See me. Fully. As a complicated human.

Someone who grew up in the cracks and spaces. Someone who believes in everything and nothing. I can’t make you understand me. I’m still making sense of myself.

I have the features of someone who’s not expected to carry this much loss. The coloring is off, the lighting is too dim. The frame is a little too thick. I carry it well. I am a woman, afterall. And we are taught to crawl into a hole and scream there. So you will never catch me wailing.

But you will pick up on the trail of salt I leave between sentences and verses. Like breadcrumbs. I am trying to lead you back to a place in yourself that I forgot how to reach. I lurk between the trees. I watch. I follow. I hope you show me the way.

Home.

What was that again? Was it a feeling? What it a mathematical equation? I must’ve called in sick that day. I don’t remember. I was busy looking at the sky. I was told I am a bird and I believed them. Now the burden of feathers ails me. Birds of feather, except mine is a boa wrapped around my throat.

You tell me I’m beautiful. Like a weeping willow. Bent over but still standing. Graceful in how the wind carries her from side to side. And she goes along. As if she has a choice. We love her because she has turned grief into beauty. We keep her around. We admire her.

There is nothing we hate more than pain without meaning. We don’t want that for ourselves. A wound that bleeds just because it needs bleeding is not a good story. It’s a disease.

Maybe I have never told my story because the wound is still bleeding. And what kind of story has no beginning or end?

I am still afraid to tell my story. Fully. So I write this instead.

I still long for that 
20-something skinny.
Light enough to be passed around
like a box of sugar free biscuits;
consumed at the threshold
of pleasure and guilt.

Where did my soul go
after they picked me?
This third space 
between skipped meals
and spinning classes
merits a Google Maps review:

★☆☆☆☆
Not worth your time, or money.

Each time I came back
a piece of me went missing,
and some guy with sad eyes
found himself
a little more
full.

I would call every summer
by your name if I could.

Crushed myself on your cliffs,
nearly drowned in my tides,
then told anyone who came after
that I don’t like swimming.

Now I salt every meal
like it’s my last supper.

What if it was winter,
and instead of the sun
you fed me the moon;
mercurial and cold.

Maybe I would be eating
sugar by the mouthful,
thinking love is a gift
instead of a lesson.

Act 2: The Stars

Blue; 
like the swirls in the sky 
I unfold on your borderless 
chest
restless—

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A white man 
draws a line 
and it’s a heartbeat;
a breath,
a nation,
an annexation.

A white man 
draws a line 
and it’s logic; 
it’s law.

If I draw a line 
I’m impossible,
impractical,
impatient.

Each time 
a line is drawn
across
my land
or body,
a man gets a pat
on the back
and I get a lecture 
on patience,
on reason,
or both. 

A white man 
draws a line 
and half the world
holds its breath
in anticipation.

And the man
holds nothing
but the line.

In that time, the same colonial knife that had sliced me open went on to mutilate your soft skin. I’ve been receiving pictures of you, sister; you remain scarred and fractured. I see my old self in you, Beirut.

I am writing to you from a part of me that was made inaccessible to my children and me. From neighborhoods built by and for the pieds-noirs, the French settlers. Now every inch of me belongs to me. I have dreamt and fought myself back into wholeness because I refused to see myself as anything but whole.

How do you see yourself, Beirut?

Through whose eyes do you gaze upon yourself, yours or the colonizer’s?

I am writing to you from the hopeful future of a desperate past, where the European colonizer swore he would leave no “Mohammads” alive to inherit me. And then my children went on to build a district called Mohammadia just to taunt them.

I am writing to you from the womb of impossibility, and I know you will understand me because everything you’ve ever birthed is also impossible.

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I have swallowed my tongue.

First, my teeth bit it off 
while I was busy growling
at my own reflection.
Then, my throat followed suit,
gulping down truth the world 
can’t seem to stomach.

How do you say “cowards” 
in 200 languages at once?

How do you shake
the hand that planted 
the knife in your back?

How do you find a new home
when the one that raised you
was raped, and you were 
forced to watch and record it?

I keep bending myself backwards,
turning my body to a bridge 
to prevent my spine from breaking.
And still, most people won’t 
make it to the other side.

So, I’ve swallowed my tongue
to ease their nervous passage
back to a quieter version of hell.

The moon was full 
in Scorpio, 
and a room of women 
drummed;
swinging, swaying, praying 
a maiden’s name into a blessing,
while a crones’s pounding palm 
swung it forward 
piercing my heart.

I watched it limp 
towards my throat 
as my lips parted;
parched for a rain 
that might never come.

And when the women 
finally chanted my name
I folded,
back into the Earth 
and remembered
that her heart 
is dry and red 
and ancient
like this desert;
and look at it beat,
and look at it drum.

Between 
me and my words
lives an ocean of grief.
Each time I try to cross
I choke on seawater;
every wave a soul, a tree, a street, 
a village, a dream, a life, a breath, 
a face, a tombstone, a son, a daughter, 
a mother, a father, a fighter, a farmer, 
a bird, a harvest, a church, a mosque, 
a souk, a house, a square, a prayer, a medic, 
a grandfather, a grandmother, a heavy chest, 
a severed limb, a scream under the rubble, 
a finger on a trigger, an eye on the horizon—
and if I start to speak I will run out of ears 
before I run out of names.
And so I sit, and watch
the tides
alone,
praying
the moon
doesn't rise tomorrow.

There is currently over a million forcibly displaced person in Lebanon.

The Ziønist entity has destroyed over 50 historical villages, making their return home nearly impossible. The entity has also been violating the ceasefire daily, killing civilians, paramedics, and destroying civillian and agricultural infrastructure.

Consider donating here to help us support displaced families, so they can continue living in dignity during these very difficult times. And don’t forget to talk about Lebanon amidst this shameful Western media blackout and political inaction, as many Lebanese are too grief-stricken and exhausted to do it.

He was always just Baba to me, 
and I was Baba to him.
An endearing tradition 
where Arab parents call their 
children by their own name;
one soul, two bodies.

My Baba was just baba,
brown eyes, dark hair, hairy arms,
like all the other babas; 
imperfect, mostly furious,
wrapped in a thick cloud 
of cigarette smoke 
and tense air.

These days he’s softer, gentle,
his heart worn down by four daughters.
Baba paces back and forth, 
displaced in Beirut, consumed 
by his beloved Sour;
smoking, scrolling, sighing, sinking, 
trying to make sense of a fate
written for him by blue-eyed men 
with corpse white skin and ice 
running through their veins.

I didn’t know my Baba is an Arab man,
until I watched a little girl in Gaza
cry for hers, and he looked just like mine;
the same salt and pepper curls,
solemn stare, dark olive skin.
Except he didn’t call her baba back,
and so she cried: 
Baba
Baba

A White therapist once told me
that I’m denying myself anger 
at an abusive parent.
I told her I ran out of anger for a man 
deemed disposable by the world.
A world where he stitched more wounds,
saved more lives, and held more hands 
than any Western saint.
But would have to sell fruit 
to make ends meet
if he left his bleeding land. 
Baba keeps choosing honor,
and I keep my anger for the world.

My Baba is an Arab man.
My anger is his legacy. 

My friend’s Stories are full of travels
and asks for tickets of sold out festivals.
My Stories are erased villages, martyrs, 
and blurs of collective traumas.

“What are your summer plans?”
How do I say “I just hope the Earth
doesn’t open up and swallow me”
without sounding insane?

Last year, July was a miracle;
a summer sandwiched between 
missles, rubble, and stone fruit.
I want this one to be ordinary.  

“But is your family safe?”
No one is safe. No one.
Not while the machine is insatiable
and its favorite food is your ignorance.

Two years ago you joined one protest, 
chanted “no one is free until everyone is”.
I even heard you call for a free Palestine.
Well, last time I checked it was still occupied,
so I guess you’ve accepted your fate.

The flower became a symbol of death and rebirth in the region, and later on, of martyrdom.

If you’re from our land, you know this red flower intimately, like drops of blood swimming in a sea of green and yellow, signaling the arrival of Spring; rebirth, hope, life—the early signs of a budding future.

We have woven this story from and with the land. Perhaps, there would be no Chris, Christianity, or Easter without it. For even before Easter, there was Astarte, who later on became Aphrodite in the Greek pantheon. She is Earth herself, the benevolent mother, weeping for the death of Adonis, as Mary wept for Jesus on the cross. Names change, epochs change, stories adapt, but the myth persists.

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This myth of sacrificial death and inevitable rebirth is embodied in the people of West Asia, it came from the womb of the land and settled in our bodies. It cannot be forgotten, for it lives in our cells and bones. We don’t only learn about it in books, we are born with its imprint within us.

The same people, the same land, the same story, separated only by the thin veil of time. What was the Earth trying to tell us? Why was this story entrusted to us? Why does it return so insistently?

Today, our youth still water our land with their pure blood so we can have a future. Their mothers weep, their wives weep, their children weep, the land weeps, and we weep with them. And with our tears we clear our vision; we think of Spring, of rebirth, of hope, and of life—of a future entrusted to us by them until our own time comes.

How will we honor all this death?

How will we honor all this life?

They say grief is love
with nowhere to go, 
but mine has roads
that were paved for it.

They lead to warm beaches
where it can stretch its limbs, 
and groves where it can pick 
olives and apples and citrus. 

There are rooms 
that feel empty without it, 
and hands that ache 
to caress its soft skin.

My grief is love 
with somewhere to go,
it’s just not allowed 
to visit. 

I keep gnawing on a conversation I had with a bartender, Shady, at Abou Elie, one of the last remaining leftist bars in Beirut.

It started rather ordinarily. My white Dutch boyfriend is hard to ignore when we visit. In his presence, conversations follow a predictable rhythm. Is this your first time visiting? Where in Lebanon have you been? What do you think? Etc. etc. etc.

And so it did, until Shady suggested we go roadtripping in the mountains. ‘You have to take the road between Bisharri and Tripoli,’ he said, ‘It’s the most beautiful road in Lebanon’, a tip we were hearing for the second time this trip.

We had been in Bisharri last summer, and his comment brought back some beautiful memories. I was feeling sentimental, and two drinks in from the previous bar. So I did what any good Lebanese immigrant would do: I told him that there’s no other place like our dear old Lebanon. That, for its tiny scale, it truly is heaven on Earth, full of awe and wonder. ‘If only they would let us live, I mumbled in Arabic without thinking; a phrase I’ve overheard so many times it fell out of my own mouth with the effortlessness of breath.

Shady, who was listening attentively, started at me in silence, long enough to make me feel the weight of my own words. And just when I was about to bite my own tongue in regret, he said, ‘Why would they let us live?’.

Ah yes! I thought. That wouldn’t benefit them, would it? But before I could say anything, he added, ‘This is our land; we don’t need their permission to live on it. Why should they let us live?’

Speechless and wide-eyed, I nodded. Then took a long and cowardly sip from my cold Almaza.

‘You’re right, I said. ‘Why would they let us live?’

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I woke up hungover. Not from the beer, but from my conversation with Shady. It stirred something deep in me, a realization of my own complicity, the role I play in my sense of powerlessness.

How often do we hand over our power by uttering a spell in reverse? Not in its substance, but in its direction; inwards, deeper, right into the tissue. Accepting an enmeshed existence with a parasitic being that preys on our minds and lays its rotten narratives inside it until we do its bidding.

Why must we speak in the tongue of the colonizer, the tongue of desperation?

The settler has no home, no roots, no sense of safety or belonging in the world. The settler believes in a fantasy, their brain a hay stack constantly collapsing under the weight of illusion. Every inkling of truth entering their mind feels like the threat of a fire. The settler hovers, like a lost and hungry ghost, they mine their needs from our bodies, the earth, the air… and still, no amount of death and destruction is enough to ease their despair, their desperation. The settler spreads death like a plague because they have no affinity with life. Tending to life requires presense, trust, and cooperation, but the settler feels rejected by life itself thus rejecting it everywhere and in everything.

Even when the settler settles, they live a life built on lies and fear—they never fully rest. Why must we reciprocate their energy of desperation? Their energy of deprivation?

Why should they let us, the people of the land, live?

To be raised by a mother 
who thinks she is white
is to suck shame 
from the teat 
of the empire.

To watch her 
single out a feature; 
mine 
inherited 
from the right side 
of our ancestry,
hers, 
the only thing 
that blew her cover, 
my sister
covering the trail 
with surgical 
precision.    

—

One day, 
I introduced myself 
as half Caucasian.
Eyes baffled, 
mouths twisting.
Me too! 
Exclaimed 
a white American. 
Not that kind, I said.
The kind that come 
from the Caucasus mountains.
The kind that rode horses
and worshiped fire
before their skulls 
were used for good measure
by a German*
desperate for an origin story
steeped in glory and myth.

—

To be raised by a mother 
who thinks she is white
is to choke on whiteness 
while denying myself
everything else
so that the Arab 
parts of my body
end up looking like her
and not like 
my father's sisters,
or our neighbors,
or their daughters,
or my unborn daughters.

—

To be raised by a mother 
who thinks she is white
is to know when whiteness
has entered the room
and made itself
the center of
attention—
white 
is the only color
that reflects everything
and absorbs nothing.

*The origins of the term “Caucasian”.

To feel 
uprooted
even in offerings
of rootedness
—a seed, 
modified,
planted, 
and replanted,
until unrest 
becomes 
its genesis.

Today, 
I learned
my favorite 
native tree
was planted 
by an ancient 
colonizer.

Perhaps, 
one day 
I'll learn 
how to perform
its cunning 
confidence.

We gather on the last full moon of 2025—a super moon in Sagittarius.

Five witches, a dimly lit basement of an Amsterdam canal-house turned into a witches’ supplies store, and a bowl of bright orange tangerines.

Mulled wine is poured, cards are pulled, and jokes are made about hexing politicians and oppressive systems.

In between sips, we swap cards and read them to each other. Mine is Bear Magic.

The witch who reads my card tells me that the female bear gives birth to her cubs while hibernating—ushering them into this world from the depths of her dreams. My card is inviting me to dream, she says.

Dreaming is something I forgot how to do in the last two years, ever since dead children started showing up on my phone every morning.

More mulled wine.

We move on to the main act: Sigil Magick.

The witch leading the ritual explains: Sigils are goals, dreams, or desires abstracted and then written or carved onto something. The intention is the spell; the abstract symbol is the magic.

Our sacrifice gets passed around next, tangerines—ripe, juicy flesh, ready to be mutilated by our carvings.

After the fruit makes its rounds, a small Petri dish follows. Full of pins, needles, and little pieces of broken glass. When my hand touches the dish, I freeze.

A strange chill runs down my spine and bounces back, landing in the pit of my stomach. I feel nauseous and apprehensive. I feel something that I haven’t felt in a very long time. Not since I was… eighteen?

Yes, eighteen. That was the last time.

In my dorm room, while a rerun of Sex And The City played in the background, as I cried over a half-finished design project that I couldn’t figure out how to finish before the deadline, the first thing next morning.

Lucky for me, graphic designers had access to very sharp X-ACTO knives for cutting posters, brochures, flyers, business cards, and so on. Unlucky for me, I was a cutter.

It had been years since I’d done it. I officially stopped at sixteen. But in that dimly lit seventeen-square-meter room, the tension between me and what was supposed to be a utensil was almost sexual. Like watching myself spread my legs for someone I promised to never talk to again; another coping mechanism that wouldn’t kick in until my mid-twenties.

When I was done, I washed the blade, dried it, and used it to cut my final project into perfection.

I passed that class with flying colors.

Seven years later, in the safety of the coven, I stare at someone else’s collection of sharp objects, and wonder: What spells had I carved into my flesh all those years?

They say the spell starts working once you’ve forgotten what came before the symbol. Once the symbol grows a life of its own. I have roughly forty scars on my left wrist—forty abstract symbols. How many spells have they been safekeeping?

The glistening bits of glass are too triggering. My cutting kit, my own collection of sharp objects, had a couple of those. Broken glass is oddly satisfying to cut with.

I fumble through the objects and pick the least triggering item, a nail. Before I poke the tangerine, I ask it for permission. As I carve, the air gets filled with a sticky-sweet smell. Blood also smells sticky, but like briny and rusted iron, like an old ship’s anchor at a wet harbor. And it doesn’t fill the room; it sits at the back of your throat.

I concentrate; attention is vital for making successful spells.

Can I create a counter spell without remembering the original? I have hunches. I have theories. I have lingering bad habits. I still cut myself mentally when I’m stressed, with inner dialogues as sharp as the tip of the nail squeezed between my fingers.

“Whole”, abstracted, becomes a circle, I decide.

If you cut yourself to pieces because the world couldn’t handle you, then you must call those pieces back once you no longer fear what the world thinks of you.

Whole.

I ask the tangerine for forgiveness in preparation to forgive myself.

Part Three: The Dead

Although she’s the only Shoukair from my direct bloodline who is buried in Tyr, my grandmother is not lonely. She is a tree in a forest of fresh and ancient tombstones. Some are small and humble, and some are extravagant even as they crumble back into the dry soil.

The most stark ones are those of the martyrs from the most recent war—a bloodshed that continues to this day despite the ceasefire. Young men, brave, or foolish, or both, enough to stand face to face with the terrifying beast of Western imperialism. Some have never held a gun, and are simply guilty of refusing to leave their ancestral land.

They look alive in their photos, immortal, frozen in a moment that denied them a future, but offered the land one, at least in some possible version of the future.

Their tombs stand proud, decorated with banners, flags, Qurans, and flowers. Some have solar-powered speakers keeping them company, reciting Quran verses even as the city sleeps and temporarily forgets about them.

After I finish paying my respect to my grandmother, I look around and pay my respect to the martyrs, extending it to their loved ones. To all the living bodies buried under the rubble of grief, who find solace in the honor of having been touched by martyrdom.

Martyrs don’t just get 'rest in peace', they also get 'mabrouk al shahada', a congratulations for their martyrhood—to standing witness to injustice, for sacrificing their flesh to liberation, or the mere prospect of it.

The West calls these men terrorists for their willingness to die as they fight against the most organized and long-lasting terror organization known to humanity—the Western empire.

The West fears a dead Arab man more than a living one, because it doesn’t understand death as an offering. It doesn’t understand that behind this death there are no cold and calculated orders, but a deep sense of honor, and a love for freedom and dignity that transcendce the fear of dying.

When I say that I come from a generous land, I’m not only talking about food and care. I’m also talking about how generous people are with their actual bodies. I’m talking about flesh and bone. I’m talking about a sense of belonging so deep that death seems like the only reasonable response when belonging is taken out of the equation.

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Some would rather die than experience the death of forced uprootedness, of having their roots ripped out in front of their eyes as they watch something or someone else take their place—their home.

This is my death, the soul and heart death I fight against each day I spend in the West speaking and thinking in languages, values, and customs that have no interest in speaking back to me.

I live on land that knows nothing about generosity. Amongst bodies that know nothing about honor or sacrifice. On a land that doesn’t yearn for collective liberation, because it’s too concerned with keeping everything and everyone out. A land of borders, papers, and dams. A land where families need appointments to see each other.

A land that throws its sons and daughters into the hungry mouth of capitalism and then calls it a World War, because it only becomes the world once it includes Europe.

A land that starts wars it can’t finish, so every couple of decades it has to bring them home to complete the cycle of canibalization.

Here, pictures of fallen soldiers don’t decorate highways and streets. They don’t intermingle with the living. They are pawns, lined on a chessboard owned by hands they’ll never get to shake. They are remembered once a year, on Liberation Day, as if liberation needs a day to be remembered. As if it’s not in every breathe, thought, and prayer.

They say the war is coming here—the unescapable Imperial Boomerang.

They’re sending leaflets and putting out commercials on national TV, preparing us for a cold, dark winter. What a privilege, to be warned about war. What a privilege, to be given a chance to prepare for disaster.

What if I die in the West? What it I die for the West? What exactly would I be dying for? For men in suits who worship the upward curve of the Lockheed Martin stock?

And where will I be buried?

I’ve seen the cemeteries, they don’t look over the sea like the cemetery in my hometown—life and death co-existing, families paying visits to the dead on their way to a Sunday swim.

Bury me next to my grandmother, Sultana. Bury me in the company of martyrs. Bury me in a place of honor, in a land that fights back and says: No.

No.

I refuse to be turned into a riviera or Economic Zone for the West’s rich. I refuse to become Walmarts, luxury apartments, and industrial farms.

No.

Over my dead body, and even then, I will haunt you.

No.

Over my dead body will you build your empire, and even then you won’t enjoy it.

Have you ever met a settler at peace?

All the new lands are haunted. Plagued by addiction and disease. All the settlers are restless, hovering from land to land in search of belonging.

I have seen and felt their emptiness. I have lived a life rooted in consumption and no meaning except for the next milestone. Except the milestone keeps shifting and moving, and then what? And then what comes after the vacation? The bigger house? The promotion? The next branded item of clothing? The next viral must-have? Then what? How do you tend to this yearning? How do you heal this soul-wound?

No wonder the entire system collapses upon itself cyclically. No wonder Western wars circle back, in a attempt to lay to rest here. No wonder personal libraries in the West are full of books trying to make sense of wars that had no meaning.

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In the West, life, unless you’re chasing something, is meaningless. Because death is meaningless.

Death hides in old folks' homes. If you catch death in the form of disease, you hide it. Apologize for it. You never speak of it. Death happens for no reason and benefits no one and nothing. There are no stories about death, no myths, no songs. No one congratulates you for dying or losing a loved one. No one celebrates you after you’re gone.

Death in the West has no voice. You can’t converse with it. And the dead, like death, have no voice either. They lay forgotten, hidden at the peripheries of cities and towns so as not to disturb the living. Because to be disturbed by death, to brush up against it, is to confront life and aliveness. But to be alive, fully living, is a threat to a system that feeds on the collective fear of death.

Bury me next to my grandmother.

Bury me in the company of martyrs. Bury me in a place of honor, on a land that fights back and says no.

No to a death with no meaning. No to a life with no honor.

Bury me next to my grandmother, so I can hear the laughter of children on their way for a Sunday swim.

Bury me in a place full of life, where the dead are always conversing with the living.

Mid-October is my burnout anniversary. This one marks two years. Two years of recovery, relearning, and rediscovering. Two years of making peace and grieving what was, while making space for what could be. And through it all, I haven’t really paused, reflected, or made sense of this journey.

When I burned out, and after a lot of resistance, I eventually made a pact with myself. I decided to allow myself to do something I’ve never done before—to exist. After all, burning out in the Netherlands affords me that privilege. At least it does so for two years. But we live in a world where not everyone is allowed to follow their whims, and the time has come for me to “reintegrate”—to officially reenter the market.

And of course, although I have been mostly existing, I’ve also been making moves and planning. I’m a realist after all, a Virgo sun and mercury (iykyk). I’ve already made the decision not to go back to corporate or 9-5 jobs a year ago, to try my best to stick out for as long as possible. Then came the decision to pivot to coaching. Then to somatic coaching, to be exact. A deliberate one-step-at-a-time plan to bridge my longings with reality—my desire to create without a client brief, to mentor without a manager breathing down my neck, and to facilitate workshops that have actual impact and meaning.

Now here I am, an inch away from jumping off a cliff and into the unknown. Everything I’ve ever feared is down there: fear of failure, self-doubt, and insecurity. And everything I’ve ever wanted is also down there: success, fulfillment, and freedom.

Women are not taught how to build empires; they are taught how to endure them. And little ethnically ambiguous girls from lands that brush up against actual empires aren’t taught how to build anything, not even sand castles. We are taught to be grateful for the bare minimum, and to wash off the sand from our hands so that no one knows we’ve been dreaming. And still, I’ve dreamt everything I have into being—a life in Western Europe, a career in tech, and a safety net wide enough for me to fall without breaking my neck. But what comes after? What comes when jumping is no longer fatal?

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When I look back at the last two years, I feel incredibly rich. This has been an exercise of letting go, of stripping down to the essentials, questioning everything, and revealing the core. And every time I lost something or someone, I felt more present, more rooted.

I lost my place and positionality in a career that took 12 years to build. I lost my cushy tech salary. I lost friends whose values no longer aligned with mine. I lost my drive to please. I lost two years of my youth. I lost the slim figure I so obsessively maintained. I lost a spot in reality that was convenient and comfortable. I lost my social mask. I lost the ability to talk myself into overriding my intuition. I became bare—everything gets right through me. I lost my ability to negotiate with the world; I refuse to. I want the world to learn how to negotiate with me. I want it to understand that it needs me as much as I need it. I lost my ability to not do the thing that feels right to me. I have to do it, even if it's embarrassing, strange, or excruciatingly vulnerable.

When I started Bye Bye Girlboss, I also started undressing. But I didn’t think this far. I just wanted to write. But now we’re here, and I also want to write about The Deep Knowing*—this name that came to me and asked me to build a coaching practice around it. And now my hands are wet, the sand has the perfect consistency, and the sea keeps calling my name.

Maybe I’ll start a new newsletter where I’ll write about The Deep Knowing, and keep this one too, so I can continue to write stories and poems. I don’t know. I just know that I have limited bandwidth, and unlimited ideas and yearnings. But for now, I’ll leave you with a poem. It’s been too long since I offered you one, and this one came to me while on a walk earlier today.

See you soon, maybe.

The wilting leaves 
reveal a sturdy frame
—a stripping,
down to the 
essential

bones, 
firm and proud,
no longer burdened 
by the performances 
of Spring
or the shenanigans
of Summer

gold, 
splattered 
on the floor—
a violent death
for untrained eyes.
An offering for 
those who know 
that Fall 
is just a season. 

* Join my first community-supported gathering and somatic meditation on Nov 9th at 5 pm CET. Read more here or save your spot here.

I turned 35, and then something… shifted. I can’t explain it, it just did. The scales I’ve been dancing on, jumping from maiden to mother, finally stood still. I’m no longer a maiden, I’m no longer a spring. I’m summer; my fruit is ripe and ready to be collected. This is the moment where I get to decide what to do with the harvest. What to eat, what to store, and what to transform into mouneh1 for the cold and dark winter. This is the moment where I have to accept that a part of the harvest might spoil, and that’s just how it is. Nature is unforgiving; she waits for no one and has her own plans.

I wanted to commemorate this moment by writing a letter to my past self. Something I did at 25 and felt like doing again now that 10 years have passed. But then time got slippery until I decided to put on my big girl shoes and stop slipping, and now here we are.

Before I could capture this moment, I wanted to read the letter I wrote to my 20-year-old self at 25, but I just couldn’t find it.

10 years is a long time, and I’m not the best at archiving my work. I googled (it was published on Berlin Artparasite’s blog in 2015, but the blog doesn’t exist anymore), I searched the cloud, I went through notes, Evernote, all of it, but no luck.

Until last night, in my hyper-fixation craze, I finally found it. In an email draft dated 25/09/2015 (how is this date even real?).

And now that I’ve read it, I can finally write a letter to my 25-year-old self, because I see her. I see her the same way she saw me in my 20.

Dear 20,

I know you are terrified, homeless, and broke, dependent on the courtesy of strangers. You’re probably hiding in a public bathroom as we speak, gasping for air like a fish thrown out of water; heart beating out of control, questioning your sanity and why you can’t take the bus on some days or even leave the house on others.

It’s been five years already, and I’m sure that you’re wondering if we’ve done well, if we’ve found love, stability, and fortune—if we’ve found success. I’m sorry to disappoint you, baby girl, but we’ve lost it all. Or rather, given it all up. But I need you to trust me when I tell you that it was all done by choice; you cut the strings with seamless precision.

You did it because you couldn’t afford losing yourself, so you lost everything else instead, and I’m proud of you for doing that.

When I look at all the people crushed under the weight of things that are no longer helping them flourish, all in the name of righteousness or logic, I can see that we’ve made the right choices. You, my love, have been reborn, and this time you will decide what to grow into.

It still hurts a little, the pain you’ve been accumulating over the past five years, but I thank you for realizing that it’s not yours to carry anymore. Yesterday I visited the cabinet where it has all been archived, neatly sorted into categories: remorse, self-loathing, anxiety, self-doubt, fear… I gazed at all of them triumphantly; they are no longer part of you, part of us.

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One day, you will forget where they are, and all those empty spaces where they used to dwell will be filled with luscious gardens. You’re a fertile ground kid, are you aware of that yet? Of all the beauty that can grow inside of you? Beauty that went unrecognized, dismissed, abused, misused, and discarded, do you know that it was all done to you in fear? No? You’ll see. Five years is closer than you think, just blink twice and meet me at the debris of this fortress we’ve been building. Rejoice in its destruction and dance naked by my side around the fire that we have set to it. They will hear our intoxicated laughs, and they will know that all their efforts to break us were in vain. We’re invincible.

But above all, I want you to know that you are loved. And if you stand still, listen to the silence of your mind and peer into the darkness of nothingness, you will feel it.

Flowing harmoniously through your extremities is eternity, the all and the nothing, and that is where you come from and to where you shall return. And it loves you, unconditionally, so embrace it. Embrace this nothingness because at the center of all things is void. Do not fear it and do not seek to fill it. People who are always seeking get trapped by the pursuit. Seek not, and it will all come to you at the right moment. Envision it, call for it, work for it, but do not run after it. Trust me, little one, after all, I am older and therefore wiser.

Finally, and this is very important, there is nothing fucking wrong with you. So stop chewing your lips bloody trying to find answers because there are none. There is you, there is what you keep, what you shed off, and what you replace it with, no right and no wrong.

Love yourself, with everything you have to offer, be an open vessel, and love will flow into you.

How I wish I could peer into your autumn eyes and kiss your lips, stroke your hair, and take you out for a drink. I have so much to tell you. But for now, happy 25th birthday, kiddo, can’t wait till we speak again.

Love,

25

Dear 25,

Where do I begin? Ten years is a long time. But in some ways, connecting to you through your letter to 20 makes time feel meaningless. We all exist simultaneously, waiting for each other to catch up.

You sound wise and mature despite your tender age, ready to throw everything in the arrogant well of youth. I don’t think you realize what flames will touch your delicate heart in the next ten years, or what they’ll shape you into.

Still, much respect your determination and vitality. Hold on to them, you will need them. The world is going to test you, life is going to test you, and you are also going to test yourself. It’s not easy being this deeply committed to unearthing yourself. You’re going to have to make peace with the shifting sands of reality; every time you think you’ve reached your final form, life will pull the rug from under you. You will lose people, things, everything, in your pursuit of yourself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I bet you’re dying to hear what your life looks like ten years from now.

I don’t know how to tell you this, but we did it again. We fed everything to the fire.

We built a home, only to use it for timber to keep our soul from freezing. We built a career, only to use its shards to break ourselves free from its gilded cage. We built a life, only to realize we outgrew it. Then we went back to the drawing board and started all over.

I have to pause here and think about 45, where is she? And what wisdom does she have for us? I feel just as lost as you did, except I don’t have the arrogance of youth to hide behind. I bet you didn’t think of me when you were writing to 20. I bet you thought this was your highest vantage point. It’s ok, that is the self-centeredness of your decade, and you deserve to be self-centered.

Sometimes I look back at you, and god, you were so beautiful. You’re still beautiful, but 25 was a different kind of beauty, a sharp one, something that cut right through things. You could’ve had anyone you wanted, but you were too wounded for that. Instead, you kept choosing anyone who didn’t want to choose you. And you had to do it just enough times to want yourself more than wanting to be wanted.

You speak of self-love with so much confidence in your letter. Which is ironic because you have no idea what it is. You don’t know the horrors women have to face before they decide to put themselves first. You don’t know that self-love will only come to you once you’ve betrayed yourself beyond recognition.

Time after time, you will find yourself cornered like a wild animal, forced to make peace with your captors. And every time this happens, you will have to choose between a warm cage and a cold, dark forest. But something wonderful happens when a girl finally decides to turn into a woman: she becomes unrestrainable. This comes at a cost; there’s a reason some animals are more tempting to cage than others, and that reason is desire.

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You live to be desired. You get high on it. Desire is the only thing that gives you any sense of worth. You are so concerned with how you look and what men think of you that you forget about your power—you partake in your own domestication.

You starve yourself out of your appetite. You fuck yourself out of passion. You talk yourself out of your voice.

But you will eat, you will desire, and you will scream again; from pleasure, pain, grief… Your voice will crack something open in you, in others. Rooms full of people will hear you speak, and they will laugh and cry with you. Your desire will pave your way forward. Your appetite will open doors. The very things that scare you about your nature will be your salvation.

You will die, again and again, until you choose the discomfort of aliveness over being a comfortable place for someone else to build their life on. It will get dark and muddy, but you will also grow thicker fur, bigger teeth, and sharper claws.

You will do many great things in the next 10 years. Meet so many people, kiss so many lips, and shed so many tears. You will experience what you thought was impossible, only to experience more. Life will surprise you, but you will surprise yourself even more.

I’m so proud of you, of your stubbornness to thrive against all odds. Of your commitment to yourself in a world that teaches women that self-abandonment is the only path to love.

Remember, kid, I am here as you unravel there. I’m the one who called upon you to start the fire, and you responded by allowing it to burn everything that isn’t ours. I only exist because you wanted me to, and I thank you for that, deeply.

Enjoy 25, babygirl. Indulge, dance, do drugs, fall in love, fuck, break things, break hearts. Enjoy, because once you’re done, we have work to do, and I can’t do it without you. Happy 25th, speak again in 10 years.

Love,

35

Part Two: The Name

Three days before I visited my grandmother’s grave at Tyr’s cemetery, I opened a random book in Arabic about theological vocabulary. I was at a guest house in Bsharri, Mount Lebanon.

I opened the book as I gazed upon Kadisha Valley. Another sunset was unfolding before my eyes, only this time the concrete buildings and their inhabitants were replaced with pine, apple, and cedar trees. The full moon was just a day away from completion, and its timid ghost was starting to appear on the horizon.

A couple of hours later, I will be listening to the echoing howls of jackals and hyenas competing over territory across the valley. But for now, I listen to the song of evening birds waving the sun goodbye.

Effortlessly, the book opens in the middle and lands on the word “Name”.

This is an excerpt from the actual book, translated from Arabic:

Name (From the Old Testament)

The name was not, from the point of view of the Old Testament, merely a conventional label, but rather an essential part of the being of the named. God gives the name (Genesis 1:5; 2:19), and in doing so, He establishes the essence and role of the named person or thing. This divine act of naming is a creative act.

A change of name implies a change in status or destiny (Genesis 17:5, 15; 32:29).

The divine name must not be taken in vain (Exodus 20:7); it is holy (Leviticus 22:2); it is invoked (Genesis 4:26) and praised (Psalm 7:18); it protects and saves (Psalm 54:3; Proverbs 18:10).

Name (Continued)

God gives names to people (Genesis 17:5; Hosea 1:4) and changes them (Genesis 17:15). Names in the Old Testament often have symbolic meanings and convey the message or mission of the person (Isaiah 7:14; Hosea 1:6).

People are given names at birth (Genesis 4:25) or at moments of revelation (Genesis 17:5).

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My first act of defiance on Lebanese soil must’ve been when I changed my name from Sultana to Tania. I was eleven years old, and one afternoon, I went home from school and told my parents to start calling me Tania. Sultana was dead.

Until then, Tania was a nickname bestowed by my maternal grandmother for reasons unknown. Perhaps because Sultana was too difficult or foreign.

I was birth-named after my Lebanese grandmother, and as I grew older, I realized that I didn’t want to carry the burden of her name. Aside from all the bullying—Sultana is an usual name, especially for a little girl—I also feared that it might lead me to her fate.

I never understood what was wrong with my paternal grandmother, Sultana.

She had everything a woman her age, generation, and background might have wanted; a large family full of highly educated and faithful children who never left her side, a community that respected her, and a husband with a high-status profession. She also had a house full of grandchildren, who at first adored her, and then grew to fear her.

But she was always full of rage and contempt, contained in a crumbling and chronically ill body. There was an air of electric nervousness about her, a certain erosive acidity.

I didn’t understand her because she never talked about what made her the way she was. No one did.

No one talked about how fear and trauma seeped into the air, water, and soil, and poisoned everything and everyone around them. How, over time, psychological turmoil turned into chronic illness like high blood pressure, ulcers, and cancer. How it rewrote the epigenetic fate of entire lineages, including ours.

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