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I have been flooded by all sorts of unexplainable emotions these days, and I feel the need to log this one, to sit with it and give it shape. anger is not something I am familiar with. it is an emotion I rarely felt throughout my life. but when I finally cast light on what had been controlling my behavior for so long, when I started seeing my past clearly, I felt angry.
Today, I spent five hours talking to Awab.
It wasn’t planned. no intention, no emotional preparation. he texted me casually saying: “VC in 2–3 hours?” the kind of message you expect to lead to small updates and shallow catching up as we usually do. Instead,it became one of the most profound conversations I’ve ever had.
I remember very distinctly how my elder brother Mohammed wanted me to pursue a career in media. he wanted me to become a photographer or a videographer, or whatever lived in that space. I do not know whether he saw my talent, or whether he simply noticed how much I loved it. the truth is I did love it. but at the time, I was lost in myself, I wasn’t clear about my love to this particular hobby, I was fooled by the glaring effect of science and progress. and to be fair, it is glaring.
There was a time in my life when I allowed myself to be uncertain. uncertainty was my mindset. it did not affect the technical side of my questions, nor did it damage my daily decision making on the surface. but internally, I sometimes drowned in it. the paradox of choices embedded itself into my behavior, and perfectionism became a side effect of refusing to pick what felt suboptimal. I lived inside my head more than I realized. this state was invisible to the external world. it was entirely internal. I was doubting my own internals.
When I turned thirteen, something shifted in me. it was not dramatic on the outside, but internally everything felt rearranged. I was lost in a way I could not articulate. I could not understand my emotions, nor my behavior, nor the sudden cynicism that began to color the way I saw the world. I became negative, sharp, and difficult, and I started affecting the people around me without even noticing.
No matter how open, peaceful or loving you are, others can only connect with you at the depth they have reached within themselves.
This realization came to me at twenty one, and it was not gentle. it hurt to admit. I come from a spectrum of people who were never fully able to see others clearly , but I was not one of them. I was always good at analyzing people. I understood patterns, motives, insecurities. I even played the therapist role many times in my life, something I wrote about briefly here . understanding people was not magic. it is a basic human feature if you pay enough attention. the contradiction that confused me for years was this: I could understand almost everyone, yet I struggled to truly connect with them.