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Oh you don’t have to carry the guilt or to blame yourself for hurting others, they say.
and I smile because I wish that landed somewhere in me. I can’t, my friend. you are looking at me but you are not seeing what I am seeing, and that is not your fault, you were not there, you did not live what I lived, you came into my life somewhere in the middle of the story and missed everything that happened before the page you opened on.
I’ve come to realize that not everything we “feel” belongs to the same category. Some emotions are momentary, they rise, peak, and then fade. Others are more persistent. They linger beneath the surface and shape our experience over time. The difference between an emotion and a state has become very clear to me.
Take emptiness, for example. Emptiness is often described as a feeling, but it behaves more like a state. When you feel hollow inside, it isn’t just a passing wave like anger or excitement. It’s a sense that something is missing. You can distract yourself from it, you can silence it temporarily, but it doesn’t fully disappear. It waits. If you’ve ever truly felt emptiness, you know it has continuity. look and investigate inside every time and you will feel it. It’s not a spark, it does not vanish easily.
I have observed many stories. friendships. partnerships. families. I have even lived inside some of them. And I noticed something. Relationships rarely die from one dramatic moment. They die from a hidden cancer.
It grows quietly. invisibly. accumulating over years. no one sees it. no one feels it. until one day, it is strong enough to turn love into resentment, and resentment into distance. I gave this cancer a name in February 2022. I called them small black dots. One black dot is harmless. almost invisible.
Among all the emotions I carry, disappointment sits in its own category, the one I least want to experience. I don’t feel it often, and that is not an accident. I don’t place people in positions where they can disappoint me, I don’t expect much from anyone, and I don’t let just anyone close enough to matter, something I’ve written about before in my defensive nature . on top of that, I’ve built a bubble around myself, overly selective about my environment, deliberate about who gets near it. I wrote about this at the opening of not broken but suboptimal . but none of that makes me immune. you cannot fully program your life. mistakes will happen. people you never invited will find their way in, and sometimes you won’t notice until it’s already too late.
My brother Mohammed told me something once, in a conversation I barely remember the reason for. my mother was there. he said our father used to say:
إذا هبّت رياحك فأغتنمها، فعقبى كل خافقة سكون
People have a habit of reading me as someone who is chasing something I’m not. they see the startups I’ve been part of, the teams I’ve found myself inside, the communities I’ve helped shape, and they conclude: entrepreneur. business minded. someone with their eye on the market.
That reading has always been a little off. I was never the one who applied. I was nominated, referenced, recommended. I got pulled in. and the reason that distinction matters is because it points to the actual motive, which was never money, and never the feeling of being supreme over others. I don’t love controlling people. I genuinely don’t. not out of shyness, not out of some performed humility, but because responsibility is something I fear, and because I have always preferred being a contributor over being a manager. a contributor does the work. a manager mostly speaks about how the work is progressing. I despised that image of leadership since I was young.