly transformed into something far more intelligent and unsettling than I anticipated.

Natalie Heller Mills, the protagonist, basically embodies every influencer archetype that people love to criticize online, yet somehow the author still manages to make her even more frustrating in the most intentional way possible, and despite that, the book works incredibly well. In fact, I think if anyone ever asks me again about my thoughts on influencer culture, performative femininity, or parents heavily exposing their children online for content, my answer may simply become: please go read Yesteryear.

I want to end this post the same way I started it, with a reference to having a Slasher Summer. I was never really a summer person, and if anything, summer and winter are probably the two seasons most capable of emotionally derailing me, but then I stumbled across the phrase “Slasher Summer,” which immediately reminded me of Summerween, and if you know me at all, you already know I’m deeply obsessed with Halloween.

So to me, having a Slasher Summer means embracing a slightly eerie, nostalgic, 90s-inspired summer filled with creepy books on warm evenings, old thrillers playing in the background, moody playlists, late sunsets, crime novels in cafés, oversized tote bags filled with paperbacks, and strong I Know What You Did Last Summer energy.

It’s basically choosing atmosphere over productivity, which honestly feels necessary after the past few years. So instead of saving all my spooky books for autumn, I’m finally reading some of them during summer instead. Here’s what’s on my Slasher Summer curated list:

The Only One Left by Riley Sager is probably the first book I would recommend for a true addictive summer thriller vibe because it has everything required for a perfect Slasher Summer read: a huge creepy house, old family secrets, an atmospheric coastal setting, and pacing that constantly makes you say “just one more chapter” at one in the morning.

The Butcher by Jennifer Hillier is perfect if you want something darker and sharper, because Jennifer Hillier writes psychological thrillers with genuinely effective twists and extremely tense pacing that make her books almost impossible to casually read.

The Book of Heartbreak by Ova Ceren is not exactly thriller territory, but it absolutely fits the darker aesthetic and feels emotionally unsettling in a very late-summer-night kind of way, and it’s set in Istanbul!

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna has absolutely nothing to do with thrillers whatsoever, but it somehow still screams “July evening with iced coffee” and feels like the perfect palate cleanser between darker reads.

And finally, The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune remains one of those books that feels like emotional escapism in the best possible way, and has been on my TBR for two years now, so I think it’s time, and I heard it’s incredible as an Audiobook!

As for shows, Widows Bay has been giving me exactly the kind of mysterious coastal-town thriller atmosphere I associate with Slasher Summer, with supernatural undertones, eerie disappearances, and strong rainy-night energy, Matthew Rhys’s performa is also extremely entertaining! While The Boroughs perfectly captures that nostalgic retro aesthetic and small-town tension where you constantly feel like something is deeply wrong beneath the surface, and if you missed Stranger Things summers, this will be your fix.

Anyway, happy Summerween.

And if you also suddenly feel the urge to read thrillers while drinking iced coffee and pretending you’re in a 90s coming-of-age horror movie, just know that apparently there’s an entire internet subculture for that now.

And if you’ve read my previous essays, you know that as an expat, I think about this even more deeply.

Getting together with friends now requires the kind of planning once reserved for weddings or international conferences. Entire group chats are built around finding a single available evening three weeks from now. I have seen countless videos online joking about the impossibility of scheduling plans with friends, and they are funny because they are painfully true. Joy now requires logistics. Spontaneity feels almost luxurious.

But I think the harder truth sits somewhere else entirely. Sometimes, long-distance friendships become easier to maintain than local ones. You realize the friend living six time zones away checks in more consistently than the one twenty minutes from your house. The person abroad somehow makes more room for you than the people physically nearby. And that is usually when you begin understanding where you matter, and who truly matters to you.

My first friendship heartbreak happened young. I had a neighbor who lived across the street from me. We were maybe eleven or twelve years old, and waving to each other from our balconies meant: grab your Barbies and come over. I always went to her house because it was bigger, with more space to play. But I do not remember ever inviting her to mine. Looking back now, maybe that was part of the problem. I did not yet understand that friendship also requires initiation. Reciprocity. Choosing each other actively.

Eventually, she stopped waving to me. Instead, the girl downstairs started getting the invitations. At the time, I could not understand why I was suddenly excluded. Years later, when we were around sixteen, we ended up liking the same boy. I remember trying to argue for solidarity, for us against men, for fries before guys, but she lied about being interested in him and chose him anyway. Eventually, I stopped being invited to her parties altogether.

Now that I am writing about this, I realize Maria — let’s call her that — may simply have been my first introduction to toxic friendship. Until this moment, I had always framed it as rejection, but maybe it was incompatibility all along. Ours was not a friendship built on depth. It was built on convenience, proximity, childhood boredom, and a shared neighborhood. And perhaps those things are not always enough to sustain closeness as people grow older.

Maybe the more uncomfortable truth is that some of these needs never really leave us. Even as adults, we still crave belonging so deeply that we sometimes ignore the fact that certain friendships are simply not compatible. Some people do not interest us enough, challenge us enough, or share enough of our inner world to keep the connection alive naturally. Yet the need to have friends can blind us into holding onto relationships long after they stop feeling meaningful.

In a strange way, I can almost compare it to Maria’s need, at the time, to have a boyfriend. She was willing to step over every idea of sisterhood for the possibility of becoming chosen by a man, the future husband, the imagined future. And maybe we do similar things with friendship too: we hold onto the idea of connection because loneliness feels more frightening than admitting that some people were never truly meant to stay in our lives for long.

I looked her up recently. She has three children now. She seems alive and well. I have not seen or spoken to her since maybe 2006.

The strange thing is that I have always been a friendship fighter. I have always been deeply invested in maintaining connections, perhaps because I changed four schools before I was even sixteen years old. Imagine how many beginnings that requires from a child. How many times you have to introduce yourself. How many lunch breaks you spend trying to decode where you belong. I think I became someone who clings tightly to friendships because I learned very early that people disappear.

So here I am at thirty-six, suddenly exhausted by the idea of trying again. Not because I dislike people, but because I feel like I have been building new social worlds since I was four years old.

Social media helped preserve the illusion of continuity. Through it, I stayed loosely connected to people from different schools, university, old jobs, different countries, different eras of my life. But very few friendships survived the actual test of time. Some quietly faded. Others collapsed dramatically. More than one friendship was damaged by a toxic boyfriend who viewed me as a threat simply because I named what I saw too honestly.

That became another lesson entirely: when someone you love is in a toxic relationship, saying the truth too directly can cost you the friendship before it saves the person. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stay nearby without forcing clarity they are not ready for yet. And if your anger becomes too heavy to contain, maybe the healthiest thing is to take a small step back instead of trying to rescue them.

Maintaining friendships is hard. But finding new friendships in your thirties can feel even harder, which is probably why so many of us fight desperately to preserve what we already have. We become archivists of old intimacy. We keep reviving dead group chats, revisiting old memories, rereading versions of ourselves through people who knew us ten years ago.

But not everything is preservable.

Some friendships belonged only to a certain version of you. Some people were companions for a period of time, not an entire lifetime. And maybe growing older is partly about accepting that losing friendships does not always mean you failed. Sometimes it simply means you kept growing.

What comes next, I think, is learning how to deal with the guilt. The guilt of no longer being able to try hard enough, plan far enough ahead, or keep stretching yourself to make things work. Plans now require scheduling three weeks, sometimes three months, in advance, only to collapse because everyone involved ended up having different priorities, different levels of energy, different capacities for showing up.

Earlier this week, I watched a podcast clip that spoke honestly about the quiet rudeness of canceled plans. The host said: “It’s more respectful to say no from the start than to lead people on knowing there’s a chance you might not make it.” And I respected that deeply. I am guilty of last-minute cancellations too. I think most of us are. Life exhausts people in invisible ways now.

But if you ask me, there is one kind of guilt that should not be carried year after year: the guilt of being too tired to keep trying endlessly, too tired to keep planning, too tired to keep fighting for every connection to survive. At some point, exhaustion stops being cruelty and becomes honesty, in my opinion of course.

And maybe that is what makes friendships harder to dissect than romantic relationships. Romantic heartbreaks often arrive with clear endings, visible betrayals, recognizable grief. Friendships fade more quietly. They unravel slowly, through missed calls, postponed dinners, emotional distance, and the gradual realization that two people are no longer meeting each other in the same place. In their own way, friendships reveal some of the deepest and most complicated layers of love, expectation, loneliness, and who we become over time.

A few months ago, in an attempt to slow down a feeling that was quietly creeping in, I decided to hibernate my LinkedIn account, and I even wrote about it at the time. It started with a familiar thought, that I am not doing enough in my career, and then it slowly turned into something sharper, that I am behind again. I wanted to take more control in what felt like a chaotic and constantly moving world, so I closed that account.

Fast forward to April, and here I am back on LinkedIn, not because I need a job or anything specific, but because hibernating the account made me feel even more behind and disconnected from the working world. As soon as I logged in, it all came back. Conferences, panels, meetings that I was not part of, announcements and promotions and visibility. This time the feeling evolved, it was no longer just that I was behind, it became something heavier, a quiet but persistent thought that I am not successful enough.

I found myself doing what many of us do, spiraling into comparison. I started looking up what others in my field had achieved by the age of 36, and many of them were already holding senior positions, leading teams, shaping conversations. It did not take long for the feeling to settle in, almost as if it had been waiting for confirmation, that I am definitely not successful enough.

But then I paused and asked myself a simple question. What is success, and in this day and age, how are we measuring it?

In a previous essay, I wrote about how attached I was to my career in journalism, and how milestones and bylines once represented something much bigger than just work. That feeling has not disappeared, but it has changed. It feels as though it has been split in half. A part of me feels very successful on a personal level. I am an avid and serious reader, I try to stay informed not only about the world but also about science, health, and how to live well. I cook almost every day, I work out and make time for walks, and over the past year and a half I have lost 20 kilograms. I sleep well, I am in bed by 10 PM and I get my seven hours. I have a healthy and grounded marriage, and the partner I chose reflects the respect I have for myself.

And yet, despite all of this, that sense of success in my personal life does not echo in my professional life, and I think I am beginning to understand why.

A widely cited review by Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, which looked at hundreds of studies, found something that challenges the way many of us think about success. Happy people tend to become more successful, not the other way around. People who are already happier tend to perform better at work, earn more, build stronger relationships, and maintain better health. This shifts the narrative many of us grew up with, the idea that we will be happy once we succeed. Instead, it suggests that we are more likely to succeed when we are already, at least in part, well.

And yet, despite knowing this, we continue to associate success with discomfort. I often think about this in the context of sports, where many people believe that a good workout is one that leaves you completely sore the next day. That soreness becomes a kind of proof, evidence that something worked. But soreness is, at its core, a form of pain. In a similar way, we have learned to connect success to struggle, as if ease, balance, or stability could not possibly mean that we are doing well.

Lately, as I’ve been reading Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, I keep thinking about how easily we imagine that clarity exists somewhere else, in another time, in another version of life, where things are slower and more certain. But even in those imagined worlds, the question remains the same. What does it mean to live well, and who gets to decide that?

Back in December 2025, I read Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It was short, disorienting, and at times confusing. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either. What stayed with me was a quiet sense of expansion; like my mind had stretched just a little further than it had before.

In Orbital, Harvey wrote: “The Earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife.”

Over the past year, I’ve found myself slowly drawn into the world of science fiction and space. After reading Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, something shifted. I was hooked. Which is strange, because for 35 years, I ran away from science.

If I trace that back, it leads me—like most things do—to childhood.

When I was 14, I came dangerously close to failing my science class. I was struggling, but instead of being supported, I was told something that stayed with me for years: “You are simply not smart enough for science. And that’s okay, you will find your way.” Something in me collapsed at that moment. I didn’t question it. I accepted it as truth. If I couldn’t do science, then I must not be smart.

So I turned fully and almost obediently towards literature.

And to be fair, that path gave me a lot. It was magical. It led me to the humanities, to philosophy, languages, psychology, and eventually journalism. I don’t regret it.

But recently, I’ve been asking myself: what shapes us when we are young?

Our families, our schools, our friends, the books we read, the cartoons we watch; but most of all, our education. And right at the moment when my personality was still forming, I was redirected by someone else’s belief about my limits.

Not guided. Redirected.

Growing up, space didn’t exist in my world. I don’t remember thinking about it; not really. Maybe during an eclipse, maybe in passing, but it always felt distant, abstract, inaccessible.

Later, when my younger brother became fascinated with the stars and asked for a telescope, I remember feeling strangely intimidated by it. I never touched it. Somewhere, quietly, a thought had settled in me: you’re not smart enough to understand what you’re looking at anyway.

So when I found myself, at 35, suddenly interested in space; it felt like a revelation, like discovering a hidden room inside your own house. There was so much to learn, so much to take in, and an almost urgent feeling behind it; as if I was racing against time, or against an older version of myself that still believed I wasn’t capable of understanding any of it.

And then, a few days ago, Artemis II made its journey around the Moon. At the same time, back on Earth, the Middle East was unfolding, again, into war, and a big massacre was taking place in Beirut. I was torn: do I continue in my space world, inside that shuttle? Or do I return to reality, to earth?

Astronauts often describe seeing Earth from space as one of the most profound experiences of their lives. They call it the Overview Effect: a sudden shift in perspective when the planet reveals itself as small, fragile, and whole.

Chris Hadfield once said: “You can’t see any borders. You just see geography—and it makes you rethink everything.” From that distance, the conflicts that define us seem almost imaginary.

And I keep wondering…

Do we really need to leave Earth to understand it? Or is it that distance; physical or emotional; that finally allows us to see what has always been in front of us?

And maybe that’s the point: distance.

Astronauts need distance to see Earth clearly. Not just to see it, but to feel it. To understand its wholeness, its fragility, its quiet beauty. Up close, we are too immersed in it. Too distracted by noise, by urgency, by everything that feels immediate and heavy and real. From far away, everything rearranges itself.

Borders disappear. Conflicts shrink. What once felt overwhelming becomes part of something much larger, something almost peaceful.

And I wonder if the same is true for us; those of us who live far from home. Because distance, in exile, does something strange. It doesn’t erase attachment. It sharpens it. It turns places into feelings. Streets into memories. People into echoes that follow you into completely different lives.

Living abroad while your country is at war feels, at times, like watching Earth from space but without the peace that astronauts describe: You see everything, you feel everything, but you cannot touch anything.

You are close enough to be affected, but too far to act.

And so you exist in this suspended state; half here, half there. Physically safe, emotionally elsewhere.

Maybe astronauts look at Earth and feel unity. But we, looking back at home from afar, often feel fragmentation, a split between the life we are building and the life we cannot return to, a split between what is happening and what we are allowed to feel in our daily routines.

And yet, just like them, distance forces clarity.

It strips things down. It makes you see what matters.

Not the noise. Not the urgency. Not even the fear, sometimes. But the core of it all: people, connection, survival, love.

Maybe we don’t need to go to space to understand Earth. Maybe some of us are already living a version of that distance.

I’m sitting in my living room on a cloudy April Friday, looking at the most beautiful bouquet of flowers my husband just brought me. One of my cats is sitting very close to me, observing me and begging for cuddles. It’s still early in the morning, a couple of hours before I hit the “Active” button on Slack and log in to my 9-to-5.

And here’s what I feel: nothing and everything all at once; a quiet life on the outside, a real battle shuffling inside my brain and my heart.

This weekend marks exactly one month since the war in the Middle East started. I write this with disbelief, because this time the war did not start in one country, but everywhere all at once, at the same time.

One month ago, on the last weekend of February, my best friend was visiting me from Dubai. We had a pleasant first day, despite sleeping a little after 2:30 AM when she landed that Friday. On Friday evening, things started escalating as we were riding the ferry on our way home. The tension was starting to build; something was about to happen in the region and everyone could feel it. Remembering this now feels like a distant memory from months ago, but it was only one month ago.

While clearing the dishes that night, at exactly 10:35 PM, news started circulating that Khamenei was dead; or more accurately, killed in a US/Israel strike. And just like that, it started. Events spiraled in the next 48 hours: we went from playing tourists around Istanbul to having lunch in front of the Tv in my living room, glued to the news, my friend no longer able to return home, flights cancelled, airports bombed, drones hovering over different cities from Bahrain to Iraq. Needless to say, everything collapsed very quickly.

By Monday morning, the war had reached Lebanon, and there we were, yet again, checking on our families and friends ten times a day, glued to the news yet again, unable to function or work yet again, crying and laughing at the absurdity of it all at the same time.

I could continue to write about politics, but that’s not why I launched this newsletter.

What I want to write about, however, is the quiet spiral of mental health struggles that has made its way into my routine since October 2023, as a Lebanese expat now experiencing a third war from abroad.

We are always torn as expats. When our families are safe and having a great time, we are happy for them and jealous because we are not there, that we are missing out on memories. And when our families are going through literal hell, we are in constant panic mode, feeling a pit in our stomach, unable to breathe, living in a permanent state of anticipation; waiting for bad news.

The body keeps the war

During that first week of the war, I strained my neck and had to go to the ER at 10 PM to get an injection for the pain. It was a superficial injury caused by my lack of proper stretching and warm-up at the gym; but the injury was also deeper. It ran deeper than the muscle. It was emotional.

I strained my neck because I was angry and sad and scared, and I took it all out in my workout. My body was tense, my muscles were not cooperating, and I did not even notice, because there I was again, back on autopilot, in survivor mode, wondering what if a bomb targets my family’s residence, and how it would feel to lose them.

I also thought about my dad’s grave in South Lebanon, in my mom’s village, where he is buried in what was supposed to be the calmest spot, under a willow tree, next to other loved family members so that he is not alone. But he is alone now, surrounded by bombs. His grave might not even survive this war.

On some days my brain is rotten. I am sleepless, tired, scared. And here’s the thing: distance does not protect you from fear; it only gives your fear more space to grow. On other days I am functional and throwing random jokes around; like a normal person.

What exile really is

Exile is not only missing home when things are beautiful.
Exile is watching home burn while you are somewhere safe, holding flowers in your living room.

I was supposed to be in Lebanon in mid-March for the Eid holiday. It would have been my first visit in three years. Instead, I had to grieve that cancelled trip silently and replace it with another plan. I am aware that this is a privilege; to be able to change plans, to travel somewhere else; but privilege does not cancel grief. Because what it really meant was this: another Mother’s Day missed, another birthday missed, and as always, missed because of war.

War not only takes lives, it takes trips, holidays, birthdays, sleep, plans, and the illusion that you control your own life.

It took me two years of therapy to understand that exile is not only geographical.
Exile is emotional.

Exile is when your body lives in one country, and your nervous system lives in another.
Exile is when you feel guilty for being safe.
Exile is when you cannot plan your life because history keeps interrupting it.
Exile is when your body carries wars that are not happening in the room you are sitting in.

And maybe the hardest part of exile is this:
Life around you continues to be beautiful, calm, normal; and you no longer know how to live inside normal.

Exile is not a place on the map, it is a life lived in two realities at the same time.

Living abroad during war is a strange existence; your life continues in parallel to destruction, you still have meetings, groceries, gym sessions, dinner plans; while somewhere else, people are counting missiles instead of hours. No one prepares you for the guilt of building a peaceful life while your country is collapsing.

After a few years abroad, you realise something more difficult: your life will not pause every time war starts. And war, unfortunately, will start again and again.

Exile is not only distance.
Exile is living in two timelines at once: the life you are building, and the life you left behind.

The hardest part is not leaving home; the hardest part is watching home change without you.

What I would tell anyone who lives far from home during war

Call your parents more than you think you should.
Save money. Emergencies will happen.
Keep your documents organised.
Build a life where you are, not only in your memories.
Learn to live with uncertainty. Sit with your emotions. Go on walks with something playing in your ears other than your own thoughts (Podcasts, Audibooks). Be honest with your friends.
You will always feel in between places.
Home will change without you. You will change without home.
Both things can be true at the same time: you can love your country and not want to live there.

And if I could give one big piece of advice to anyone living far from home while their country is at war, it would be this:

Build a life anyway.
Laugh anyway.
Fall in love anyway.
Buy the flowers anyway.

Because war already takes enough from us.
It should not take the life we are trying to build, too.

When I got married a little over a year ago, I imagined I had built an extra layer of protection against it, as if companionship itself could inoculate me. I believed loneliness would only arrive in predictable moments; when nostalgia crept in, when I missed home, my country, or my family. I never imagined it would become a dilemma that chased me daily, shadowing my moods and quietly shaping how I relate to people.

I’ve spent the past two and a half years away from home. I declined every invitation to visit. I quietly withdrew from summer trips friends tried to plan. I found myself emotionally incapable of returning during moments when the threat of yet another war loomed. Call it selfish, but after thirty years of living through assassinations, wars, murders, and explosions—and after covering those events professionally—I am not eager to undo the progress I fought for in therapy. Nor am I ready to invest more emotional labor in a country that, in many ways, failed to protect its people.

By the end of 2025, I was left with a confusing emotional mix. Somewhere along the way, I realized I had been living almost entirely in nostalgia: for a place, a time, a version of life that no longer exists. I began asking myself questions I had long avoided: when does nostalgia comfort us, and when does it quietly turn into another form of isolation?

The holiday season made those questions louder. I couldn’t understand why everything felt so heavy, why excitement felt distant, why joy had shrunk into something practical; reduced to the relief of time off rather than the warmth it was supposed to bring.

I felt drawn to old photo albums my mother brought with her when my parents temporarily evacuated Lebanon, yet I couldn’t open them. I skipped the nostalgic movies I had planned to watch. Even joy, it seemed, required an energy I didn’t have.

At the same time, I found myself scrolling through images of reunions: families returning home, friends embracing, people gathering for the season. Each image felt like a reminder of something I was watching from the outside. The loneliness wasn’t loud or dramatic; it was quiet, cumulative, and deeply personal.

Perhaps the most revealing part was what didn’t happen. I didn’t mask it. I didn’t perform joy or hold things together for others. We weren’t hosting the holidays. I let myself exist without pretending and in that stillness, loneliness finally became something I could name, rather than something I kept outrunning.

January 2026 marks a full year since I started working fully from home after changing jobs. If you work from home, you know how easily it can swing between privilege and isolation. I’m not talking about hybrid setups or occasional remote days similar to what I had in my old job, but the kind of total work-from-home life where your company doesn’t even have an office in the country you live in—where your only colleague is on the other side of a sprawling city you rarely cross. On paper, it sounds ideal. In practice, it can feel unspeakably lonely.

There are mornings when I work in my pajamas, start the day writing instead of commuting, and feel grateful for the softness of that freedom. But in a city as vast and overwhelming as Istanbul, that same freedom can quietly deepen isolation. Days blur. The absence of friction slowly becomes the absence of connection.

Over the past seven months, loneliness has taught me more about myself than I expected. It forced me to look inward, to confront parts of my life I had been too busy to sit with. It stripped away distractions and made it impossible to ignore what felt misaligned.

Last week, I wrote about disappointment in my career and the exhaustion that followed years of burnout. I hibernated my LinkedIn account as an act of self-preservation, an attempt to step off the treadmill and recentre myself. Today, I woke up thinking about loneliness instead, about how easily it becomes a lifestyle we normalize, and how deeply it shapes us without us noticing.

There’s a strange parallel here with how relationships function today. Loneliness doesn’t only come from being alone; it comes from low-maintenance connections. From people being present in bursts but absent in upkeep. I’m guilty of adopting that behavior too. It feels familiar in romantic dynamics, but jarring when it appears in friendships—especially among women, where we’re socialized to expect emotional reciprocity. This isn’t really about gender. It’s about a cultural shift toward low-friction closeness: friendships maintained by nostalgia or proximity, intimacy reduced to memes and “thinking of you” texts, people wanting the identity of closeness without the responsibility of it.

In the past seven months, I’ve done an impressive job isolating myself from noise. I stepped away from social gatherings, from draining circles, from unnecessary commutes across Istanbul. Sometimes, I even withdrew from potential adventures. Last week, I isolated myself from my bookclub—the one thing that had quietly become my lifeline.

At first, this looked like self-preservation. Protecting my peace. The same instinct that leads people to shield themselves from relentless news cycles, telling themselves distance is safety. But the truth is, no matter how isolated you think you are, the repercussions reach you anyway. Even in a remote cabin in the Scottish Highlands or a cottage in Greenland, the world eventually knocks.

Loneliness catches up. Slowly, the choice to be alone begins to curdle into anger; anger at the world for moving on without you, and anger at yourself for the distance you created. You start to feel irrelevant, forgotten, invisible. What once felt like control begins to feel like abandonment.

Living in Turkey has sharpened this realization. In many ways, it mirrors Lebanon: if you don’t consciously distance yourself from daily news, from people, you spiral—economic collapse, violence, crimes against women. The weight of it all feels constant, inescapable.

And maybe that is the quiet truth I keep circling: loneliness isn’t always the absence of people. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of distance: geographical, emotional, intentional. A series of small withdrawals made in the name of survival, until one day you realize you’ve protected yourself from harm, but also from closeness. Naming it doesn’t fix it. But it does mark the moment where running stops and listening begins.

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What Samatha Harvey wrote in Orbital is true: the further you get from something, the more perspective you gain. For me, distance has not brought clarity as much as it has brought grief.

Conversations that began as early as September slowly made me aware of how disconnected I had started to feel, not just from Turkey, but also from Lebanon. Still, what truly unraveled me was something else entirely: the moment I realized how deeply uninterested I had become in the field of work I once loved and worked relentlessly to be part of.

For twelve years, my career in journalism was my pride. For a long time, it was my entire identity. I was defined by my work, my milestones, my bylines; not by my habits, not by what time I woke up or went to sleep, not by the books I read, the food I loved to cook, or the places I traveled to. Everything I was lived inside my career.

By the end of 2025, I found myself unloading years of anger, disappointment, and grief about journalism in therapy. Anger at systems that exploit passion. Grief for a younger version of myself who believed the work would feel meaningful enough to justify the sacrifices it demanded. Disappointment in how estranged I now feel from an identity I once wore with pride. And fear; fear that I now treat my job as simply a job, rather than something I live and breathe for.

Even though my current role is no longer directly linked to journalism, it remains tethered to its world to a chaotic, traumatic ecosystem shaped by crisis, violence, and the fight for freedom of the press. A world that asks you to carry its weight long after you think you’ve grown immune.

I was never used to treating work like a nine-to-five, even though many would argue that this is the healthier way to live. By the end of 2025, I found myself choosing that road. Slowly, almost unintentionally, my attention began to shift. I felt less connected to people whose lives revolve entirely around work, and more drawn to those defined by what exists beyond it; to conversations about books, travel, science fiction, cooking, movement. I no longer wanted my days to be consumed by devastation, only to have my evenings echo it back to me.

Then, on a quiet Wednesday afternoon, I logged into LinkedIn and found myself reading yet another post confidently narrating how successful 2026 would be, career-wise. And in that moment, something became clear: this was exactly the kind of noise I no longer had space for.

So I hibernated my account.

Hibernating LinkedIn was not an impulsive decision. It was a quiet refusal.
A refusal to perform ambition when I no longer feel it. A refusal to measure my worth against milestones that no longer move me.

It was an act of self-preservation.

I didn’t log out because I am lost. I logged out because I needed distance, from a narrative I no longer recognize myself in, from a version of success that feels hollow, from a self I am still mourning.

This hibernation is not an ending. It is a pause. A holding pattern. A space where I allow myself to grieve what was lost: careers, identities, even time, without rushing to replace them.

What comes after, I don’t yet know.

I only know that somewhere beyond productivity, beyond titles and timelines, there is a quieter life asking for my attention. For now, listening feels like the most honest thing I can do.

This essay is part of an ongoing reflection on identity, work, and what remains when the center no longer holds.

In the last four months, at 35, I decided to pause; to crack open my personality, micro‑analyze it, and take a closer look at who I am and what I need. Unintentionally, and by complete coincidence, the last four books I read this year guided me through that process of self‑examination.

I found myself in a quiet but persistent rut. My job had become mentally consuming; I was exposed to far more traumatic stories than I had anticipated. The holiday season arrived with no family or friends planning to visit, and I was too burned out to plan a trip or travel myself. A general sense of disorientation settled into my days. In an attempt to recalibrate, I held tightly to three things: my morning routine, my reading time, and this newsletter.

Beneath that surface, however, lay a layer of unanswered questions; chief among them an urge to deeply re‑examine my passion, values, beliefs, actions, and connections before the year came to a close.

The Books That Found Me

If you read last week’s essay, you’ll know that the four books we completed at our local book club were Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, August Blue by Deborah Levy, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, and Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

At the time, I didn’t choose these books with any particular intention beyond curiosity and community. They were book‑club picks, and I had read several other titles over the past four months as well. Looking back, though, it’s hard not to notice how precisely these four mirrored what I was already feeling, and what I was quietly avoiding. Perhaps that is why they have lingered with me longer than the rest.

Four Themes, One Season

Four essential themes came to dominate my last four months: grief, community, friendship, and passion. Each of these appeared; sometimes subtly, sometimes forcefully, across the four books.

In Perfection, I underlined passage after passage about friendship and the fragile performance of community: the effort required to belong, the fear of being sidelined if you don’t visibly signal commitment to a cause, the question of how to build community in exile, and how to sustain it through the daily hardships of life. Latronico captures how easily belonging slips into performance—through trends, consumption, curated values, even well‑intentioned activism. The novel exposes the quiet choreography of modern friendship, how closeness becomes aesthetic and community becomes a pose. Reading it, I began to recognize how often I had performed belonging rather than inhabiting it.

August Blue held so much about grief—its quiet repetitions and unfinished conversations. I couldn’t avoid thinking about my father while reading it. He often spoke about his many unlived lives, and I still carry the weight of not being physically present when he passed. One particular passage broke me: Arthur’s insistence on tasting chocolate ice cream. “That’s what it comes down to in the end days. A little ice cream on a teaspoon is everything.” You read that and inevitably wonder what we spend our lives fighting for. In the end, people may forget our voices, our faces, our accomplishments; but they remember how they felt in our presence, the energy we brought to the table when we took our seat.

Time Shelter offered a deep meditation on life, purpose, passion, and our relationship with the past—nostalgia, avoidance, and the temptation to choose memory over the present. I owe this book an essay of its own. I loved it so deeply that I still haven’t posted a five‑star review, perhaps because I’m not entirely sure what I loved most: the idea of time travel, the recovery of memory, the historical layering, or the writing itself, beautifully translated by Angela Rodel. This was the book that made me re‑examine my passion—especially my passion for writing. With every paragraph, I fell more in love with the narration and the author’s factual imagination, while quietly questioning my past, my present, and my future.

Orbital opened space for reflection on distance, perspective, and smallness; about scale, orbiting, and observing life rather than inhabiting it. In many ways, I recognized myself there, watching my own life from a distance during certain periods, mistaking observation for safety.

Together, these books formed an unexpected map of the emotional territory I was already moving through.

A Habit I Had Normalized

One of the first things that struck me during this year of self‑reflection was how accustomed I had become to a specific habit: accommodating—or humoring—people in order to maintain friendships, or to preserve a sense of community around me.

What once felt like generosity had slowly turned into self‑erasure. I began to wonder how often I stayed quiet to keep harmony, how often I bent to remain included, and what that quiet negotiation had cost me over time.

What these books revealed was not who I am, but what I have been quietly tolerating.

I didn’t find answers in these books, nor did I expect to. What I found instead were mirrors held up at different angles, offering glimpses rather than conclusions. Reading became less about escape and more about attention: to grief I hadn’t named, to communities I had performed for, to passions I had postponed, and to a life I sometimes observed rather than lived.

As the year comes to a close, I’m not stepping into the next one resolved or fully recalibrated. I’m simply more aware. And for now, that feels like enough.

When I moved to Istanbul in the autumn of 2021, I knew, at least in theory, that relocating to a city suspended between Europe and Asia would require adjustment. But knowing something and understanding it are entirely different. Istanbul may sit partly on European soil, but living here has taught me that geography doesn’t define identity. In many ways, the city reminds me of Beirut: chaotic and beautiful, full of contradictions that both comfort and unsettle me.

Since arriving here nearly four years ago, many things inside me have shifted, quietly, slowly, and sometimes painfully. One of the most profound changes has been my relationship with books. What used to be a pastime gradually transformed into something deeper, something essential.

This year alone, I’ve read 22 books, possibly the most I’ve read since graduating from university. And for that, I have to thank the book club I found by complete accident in December 2024. A month into my friendship breakup and desperate for something new, I spotted it while scrolling on social media: The Minoa English Bookclub, starting January 2025. I registered immediately, no questions asked.

A deeply inspiring English Literature professor moderates our Book club, what more could one ask for? She nudges us toward award-winning books and controversial novellas, and each month we spend an hour and a half discussing not only the text but everything it touches: life, existence, Istanbul, our homelands, exile, belonging, loss. The conversation always expands beyond the page.

Located in one of the most beautiful book cafés in the world, Minoa Pera has become my refuge. Once a month, I walk in with a head full of thoughts about the book of the month and a quiet sense of comfort knowing that the women waiting for me there are warm, curious, and welcoming.

But my 2025 reading list is not a badge of honor or a declaration of “look how much I read.” It isn’t a competition. If anything, it’s a mirror. It reflects the loneliness I’ve felt, the difficult mental health days I’ve endured, and the silent battles I’ve fought when life felt heavier than I knew how to carry. I’m not reading to impress. I’m reading to escape toxicity, to soothe myself, to learn, to grow, and to cross emotional bridges I’ve avoided for years.

This past year has been a mosaic of loss and transition: losing dear friends, watching others drift further away, coping with unexpected changes in people I thought I knew, navigating the challenges of a new job, and confronting a persistent sense of displacement in Turkey, a country that still doesn’t feel like it fits me, or maybe one I don’t quite fit into. There were days when I envied those with better passports and, by extension, more open futures. Days when I missed home with an ache that felt physical, its language, its food, its familiarity, its people. And some days, I missed myself most of all.

All I can say is: it has been a year. A heavy, transformative year. And books have made it more bearable. They offered me shelter when nothing else did.

This is why reading feels sacred to me now. Why I refuse to judge anyone’s literary choices, genre, writer, politics, ethics, or any of it. Books meet people where they are, not where others want them to be. If you ask me, literature was made to be explored without shame or restriction. Let people read in peace.

I hope your books are healing you too, quietly, gently, the way mine have been healing me.

Bookclub titles I enjoyed reading in 2025

Small Things Like These — Claire Keegan
Intermezzo — Sally Rooney
Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico
August Blue — Deborah Levy
Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov
Orbital — Samantha Harvey

Bookclub titles I did not finish

How to Be Both — Ali Smith
The Safekeep — Yale Der Wouden

Bookclub titles I’m taking with me into 2026

The Empusium — Olga Tokarczuk
The Time Regulation Institute — Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Exactly one year ago, I lost my best friend, my adult life’s best friend. People say that as we move through the seasons of our lives, we gather different kinds of companions: some stay briefly, some stay long, and some become the quiet architecture of who we are. I never truly understood that idea until the fall of 2024, when I lost the closest friend I had made since moving to Istanbul in the autumn of 2021. Three years of friendship, three years that cut deeper than any female friendship I had ever known, because it was forged in exile. Two women, displaced from home, are trying to build a life in a hard, foreign land called Turkey.

The point of this story is not to dissect what happened. Friendships collapse for all kinds of reasons. One of mine from university broke under the weight of politics. Another ended without explanation, its silence lasting for years. The details vary, but the result is the same. This isn’t about the mechanics of endings; this essay is about grief, and the way it arrives unannounced, long after the dust has settled.

Literature has always known what we forget: that friendships are epics in their own right. In many novels throughout the years, the unraveling of a friendship carries the weight of a broken marriage, a broken home. Books understand, long before we do, that losing a friend can be one of the great ruptures of a life.

Every November since 2022, I grieve my father. It’s a month that arrives with a heaviness all its own. It brings back memories I wish I could hold at arm’s length. I always revisit the memory of taking a 3:00 a.m. flight to Beirut to attend his funeral. And in that memory, she is there: holding my hand when my brother called to tell me our father was gone. She is in my memory of me rushing home to pack, of her gently promising to care for my cat for however long I needed to stay in Lebanon. She is in the memory as a daughter who had lost her own father long before I did, grieving in her own shadowed way beside me.

I lost that friend in November 2024. We are no longer speaking. Our rupture happened just weeks before the anniversary of my father’s death. Back then, I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to understand either loss. I was exhausted, grieving my father, watching my family scatter back to Lebanon after the war, holding myself together in whatever way I could and holding on to my anger towards her. But this year, November felt different. Its weight doubled. I found myself mourning not only my father, but also the friendship I had once considered unshakeable.

When I finally cried for her, really cried, for the first time in a year, it happened in therapy. And my therapist said something I haven’t been able to forget: We are lucky to experience friendships so profound that losing them is worth mourning. Some people, distant from me or from what that friendship meant, might dismiss it. They might say, “Why waste your tears?”

But what a tragedy it would be not to shed a tear for a friendship that shaped me. What a disservice to ourselves as women to pretend that friendships are secondary, small, or easily replaced.

They are not. They are the family we choose in the years when life is hardest. They build us, sustain us, and sometimes devastate us. And sometimes, it takes an entire year to understand that losing a friend can feel a lot like losing a part of ourselves.

The older I get, the more I see that women’s friendships form a quiet canon of their own stories, passed from life to life, just as powerfully as any novel we underline and lend out. Maybe that’s why their endings hurt so much. They are not mere chapters; they are entire books we thought we’d be reading for the rest of our lives.

I didn’t watch the show when it was released. It took me a full year to press play, but once I did, it slipped into my life as though it had been waiting for me. I found myself wondering why. What made this fictional town, these children on bikes, these impossible monsters feel so personal?

It wasn’t until I began Season 5 last night that the answer came to me with surprising clarity: Stranger Things allows us to revisit childhood, the one we had, the one we wanted, and the one we feared. In its creatures and shadows, it resurrects the monsters we once imagined. In its friendships and quiet moments, it resurrects the innocence we lost.

Most of us were told, at some point, “Monsters aren’t real.” Adults said it with such certainty, as if a sentence could silence the things we saw flickering in the corners of our rooms. But childhood is full of contradictions, the blurred line between what is real, what feels real, and what no one believes when you try to explain it.

A friend and I were reminiscing recently about our parents, how loving and protective they were, when we stumbled upon a shared memory: both of us had confessed as children that something scared us, and both sets of parents had responded gently, firmly, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” They meant well. But their certainty did not always match our reality. What if, in our young minds, there was something there?

And perhaps that is why certain moments in Stranger Things hit so hard. Watching the characters grow older this season, no longer brushed off, no longer dismissed as children with “overactive imaginations”, felt like a quiet vindication. The scene between Nancy and Holly Wheeler in particular struck me. It was a reminder of what it felt like to be small, certain of what you saw, yet unheard.

The genius of Stranger Things lies in how it transforms childhood fears into metaphors we can finally examine without shame. It gives shape to the anxieties we carried alone. It honors the courage we didn’t know we had. And all the while, it wraps us in a comforting layer of nostalgia, a world before smartphones, before algorithms, before constant noise. A world lit by bike headlights and walkie-talkies, where imagination was both a refuge and a threat.

Maybe that’s why we remain obsessed with the show. Because beneath the Demogorgons and the Upside Down is something achingly human: the longing to be believed, the wish to revisit who we were, and the quiet recognition that the monsters we feared as children were never just monsters.

They were reflections of us, our vulnerability, our wonder, our courage, brought back to life so we can finally face them as adults.

So what’s the process really like at 34? What is it like to find the ‘one’ and to get married to him within two years? I can say one word for starters: it’s lovely.

But it’s also a very challenging experience, not because of him in any way, but because of what comes with it: feelings and changes and a long thought process when preparing your wedding list of invitees.

The process of planning for a wedding is not easy, it’s costly and confusing. I’ve never been interested in weddings, always skimmed through wedding season and wedding videos without a care in the world. Even years before getting engaged, weddings always struck me as an overrated societal ‘have to do’ to make people happy and ‘have to pay this or that money’ to leave a good impression regarding the start of what is supposed to be a life between two people only, minus everyone and everything else.

However, since like everything else, it’s easier said than done, here we are almost in Mid-2024 and my wedding is exactly 5 months away. I’m happy to say that this has been a smoother process than expected, and I write this as someone who had no idea what her wedding dress would be like, how she would like the wedding to be, where, when, and all the small questions and nitty gritty details in between.

The thought of going wedding dress shopping was so daunting to me. If you’re not new here you’ve already read about my body image issues in previous editions of LuTalks "You're Fat" ... And other body image issues, and as someone who had no idea what her ‘dream dress’ is like - if a dream dress even exists, I was nervous to say the least.

Unlike movies, I did not want to go wedding dress shopping with my friends and sip champagne while laughing carelessly, actually, I wanted in and out, I had to meditate for 20 minutes before leaving for the wedding dress appointment, just to calm my upset stomach. I didn’t know why I was ready for an attitude regarding my size and my body type, so I had a plan, I had my eye on one dress and I was simply going to try it on and leave. I knew they had it in my size.

Unlike what many might think, I went wedding dress shopping with my finance, and as we walked into the store, I was welcomed by many smiling faces, and a very nice sales lady accompanied us to the wedding dress section where I showed her a photo of the dress I was interested in. She disappeared for 2 minutes and came back with the dress, I tried it on for the first time and instantly loved it: ‘It fits me’ I thought to myself, and it was within my budget. The sales lady suggested I try on a few more designs to get a better idea of my style, I started scanning other dresses, but two of them were not my size, she redirected me to a section that had bigger sizes, and I did not dislike it, it felt normal. Yes, that’s me and this is my size and I am not skinny.

Three dresses later, I put the first dress back on, and she fixed my hair with a nice glittery accessory, shimmery but not extravagant, I had read lipstick on, and she handed me the fake bouquet, and we all stood there in silence admiring what the 3 of us had just created: a Bride.

I bought the first wedding dress I ever tried on, that’s how I will always remember it. But before buying it, I did my research, I put away my emotions and my size-related anxieties - which turned out to be completely unnecessary by the way - and I organized my shopping plan: the dress has to be under 1,000$, I must be able to repurpose the dress [i.e shorten it, redesign it, use it again somehow] and lastly, I must get that one feeling when I’m wearing: that I am myself.

That’s what has helped me in picking my wedding dress, as someone who had absolutely no dream wedding in mind, I never dreamt of this day as a little girl, and I was always conflicted about wedding dresses, and the fact that my parents made me wear a white wedding dress as a kid during one of our end of the school year ceremonies back in the 90s - I am certain all girls my age in the Middle East have been through something similar. Nowadays it’s giving child marriage, to be honest. Like what were they thinking? *Inserts smiling emoji here*

Our - wedding to be - will not cost a fortune nor it will cost us our savings, we have a smart list of invited friends and family members from around the world, it’s as simple as it may be. I still don’t understand how people spent this much money and time on weddings, one of the wedding venues we scouted last September asked for twenty thousand euros only for the rental of the garden and very few logistics that did not include food or drinks or decoration or lights of flowers. Our wedding will cost less than that amount, everything else included, including our post-wedding vacation. You can’t convince me that it’s okay to spend more than 20,000$ on a wedding. May the force be with whoever still feels that expensive weddings are necessary, they certainly don’t have their priorities set right.

However, what they don’t tell you about weddings is how weird working on your wedding list of invitees can be, I have never felt so confused and torn. Writing down my wedding list of invitees felt like a detox and like a closure, and only then did I realize how many people did not make it to the list, and with good reason, including a whole side of my family, my father’s side.

My father’s death created a divide in our family, instead of bringing people together, it tore us apart, and as heavy as this may sound, I believe it was for the best. It’s very rare to grow up in our region while feeling zero connection to both sides of your family, one side is too religious, too political, and the other side is simply toxic, a combination and accumulation that caused my parents to separate and get a divorce for a couple of years when I was around 8 years old.

The baggage it brought to our lives growing up was heavy, and even though my parents remarried, and I was there to witness it as a 10-year-old girl, something remained broken in our extended family bonds, and I never truly understood the root of it until dad went into an induced coma in November 2022, and I found myself sitting home with my mom having a drink, smoking a cigarette, discussing the past, and telling her how I now as an older woman understand what she was going through when the divorce happened years ago, and how much I judged her as a young girl, but how much I respect her as an adult woman today. My mom cried, not only tears of sadness because Dad was dying, but probably because she finally felt that I understood and that I was on her side.

So when the day came to make decisions about my father’s situation, the burial, the funeral, I understood, when she looked me in the eye, that his family was bringing her pain again and that her current pain of losing her life partner was enough.

So they left, possibly because we pushed them to, and they never attended his funeral.

And while there is a part of me that still wonders whether or not we did the right thing for him, whenever I have doubts, I close my eyes and remember how cozy and full of love and private his funeral was. How we said goodbye silently, how we smiled seeing my mom surrounded by her family, getting exactly what she needed, after years and years of not receiving what she truly deserves, peace and respect.

So when I noticed how short my list of ‘family’ invitees was two weeks ago, and how long my list of friends invitees is, I felt the ick, there was sadness, there were questions, but there was also peace, and I finally started accepting the fact that I will never be the Arab girl with a big loving blood family, I only have a handful of people, and they have to be enough because their love is at least, real. And I have the family I chose: my lifelong friends, my partner’s family who have filled these gaps with love care, and tenderness.

It pains me that the world is full of silent painful conflicts that we often don’t write or talk about, because we are too caught up with some other sh*t the world is going through, but the point of this newsletter is to write things I have never written about before. As a journalist, I was always so collected and calm and strong, but underneath that lays hundreds of stories that are waiting to be written, this is just a portion, and I am sure on some level, there is a woman/man/person reading this and thinking: I’m not alone. You’re not alone, I promise.

This edition is dedicated to my Dad: I hope he is resting in peace, in a beautiful place similar to what we saw in the movie ‘The Lovely Bones’. I thought about you so much last night, Pap.

Things I enjoyed this week:

PCOS-friendly homemade chia jam.

Exploring homemade iced coffee options.

My plants survive and thrive despite Istanbul’s crazy weather.

Movie nights: Watching The Lovely Bones and Scoop.

A very long read about the author of Lovely Bones: The Tortured Bond of Alice Sebold and the Man Wrongfully Convicted of Her Rape.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for almost a year, but it never felt complete in my head until I found myself sitting on the ferry during my commute back home from work, crossing the Bosphorus from the European to the Anatolian side drafting the skeleton of this edition on my phone [as my fiance says “now you are a real Istanbuli, when you say Anatolian instead of Asian and you work on the ferry” and I’m flattered!]

I’m finishing this newsletter edition tonight while closely watching the results of the Turkish local municipality elections, so nothing screams Istanbul more than this.

It’s hard to move abroad in your thirties especially if you are headed to a country where Arabic English or French are not the first language, your priorities change from wanting to experience the new country to taking 3 language classes a week and overbooking yourself because surviving without understanding and speaking the language is hard. So I knew it was time to write about Turkey once I made peace with both the language and the dishwasher, it being the last thing I accepted to use and include in my daily life here. I don’t know why I held on tight to handwashing the dishes for so long when the most practical thing was available. Perhaps there was a piece of home in handwashing the dishes since we are so used to and accustomed to it as Lebanese? I don’t remember anyone in my entourage in Beirut who owned a dishwasher. It seems like the dishwasher topic needs a separate edition!

So how exactly did I end up moving to Istanbul?

Let’s travel back in time; it’s July 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic when the whole world shut down, my friend Yara and I are sitting in Santana in Beirut, one of our signature spots for drinks and food, both bored with life, trying to process the economic collapse of our country, both lucky enough to be able to work remotely from anywhere. “Let’s go to Istanbul!” Yara suggests and she doesn’t stop there, she also says that we should rent and share an Airbnb and spend 3 weeks working remotely. The thought of going back to Istanbul after leaving it without looking back in 2019 was horrifying for me. You see back in 2019, after spending almost 6 months trying to settle in Istanbul, things took an unexpected turn in my personal life and I ended up packing my things and returning to Lebanon as the protests were starting, it was my sign to stay in Beirut, and with the pandemic hitting, settling back in Lebanon did not seem like a bad idea.

But I left Istanbul with so much baggage [literally] and with unresolved feelings, so the thought of seeing people I dislike walking down the same streets made me nervous. Yet something was pushing me to say yes to my friend, so we packed our bags and off we went.

We landed in Istanbul and headed to our Airbnb, as I walked in those same streets that had left me heartbroken in 2019, I felt nothing but joy, settlement, and grace, I thought I would hate it, but I loved it.

It hadn’t been a couple of hours since we landed, and we headed out to meet a colleague for lunch, whom I hadn’t seen in person since 2019. “Would you consider moving back to Istanbul if your current position turned full-time?” she asked before I even took a sip of my beer.

A few weeks earlier, Yara and I had been exploring and discussing the possibility of moving to Istanbul for good, my constant reply to Yara was “ I’m not ready at all we shouldn’t, Turkey is becoming harder for foreigners”.

The whole situation took me by surprise, I had been a consultant with the program since 2017, and I had cold feet back in 2018 when I was offered a full-time position in Istanbul, but I turned it down. So when the opportunity presented itself again in 2021, I thought why not? My disappointment in Lebanon had reached its peak and my parents had been encouraging me to explore opportunities abroad due to the increased threats I was getting.

It didn’t take me much time to decide, I applied for the job opening, and within a week it became evident that I was moving, so I found an apartment, signed the lease, and started planning for all the necessary legal paperwork required to get me a residency permit while trying to process that I’m leaving Lebanon in September.

The whole time, my friend was making fun of me, and I was making fun of myself: I went from someone who was not ready to discuss moving abroad to saying yes to a long-term work agreement after one week in Istanbul, you can’t ignore the signs, this was ‘destined’ to happen, there was no escape from my return to Istanbul.

Even my friend Naz was affected by the chaos of my quick move to Istanbul. We were supposed to have lunch together and I ghosted her to go and sign the house lease. Needless to say, she forgave me and invited me to her wedding and now we are cat aunts and besties. We were even neighbors during my first year and a half in Cihangir sharing morning coffee and gossiping every other day pretending that we were hanging out in Beirut, since the resemblance between Ciganhir and Mar Mikhael is uncanny!

The reason I am sharing all of this is to say that: not everything goes according to plan in life, that’s what my one-month move to Istanbul taught me, and that’s what Istanbul taught me. I have changed so much since I moved here, and I mean it in the best ways.

However, getting sick abroad is a whole other scare and another level of homesickness.

A few days ago while commuting to work I started feeling sick and an excruciating pain hit my back, we were in the middle of a long 11 days of training at work, there was no time to get sick. I pushed through until I could no longer sit down straight on the last day of work, so I scheduled a doctor’s appointment the next morning and we went from her inspecting my pain to getting my insurance to approve my immediate admission to the hospital for an urgent surgery.

I’m not writing this to make anyone worried. I’m fine. I’m home recovering and enjoying some treats! It wasn’t exactly my plan though, to spend my easter weekend recovering from a surgery, the first of 2 surgeries I will need to have. But I am alive and healthy, and while this was my first experience getting surgery done in Turkey [minus the occasional summer stomach flu and IV routine at the ER] - it was not terrible. I felt so much comfort when I entered a surgery room full of women doctors and nurses, and more comfort when I caught myself tearing up before they took me into the surgery room and one of the nurses gently touched my face and wiped away my tears while comforting me.

I want to write candidly about Istanbul, this is a discussion that I had with my Turkish partner many times, this city is charming yet very hard to foreigners, it’s not automatically welcoming, you have to make a lot of effort here, and sometimes it’s mentally draining as there is so much push back. However I love this country, there is something about it that makes me feel at home. When I moved here I left so much behind and I lost so much in the process of settling down, I left my whole country and who I was, I left friends and family, I also left my dad and never got the chance to properly say goodbye to him. I arrived in Beirut when it was too late. These details never leave you, but they do teach you a lot about who you are and what you are capable of.

I believe that Istanbul made me stronger, you see I didn’t meet my partner when I moved here immediately, I met him a year later, I had time to process and live and learn to be alone, I didn’t even have him when Dad died, we met 2 weeks after my father’s passing, our friends also say it was ‘destined’. So when my dad died I only had my friend Naz [yea you remember her right? The woman I ghosted for an apartment lease].

One thing that is also hard about Istanbul is making friends, especially if you are approaching your mid-thirties.

And how do you know that you have someone? a friend? It’s the person who shows up in the middle of the street while your brother is with you on the phone, and stands in front of you, silently, ready to hug you as your brother tells you that dad died, and you need to fly to Beirut for the funeral. It’s that friend who cat-sits your newly adopted cat as you go home to be with family. It’s that friend who has half of your Tupperware, and you have half of hers, because you keep exchanging food and successful recipes so you lost count of which belongs to whom. It’s that friend who shows up at the hospital before you at 8:00 AM with yet another Tupperware of homemade shortbread and spends the whole day with you until you are discharged from the hospital.

I want to end this edition on a happy note, while I know that my current medical situation represents a setback for me on so many levels, especially in my fitness journey, I am finding peace in accepting things as they are, and I came to realize that good and bad things can happen almost at the same time in our lives; just like I met my other half few weeks after my father’s passing, the way I said yes to moving to Istanbul as I was healing, the way I was receiving great professional news while I was feeling the pain grow in my back wondering what is happening to me. I am finding peace in accepting things as they are.

Things I started when I moved to Turkey:

Drinking Ayran with almost anything.

Using the Dishwasher.

I bid farewell to my heels and opted for more comfortable shoes that almost always ruin my outfit because comfy and fashionable rarely mix.

Taking a book with me everywhere.

Public transportation over taxis any day any time.

Buying flowers.

Things I enjoyed this week:

Taking sneak peeks at my wedding dress.

Lebanese lentil soup with chard [Adas bil Hamod]

Our new cat Mila!

Watching ‘Poor things’. It’s a great movie with so many smart messages about our societies.

In this version of LuTalks we discuss how small comments shaped the way I look at my body since I was 9 years old. And things I am trying to do as an adult to have a better relationship with myself and my weight if that’s possible at all.

“When was the last time you did not think about losing weight? or of the scale?” My therapist asked me in 2020, a few weeks after the pandemic hit the world.

“I don’t remember” - I answered.

And after that came a rollercoaster of emotions and tears. I was crying because I was worried about not being able to go to the gym, not because of the pandemic, ironic, but real.

I was 9 years old when I went with my mom for the midyear pediatrics check-up. I remember his clinic very well in Beirut, I loved it, it was full of toys, and if we were lucky and the check-up was scheduled at 3:00 PM, it meant being picked up from school earlier to go there and enjoy playing in the waiting room without any other kids in sight.

But that joy often fizzled down the moment we stepped into the doctor’s office, once I noticed the syringe and vaccine.

On one of those visits when I had just turned 9 years old and was getting close to full-on puberty mode, I stepped on the scale at his clinic, and I remember his words like it was yesterday: You are fat. Blank, just like that with zero emotions or facial expressions.

Truth be told, maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t, I was a little chubby, but in the eyes of a male Mediterranean doctor, I was fat. I left his clinic crying. My mom did not know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. The next thing I knew, my afternoon ‘Fantasia chips’ break disappeared and was replaced with a fruit. Long were gone the days when I used to wake up from my afternoon nap cranky and mom used to make me 2 small pancakes that would cheer me up. Sadly, everything became about weight, and I don’t blame my parents for this at all, they were the nicest, they rarely said no to me and they tried -under the constant pressure of that doctor and the family of course- they tried to make better choices for me. When I grew up I understood that chubby was not fat and that because of that doctor’s words, I was judging myself too harshly at only 9 years old.

The next thing I know, I am a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, 15-year-old girl, noticing the smallest details about weight. I was so insecure in school that I dreaded wearing shorts during our physical health and sports sessions when you were allowed to have your sportswear on all day. I used to hate that day. I watched my classmates run down the courtyard with their shorts, and here I was, a 15-year-old thinking of how that Manouche I ate would make me fat.

It was always about body image for me, I blame our region and the way we were introduced to what is healthy and what isn’t, and how it traumatized us. The most horrible day at school for me was of course our yearly school doctor check-up where yet another person had to see my weight, sometimes the school nurse would say it out loud, why you may ask, your guess is as good as mine.

The years went on. I tried multiple methods to ‘lose weight’ because, in my opinion, I was not thin enough. The diet culture took over when I was only 17 and I went to see my first dietitian, a couple of years later I was jumping to the next one on the list, and here’s a fun little story for you: I did not like my first dietitian because truth be told I did not even make an effort with her, but my second dietitian came highly recommended by a close friend of mine when I was 19, my friend kept telling me that she is losing weight and that her dietitian only allows her to jump of the clinic scale once time every 10 days, and every 10 days my friend noticed a change. she was down 8 KGs by her 4th visit. I started seeing ‘Celine’ - that’s what we will call her. The numbers started changing for me too on the scale at her clinic, and then she prescribed a medication for me -Glucofage, which was popular for weight loss back then. I held on tight to my journey until one morning I got too curious and jumped on my scale at home to check the progress, and to my shock, I was only 1 KG down from my original weight. I ran to two pharmacies and checked my weight, the same result. I called my friend and her sister and urged them to do the same, they resisted first but then got intrigued and went to check. Our dietitian was manipulating our weight on the scale and was prescribing Insulin-resistance medicine to us to lose weight.

The confrontation happened the next day in her office where she admitted that this was her method to encourage her clients to ‘look beyond the scale’. How ironic, ever since that experience I became addicted to scales, not to mention the water retention that her prescribed medicine caused me.

Fast forward 8 years. I am 27 years old and going through a breakup, of course, I am motivated to change something about myself. I have years of built-in negative body image issues. I paid gym subscriptions but rarely went. It had been years since I dared to try on a pair of jeans in a store thinking ‘they will not fit’. I notice a gym opening just around the corner from my house, I walk in on a sunny May afternoon, and there I met a trainer who would change my life, Moe. I told me the story of my life that afternoon, and in return, he asked me one thing: What is a sport that you wish you could do?

“Kick boxing” I answered.

“Well - We don’t do that here, but we have one hell of a Muay Thai class. You must come try it out.”

And that was the beginning of my relationship with the gym. A very positive relationship where I broke the fear of not being “good enough” for a Muay Thai class, where I invested a few hundred dollars in PT sessions with Moe, who taught me everything I would need to know about human anatomy and sports and muscles and injuries and weight lifting and Muay Thai.

It took me 3 years, but I lost the weight I had been trying to lose for 12 years. My body image issues were not fully healed, the process of losing weight and falling in love with sports and with the way your body is becoming can also trigger a negative association with food cheat meals, calorie counting, and guilt. But I was managing. I had a great gym community and I was happy.

In 2020 the pandemic hit. We were all stuck at home. I was still working out but I was counting every single thing I eat. On some occasions, I threw up right after a meal because of the guilt and the fear of gaining back the weight. Ironically, I maintained my success until I left Lebanon at the end of 2021. The rollercoaster of emotions, leaving and moving abroad, my father getting sick, my priorities constantly changing, losing my gym community when I left Lebanon, and my mental health declining left me with a heavier problem: the weight I had lost had somehow made its way back, and I was stuck again.

I’ve had the most random people comment on my body. In 2022 during a quick visit to Beirut after my move to Turkey, the first thing my hairdresser said to me when I walked into the salon was: Luna you gained some weight! Nas7ane! - and I thought ‘Mother F.. here we go again’.

2024

It has been a great 6 months for me sports-wise, especially with the work I am doing with my online coach and with myself at the gym. I am trying to block the noise as much as possible.

A few weeks ago, to make sure I was doing everything I could to be healthy, do my workouts, eat clean food, and maintain good mental health while trying to lose weight, I decided to visit an endocrinologist in Istanbul and ask for some blood tests to be done.

I hadn’t been that unlucky since I was 9 years old probably. You guessed it right, in reality, the doctor did not ask me to go on a scale, but he did tell me I was fat and I was doing everything ‘wrong’.

It was the cherry on top of my frustration. I left his clinic smiling and then collapsed into tears the minute I arrived home, it took me back to when I was 9 years old at my pediatrics clinic with my mom, and maybe I had missed my childhood, or my mom, or Lebanon, maybe my hormones, but that sense of unfamiliarity and coldness that came from the doctors’ comment hurt me deeply. I was in unfamiliar territories away from ‘home’ - I wanted to be back in Lebanon where I knew everything would be okay. But that was not possible. So I had to gather myself, get my blood test done, and look for another doctor.

Tonight, I am writing this and it barely scratches the surface of what I am going through, I am writing this with pain and sadness but also with a lot of persistence, because I know I am also strong, and this period is just a bump in the road.

Yes, I’m having major negative body image issues, and I am certain that others are too, and if you are reading this and you are going through the same I tell you: I hear you I feel you and I am sending you strength. It’s been a long journey for us.

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Hello to everyone who stayed here as I remained silent weeks after launching this weekly newsletter last year, the world around us started crumbling on October 7th, 2023, and at least for us Arabs, everything changed, and I had no idea what to do with this platform. But then it hit me: the reason I started this newsletter in the first place was to write thoughts that I don’t want to share in public on social media, but only with a niche group of interested friends and readers who are here for real me, for the new me, and who understand the core of my thoughts and won’t rush to attack and scrutinize me, because let’s face it, I have some very unpopular opinions as a Lebanese and Arab woman and I have been constantly accused of ‘being too much’ even by colleagues in the same field of work that I used to be a part of.

But before we dive in, things have been good on my end. My job has been keeping me busy, since the end of 2023 where we left things off, I traveled for work to several locations: Erbil, Iraq and Pokara, Nepal. I have also scored a really good consultancy that will keep me busy on some weekends until June, with an organisation I have been dying to work with, RNW media, where I will be working on safety policies for journalists from around the world, from Peru to Libya to Asia, a superbe addition to my portfolio as a trainer.

I’m also getting married this September! My Turkish partner proposed during the holidays and we had a nice cozy engagement ceremony in his city [Izmir] on New Years’ eve.

The past period has also been eye opening to me on a personal and professional level as I try to navigate this new state I am in: no longer a journalist, but still have so much to say and share with the world, so how can I exactly do it? How can I share my knowledge, any knowledge I have, how can I be more useful on my Instagram profile with allt those faithful followers who did not leave when I announced my exit from journalism.

Podcasts and reflection in addition to few paid and free online courses have been helping me pave my new way!

Now, back to the newsletter, here goes: a very political and also personal edition of LuTalks. Grab your coffee/Tea/drink of choice, and let’s dive into what has been happening since I last showed up here.

‘I will never be the same person again’ I have seen this sentence being helplessly shared online repeatedly, in the past weeks, about the heinous crimes that we are witnessing, boldly committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and what we are witnessing daily.

And since that wasn’t enough, of course, Israel expanded its attacks to include South Lebanon.

This never-ending equation of war allows both of them to coexist and manipulate our region. I would say a smart strategy and a great long-term win for entities that are controlling our futures in Lebanon and the region. You can see where I’m going with this right? Wait, let me say it out loud: Just because there is a war between Israel and Lebanon on the southern borders, does not mean I will cheer for the Islamic resistance in Lebanon in any way.

Do I need to justify this? Ok - maybe I do, as I can imagine that not everyone reading this will agree with me, so let me ‘justify’: The same Islamic resistance that is ‘standing up to Israel to defend our southern borders’ has participated or sometimes even lead some of the following actions in the past years and these events made any possibility of crossing paths with that resistance impossible to me personally:

HA is the number one supporter of the Islamic Republic in Iran which has imprisoned attacked and killed more than 530 people since the murder of Mahsa Al Amini.

HA has participated in a co-led war in Syria alongside Russia, the Islamic Republic of Iran through their IRGC, and the Syrian dictator Bachar Al-Asaad in murdering Syrians who dared to oppose the Syrian regime. Then any opposing side to the regime was portrayed as ISIS, Extremist, or Islamist [that’s not to say that the opposition in Syria is not dominated by extremism today - however, that was the result of 10 years of propaganda, exile, murders, torture, and regional involvment].

And most importantly, the same HA traumatized us Lebanese during the events of May 7th, 2008 when Beirut was hit by deadly street battles as Hezbollah rejected offers for the army to mediate leading a street war for weeks. That’s something not all of us can forget.

The list goes on, fortunately, my newsletter is not solely about them, so I want to use my word count wisely.

Hence why, to go back to this: I believe that none of us will ever be the same indeed. The past months made me question everything and everyone around me. I’ve spent the past weeks watching people fall back into the emotions of forgiving and forgetting simply because there is a war with Israel, and I hope people can see how beneficial this has been to HA and their allies before anyone else. The only people truly suffering are Palestinians inside Gaza who are paying the price of not being heard, again.

Observing this has truly rocked me to my core, it made me question my years of activism in Lebanon, as I sat down observing Lebanese comedians, social media personalities, political activists, journalists and even friends, I observed them as they put years of intimidation, threats, hate, assassinations behind them, to stand again by the idea of Hezbollah is one thing, and the Resistance is another thing. And that’s sad, not to me, I mean I’m alive, I did not die for the cause, I moved on, it’s simply sad for those who died for the cause, for Samir Kassir and Lokman Slim specifically. Sometimes I sit and ponder what would Samir and Lokman say if they were still alive. Then I stumbled on this article by Hazem Al Amin, which to me said exactly what they would have said, and the world started making sense again and I felt heard.

Transition: I am still reading A Little Life and even though it’s a page-turner, with every page I turn I fear the tears ahead. Slow progress but I’m still reading it!

‘They may be fewer, but deeper’.

‘Many people decide in their 30s that money is more important than friendship’.

‘Oxford University study found that our social circle starts to shrink from our mid-twenties’.

So many captivating sentences pop up on Google when you start typing the words: friends, 30s, and friendship. My social media timeline has been dominated by friendship content in the past weeks, which was surprisingly convenient. But not one viral article managed to offer me and one of my close friends the answers we were looking for when we started discussing friendship over a long-distance phone call and how we are feeling towards our friendship but also towards other friendships we have.

Apparently, there isn’t an answer, but rather billions of women with thousands of personalities, expectations, and behaviors who are going through their Mid-thirties wondering about the same things: Where are my friends? Why are my friends changing? Can I still make new friends?

When I was getting ready to commit again to my Sunday newsletter -which we all know I was not as committed to as I promised because I’m lazy- I was also going through a friendship phase -still am- and a part of me believes that we are all going through that phase one way or another as women especially in our thirties because we tend to pour so many emotions and energy into our friendships, and partially because of what we consumed while growing up: the picture perfect years of friendships on Tv in different productions, especially western ones.

The last time I had friendship crisis was at the end of my twenties and back then I had a therapist -hurray- and the phases seemed normal given that I was saying goodbye to my twenties. Amid all of this, I’ve read a sentence repeatedly in the past weeks regarding the ongoing war in Gaza and South Lebanon, the sentence says: ‘This war showed us who some people are’ - and something along the lines of ‘things will change' post-war.

And sadly, there’s some truth to that.

I believe that the whole world is changing, and so are we. For weeks, I found myself unable to communicate with friends who were constantly posting videos of murdered children in Gaza and South Lebanon, but also impossible to reach out to Western friends who seemed to be living in a bubble [literally what is happening with you guys? Are we even on the same planet?!] not acknowledging what was being done to us in the Middle East.

It became very challenging to spot those friends in between, those who are willing to post non-traumatizing content about the war to spread awareness, which keeps the conversation going and in parallel talk about life and work and hopes and dreams and career plans and travel and books and movies [and weddings!!] without making you feel the guilt of living, surviving, being happy and excited for the future, despite the war, because people never really stop living in Lebanon due to war.

My mother lived through a long civil war in Lebanon, it started in her early twenties, as the war was happening she traveled to different countries, tried to pursue a future in both Beirut and abroad, worked and changed jobs, she met my dad and fell in love amid civil war, they got married, they both dressed up and went out dancing and when the shelling hit the city in the late 80s, many nightclubs transitioned from 80s pop music to streaming local radio stations at 1 AM, from serving drinks to serving coffee while waiting for the shelling to stop so that everyone can go back home after a night of partying.

Like it or not, these are the stories many of us heard from our parents while growing up, and they leave a mark, a survival mark, that we must keep living despite war. War is hard. War is death. Gencoid is horrendous, but we need to keep existing, otherwise, we fade and so will our culture language history, and country.

So I stopped trying. And then two girlfriends who are exactly in the middle, just like me, one is a Middle Eastern woman and the other is a foreigner, they both reached out, and we found that common ground somehow, over the phone and then over dinner and coffee, and that was lovely. Those friends in between still exist, you just need to be more open and more willing to dive and have some uncomfortable conversations, to reach that serenity phase, in the middle of genocide.

Transition: I have been obsessed with fitness-oriented content [and gym] and I am contemplating revamping my page on Instagram to post more about my fitness and body image journey.

So France has legalized IVG and that’s HUGE! It’s big news to me as a woman. It’s important even though I don’t live in France and currently don’t hold a visa. Yet it’s big news. Because it matters to women in France and that’s enough reason. We are happy to see women being heard anywhere in the world especially when it comes to their reproductive rights, after the reproductive rights fiasco in the US.

Legalizing IVG in France is another win for women from all corners of the world. You can celebrate it or not, up to you, but not celebrating it because there is a war in Gaza or South Lebanon? …

There has been a war in Syria for as long as we can remember, a war in Sudan and Ukraine, and rape and killing of women too, which are war crimes. There have been attacks on women in Iran where they lost their eyes, they were tortured and also raped, that's brutal. And in parallel there have been smaller wins celebrated worldwide while the mentioned crimes were taking place.

One does not cancel the other. In women's rights, every win worldwide is our collective win and every crisis is our collective crisis.

Things I enjoyed this week:

Moroccan Mint green tea before bed.

Chicken in the oven dinner - recipe by AlphaFoodie.

Suki Waterhouse’s music.

Thank you for sticking along and reading my latest LuTalks newsletter!

See you next week!