Growth

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.

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.

The image I held about myself was always vague. if I am being honest, I never truly liked myself. I never paused long enough to build a clear internal picture of who I was beyond performance and ambition. this whole psychology conversation about self image and inner narratives felt unnecessary to me. I did not have a defined understanding of self worth. when someone asked me if I believed I was worthy of love, I genuinely did not know how to answer. I did not spend time thinking about those questions. they did not feel practical. they would not buy me the Lamborghini I wanted, so why should they occupy space in my mind. for the longest time, introspection felt like a luxury I don’t want to invest in.

There is something interesting about a certain kind of people. they are flexible in a way that makes them difficult to categorize. as if they were not built to fit into a single rule, a single system, or a single identity. I still cannot give them a perfect name, because they blend too many traits at once. they are curious, exploratory, internally alive, purposeful, often generalists, and deeply adaptive. they are not built for a narrow lane. they are built for terrain.