Detachment, in my case, is not a serene monkish achievement. It is a very active, very noisy awareness that I am attached while simultaneously rehearsing the grammar of letting go. As if I am learning two languages at once: Caring and Surrender. The first is fluent; the second keeps making mistakes.

I did not always have words for this doubleness. For a long time, it lived in me as a sensation rather than a concept, something I practiced instinctively, long before I could name it. If I trace it back, it begins in a place where language had not yet caught up with feeling. I learned to read rooms before I learned to read books. Not the fashionable, therapeutic kind of “reading the room” people mention on LinkedIn, but the survival kind. You develop it when your emotional weather depends on grown-ups who are tired, worried, or about to disappear.

My mother’s face was my first text. I memorized the lines around her eyes, the slight tightening of her mouth when she was about to leave on a trip, to work, back to another city where life was pulling her. I was attached to her in the way small children are: as if she were the axis on which the world turned. And then she would leave, and that axis would tilt. I would stay with my grandmother, whose love was warm and steady, but not the same. A child does not know how to articulate that. A child just knows: something essential has shifted.

So I learned to scan. To anticipate. To prepare. Somewhere in that preparation, a habit formed: I would attach fiercely, and at the same time, guard myself against the pain of separation. Call it a primitive form of detachment. Call it self-defense dressed up as wisdom. Call it what it was: a way of loving with one hand and holding an exit route with the other.

Years later, in friendships and careers and relationships that felt like “this is it, finally,” I kept meeting the same pattern: I want to be close, but I also want to be ready to lose. I want to want, but I don’t want to suffer for wanting.

So I read about non-attachment. I watched videos with soothing voices telling me to “release the outcome” and “trust the universe” as if the universe were a very patient customer service line. Detachment, in the social media version, is a clean aesthetic: candles, journaling, a quote about how “if it’s meant for you, it will stay.” Very little grief. Very little mess.

But here’s the thing: detachment is not what Instagram made it. It is not a filter you apply to your life to make your heart look more zen. Real detachment is awkward. It is embarrassing. It is waking up in the middle of the night realizing you are still attached, even though you went to bed committed to “surrender.”

What is it like to detach, really?

It is like trying to unclench a fist you’ve had closed so long you forgot what open feels like. It is like loving someone and whispering, under your breath, I am not holding you hostage to my need for you to stay. It is like working hard on a project and then, when the results come, remembering that your worth is not nailed to that spreadsheet, that email, that approval.

And yet, theory is very brave. Practice is shy.

I suspect I am not alone in this. We say “detachment” and think we mean one thing, when in fact there are several. There is emotional withdrawal, which says, “I will not feel, because feeling hurts.” There is disciplined non-attachment: “I will feel, but I will not let my stability depend on this.” And there is spiritual surrender: “I will do my part, and I will entrust the outcome to God.”

For a long time, I confused withdrawal with surrender. I told myself I was “letting go” when I was actually numbing. I called it maturity. I framed it as wisdom. But numbness is not wisdom; it is exhaustion with better PR.

I wanted the calm of true detachment without the cost. I wanted the tawakkul of the saints without the vulnerability of the humans.

At some point, the question shifted from “How do I stop caring so much?” to “What does it mean to put this in God’s hands?”

In Arabic, the word taslīm carries both “surrender” and “peace.” It’s not just resignation; it’s handing over with a kind of relief. The Qur’an speaks of those who say, when struck by calamity:

“Indeed, we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we will return.” _{[Qur'an 2:156]}

“إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعونَ”

On paper, this is beautiful. In practice, it is a gut punch. To say “I belong to Allah” is to admit that what I love does not ultimately belong to me. To say “to Him we will return” is to look at every person, every ambition, every dream and whisper: You are not mine to keep.

And then there is the verse that feels like a direct challenge to my need for control:

“And whoever relies upon Allah—then He is sufficient for him.” _{[Surah At-Talaq (65:3)]}

“وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلْ عَلَى اللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسْبُهُ”

Sufficient. Not “He will give you exactly what you want,” but “He will be enough for you.” That is a very different promise. It does not spare you from loss. It saves you from the delusion that you are the one keeping everything from falling apart.

Detachment, in an Islamic sense, is not walking away from life. It is walking through it with a different grip. The Prophet said, when a man asked whether he should tie his camel or leave it to Allah: “Tie it, and trust in Allah.” Effort, then surrender. Not effort or surrender.

So I try. I try. I plan, I write, I love, I show up. And then I say, with all the sincerity I can muster: Hasbun Allāh wa ni‘mal-wakīl. “Allah is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.”

But my heart is stubborn. It still breaks. It still aches.

I can imagine my life without certain ambitions, but without my family, loved ones? I shudder. And that is where detachment becomes not a theory, but a test.

How do I detach from people I love without becoming cold? How do I hold them without holding on so tightly that I turn love into a leash?

I do not have a perfect formula. I only have this: I am learning that detachment is not “I don’t care.” It is “I care, and I will not make my caring into a cage.” I am learning that grief is not a failure of faith. That crying when someone leaves does not mean I have failed at tawakkul. It means I am human.

The Qur’an tells us that the hearts of the believers find rest in the remembrance of Allah: “Unquestionably, by the remembrance of Allah hearts are assured.” But notice: it does not say “by the denial of your humanity.” It does not say “by pretending you are not attached.” It says: remember. Return. Again and again. Even when you are attached. Even when you are grieving. Even when your idea of detachment is a very dramatic, very attached form of drama.

Then there is the other attachment: to my own significance.

I am an academic. I have spent years building a life where my value is measured by lectures given, papers published, students impressed. I tell myself I care about knowledge, about service, about truth. Part of that is sincere. Part of it is a polished story I tell so I don’t have to admit that I also care about being seen, chosen, confirmed.

Detaching from ambition is not refusing to work. It is refusing to let my worth be a hostage to outcomes I do not control.

Some nights, I lie awake replaying an email, a comment, a rejection. I calculate. I strategize. I bargain with Allah in my head: If you just let me have this, I’ll be more grateful. I’ll be better. And then, somewhere between planning and prayer, I catch myself: Whose life is this, exactly?

The Qur’an is almost teasing in its clarity: “You do not will unless He wills.” Which is both terrifying and deeply relieving. It removes me from the throne I keep trying to sit on. It tells me: you are not God. You were never meant to be

So here is what I am learning, against my better instincts: Detachment is not easy, and it is not a personality trait. It is a practice. Social media has made surrender look like a yoga pose. It is more like surgery. You will lose things. You will grieve people. The goal is not to avoid pain; it is to stop building your identity on what you cannot keep. Surrender is not “I don’t care.” It is “I care, and I am placing this in God’s hands.” Awareness is more important than perfection. It is better to notice your attachment and name it honestly than to pretend you are above it.

I am not writing this as someone who has arrived. I am writing as someone who keeps arriving and then realizing they are still attached. Who says “I have let go” and then finds themselves clutching the air.

This is not a conclusion. It is a set of questions I am trying to live through: Can I love people fully and still be ready to lose them? Can I work hard and still accept that the outcome is not mine? What does taslīm actually feel like in the body, not just in theory? How do I distinguish between healthy surrender and the more cowardly form of “letting go” that is really just fear in a spiritual costume? Is it possible to be attached and detached at the same time, or is that just a fancy way of saying I am conflicted?

I do not have clean answers. I have moments. Moments when I feel the click of attachment and the quieter click of surrender, almost overlapping. Moments when I say, with my whole chest: I belong to Allah, and to Him I return, and then spend the next hour panicking about an email.

Detachment, for me, is not a state. It is a practice of noticing. A practice of returning. A practice of trying, failing, and trying again, with as much honesty and as little self-dramatization as I can manage.

I have come to realize that some people move through the world being hard on others, while some of us turn that harshness inward. Without any mystery I belong to the second kind. Not because I want to, and not because there is any pride in it, but because somewhere along the way I learned that this was the only way to grow. I believed that if I pressed hard enough on my own flaws, if I refused myself comfort, I might become a better person. And so, for as long as I can remember, I have carried a cruelty toward myself like a second spine. With others, I am patient. I listen. I search for reasons for their mistakes and call it compassion. But when it comes to me, there is no such kindness.

Why is it so easy to be gentle with others, and so difficult to be gentle with myself?

My voice softens when someone else is hurting. I offer what I can, the best advice I know. I place myself in their shoes and try, as honestly as I can, to comfort what can still be comforted. I listen without judgment. I tell them that life is hard, that they did what they could, that they deserve patience. The words come naturally, almost without thinking. But when the same mercy is meant for me, something in me completely shuts down. The tenderness disappears. I speak to myself in ways I would never dare speak to another human being.

Sometimes I wonder whether the kindness we offer others is easier partly because it can be seen. It confirms the person we believe ourselves to be. Kindness toward oneself, however, happens quietly. No one sees it. No one praises it. Perhaps that is why I resist it, why I deny myself the very mercy I scatter so generously around me. There is something deeply sad about living this way, giving the world our gentleness while withholding it from the one heart that carries us through everything. There lives a voice in my head that never goes silent. It is there when I wake up, there when I lie down, there in the mundane. It remembers what I wish would fade: the words I said wrong, the chances I let pass, the years that feel misplaced, the people who seemed to move forward while I stood still, the moments I should have been braver, smarter, better. From that voice, other things begin to take shape. Guilt. Shame. They stretch out behind me like shadows. I do not always see them, but I feel their presence wherever I go, following my steps with a patience that never seems to tire.

Maybe that is why I keep returning to something Toni Morrison once said in an interview. When she was asked whether it is possible for someone to forgive themselves even after doing something terrible, she answered simply: yes, it is called grace. There is something almost unbearable in how gentle that answer is. It does not argue. It does not excuse. It does not erase what has been done. It simply leaves room for the possibility that a person may be more than the worst thing they have done, or the worst thing they believe about themselves.

I think that is the part I struggle with most, not the idea of guilt, because guilt comes easily to me, but the idea of grace. Grace asks for something harder. It asks me to believe that punishment is not the only path to honesty, and that I do not have to keep reopening every wound in order to prove that I remember it.

For a long time, I believed that if I punished myself enough, I would become better. That harshness was a kind of discipline. That regret was a way to stay honest. But years pass, and punishment does not make me better. It only makes me tired.

Ramadan arrived this year as it always does, carrying with it this very language of forgiveness. During this month, we speak often of Allah’s mercy, of how it is greater than our sins, of how no matter how far we go, the door remains open. I have heard these words many times before, but this year they reached me differently. I found myself wondering what it means to believe in divine mercy while refusing any trace of mercy toward myself. What does it mean to ask for forgiveness, yet remain unwilling to loosen my grip on my own mistakes?

I know how to ask Allah for forgiveness. I learned early that to be human is to fall short, and that mercy lives somewhere above us, waiting to be asked for with enough humility. While reciting the Qur’an, a verse kept returning to my mind:

“O my servants who have transgressed against themselves (by sinning), do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed, Allah forgives all sins. Indeed, it is He who is the Forgiving, the Merciful.”

Islam insists on accountability, but it also insists on mercy. One of the most repeated invocations in the Qur’anic imagination is that God is Al-Ghafur, the One who forgives again and again, that God is Ar-Rahman, the Most Merciful. Ar-Rahim, the Especially Merciful.

If divine mercy can exceed human failure, why is it so difficult for me to allow even a fragment of that mercy to touch my soul? who am I to refuse forgiveness to myself? Why do I act as if my mistakes are greater than His mercy?

Maybe self-forgiveness is not the same as excusing everything. Maybe it is not pretending that the past did not happen, or that I have never failed, or that I do not carry regret. Maybe it is simply choosing not to turn regret into a permanent home. Maybe it is believing that I can be honest about who I have been without condemning myself forever for it.

I am not writing this because I have mastered forgiveness. I have not. I still return too easily to blame, to shame, to the old habit of thinking pain is proof of sincerity. But I am beginning, slowly, to understand that mercy is not something meant only for other people. It is not weakness to offer it to myself. It may be the only way to keep going without hardening completely.

So perhaps forgiveness begins there, not as a grand moment of release, but as a quieter decision: to speak to myself more gently, to let the past instruct me without letting it devour me, and to trust that becoming better does not have to begin with cruelty. Perhaps that, too, is a form of faith.

“In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

“live in the layers,

not on the litter.”

—Stanley Kunitz, “The layers”

I was in the middle of writing a conference paper that refuses to move forward. My academic sentences felt airtight, almost sealed. So I opened another document to write this, whatever this is, because that’s the only way I know how to breathe, through words that come from within, unedited by permission or proof.

It has been months since I last sent a letter. God I love letters. Life has been full and busy and I find myself holding onto the things I love with every ounce of my being, trying not to let them slip away. And please don’t be fooled by what I share on Instagram. I have received a message that stayed with me in an uncomfortable way. Someone told me how much they wished for my slow life, how beautiful and calm it seemed. What I share is not my life as it is, it is curated. I treat my Instagram like a mini museum of my own. I choose what to display, what to frame, what to preserve. But behind it all, life moves quickly, messily, imperfectly. And I’m just here, doing my best to keep the small things close.

Speaking of statements that stay with me, the other day one of my students asked me if I’m enjoying teaching.
I said yes.

It surprised me. The answer came without hesitation, without a pause, without rehearsal, without the careful thinking I insist on in class. Just yes, already spoken. Already out of my mouth. Then I paused. Not because I doubted it but because I realized my body had answered before my mind caught up. Not practicing what I preach. I tell my students to think before speaking, and here I was, already…spoken.

So I decided to answer properly. Slowly. From where I am now. From the hotel lobby I am staying in on a cold rainy December night. Hotel lobbies have always made me feel strange and familiar at the same time. No one really belongs here. People are either arriving or leaving, waiting to step into something new or trying to hold onto something that’s ending. You’re not meant to stay, and yet everything feels like the backstage of a movie scene. Everyone has rehearsed their role, waiting to step into the light. I think that’s why I feel at home in places like this. I don’t have to be anything here because I, too, am blurred by the departures and arrivals and for a moment, that is enough.

This month, I went back to my journal and read the year from the beginning, January onward, month by month, letting each version of myself speak in her own tense. I rarely do this. I don’t like to read my own words. They carry feelings that have settled on the page on the moment they were written but haven’t settled in me. But something told me to look, to return, to remember because forgetting myself had become too easy.

January feels distant. I recognize the handwriting more than the voice. Notes everywhere with open margins and a name of a student that I don’t recall the face. I am usually good at remembering faces. They stay with me longer than names. Longer than dates. But this one slipped through. Is my memory failing me? I am good at remembering faces which is how I know this forgetting matters.

I was preparing lectures a week ahead, like I always do. I still do this. I leave space in between pages, not everything needs to be filled. Sometimes I step outside the curriculum. Sometimes philosophy slips in. I don’t want my students to collect information; I like to ask questions instead of offering answers. I like watching them sit with uncertainty, even briefly.

I like to ask questions because they resist closure. Because they stay. Outside the classroom, I am less disciplined. When a question turns inward, my first instinct is to move, to tidy a shelf, to scroll, to answer an email that doesn’t matter. Distraction is easier than stillness. Stillness asks something of me. But in those classrooms, in those conversations, I am safe. That version of me, the one standing there, asking, listening, watching something spark, that is the version I trust. That is the one I like.

February and March were heavy. The pages are full of a feeling that doesn’t yet know how to arrange itself. Reading them now, I want to be gentle with the person who wrote them. I am always gentle with others. I forget that this is something I’m allowed to extend inward. Clarice Lispector writes:“I am searching, I am searching.”
That line could have been my handwriting then. That’s how those months read. Searching without knowing what for.

But some evenings, I don’t move, I let the questions sit beside me, unanswered, like a coat I haven’t hung up yet. It’s uncomfortable. It makes the room feel larger, colder. It reminds me that not everything yields to effort.

By April and May, something in me was shifting, the way seasons do, though I didn’t yet have the language for it. I was giving everything: care, effort, attention but nothing felt complete. Achievements arrived like relief instead of joy. I would exhale and move on. These were the things I had once prayed for, and still, they asked something more from me. Growth, I was learning, carries its own kind of weight. Even becoming takes something from you first.

I think this is what I have been teaching all along, without naming it, that uncertainty isn’t a failure of understanding, but a condition of being alive. That sitting with a question, really sitting with it, is an act of attention, maybe even care.

June was strange. It felt as though I was carrying the change of seasons with me, winter loosening into spring, spring tipping into summer. It wasn’t like a metaphor, not really, but as a weight, a heavy physical weight. It was revealing nonetheless. I kept writing. I noticed patterns, how suffering repeats itself with different faces, how it insists on being witnessed before it loosens its hold. Writing didn’t fix anything, but it made the days lighter, breathable.

When I finish my lectures, there is a moment I never quite hold onto. The room empties slowly, chairs scraping, notebooks closing, voices returning to their everyday pitch. I gather my things carefully, as if I might disturb something fragile.

July and August were different. I was intensely alive. There was warmth everywhere in my body, in time, in the way days opened themselves. I felt full of love, reckless with it. Everything seemed sharpened by feeling. I moved through those months as if touched by something electric. I didn’t ask questions then. I lived inside the answer.

I know it wasn’t going to last. I think I always knew. There are moments that announce their own ending even as you’re living them. Those days have already become memory, the kind that haunts and returns without permission. I am still haunted by July and August while standing inside the cold patience of winter.

September arrived like reality clearing its throat. It started in the beautiful Rome where I walked through stone and light, through streets that kept offering themselves, through churches where silence knew how to hold color. I was open then, easily moved, easily lifted as if beauty had found me before I had time to brace myself. But September also thinned. It showed me how quickly fullness can empty, how joy can fold itself away without warning. I moved through half of the month colder, suspended between places, between selves, learning the strange stillness of not knowing where to live inside a body, inside a life.

There was chaos in the suspension, but also a silence I didn’t resist. I stood there long enough to notice the risk: that staying too long in between could turn me into someone unrecognizable. So I watched myself carefully, holding on to what still felt like mine.

October and November spoke in different language and there was a shift in my pace. There was a shift all along sometimes I observed it and other times I completely ignored it. These months arrived with a finality I could feel in my bones. I walked through days that felt unfinished. I stayed busy, filling hours, arranging tasks, letting motion stand in for certainty.

The days moved forward, but I carried memory alongside them, aware of how different I am in every month, how each version of me feels temporary and convinced of its own truth. Sometimes, though, I want an older version of myself to surface not out of longing, but out of need, someone who knew how to submerge and deal with life without asking questions, without feeling estranged from herself. Why do we reach for earlier versions of ourselves when we’re lost? When we are heartbroken? Maybe because we are our own refuge, our own safe space that we constantly look for in others.

Clarice Lispector writes about this continuous becoming, about never being the same person twice, and I return to her often because she understands how unsettling that can be. What unsettles me is not the change itself, but the fear that certain ways of feeling may not return, that what once felt vivid and immediate may exist only as memory now, and that I will go on carrying proof of who I once was while learning, quietly, how to live as someone else.

This has always been me. I live in between moments, and I let nostalgia haunt me willingly, not because I am trapped in the past, but because this is where I know how to feel most honestly. I am better, in some ways, when I live inside memory, even though it can be burdensome, even though it asks me to carry more than what is immediately present.

Reading back through my journals, month by month, gives the impression that this year was difficult, or at least gives it the allure of difficulty, but that is not the whole truth. It was a year dense with experience, rich with emotion, saturated with feeling. I have made mistakes, and I am no longer ashamed of them. I am learning to sit with the discomfort instead of rushing past it, because avoiding it has never taught me anything. Growth asks for presence, even when it’s awkward, even when it costs you certainty. I owe that honesty to myself, and I owe it to my students too. I don’t want to show them perfection. I want them to see that I am still learning, still failing, still becoming. That this, too, is part of the work. And in the midst of all this, I realize I was not wrong in how I answered the question: I do enjoy teaching. It is not incidental to who I am; it is woven into me, a way of being attentive, of staying with questions, of remaining open to others and to myself. It has shaped how I move through time and memory, and whatever else changes, this will remain, quietly, faithfully, part of me.

It was a strange year, but I met it with a tenderness I didn’t know I had learned. Not perfectly, not consistently, but often enough to surprise myself. I learned how to move more gently through uncertainty, how to stay present without demanding resolution, how to offer care to others, and eventually to myself. Looking back, I can see that even the hardest moments were held with a kind of grace, one that grew slowly and without announcement. For that, I am grateful.

I hope this letter meets you gently, and if nothing else, feels like a warm hug.

Happy new year

With love

I am sitting at my desk. It is late in the morning. The sky is turning that bright, weightless blue that only appears for a few minutes before noon. I have tea in my cup. Jasmine flavored. Slightly cold now. The vase in front of me still hold the roses from last Sunday. I had done everything I could to keep them alive: trimmed the stems diagonally, changed the water twice a day, added sugar and aspirin like some kind of ritual. A way of bargaining with time.

They are still beautiful, but in that sad, crisp way flowers get when they begin to dry from the edges inward. I don’t know why it always surprises me. It’s not like I don’t know how this ends.

I have been looking at them for a while. Not out of grief, but out of something else. Recognition, maybe. The pulse of writing came suddenly. I didn’t plan it. I never do. It always arrives uninvited, like memory, like grief. And when it comes, I follow.

What struck me was not just the dying of the flowers, but the way they were dying: with grace, with silence, with something that looked like surrender. Something I am still trying to learn. Why do I try so hard to stop the natural course of events. How many small, invisible acts I had performed to delay the fade. There’s something in me, and I think in many of us, that can’t help but try to hold on, even when we know. Even when we know.

There is something sublime, almost unbearable, about watching things fade. And this is where I always return to Edmund Burke, who said that the sublime is found not in beauty alone, but in beauty touched by terror, in vastness, in awe, in the feeling of standing before something that exceeds us. For him, the sublime was not soft. It was a kind of trembling. And maybe that’s what I felt looking at the flowers, not sadness, exactly, but trembling. Because they reminded me of how everything slips away. Not in a dramatic way. Not even in a loud one. Just… eventually.

There was another time, months ago, when I was rearranging the shelves in my room and I found a crumpled receipt from a restaurant. I had forgotten I kept it. The ink was slightly faded. But as soon as I saw the name, the time, the title printed total I remembered. The way I sat near the window, pretending to read but really just watching people walk by. I don’t know why I kept the ticket. Maybe I thought it mattered. Maybe I wanted proof that I was there. I sat down on the floor and held it for a moment. I wanted to feel what it was like to be that version of myself.

And I thought of the idea of the punctum of Roland Barthes, that sharp point in a photograph that wounds us. The part that pierces through and reminds us of what’s no longer there. In Camera Lucida, he writes:

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me.”

The flowers, too, feel like that. Radiations from a fragment that was. The receipt. The restaurant. The people we no longer speak to but still carry in our gestures.

And it’s strange, how often we live like we can outsmart time.

We record voice notes, write down memories, press flowers in books, take pictures, keep old T-shirts. We do this knowing full well that none of it will bring back what has passed. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is the act itself: to try. To love so hard we can’t help but leave traces.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s what makes us human, our stubborn refusal to let go easily. Our quiet rituals. The sugar in the water. The receipts we don’t throw away. The essay I wasn’t planning to write.

The thing is, everything will fade. I know this. I’ve always known.

And yet I choose to stay soft.

I choose to keep watering the flowers.

And maybe that’s the most beautiful thing about us.

Not our ability to hold on,

but our willingness to love

even as we let go.

Tables too close together. Chairs scape loudly. A glass of water already sweating. The air conditioner is broken. Or slow. Or both. A man reads the paper without turning the page. Two women talk in low voice. One leans in too close. Outside the bus groans. Inside is quiet. Almost. Someone is always arguing on the phone. Coffee is being ground. The mechanical rhythm. The way it drowns your thoughts. A server walks by. Doesn’t look at me. I wander if he remembers me. I have been here before. Not many times tough. But always alone. My back to the street. My face to the mirror. I try not to look at myself. The espresso is bitter. I drink it anyway. I always do. It was a random Tuesday morning. Or a Monday. I don’t remember the exact moment. Or day. But I remember my walk to this coffee shop. I remember everything about Algiers. White buildings stood too tall to ignore. Pigeons circled lazily above the chaos. sidewalks were more of a suggestion than a space. Balconies too close together. The sea somewhere behind you. But you don’t turn around. You keep walking. You pass the flower shop. Fleur d’Alger. It’s always been there. Or maybe it just feels that way. Like it belongs to time, not to the city. People stop there without thinking. To buy flowers. To prove they were here. To mark a moment. It’s almost ritual. Almost sacred. Like a small temple hidden in plain sight. And somehow that’s enough. To stand there. To breathe it in. To let the scent of roses or lilies or whatever is in season press against the day. You don’t need more than that to feel the city. Not really. When I pass by I remember my younger self. Lost. Restless. A version of me who thought time could be kept like letters I never sent. I was wrong. But I still stop. Still look. Like it might all come back if I just stand there long enough.

There are cities that take you in completely, hold you, name you, give you back to yourself. And then there are cities like Algiers, where you can live in the heart of them and still feel like a stranger in passing. I’ve always been somewhere in between, not a tourist, not a local. I know the turns, the smells, the way the sun hits la rue Didouche at noon. But the knowing doesn’t mean belonging.

It’s a complicated thing, to be present in a place without feeling anchored to it. To recognize every corner yet feel no thread tying you down. I walk through Algiers like someone who’s memorized the script but can’t connect to the character. There’s a kind of inaudible grief in that. Not loud or dramatic, just something that lives in the pauses. In the long silences between buildings. In the space between me and the city.

Emotional geography that’s what they call it. The way places shape us emotionally, how our inner life mirrors or resists the landscapes we move through. But what they don’t always say is that sometimes your emotional geography doesn’t match the map at all. Sometimes, you live in a place that feels misaligned with your internal rhythm. Algiers, with its blunt grace, its unpredictable noise, its urgent chaos, always pulsing outward, spilling into itself, is so often at odds with the quiet tempo inside me.

I think that’s where the tension lies: in the dissonance between the city’s insistence and my detachment. I’m here, yes. I am physically in the streets, in this coffee shop where I always return to without meaning to -not because it is good, but because it never pretends to be more than it is -but something in me doesn’t settle. Something in me resists. The attachment never forms fully. Or if it does, it slips away the moment I try to name it.

there are moments, though, moments that almost trick me. When the light falls right over the hills, or when the wind carries that particular blend of salt and dust and cigarettes. Then I think maybe I do belong. Maybe there’s something here holding me too. But those moments pass.

They always do.

I exist here in a kind of in-betweenness, not from elsewhere, not entirely from here. A liminal identity shaped by half-roots, blurred borders, and a quiet ache that doesn’t go away. Maybe that’s why the city’s broken symmetry feels familiar: the unfinished buildings, the interrupted sidewalks, the loud voices that echo long after the people have gone. It’s a place in constant becoming, never still, never complete. Just like me.

There’s a strange comfort in this dissonance, even if it hurts. Maybe I don’t need to belong to Algiers to feel something for it. Maybe presence, this quiet, detached witnessing is enough. Not every place needs to feel like home. Some places are meant to mirror the parts of us that stay unresolved.

And now I am here again, alone, stirring sugar into coffee I don’t really need. Watching the street through the glass. People blur by. The city performs itself endlessly, unbothered by who is watching or not.

Algiers and I, we have never agreed on how we feel about each other. I never quite miss it when I am gone, but I soften when I am here. It overwhelms me, wears me out, but somewhere between its streets and this chipped porcelain cup, I remember why I come back. Not because it is home, but because it is part of me as much as I am part of it. Algiers and I, we remain unfinished.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s its gift.

I lie there, eyes tracing nothing in particular, yet I can see it all: replayed conversations, old messages, answers I wish I’d given—all uninterrupted. The room is still, and I’ve become part of its stillness—except for my mind. It has wandered two lifetimes ahead: what I should have said yesterday, what I will never say, the grocery list I didn’t write, the cold tea on my desk, my unfinished books, a forgotten face. I envy those who can just be, who stare at the clouds without dissecting their movement, who sit without calculating the geometry of sitting.

The clouds move slowly, forming shadows that stretch across the bed in uneven patches, skipping over one part, sinking into another. I surrender to this movement.

The lights and shadows shift just enough to keep me watching. One thought slips in, another slips out—half-formed, not fully mine anymore. The tree by the house rustles with the wind. I can hear the leaves brushing against each other. It’s always been there, that sound, and I think I’d miss it if it ever stopped.

Sometimes I stay like this for long stretches, not doing anything, not needing to. But life doesn’t offer me the luxury of farniente—of simply being without needing to explain.

I think about the lecture I gave on propaganda—how language, repeated just right, can distort reality without breaking it. I remember standing there, speaking of manipulation and memory, but feeling far away from my own words, explaining a truth I’d only borrowed.

Why do I carry fragments with me like stones in my pocket? Why do I carry an ache for something I can’t name?

Sometimes I think of Selin, the protagonist in Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and how she moves through the book like someone caught in the act of becoming, always looking for the shape of her life in books, in conversations, in the way a sentence lands. There’s something familiar in the way she carries herself—not aimless, but suspended, as if waiting for the whole world to announce itself.

I, too, carry that ache—not for a person or a place exactly, but for a version of clarity that always stays just out of reach. We both trace meaning in the margins, hoping the right phrase or moment might unlock something unnamed. But it never quite does. And yet I keep looking, as if longing itself is the only real thing I know how to hold.

I blame the weather for making me feel extra nostalgic. It’s been indecisive lately. There’s no denying that I’m drawn to nostalgia like a moth to a flame. A sacred return to what once was. To a memory I haven’t made yet. A walk toward a moment I might never reach, but still carry the ache of having lost.

Mornings start cold, almost winter-like, then give way to soft warmth by late afternoon. Buds are just beginning to open, like they’re not fully convinced it’s time yet. And I get it. I’ve been waking up with that same kind of uncertainty. Not sad exactly—just... in between. As if I’m waiting for something to click into place, but I don’t know what, and I don’t know when.

People talk about transitions like they’re temporary. Like you move through them and then arrive somewhere new. But for me, it’s never been like that. I don’t feel on the edge of something. I feel caught in the middle of everything. Between tired and restless, between wanting more and fearing what more even means. Between doing things because I want to, and doing them because I should.

There’s no crisis. Nothing dramatic. Just this low voice of not quite. And it’s familiar. I think I’ve always lived here, in this in-betweeness. I function, I laugh, I get through the day. But underneath it all is this question I never manage to answer.

I think a lot of us feel this way, but we rarely say it out loud. Maybe because it sounds like complaining. Maybe because there’s no neat way to wrap it up.

But here it is. The weather is changing once again. And I’m still the same, stuck between seasons, between versions of myself, carrying fragments of nostalgia like pressed flowers in a book—incomplete, quietly fading.

In the Adolescence chapter, Ferrante delves into the intense, sometimes volatile teenage years of Elena and Lila, where the complexities of friendship, personal aspirations, and social expectations become even more pronounced. Both girls find themselves navigating new tensions in their relationship, facing choices that will shape their futures while contending with the constraints of their community in Naples.

As they enter adolescence, Elena and Lila’s paths diverge in striking ways, intensifying their friendship's inherent push-pull dynamic. Lila’s intelligence and wit, combined with her rebellious nature, are becoming more pronounced, drawing admiration and envy from Elena. Although Lila is fiercely intellectual, her path forward is increasingly limited by her family’s socioeconomic status and the traditional expectations placed upon women in their community. Despite her ambition to continue her education, her family ultimately decides it’s time for her to work, cutting short her formal schooling. Elena, on the other hand, is allowed to pursue her studies, an opportunity that sets her on a very different trajectory.

This difference in privilege heightens Elena’s awareness of their contrasting circumstances. Lila’s forced departure from school is a turning point, as it creates a growing sense of separation between them. While Elena is advancing in her studies, exploring literature and different aspects of intellectual life, Lila feels increasingly confined. However, this doesn’t diminish Lila’s influence on Elena, who constantly compares herself to her friend, measuring her own worth through the lens of Lila’s unfulfilled potential and raw intelligence. Throughout this period, both girls grapple with their emerging identities, shaped by their burgeoning sexuality and relationships with boys.

Lila, though constrained by her family’s expectations, catches the attention of local boys, most notably Marcello Solara, a member of the wealthy and powerful Solara family. Marcello’s interest in Lila is both flattering and repellent to her. Although he represents social mobility and security, she instinctively resists him, sensing the power dynamics and moral compromises that come with his attention. Lila’s interactions with Marcello underscore her desire for autonomy; she resists the idea of becoming someone’s possession, refusing to yield her independence even in the face of the limited opportunities available to her. Elena, meanwhile, finds herself entangled in a budding relationship with Nino Sarratore, a young man who, like her, is passionate about academics and is seeking a way out of the confines of their neighborhood. Nino’s intellectual pursuits make him attractive to Elena, offering her a glimpse of a life beyond her small world. However, this relationship is fraught with its own complexities. Nino’s intellectual ambitions and pursuit of freedom resonate with Elena, yet his evasive nature often leaves her feeling frustrated and uncertain. Her interactions with him reveal her internal struggle between her desire to escape her origins and her ties to her neighborhood and family.

Friendship, rivalry, and identity remain central themes in this chapter, as Elena and Lila constantly challenge each other. Despite their differences, they continue to inspire one another. For Elena, Lila is a symbol of untamed intellect and defiance against societal expectations. She perceives Lila’s innate brilliance as a force that challenges her own achievements, propelling her to work harder, study more diligently, and set her sights higher. Lila, too, looks to Elena as a friend who embodies the privileges and freedoms she cannot attain, admiring her educational pursuits while also resenting the circumstances that deny her similar opportunities. As their paths continue to diverge, adolescence brings them face to face with the pressures of conforming to traditional roles. For Lila, this manifests in her family’s expectation that she marries early, sacrificing her dreams and intelligence to secure a stable life.

The pressure to marry Marcello, however, does not sit well with her. Despite the allure of financial security, Lila rejects him, asserting her agency and refusing to submit to the expectations of her family and society. Rejecting Marcello symbolizes her desire to chart her path, even within the confines of her circumstances, and reinforces her defiant nature. Elena, on the other hand, is left to grapple with a different set of expectations and fears. She feels the weight of her family’s sacrifices for her education and the hopes they pin on her success. However, the social divide that education creates between her and Lila makes her question the value of her achievements.

This conflict—the sense of both wanting to transcend her origins and feeling guilt for distancing herself from her closest friend and her roots—leaves her in a state of internal dissonance. In Adolescence, Ferrante masterfully portrays the turbulent, formative years of Elena and Lila’s friendship. The chapter captures how their lives become a study of contrasts, shaped by gender roles, economic limitations, and personal ambitions. Their relationship continues to be marked by admiration, rivalry, and a fierce loyalty, encapsulating the essence of a friendship that will shape their lives in profound ways, even as it drives them down increasingly separate paths.

The novel opens with an adult Elena receiving news of Lila’s sudden and deliberate disappearance. Lila has erased all traces of her existence, an act that profoundly affects Elena and drives her to recount their long, complicated history. This revelation becomes the catalyst for Elena’s narrative, taking us back to their shared childhood in a poor neighborhood in Naples.

The Prologue: Lila's Disappearance

The prologue begins with Elena Greco, now an aging writer, discovering from Lila's son that Lila has disappeared without a trace. This is no ordinary vanishing—Lila has meticulously erased every physical remnant of her life, from personal belongings to family photos, leaving no evidence that she ever existed (kinda cool don’t you agree?). Elena, both angered and fascinated by Lila’s final act of defiance, chooses to retaliate in her own way. She starts writing down their shared story in an attempt to immortalize Lila in words. From the outset, Ferrante establishes the novel's primary themes: the elusiveness of identity and memory, the power struggle within friendship, and the act of storytelling itself. Lila’s erasure is a form of rebellion, as well as a reflection of her deeply enigmatic personality. By documenting their history, Elena seeks to reassert control over her narrative and perhaps even over Lila, who has always held a dominant presence in her life.

Childhood and the Naples Neighborhood

The narrative then shifts to their early childhood in 1950s Naples, a tough, working-class neighborhood where violence, poverty, and hardship are part of everyday life. Ferrante paints a vivid picture of this small, insular world, where families are tightly knit but often at odds, and where children inherit the resentments and struggles of their parents. Elena and Lila grow up as neighbors, and from their earliest encounters, it’s clear that Lila is a force to be reckoned with. Even as a child, she is clever, audacious, and rebellious, with a sharp mind and a fierce will. Elena, on the other hand, is quieter and more introspective, but she is immediately drawn to Lila’s brilliance and daring. Despite their differences, the two girls form a close, if competitive, friendship that will shape the course of their lives.

Ferrante masterfully captures the complex emotions of childhood: the intense curiosity, the desire for approval, and the simultaneous love and jealousy that often define close friendships. Elena is both inspired and intimidated by Lila’s intelligence and fearlessness. This dynamic of admiration mixed with rivalry will become a central aspect of their relationship as the story progresses.

The Dolls and the Emergence of Power Dynamics

A key event in the childhood chapter is the incident with the dolls, which serves as a powerful metaphor for the larger themes of the novel. Lila and Elena each have a beloved doll—Tina for Lila and Nu for Elena. One day, the dolls disappear, and Lila becomes convinced that they have been thrown into the cellar by Don Achille, a terrifying figure in their neighborhood who represents a kind of monstrous adult authority in the girls' eyes. Lila’s insistence on confronting Don Achille reflects her fearless nature, while Elena, despite her fear, follows her. This moment marks a turning point in their friendship, establishing Lila as the leader and Elena as the follower. The dolls symbolize the fragility of childhood innocence and the loss of control that the girls feel in their harsh environment. When Don Achille compensates them for the loss of the dolls by giving them money, it also introduces the idea that power—whether in the form of money or authority—plays a significant role in their world.

The doll incident also hints at a darker, more dangerous undercurrent in the story, as the girls begin to realize that their neighborhood is not just a place of childhood games but also of real threats and violence. The encounter with Don Achille is their first exposure to the adult world, a world governed by power, fear, and unspoken rules.

Another crucial element of the childhood chapter is the early display of Lila’s extraordinary intellect. Even without formal education, Lila teaches herself to read and write, mastering these skills with remarkable speed. She quickly surpasses Elena academically, which both impresses and unsettles her friend. Lila’s ambition is boundless; she is not content to remain confined by the limitations of their neighborhood or their social class. However, Lila’s brilliance also causes friction with the adults in her life, particularly the teachers and her own family, who do not know how to handle a girl with such intellect. While Elena’s family supports her education, Lila’s family discourages her, expecting her to conform to the traditional roles of women in their society. This disparity in their family environments will have lasting consequences for both girls as they grow older.

The Foundation of a Complex Friendship

By the end of the childhood chapter, the foundation of Elena and Lila’s relationship is firmly established. Their bond is intense, but it is also fraught with complexities. Lila’s dominance and Elena’s admiration create a dynamic where Elena constantly measures herself against her friend, feeling both inspired and inadequate. Yet, it is clear that neither girl could exist in quite the same way without the other; their friendship is both a source of strength and a form of confinement. In this opening section, Ferrante introduces the themes that will resonate throughout the entire series: the fluidity of identity, the constraints of gender and class, and the profound, often painful impact of friendship.

Through Elena’s eyes, we begin to see how Lila’s disappearance is not just a physical vanishing, but also a symbolic act that forces Elena—and by extension, the reader—to confront the impermanence of memory and the elusive nature of selfhood.

The idea of starting a book club was honestly never on my mind because I have commitment issues and thought probably I will give it up before I have even started. BUT when it comes to Ferrante, I would do anything.

I am excited to announce the launch of the Neapolitan pages, a what-I-think-is-a-cool-name of a book club dedicated to read and explore My Brilliant Friend series by Elena Ferrante.

This quartet, set in the complex world of mid-20^th century Naples, explores friendship, identity, and the power dynamics of love, ambition, and class-all through the lens of two protagonists, Elena and Lila.

Here’s how the book club will work:

To make this experience interactive and seamless, I will be using both substack and fable to keep everyone updated and engaged. Here’s a breakdown of how we’ll use each platform:

Substack:

I will share weekly newsletter updates here, providing chapter summaries and key discussion points. Think of this as your guide to each phase of the books, where we’ll dive deeper into the major themes and characters.

Expect reflection prompts, recommendations for further reading, and summaries of our on going conversations, ensuring everyone stays on the same page (literally and figuratively!).

Fable:

We will use the fable app to hold real-time discussions as we read, chapter by chapter. You can share your thoughts, favorite passages, and questions as you read, interacting with other members in real time.

Fable also allows for in-app reading, meaning you can highlight sections and leave comments directly within the text.

There will also be live chats and discussions, polls, and even quizzes to keep things fun and dynamic.

I can’t wait to uncover the layers of My Brilliant Friend series, sharing thoughts and reflections as we move through each novels. Whether you are new to Ferrante or revisiting these stories, this book club is a space for all to connect, discuss, and experience Naples, friendship, and the search for self like never before.

Looking forward to reading with you all!

Join the bookclub via this link:

https://fable.co/club/the-neapolitan-pages-with-buthaina-554954650931?invite=a2e1a1c3-c807-477d-892b-5432e1ecda46&referralID=by5uaemfvi

1. I have a complicated relationship with writing. It’s a fuis moi je te suis, suis moi je te fuis kind of relationship. If I try to mold it, to force words into the lines of a page, they resist. They twist and writhe until they slip through my grasp, leaving me staring at a blank page. If I ignore it, words emerge as they are -wild, fierce, sometimes beautiful, sometimes sharp-edged and jagged. But no matter what, I always find myself longing to write, to bury myself in a page, and let the words come as they are, not as I want them to be.

   This newsletter is going to be exactly that. A practice of letting loose (I should do that more often), letting words flow naturally, just as August air drifts freely.

2. August of this year feels different in a way I don’t recognize but love. It carries a certain finality, a quiet surrender to the cycle of time. The days are still warm but the light begins to soften, tinged with a golden hue that whispers change is inevitable. The nights stretch out like a farewell, each one a little longer, a little cooler.

   I feel like time is slipping through my fingers but I am not angry about it. These last days of August feel like the last pages of a book that I am unwilling to let go of but know I should. They are beautiful and haunting, a reminder that nothing lasts forever. I love this subtle but relentless change in nature, seasons seem to give way gently to one another, without me noticing.

3. I used the word fragments in the title because Queen Ferrante used it and it sounds way cooler in Italian, frantumaglia. Frantumaglia is the title of one of her nonfiction books that I admire so much where she simply writes to answer complex questions sent by publishers (she doesn’t show up for interviews but rather answers by correspondence, how cool is that). The word was initially used by her mother to describe when she “was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart”. La frantumaglia is a jumble of fragments, as Ferrante would describe. She has a beautiful passage that I can’t get enough of and probably the reason why I would use fragments instead of bits or pieces or notes:

  She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia… [it] depressed her. Sometimes it made her dizzy, sometimes it made her mouth taste like iron. It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in muddy water of the brain. The frantumaglia was mysterious, it provoked mysterious actions, it was the source of all suffering not traceable to a single obvious cause. When she was no longer young, the frantumaglia woke her in the middle of the night, led her to talk to herself and then feel ashamed, suggested some indecipherable tune to sing under her breath that soon faded into a sigh.

A word of disquiet not otherwise definable. Name an author who could write this. I will wait. I think I do have a frantumaglia inside me too, maybe we all do at a certain point in our lives. Maybe I don’t have a great connection with my fragments, so writing is hard at times. Ferrante’s frantumaglia is very recurrent in one of her novels The Days of Abandonment where Olga, the protagonist, faces an emotional breakdown after her husband leaves her, prompting her to confront her own identity. Olga reminds me of Sartre’s Nausea, or his character’s Nausea, Roquentin. The latter experiences episodes of being in and out of nausea, a strong sentiment that there is absolutely no reason to live. Roquentin sees life through fragments of randomness and pointlessness, just like Olga. They both experience profound isolation, rage, despair, and vulnerability, quintessential components of la frantumaglia. This existential angst that follows both writers and both characters, is following me too. Or am I reading existential novels to tell myself about what is happening and why, to have control over what is happening and why.

I write passages like this and then question their whole nature. Imposter syndrome never ever helps. Who the fuck would read such nonsense. People are busy writing good stuff. It’s too hard for me to be at peace. I seek chaos where there isn’t any. I should go back to Nausea, maybe it will help the nauseating feelings.

4. I write because I feel too much of something, so much that I need to put it elsewhere.

5. Why everything that I have ever wanted to write is already written and written way better. What’s the point of…me if everything I want to write about other people are writing about them too. Many times I think I have a revolutionary completely new idea…that I find later on existing, described, and put in a better way than I would ever do. What need of me? I try to quiet this voice because I firmly believe we are all living in a society that is more connected than ever and inevitably we will come up with the same ideas. But what is unique is the voice. Your writing voice is so unique, to you only.  

6. Can I become a reader of my work? Almost like a reader who is not the author. It must be a complex and layered experience. A passionate writer always needs an audience of at least one reader. I would be lying if I said I don’t care about whether I am being read or not because writing is meant for others to read.

   Ferrante again wrote something that I think about often:

   Real books take their own path and no longer belong to me

   In a letter sent to her editor, Sandra Ozzola, she distinguishes between imagined books and real books. Imagined booked are those she’s written. Real books are those published and sent to readers. How can you be detached from something that almost defines you? I know it has to do with the interpretation and horizon of expectations¹. Put simply, the intentions and personal context of the writer shouldn’t influence the interpretation of the text. In Death of the Author, Roland Barthes argues that once a work is created, the author’s role is effectively finished, and the meaning of the text is determined by the readers, not the author. This idea basically shifts the focus from the author’s intentions to the text itself and its interaction with the reader, emphasizing that texts have multiple and layered meanings that are created through the act of reading. Sometimes it’s hard for me de detach the author from the work. almost every book I have read is because I was interested in the author, what influenced them, what type of music they liked, and their favorite writing hours. There are also writers like Amélie Nothomb who put clues in her writings for her readers to find or detect. They can’t do so if they don’t have the voice of the author within them.

   

7. I binge-watched Emily in Paris last week. I love the show because it’s like taking a vacation without leaving my couch. Mindy, Emily’s best friend is my favorite character. She said something that made me pause the show, grab my phone, open the notes app, and write THE quote that will change my life:

   try to live the question instead of always trying to find the right answer.

   This will be my little reminder to take it easy. and note to self: watch more cliché shows, you will end up with great wisdom.

8. I deleted my Instagram and TikTok because I was being sucked into the void of doom scrolling and scrolling, for hours. The decision came to me after feeling a hollow void within me. The world outside my screen faded into a foggy background. I felt disconnected from reality with no motivation and no creativity. I knew I had to change something. My mother was right, it was the damn phone after all.

   I consume content to be inspired, to create something authentic. But this online pursuit of authenticity became a performance, an endless cycle of curating, comparing, and projecting an image that doesn’t fully match who I am. It feels like I am always chasing validation, striving for a genuine connection, yet the more I try to be seen, the more invisible I feel. The more I try to show my true self, the further I drift from it.

   I read something, not entirely sure whether I heard it or read it, the other day that goes in the line of “you don’t have to share your whole self to be authentic, it’s ok to keep parts of yourself because it is not about the amount you give, it’s that you give something real.” It’s very simple and almost common knowledge yet I was shocked as if I was receiving the information for the first time. I realized that there will never be an end to this quest of giving something real online but rather the way I should approach it and…stop overthinking about it.

   In the process of doing so, and following a demure mantra, I started listening to Brat, by Charli xcx. Did I become obsessed? Did I go down the rabbit hole and frantically listen to all of her songs, watch every video on the Charli xcx lore? What! Do you think I am basic? Of course I did. And you know what? I think, bear with me, I came up with a conclusion: having an online presence is just like Charli’s music. Good question! How? Take my hand, close your eyes (not really, but you get the metaphor), and let’s combine these two.

   Who I am online is not who I am in real life. I get confused when this version of me is not similar to the version I have created online. That’s because I am dragged into the narrative of to be authentic online, I have to replicate the real self, that is, the version of me in real life, to be exactly similar to the online self, that is, the one I have created in the virtual platforms. Sometimes, I become unhinged online while sipping a cup of tea on a very calm beautiful afternoon. I watch women I follow on my socials become unhinged and wild. I got the chance some of them in real life and you know what? They are just women who have created a little corner for themselves on their phones!! Charli’s music describes that perfectly, especially her latest album, Brat.

   Brat is all about being your unapologetic self. You can be a party girl who is bold, flashy with a slightly mischievous attitude and simultaneously strive for genuine deep connections. You can create the perfect Instagram grid with the most aesthetic posts and be vulnerable and longing for something deeper while navigating life.  The point is, we are all complex human beings with desires and melancholia and ambitions. We are chaotic in the most beautiful way because these emotions among others are what make every experience unique to us and valuable. The beauty of being is not in creating a perfect life, online or else, the beauty of being lies exactly in this complexity -in the way we can feel hope and despair in the same breath, in the way we listen to music and cry and read books and giggle. It is in the way I read a quote or a passage from a book and produce nonsense of a newsletter that means absolutely the world to me.

1 The horizon of expectations is a concept from literary theory that is associated with Robert Jauss Hans and reception theory. it refers to the set of cultural norms, values, expectations, and assumptions that a reader brings to a text based on their historical and cultural context. over time, as cultural contexts shift, the horizon of expectations evolves, changing how texts are understood by different generations.

The head of the department must be thrilled now that I have sent the documents a day before the deadlines. Deadlines remind me that time waits for no one while bringing out the best of me. I hate deadlines but without them, I am unfunctional. I also hate it when I am not writing. I feel like I am losing parts of myself. I feel like I am locked out of the house in the middle of a cold night and I can’t find my keys. When I’m not writing, I am growing away from myself.

I don’t know how or when this relationship deteriorated. The imposter syndrome doesn’t help. It’s always after me, swaying me to give up because I am never going to be read and I am never going to be good enough. I am writing this particular letter to try to understand: Do I write to escape? Or to comfort myself? Maybe both? neither? I don’t know.

At first I thought it was a fleeting phase because it happened before. I’m not all the time inspired to write but when inspiration and creativity strike, I seize the moment and act on it. So I waited for it to be back again. I went with life commitments and teaching and adulting and thinking about the future and scenarios that would probably just stay in my head and scrolling on Instagram. Too busy scrolling to notice what’s inside my head. Too busy to notice that the strike of inspiration is not any nearer. I didn’t write reflections on 2023 and A LOT has happened during this year. I didn’t write on turning 31 and if you know me you know that I am the type who will write about the smallest inconveniences because what else would I do?

I am not reading much either. When I am reading, I’m always drifting towards doing something else. I’m reading My Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and it’s not doing much for me. Don’t get me wrong, I like Didion’s ability to write from a place of an observer. She writes about pain and grief not as feelings she has experienced. She writes about pain and grief as if they are being experienced by someone else. I wish I could do that. The effortless ability to engage with a book has become a challenge. Everything that I have ever loved and enjoyed became a challenge. A task.

The process of creating became so haunting and agonizing for me. I used to love taking pictures and writing long captions on books or whatever topic and reflecting on life moments and sharing them without thinking much about it, without thinking about the content creation. Now I can’t do anything because all I have in mind is content and content must be good. A task that must be perfect. Now all I think about is fitting into Instagram’s algorithm. I don’t know when or how I started thinking this way. Briana has written a wonderful piece here on self-promotion and creating art and social media and the self. I resonated so much with what she said:

Everything I was creating lived inside these perfect little squares, or rather 4:5 rectangles. The problem is I wasn’t creating art freely and then shoving it into the little rectangles, I was making art for the rectangle, for the prospect of people in the rectangle space to view it.

When does one break character? How can one escape the algorithm’s game, the trap it has created that sucks creativity out of you and leaves you empty, comparing yourself to other squares and consuming more than creating and getting overwhelmed by the whole process.  

I became trapped in others’ points of view, perceptions, and ideas that I forgot how to listen to the voice from within. I compare myself to others more, and when I do, I feel sharp, unsettling dissatisfaction with who I am. I know this leads to nowhere, but it’s hard sometimes to avoid it. I feel like my only job now is to judge myself based on standards people I don’t know set. And the only way to sort of get out of this circle is to reminisce on who I was and how I used to do things. A version of myself that was not tinkered with perfectionism, overthinking, and social media.

I’m writing this letter with the anxiety of being unable to go forward. Overthinking and anxiety and fear are a disease that lurks into my skin, paralyzing the most random thoughts, leaving me almost empty and locked in my head. It’s a fucking curse to feel everything and to see everything and sense everything and to want to write about everything. Sometimes I feel like I am a gate and all these sensations, contemplations, and thoughts go through me, sweeping me by their mighty currents and I can’t stop their flow.

When will the shadow of perfectionism leave me alone?

Not finding pleasure in what I used to love is pulling me into infinite chaos. Writing and reading became a hustle and I struggle to write my sentences because they look empty, shallow. Do they even make sense? Will I ever stop tormenting myself? Losing friends does not help because no one prepares you when a friendship ends, one that meant something to you. No one tells you that you will still think about that person every day and the way the friendship ended eliminated all roads to make amends, ever. It’s hard to miss someone so much yet also know that reconciliation is not an option. And even if it was the friendship would never be the same. it feels like grieving a death.

Am I in a state of grief?

I am writing, or trying to, from this place to turn whatever I feel into something tangible. To let these words carry some of the heaviness inside me. I am writing this letter to let go of the perfectionist I have become. I am writing from this place because I am my witness and these pages will stay here to remind me that life is not linear. It never was and it never will be. It’s chaotic and messy and I will be too, chaotic and messy and melancholic and nostalgic and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In A Horse at Night, On Writing, Amina Cain wrote something so trivial, so obvious and I am kind of angry because I have never asked myself this before. She writes: “Is a short story, or a novel, or a work of art, or a film meant to be perfect? Is it even possible? Do we write in order to create perfect things? I don’t.”

Amina Cain doesn’t write to create something perfect. why the hell should I?

 To be honest, I never thought I’d live to see terms like genocide and ethnic cleansing used outside history books in the most repugnant ways. It is dismaying for me to bear witness to the brutality of colonialism in Palestine. As an Algerian, I can’t help but think about my people who endured 132 years of colonialism, of unjustified cruelty and barbarism that went without any media coverage, without anyone to support or help.

 I teach Western Civilization and it is bothering me, as an intellectual, to stand in this idolized ‘middle’ that is often synonymous with rationality and scientific integrity. It is bothering me to lecture my undergrads that neutrality, in these pivotal times, is mandatory for critical thinking and objectivity. I have consistently avoided adopting the somewhat heroic attitude that experts on Western civilization tend to take. More than ever, I’m more skeptical about the accuracy of their claims.

It bothers me to lecture about how civilized the West is and how we should take them as idols of democracy, of freedom of speech, of human rights, of ethics, and morality. In fact, they are the masters of these concepts. Theoretically speaking and only when it serves them. Them, not us.   

 Things get even more intricate when you consider that I am not just writing about any people but specifically about Palestinians, who, in the eyes of Western media, are savages, inhumane, unworthy of life. And so is anyone who is supportive of their case.

Am I going to lie to my undergrads? Am I going to explain the genocide and what is happening in Gaza according to empirical, historical, and social scientific methodologies, and inscribing the events within continuous historical narratives? The answer is no.

Because the narrative has always been manipulated. It is being manipulated right before our eyes.

 Because bearing witness is not only a matter of speaking out against silencings. It is accountable listening. It is a form of historical memory. It is a mode of subaltern resistance and agency.

So I will gladly teach Western Civilization.

 I was asked to teach the Western values, their philosophy, and their way of life. I was asked to explain the early settlement, their heroism, glorious campaigns, and amazing tales of moral courage and military competence. But what about the chapters on expulsion, colonization, massacres, rape, destruction, and the burning of villages.

What about the hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots"? Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with Palestine but not with Ukraine. What about these double standards unfolding right before our eyes?

I will gladly teach Western Civilization.

Western nations have expanded, conquered, colonized, and tainted every other civilization that is not theirs. The West is attempting, and will continue to attempt, to sustain its preeminent position and defend its interests by defining those interests as the interests of the "world community." That phrase has become the euphemistic collective noun to give global legitimacy to genocides and abuse of power. What is happening right at this moment in Gaza is proof of that.

 What makes that possible? The two-world image they have created, preached and indoctrinated for over four hundred years. The in-group vs the Other. The Us vs Them, Our civilization vs other barbarians. The center vs the periphery. Good vs evil. Light vs darkness. The West and the rest.

To push this global legitimacy even further and to normalize genocides, they use terms like tension between two sides instead of colonization. They use complicated conflicts instead of apartheid. They use terrorism instead of ethnic cleansing.

The US strongly supported the Israeli raid and accepted it as justified self-defense.  Arab leaders expressed deep concerns; others said nothing. The question is still raised: Why don't the United States and the "international community" (that is, the West) react to the outrageous behavior of Israel and its violations of U.N. resolutions?

I still cannot, for the life of me, fathom how a conscious person sees children dying, pregnant women under rubble, and still calls it a conflict, a complex issue. Or because they carry an Arab identity, they are unworthy of life?

The West has failed humanity, and I will gladly teach that.

One thing I tell my undergrads when I start my lectures is to never be passive receivers of ‘facts’. I always ask them to not just nod yes to everything and to always use their voice. I ask my students to do their own research and understand what is happening from their perspective. I say the same to all of my friends and online friends in these dark times. Your voice is important for major shifts. It’s already influencing the media.

Your voice is power. And remember bearing witness is speaking out against silencings. Bearing witness is a form of historical memory. Bearing witness is a mode of subaltern resistance and agency.

The West is terrified of the power of unity, the power of nations coming together as one body. That’s why they keep spreading propaganda, that’s why they cut off Gaza from all means of communication, that’s why they are boosting the discounts on corporations you’re boycotting.

All because of your voice, remember that.

I am rooted, but  I flow.
Virginia Woolf, the Waves. 

I should have gone, too, and stayed a nomad, once and forever, until … Now, maybe it’s too late. Deserts are made to be crossed, not to be buried in. scrutinizing the infinite has never made it move. The infinite does not come to you. you have to go to it to save yourself. Otherwise, it roots you where you are and suffocates you.
Malika Mokeddem, The Forbidden Woman. 

All families invent their parents and children, give each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. 
Edward Said.

I am always writing with an accent.
Rosi Braidotti, Writing as a Nomadic Subject. 

Growing up away from my grandparents’ house meant driving a total of eight hours every weekend to visit. My father drove the same stretch of rural highway so many thousands of times you stop seeing it: kilometer markers and exit signs, signs that declare we are in the territory of roaming camels, the constant appearance of radio antennas yawning in and out of heat fogs. The scenery becomes more desolate; a dramatic change as we journey from lush green landscape to vast expanses of sand and rocky outcrops. Going through the dusty gravel road nauseated me. I preferred to lie down in the car, sandwiched between my brother and my sister. Eyes on the partially rolled down window, observing the change in the once-brilliant blue sky that is now taking a yellowish tint as dust and sand particles become suspended in the air.

My grandparent’s house was always filled with people. Not just my father and his seven siblings, each with their spouses and collection of children, but also people unrelated to us, visitors, my uncles’ friends and their kids. I always thought how interesting it is that I am related to this many people I hardly know at all. I couldn’t name all of my cousins even if I tried.

Three things excited me most when at my grandparents’: baby goats, grandmother’s stories, and the rugs she made, or rather the way she made them. My grandmother loved to make her own rugs. A special ritual unfolded each time she prepared to embark on the traditional art of rug-making. My grandmother is a revered matriarch, and her rituals were steeped in tradition. She would rise before the sun on the morning of rug creation, her room, adorned with colorful textiles and intricate tapestries, felt like a sanctuary of Algerian culture. The air was heavy with the scent of incense and the faint aroma of brewed mint tea.

 My grandma’s oversized beige dress, worn out and cherished, was a central element of her ritual. The dress was filled with little black flowery patterns, each one a statement to the countless hours spent crafting rugs and blankets for her children. The fabric had been kissed by the desert winds, sun-bleached, softened by years of use. It was special to her, you can feel it. she believed the dress held a piece of her ancestors, the generation of women who had come before her, and wearing it was like inviting them to join her in her creative journey.

Her materials are in front of her. She had a vision for the rug that would blend the vibrant colors of the desert and the intricate patterns she learned over the years. She started with a blank canvas –a sturdy loom made of wood and iron. This loom was a faithful companion of hers, standing in her humble house like an old friend. Talking to her behind bars of fiber felt like talking with a sacred person. She carefully selected the wool for her rug. The wool was rich and varied in color, from earthly browns to deep reds and vibrant blues. With a practiced hand, she spun the wool into long, thin threads, ensuring they were of uniform thickness. This would be the foundation of her rug. As she worked, the rhythm of her spinning wheel was like a heartbeat, a steady and comforting presence in her small workshop. She attached the threads to the top and bottom beams, creating a taut horizontal canvas. The loom resembled an intricate web, a structure that would hold her design. She started with boarders, carefully knotting each thread into place, working row by row. One knot at a time, her fingers danced with precision. Where the lines and shapes start and end are based solely on instinct, a knowledge given to her by her mother and grandmother. The colors blended harmoniously as the patterns told stories of her past, of all the places she had been and the people she had met. The desert winds and the brilliant Algerian sun all found their place in her rug. I observed her carefully, diligently, silently.

Grandmother’s popular stories revolved around the time they were nomads, Granddad and her, moving from one place to another, riding across the desert, traveling with herds of cattle and goats. As she wove, she would begin to share her stories, tales passed down through generations, a living tapestry of her people’s history and culture. Her voice was a melodic river, carrying with it the wisdom that came from a lifetime of experience. With every knot she tied, and every stitch she made, her words flowed like poetry, filling the room with a sense of wonder.

But my questions seem to interrupt this state of being, bringing her back, with every word I utter, to a reality she doesn’t seem to accept or like. “If you moved around so often, then where are we from? What is our origin?” I asked Grandmother. This question rubbed her the wrong way, touched a nerve deep within her heart. As my words hung in the air, her face tightened, and her eyes flashed with fury. With a voice that quivered with both anger and sorrow, she replied: “child, our origins are woven into the very fabric of this desert. We are the children of sand and wind, born from the ancient tribes that have roamed dunes for generations beyond counting, our roots run deep, deeper than the wells we dig, our heritage is etched in the lines of our hands and our stories are whispered in the desert’s silence. We don’t belong to a specific place, that’s selfish, we belong to the very essence of movement and adaptation. We don’t possess the land, it possesses us. It cradles us in its ever-changing embrace, and we, in turn, become part of it, part of its grains of sand that shift and scatter with the wind.”

At that time, her answer didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t decide if I felt sad or angry or confused. Why my friends could talk about their genealogy, how they can trace their family tree back to many generations, why they have written records of their ancestors and I don’t. I can’t do that because there are no written records dating back to even one generation. Everything is carried orally, which seems to fade away with time. Is this the result of being born to a people whose culture isn’t obsessed with writing? That is the most nonsensical bullshit of an answer. I know it is the result of belonging to a people ravaged by colonialism where the French kept a record of themselves in the exotic Sahara to entertain their white souls, destroying records and distorting the image of a people who refuse to stay in any community. The whole thing made me want to scream and cry but I don’t want her to notice. I bite the inside of my cheek instead.

The visits to my grandparents diminished over the years, but not my interest in knowing my origins, where I belonged. The image of my grandmother making rugs gilded my memory like those patterns she made on those rugs. Her words haunted me and I don’t know why I became fixated on the idea of a boarded home, a physical, non-changeable place one can return to. I subscribed to the literature of homelessness and exile and belonging, but nothing seemed to figure out my thorny state of unbelonging. On the contrary, it made it worse. Nomadism, the thing I have been intentionally avoiding, runs in my blood. Nomadism is not a symptom of psychic displacement as experienced by the exiled and migrant subjects who chose a place and made it their home. Nomads distribute themselves across open space, rather than dividing up land for settlement purposes. It runs in my blood.

As a granddaughter of nomads, belonging and home, slipped away from me and refused to anchor because they are anchored to nothing. What is home then? Do I carry a map inside myself to guide me home or is home itself carried within me? I looked for home, for belonging in other places, people, and feelings yet it persistently perpetuated the illusion of the return. Where to go? My grandmother did not suffer from homelessness. She suffered from the attachment to a single land. My questions brought her to this reality, interrupting her time-travel through rug-making to other worlds, border-less frontier. She assigned each fiber with a story and tucked it carefully, creating a mosaic of life’s experiences, a richly textured Bedouin carpet carefully hand-sewn with the fine threads of memory.

Why can’t I be like grandmother? Why am I resisting my faith? Belonging is not in my blood… My mother says I tend to overcomplicate things. Maybe I do. Maybe that’s why I change my home décor so often. Seeing the sofa in the same place makes me anxious. Are these concepts that I cling to so much nothing but mere fictions that one can construct and deconstruct? The idea seemed appealing. Soothing. It became more appealing when I read the works of the Algerian writer Malika Mokeddem.

Malika is one of those writers whose characters struggle to find a place in new surroundings and can’t readjust to their original place. Most of her female characters share the same pattern: a crisis that arises from a detachment that they have to maintain between themselves and their place of origin, the motherland. Besides their nomadic characters and imagery, Mokeddem’s novels demonstrate a language usage that is a kind of “nomadism or journey into language”. Through this journey into language, she pays homage to her nomadic ancestors by which she means a continuity of history and community invoked in the storytelling tradition of her ancestors who kept their tribal identities through narration. She created multiple places and identities through her characters, a state of in-betweenness that permits her to adapt wherever she goes. She tells Yoland Helm in an interview:

 Cet entre-deux m’a saisie tellement tôt que j’ai cette identité mêlée. Vraiment, on ne peut pas me scinder en deux. Il n’y a pas une couche algérienne, une couche française. Ça fait partie de moi ; je suis une Algérienne francophone. […] Je suis en adéquation avec moi-même, c’est-à-dire que je suis les deux à la fois: pas deux moitiés juxtaposées ou accolées mais c’est intimement imbriqué en moi.

[This in-betweenness has seized me so early that I have this mixed identity. Actually, you cannot split me into two. There is not an Algerian layer, a French layer. It is part of me; I am a francophone Algerian. […] I am in harmony with myself; i.e. I am both at the same time: not two juxtaposed or contiguous halves but two intimately intertwined parts].

I have never thought about it this way. Partially because my problem isn’t an oscillation between a mother-country and another land. My problem is less complex and more chaotic, emblematical of the deleuzo-gattarian rhizomatic thinking. This botanical term, the rhizome, refers to a bulb with horizontal roots and shoots that connect it with other bulbs. Deleuze and Guattari use it as an alternative to the root metaphor of identity. The rhizome, in their view “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills”. The rhizome resists chronology, “favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation”. This means that rhizomatic thinking deterritorializes any ties between identity and territory. This means all my attempts in trying to find an origin as in a specific place, a place of belonging is a territory doomed in nothingness. It is in my blood.

What is then, to embrace a nomadic identity, to be detached from everything and nothing? Nomads possess a sense of spatial mobility that offers them the assurance of several portable homes, an elevated sense of consciousness. This means the idea of a permanent origin can only be conceived in terms of constant negotiation and displacement. Belonging becomes to borrow Bakhtin's word, a chronotope in which both space and time are reduced to a degree zero, allowing it to be replaced by multiple places, multiple homes, wherever that is. In other words, the concept of home loses its relevance and becomes a mental invention. As Stuart Hall puts it:

“Identity has many imagined “homes” […]; it has many different ways of “being at home” – since it conceives of individuals as capable of drawing on different maps of meaning and locating them in different geographies at one and the same time – but it is not tied to one, particular place.”

As daughter of the desert, the granddaughter of Bedouin nomads, belonging isn’t in my blood but rather synonymous with emptying out the self in an exuberantly discontinuous way. Child of sand and wind. Child of the desert, a multi-layered topography that doesn’t permit itself to be the sign of rootedness but it permits and encourages a wide variety of itineraries of discovery. Discoveries that I can only conquer through writing, through inhabiting language, out-maneuvering it but never controlling it. Being nomadic is not as glamorous as it may sound, it’s history tattooed on my body. One may be empowered and adorned by it, or be scarred and wounded by it.

First of all, it’s been a hot minute! I haven’t sent a letter in months. I have missed it so much. To be honest, I didn’t know how to come back or what to write. I was a bit busy with life that I forgot how to look inward. When I read All About Love by bell hooks, words started to surface again. I feel like this letter in particular forced itself on me as words kept coming in waves. I really want to send letters again. Maybe I will start sending these twice a month then will see how things will go.

With that said, I hope you all are doing great. Sending you much love.

I didn’t grow up wanting to love and be loved. The idea irked me to the bones and set my nerves ablaze with an unsettling uneasiness. I was taught as a teenage girl –the era where one usually embarks on new life chapters and where the concept of love is all very new and fascinating– that love only exists in fictional realms and if it ever existed, it is only for grownups. I was taught that feeling affection for somebody before marriage would bring shame and embarrassment to not only myself but to the whole family. It would even bring shame to my ancestors. I didn’t have the right to ask what love is. I thought of it as something unnatural. The idea of love frightened me. I feared love but I was curious to know it. But I feared it more than I was curious. I was taught that love is always related to some sense of secrecy. I hated secrets. Love only meant one thing in my culture: inability to show affection because it is related to weakness, shame, and disgrace. It is limited, dominated, and deemphasized for the benefit of family/society.  Love is inextricably linked to the discourse of patriarchy.

The contrast on TV and magazines was blatant. Loving households, parents who don’t shy away from showing affection to their kids, and romantic relationships were something normal and public (I learned later in life that popular culture narratives tend to be either ideal or unrealistic but imagine the younger me watching and believing every single thing. it blew my mind such a thing was possible). In the Arab culture, although love is a central theme in many outlets such as Egyptian cinema, it is portrayed as something unattainable or one must suffer to earn it. Oftentimes, stories of failed love marriages were a lesson, an instructive tale of the dangers of marrying for love. Such narratives are often constructed as a tension between an individual choice of marriage partner, in other words, marrying for love, or an arranged marriage that is more or less patriarchally controlled.

The tension between the two forms of love, which often manifests as a foreign versus local discourse, shaped my view on love. I was bombarded with external cultural narratives and discourses of love and romantic relationships due to globalization and ubiquitous transnational mass media. While in my culture, love is suffocated and shocked by social pressures. Love is transformed into something sectarian. As a young girl, I was sent contradictory and confusing messages. I didn’t have internet back in the day. I had to carry many questions instead of vomiting them on Google. It bloated my mind. It confused me.

To be honest, I didn’t even know what love is. In school, debates were held about whether one should marry for love, and only for love, while others insisted that this was a faulty basis, a sin and only marrying is what’s right. At that age, all I had to worry about is getting good grades and being a good girl because that will increase my chances later in life of finding love. “You will grow up and have enough of that” my mother used to say. In the mind of the younger me, love was a tiring task. There was a huge fuss surrounding it yet so little is known about it. In my culture, marriage is the only place where love is real, where love can exist. Other than this realm of holy matrimony, love, among other feelings, had to be swooped under the carpet and there it should stay, buried under.

On closer inspection, this is not surprising. Taking into account the larger Arab World, emotions and the role of emotions have generally been ignored and love is often neglected by scholars as a topic of inquiry. Little or nothing has been said about love, romance, and passion even though these concepts seem to saturate the Arab and North African society for centuries. The representation of love itself is paradoxical, let alone its definition and its presence. Love also means different things for men and women. Men have to be brave and show no vulnerability or weakness. they have to live up to a certain image where there is no internal conflict but only external rivalry. Women have to be soft and the source of affection, taming the rage inside men. Certainly, things are changing, but the weight of tradition persists, impacting not just one, but generations to come. This stigma that love evokes arises from many cultural constrictions. This includes emphasizing compatible religious and social backgrounds and even geographic and political backgrounds over personal desires and feelings or individual choices.

 Because we don’t know what love is, because we don’t learn about love at an early age, we grow up desiring it, seeking it, and accepting it in all its forms, even the most abusive ones. because we don’t know what love is, because we are not aware of its existence within us, we seek it and chase after it externally. Because we are not completely validated by self-love, we seek validation from the outside.

I had to learn about love through disappointments, heartbreak, and sadness. I had to learn love from others’ stories of disappointment, the sad songs, and the melodramatic themes like the agony of romance, the long-distance separating lovers, the desperate yearning, pain, and lost dreams. These views of love affected my relationship with myself and others. Of course my views changed with time, age, and finding the right partner, but it became clearer when I read All About Love by bell hooks. The questions that I carried within me for years were finally answered.

Through a combination of data, psychological and philosophical notions, quotes, and personal experience, hooks formulates an inclusive reading that invites all readers from different background to delve into what loves means. By defining love as: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” at the very beginning of the book, she unequivocally articulates the inherent capacities of love.

While reading the book, I was constantly thinking about the way we love in the Algerian culture and how love is portrayed in the private and public spheres. When we talk about love (if we ever do) we talk about it as something that exists outside of us and we must earn it. We talk about how to find it or get it, or how to convince someone to commit, to love us, to get married. hooks encouraged me to question these social and cultural interpretations of love. One line that particularly stood out to me was: “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” This quote not only exemplifies hooks’ aptitude for creating impactful, universally relatable declarations that resonate with every reader, but it also pushes one to think about the very essence of love that lies within us.

Furthermore, hooks tackles what I consider the reason we stigmatize love. We put so many restrictions and rules over love not because of its nature, but because we fear it, hooks explains:

“In our society, we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time.”

As I delve into the clashing nature of love and fear, my understanding of love changed. Growing up, I used to fear love because it seemed complicated and a concept that is only confined to fictional realms. However, hooks’ recontextualization of love unveiled a truth: love had been present in my life all along, and all I needed was to conquer the fear of being vulnerable in order to embrace it fully.

Through her skillful exposure of ideas deeply ingrained in our society, hooks compels readers to transcend the limitations of their emotions and delve into what love means to them. There is no school for love, that’s why, through her book, she priotitizes inner reflection and healing:

“To return to love, to get the love we always wanted but never had, to have the love we want but are not prepared to give, we seek romantic relationships. We believe these relationships, more than any other, will rescue and redeem us. True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”

How many of us have a false notion of love? How many of us fear love and prefer to stay protected, walls high up in the sky only generating stronger defense mechanisms? I know we are numerous. But how many of us are willing to open up for the love that is within us? It takes courage to excavate buried love that is under layers of soot and rubble. Layers of naiveté, good intentions, relinquishment, bitter failures, detours, disappointments, rejections, wrong choices, bad timing, bungled efforts, stupid mistakes, unforeseen circumstances, whims of fate, and missed opportunities. It’s no wonder one needs courage to retrace one’s steps. But remember, love saves us only if we want to be saved.

Some questions never leave my mind. Regardless of the number of answers I provide myself with, they still manage to lurk into my soul, invalidating every single answer and leaving me pondering over the absurdity of life (what do you expect from someone who reads Sartre for entertainment?)

Obviously, I can’t list them all here, at once. God that would be like entering a black hole, a one-way ticket to total chaos. However, I can reveal a few, especially those related to a topic that has been on my mind lately, that of selfhood.

I have been thinking a lot about selfhood and what it means nowadays in the age of social media where everyone can be whatever they want through over-polished and curated content. This is one of those topics that makes you dive deep down –mind, body, and soul–into the rabbit hole of extensive philosophical passages, then leave you confused more than ever. At least that’s how I felt. To be honest, my interest in understanding the self within the sphere of social media was evoked (indirectly) by a conversation I recently had with one of my followers on Instagram.

As you may know, my Instagram page is a mélange of books and snippets of my life. It wasn’t the case at the beginning of @ thoughts.andpage as I was more or less rigid on what to post. It was solely books or Ph.D. journey. That’s it. I was scared that I might share too much or share too little. How does one know they are sharing too much or too little on a virtual platform? It didn’t feel right because I love experimenting with pictures & longer captions (I don’t call myself a photographer though) but I found myself within a mold I created and I couldn’t get out of it. I became a prisoner of my own limitations. This frustrated me a lot and I couldn’t write I couldn’t take pictures I could barely be present in this world that I created, a world I thought I could run to whenever I am shell-shocked from things life throws my way.

This is just a small fragment of the complicated relationship I have had with Instagram. Luckily, I am following a bunch of inspiring people who, through their posts and the way they carry themselves on this platform, encouraged me to think less and let my creativity lead me out of the fog. Today, I like to believe that I am flexible in my posts and the way I represent myself online, without drifting away from my main niche, bookstagram.

The other day I shared a book I was reading, a passage from this book that I found interesting, and one of my followers sent me this message:

 “Thank you for the great content, but it is very hard to read in this form, you should try book reviews, vocally not necessarily using videos”.

I rarely speak in my stories. I don’t make videos of myself talking because that’s how I am comfortable now. It might change, but not for the time being because this is how I chose to exist on the internet. The message I received is coming from a good place, even though I shared a passage from a book, not a review… Is it actually a good idea? To talk about what I like and to meet the requirement of a generation that is auditory more than it is kinesthetic. The conversation didn’t stop there. I answered, in a very polite way, explaining that this is my way of sharing content. The person writes back:

“Try something like ****1 is doing. I think it would look great. Not necessarily face cam I guess you don’t like showing yourself.”

I stared at this answer for quite some time. In fact, I thought about it for the next few days. I was not offended or any of that sort. I was more intrigued by how online audiences can greatly impact our self-representation and decision on whether and how to share content. I remembered a passage from Feel Free by Zadie Smith that I think describes this moment perfectly. In her passage, she was talking about Facebook. I see no difference if applied on Instagram as well:

 “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility [my italics]. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desire, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.”

Everything shrinks. If this conversation took place in the physical world, everything would be different, form and context. But online, everything shrinks and the audience has a huge influence on our existence. I used to think that influencers influence people to buy products or experiences. Turns out that the audience too has a huge weight on what we post and how we exist online, herding us in the direction opposite to our authenticity.

If I express myself in a way that I consider authentic, that I am comfortable with, then who is this authentic self? Who is she? Does she bear any resemblance to me? I will leave the question of authenticity for later because now I want to understand the nature of the self within the space of Instagram. With that said, I feel it’s necessary to mention that my interest in understanding the self is not the idealized notion of connecting with the inner-self nonsense or rising above the herd and being unique to be oneself. My interest is rather –bear with me –philosophical. In a way.

Outside the online world, the nature of the self is a subject of much controversy and a very complex one. Radical claims insist that the self does not exist. Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher, insists that there is no such thing as the self and what we call the self is just a picturesque element of our conscious experience:

“The self is in reality a persistent illusion created by a multitude of interrelated cognitive modules in the brain. Our self-experience, our feeling of being a conscious self, is never truthful: it merely testified to the fact that we tend to confuse a representational construct with a really existing entity.”

To understand this view, consider Arya from Game of Thrones. She is the perfect embodiment of this view. Through her experience, she has been stripped from herself to become no one, a shadow-like person. But I find this line of thinking a bit extreme as it doesn’t match the way I think about the self, especially on Instagram. If I post a picture of myself with my cat or a friend, or if a post a life-changing experience, I am capturing a feeling that I have felt, a moment that I want to make memorable. So if the self doesn’t exist does that mean those feelings did not exist at all? And if there are many versions of the self, which one is Metzinger trying to deny? True Arya became ‘no one’ in Game of Thrones, but it was an act of revenge for everything that has happened to her. She became another version of herself that is merciless to be back home or to fulfill her goals.

The self in this way is fluid, flexible, changeable, comes in degrees, and takes many forms. Behaviorist and sociologist George H. Mead thinks that the self arises in social interactions with others, which explains the many versions of it:

 “We divide ourselves up to all sorts of different selves with reference to our acquaintances, we discuss politics with one and religion with another. There are all sorts of different selves answering to all sorts of different social reactions.”

To say it in simple words, our life is caught up in an assemblage of stories. It is nothing apart from these stories which provides the only possible access to oneself, and to others. In this way, I like to think of the self as a mosaic picture with lots of patterns, formed by inlaying thousands of small, multicolored pieces to create a larger visual representation. Ancient mosaics tell us stories, sometimes sacred, about ancient worlds. How they lived and what was important to them. The self is home to our experiences, feelings, and thoughts. It is shaped by the multitude of sensations, by all the failures and successes we go through. It brings texture and meaning to our experiences. In this way, Instagram becomes a place where we share pictures as experiences rather than objects. We are constantly telling stories through slices of reality, be it through stories, posts, or reels.

However, in this over-polished digital presence, we tend to tweak this version of reality. Even though editing pictures is not considered as being fake or inauthentic, it is still a controlled way of representation. How does one preserve the self in this form of representation? In other words, in this space where we can control what, where, how, and when to post/share, does the self remain the home of our experiences, the shelter of our feelings and emotions? To answer this question, I think it is crucial to understand first do we present ourselves in an idealized or authentic way.

On Instagram, we become driven by algorithms, remaking ourselves into something we are not because of an entire industry that is built around people’s desire to present an idealistic self-representation. This is not necessarily good or bad because, on this app, people give off certain impressions where authenticity is a purely idealized version of reality. This can be the result of something that doesn’t require an observer or audience: shame.

Shame targets and involves the self in its totality. The self is affected by major devaluation: it feels trapped. Shame makes us aware of not being in control. The other’s gaze, in Sartrean understanding, confers a truth upon me that I don’t master and over which I am, at that moment, powerless.

On Instagram, people are given a sense of control. Editing pictures and videos, tweaking them for an embellished feed, and creating a world that is either an escape or a world where they are their authentic selves. However, authenticity can be ambiguous here because of the complex relationship between the real self and the virtual persona.

Speaking for myself, in my dark days, those dark stormy days when I feel very small, fragile, and terrified as if I might shatter into a thousand pieces and break into heart-rendering sobs, during the silent hemorrhage of my soul, I don’t post or appear online. I disappear from this world, while others, through their bad days, still show up, still be present, still recommend books to read, places to visit, and whole experiences to chase.

Essentially, authenticity in the online world is constructed and those who present fake versions of themselves are no less authentic than others. Besides, for an authentic self to exist, it must be distinguished from the experiences in which it lives and functions because the self preserves its identity, and experiences arise and perish in the stream of consciousness, replacing each other in permanent flux (transcendence at its finest).

Dan Zahavi describes the authentic self as poor because it has no depth: “it is pure but poor”. Pure in the sense of being fixed and consequently poor in form of content, it lacks experience. Similarly, Sarah Banet-Weiser, an author and an academic, mentioned that authenticity in the online world should not be understood and experienced as the pure inner self of the individual, it can also be the relationship between the individual and commodity culture.

The answer to my previous question would be, in a way, that we experience many selves through what we post because we are constantly changing, evolving, and becoming another version of ourselves. If we choose to present these selves in a certain way that doesn’t mean we are fake or inauthentic since what authenticity means is highly subjective and socially constructed. To be authentic is to own one’s feelings and personal experience, with everything that it carries. To be authentic is to, upon experiencing anxiety in the face of the ultimate absurdity of life, live intensely in the present, and create a world through leaps of radical freedom.

references

1. Zadie Smith. Feel Free. 2018. pp.58-59

2. Thomas Metzinger. Being No One. 2003. P.370

3. Dan Zahavi, The Self and Other. 2014

4. Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness. 2003 [1943]

5. Sarah Banet-Weiser. Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. 2012

- Happy New Year my loves. Hope you all achieve and reach whatever your heart desires.  

Yesterday I turned 30. Reaching this age used to terrify me when I was way younger, say about fifteen or sixteen. I used to think turning thirty would be like having one foot in the grave. I felt this consuming, suffocating pressure to achieve everything I want before my youth slips away. Thirty has always been my deadline date, looming large in my mind.

Realistically speaking, it is only a third of the way through most of our lives. So where do these feelings come from? Why were they so intense as I was approaching this age?

I do blame the social narrative and the deeply engrained cultural norms surrounding this age. We have collectively endowed the mammoth 30 with certain meanings and achievements. It is very normal for millennials such as moi to be anxious and get panicky as we approach this age.

I had this pre-30 existential crisis on where I am in life and what have I accomplished. I was constantly measuring myself up to what I perceived as the norm. Whenever I meet family members for example, there’s absolutely no single conversation that goes by without encountering questions like when will I be married or have I even met a partner, or what will my next career move would be. This tendency of invading the personal, the private space really makes me anxious and angry and without answers to these questions.

When I read success stories of people in their twenties, I ask myself what the hell I have been doing the last decade. Now that I am writing this, I’m realizing that I have spent my entire twenties in academia, in the humanities field. The job market and building a career isn’t steady in this field (especially in a country where the only option for this major is teaching and unlike fields such as medicine or law, which involve a slow steady climb to positions of prestige).

After graduating in March 2022, I decided not to teach at the university. I have been doing it for the last seven years and it’s not something that I want to do. I had no idea how to build a new life outside academia. I went through the job process. Seeing my peers achieving dizzying heights on a daily basis (or so it may seem) can sparkle all kinds of cray comparison. We live in a world where everyone is portraying the best possible version of themselves via Instagram promoting their high points and successes without giving any airtime to the struggle. More than once, I’ve gone to apply for a job only to find myself stalking the staff’s LinkedIn profiles a couple of hours later, obsessively calculating their age via their graduation years.

 I let go of relationships, I built new ones, I reconnected with old ones, I learned to find meaning in the everyday, simple life. I rekindled my love for reading. I rediscovered my favorite genres. Through my connection with books, I learned a very different image of success, not like the glossy, polished Carrie Bradshaw success story that my generation grew up with.

 I realized that I needed to focus on what I want and not what others expect or want from me. I realized that I need to focus on what genuinely makes me happy, rather than simply soaking up different messages about where I should be. I realized that I need to stop being so damn hard on myself. Not having the career I want by this age most certainly does not make me a failure. I learned to count my blessings, appreciate health and family.

Don’t be fooled though, writing this doesn’t make me successful, that’s still far from reach. I’m still struggling to find my purpose, I am still struggling not to compare myself to others. I’m still struggling to control my emotions. And I am thrilled that I still have a lifetime to figure my life out.

Okay, enough of age shenanigans. I just had to let it out of my system. I also need to voice that 2022 was a good reading year for me. I read my favorite books so far and discovered amazing authors. I want to focus more on reading and writing this year. I don’t like to pressure myself by setting up reading challenges. It was never about numbers for me (did I mention I hate numbers). I want to soak up good writing and let myself be carried by the grace of words. I can’t wait to read and discover more authors.

Some of my favorite reads 2022 edition

·         Feel Free by Zadie Smith

·         Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

·        My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

·         Blue Nights by Joan Didion

23 hopefuls for 2023:

1. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

2. The Idiot by Elif Batuman

3. Men Don’t Cry by Faiza Guène (thanks Assia for the discovery)

4. The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté 

5. All About Love by Bell Hooks

6. Concerning my Daughter by Hye-Jin Kim

7. Lose your Mother by Saidiya Hartman

8. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

9. Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes.

10. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing 

11. Wayward lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

12. Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord

13. Someone Who Will Love you in All your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob Waksberg

14. Against Disappearance Essays on Memory by Leah Jing McIntosh

15. A Woman’s Battles and Transformations by Edouard Louis

16. Mother in the Dark by Kayla

17. Yes Yes More More by Anna Wood 

18. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow 

19. Things we do not Tell the People we Love by Huma Qureshi 

20. Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

21. Essays by Lydia Davis.

22. Trauma. Essays on Art and Mental Health (anthology) 

23. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Jamison

Now tell me, what’s THE book you’re excited to read this year? Can’t wait to hear all about it

Much love

The winter air outside is thin and bracing: sharp, frigid, icy, stinging. I certainly don’t saunter; the pace of my steps is quick, mirroring on the outside the accelerated forward motion as the final days of December takes center stage. Behind closed doors, the winter air is warm, heavy, and aromatic. The call to prayers echoes in the background, a melody that has the ability to stop time, a melody that captivates the attention of muslims and non-muslims. The voices of playing children join the birds in their chatter. All these sounds blend to form one single unceasing prayer to the Creator, a prayer not of thoughts and words but of sounds and life. What a year it has been!

I’m sitting here at my desk, writing this newsletter and thinking of everything that has happened this year. Memories unfold like a vivid rainbow on a cloudy day as I oscillate between a smile and a cry. Is this what we call a bittersweet feeling? I strangely like it! I don’t know how to accurately describe it but it’s like something warm, like sipping hot tea on w very cold day, that warm fuzzy feeling you get. I think it’s called contentment. It’s something between contentment and serenity and that’s what I learned the most from this year.

 It wasn’t the most joyful year for me but I’m grateful for everything. The little things especially. The little walks, the little moments of inner peace, the little paws of Molly when she follows me around and jumps into my lap, kneading and pressing her paws against me, against my stomach (a sign to get into working out? Maybe), luring me to give her food, not affection, don’t be mistaken (I’m sure every cat person can relate!). In those moments of sadness, I zoom out and have a global look at myself, my thoughts, my feelings, eager to change something but somehow trapped.

Years ago, when quotes were a thing, I had this quote as wallpaper on my laptop. “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”. The quote was written in a bold white font. I don’t know the name of the font but it looked like Times New Roman or Bell MT. the quote was above a boat in a foam-flecked sea. No harbor, no land, just turbulent waves. I remember this quote when I’m going through my moments with this exact image. I think of the boat, whether it makes it or gets swallowed by the waves. I assume if we put a quote under such an image, then there is a way out somehow? Pretty optimistic and silly of me, isn’t it? The possibility of a way out is more realistic for me

.

I can’t believe how this year has passed by so quickly. To be honest with you, I’m still stuck between 2019/20. The Covid era and the lockdown messed up my memory, or the process with which I store them. Like for instance, when I try to remember something, I find myself going back to three years ago and unable to remember anything from 2021/22. Does this happen to you too? Or am I on my way to insanity? Van Der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score explains that when we go through a traumatic event, our mind erases the memory of it but our body remembers it. Consciously, we don’t know if that event happened or not, but the way our body behaves says otherwise. Is my inability to remember what happened in 2021 a traumatic response? I mean lockdown was a mess. Having covid was chaotic. This is pretty traumatic (what a snowflake).

Luckily we have endings and beginnings. The end of December. An end that denotes a new beginning. I have always loved December, especially new year’s eve. I don’t do anything extravagant and I have never gone to a party to celebrate. I don’t like to start my years in noisy places surrounded by half-conscious people. I am not a party person. I am just a boring regular human and I like it this way.  

I started this newsletter a month ago and I cannot tell you the joy it brings me. I get excited by the thought that you are actually reading me. I never thought what I write would interest anyone. Yet here we are. Thank you so much for the endless love and support. I hope this coming year will bring us all joy and happiness.

Happy new year, beloved reader.

Much love

I love reading fiction. I love the idea of limitless interpretations when reading a good novel. I love the confusion and the tension created by the author, intentionally or unintentionally. I think of fiction as this space where the author becomes the character, the character becomes the reader, and the reader becomes both the author and the character. This idea fascinates me. But it’s also tiring.

I’ve always been intrigued by the realm of real experience, be it external or internal. I love reading real, raw stories of people that’s why I find solace in personal essays. I like reading personal essays where the author unfurls the personal, the intimate, the unspeakable. Essays in which the author, speaking in the first-person voice, challenges the unnarratability, dares to break the internal silence and. What I love most about personal essays is that they tap into, in one way or another, the act of writing.

I have been preoccupied with this act a lot lately. Now that I am thinking about it, I have been preoccupied with it for the last four years. My whole dissertation was about women writing their wounds. There are those who write to find out what they are thinking, like Joan Didion. There are those who write to understand the interconnection between language, the world, and the self like Zadie Smith. But both Zadie and Joan agreed that the most important part of writing is how sentences and words are arranged and the effect they create on the reader.

I have never thought about it that way actually. The arrangement of sentences and words. Their effects on the reader. Yet whenever I write this letter, that’s exactly what I do. Arrange words and sentences. Edit and delete and add some more. Trying to tell you, my reader, what I feel, what I think, what I see. This is exactly what Didion meant by saying:

“writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind … It’s an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

Zadie wrote something similar:

“[writing in] the first person opens up a possibility of telling someone a true lie: let me tell you what happened to me.”

After reading Joan Didion and Zadie Smith’s essays on writing, or the act of writing, and as someone whose English is not her first language (nor second by the way) I felt the urge to not only explore with you why I write but also why I write in English.

When I told my family that I am starting a newsletter, they asked whether it was going to be written in Arabic or French, or English. I answered it was going to be in English and then it hit me: I had to wait for a third language to fully express myself. To voice my thoughts.

Algeria is a francophone country. Arabic and French are the mediums of communication. Why then do I write in English? The urge to justify myself to others feels like a validation of my own insecurity. I still struggle with words because Buthaina who is writing here and Buthaina who talks to her partner and parents are two different people. Two languages, two attitudes, two sets of minds and emotions. I appreciate Edgar Allan Poe’s poems the same way I treasure Algerian buqalah poetry. But the majority of my education and experience as an adult has been in English. So when I want to contemplate, question, and write about anything really, English is the language that enables me to do so.

I wish there were more Algerian essayists who write about similar experiences. Someone to whom I can relate. Someone who is struggling the same way I am struggling. Maybe that’s why I am writing these letters. Writing in the first-person isn’t meant to entertain or create a sort of escapism from reality, I think. I am writing these letters not only for you but for myself as well, for the confused, the lost, the alien parts of myself. Zadie Smith described it better when she said:

“that part of me (autobiographical part) is always writing backward to the confused brown girl I once was, providing the books I wished back then that I could read.”

What is my purpose in writing all of this? If writing allows readers to see what the writer is seeing, to feel what the writer is feeling, connect with what the writer experiences, then my writings are the images and sounds of everything I encounter and experience. Some of those writings are rooted in the personal, and some of them are whims and complaints and whatnot.

Writing in English feels sometimes like a personal failure because I can’t fully express myself in my native language. But also writing in English feels like a political statement about this failure. Every word, every sentence that I have arranged here feels like an attempt to say, to articulate, to explain to understand the me who is here, the me who is in between.

Last year, this time, I constantly felt adrift. I was still working on my dissertation, suffering from major burnout. First-degree burnout, a soul snuffer (it was an accumulation of many things really: recovering from covid, working while sick because of supervisor’s pressure, & the whole freaking covid era that is so blurred to me).

There’s something tricky about burnout. You don’t realize your mind is on fire until the smoke gets in your eyes. I used to think it only happens to others, people who worked with corporates, but it’s also real for workaholics… and perfectionists (yours truly). I have been told once that the road to hell is paved by perfectionists working with grains of sand… Uh oh, you missed a spot right there. That never fails to make me laugh and sad at the same time because I see myself among those workers, holding the grains of sand so very carefully.

But when is it burnout? do you feel it? Do you know if it’s there or when is it coming?

It’s burnout when you go to bed exhausted and wake up exhausted and no amount of sleep refreshes you. It’s burnout when everything becomes too much effort. It’s burnout when you find yourself cranky all the time, bursting into tears or going into fits of rage at the slightest provocation. It’s burnout when you dread the next phone call. It’s burnout when you feel trapped and hopeless, unable to dream, experience pleasure, or find harmony and contentment. It’s burnout when neither big thrills nor little moments have the power to move you, when nothing satisfies you because you haven’t a clue what’s wrong or how to fix it. Because everything is wrong. Because something is terribly out of whack: you. It’s burnout when you feel there is no one on the face of earth who can help you.

And you’re right.

When suffering from burnout, you are the only person on earth who can help you. When you have no strength left, you have no choice but to rely on the strength of a saner Power to restore you to wholeness.

 Desperate to free myself from this tragedy that academia has caused me, I started writing down the conversations I continuously carried on with myself because there’s rarely a quieting of my mind. Another thing during a burnout is the crippling sound inside your head that screams your unworthiness. I noticed that my mind will grab hold of a single thought like a pit bull terrier with a bone and not let it go until I’m exhausted.

I began having a conversation with myself on paper. Everything just spilled out in a bizarre stream of consciousness. I felt calm and still. I felt comforted. Joan Didion wrote in Let me Tell you What I mean: “I write to find out what I am thinking, what I am looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” In writing those conversations with myself, I discovered what I wanted, what I lacked, what I needed. Sometimes I get so overwhelmed by my own thoughts I forget how to breathe. I cry like a baby because I don’t know what to do. How to get out. I feel shy about admitting all this as if it’s a cosmic flaw, but I know I am not the only one who feels this way. I thought I needed some kind of miracle or a savior to get me out of there, little did I know that the small act of writing those conversations is the miracle that helped me change and overcome my internal struggles.

Change.

How much time, effort, and energy –be it emotional or physical–do we expend resisting change because we assume growth must be always painful? It’s definitely uncomfortable, but not impossible.

Have you ever felt constantly adrift and don’t know why? you are not alone.

Let today’s letter remind you, beloved reader, that the small things we take for granted are sometimes those that save us. Change doesn’t have to be painful and it doesn’t have to be in another town, another place, with other people. Change can start with small things, like writing down your thoughts, enjoying the sun, reading a good book, or just knowing that stolen moments of pain eventually can add up to a lifetime of serenity.

These are my thoughts on my relationship with reading. Written on the 5th of December. I was going to edit them as I wrote this piece this morning but then I didn’t. Thoughts aren’t meant to be linear. Enjoy the chaos.

The final chapter of 2022 is drawing to a close, and whether we are aware of it or not, we’re balancing our personal books, tallying up the profits and losses. To be honest with you, December stresses me out and summons the worst of my anxiety. I don’t do year recaps (maybe because I am in a place in my life where I only wish memories remain where they belong, in the dear past). What I also don’t like is counting the books I read.

Not that I have anything against my fellow friends who set reading goals or count the books they read, it just doesn’t resonate with me. Do I have a complicated relationship with reading? Probably. Or perhaps I just don’t like it and it doesn’t need a glorified explanation.

How is my relationship with reading? Now? Pretty good, I guess. The last couple of years? Not so much. I majored in literature and it’s been 9 months since I got my Ph.D. Time flies (I still feel exhausted). I have always read books and all sorts of articles. This intensified during my years of research. I didn’t know how many books I had read until I checked my bibliography.  More than 300 books. Mind you, all academic. Too much? Fellow researchers would say it’s the norm. When is it too much really? How can one read too much with only twenty-four-hour days? Lifetimes that average only 80 years?

During those years of research, I read a few books that I left occasionally on my bedside table.  My reading was a form of escapism from the pressure academia brought to my household. The burnouts led to reading slumps and sometimes disliking the act altogether. And then I discovered bookstagram.

Even though I felt very discouraged to read -because I live in a place where books aren’t always available and the shipping takes way too long and sometimes by the time the book arrives I even forget I ordered it-I wanted to get out of the solitary act of reading. in creating a bookstagram, I have had wonderful friendships and wonderful conversations on books. Sharing books with others can be a meaningful form of communication.

I haven’t had the best relationship with reading. I regret it sometimes. I used to find excuses not to read but the pandemic changed my relationship with reading. Any time of the day was perfect for reading. Any place (of the house because of curfew). Any excuse. Reading became my refuge.  It changed me. It shut down all the voices in my head and the only voice that mattered was the one that took shape from the words on the page. I have to say that books reached the marrow of my bones. I grew so fond of reading books that I felt compelled to write my own. When I don’t read, I miss it in a visceral way.

Books do change us. They turn us on to our passions and to pursuing our passions. Most of us long to experience Paradise on earth. Those who read do. For every book I have ever read, loved, and remembered is now a part of me. What is once cherished can never perish.

 “Reading means”, Italo Calvino tells us, “being ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the convention of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say.”

Tell me now, my beloved reader, how would you describe your relationship with reading?

I can’t wait to read you!