Series
My memory has a specific shape of unreliability. its not about forgetting phone numbers or struggling to hold a long Quran verse in place. it used to be harder to name. It is about people. It is about places. Somewhere in the background of living I was always slightly elsewhere, I used to call it, absent minded, running scenarios, processing, clearing out some cognitive overhead that never fully cleared. And the people around me, and the rooms I sat in, they registered as peripheral. I was there, technically. but I wasn’t looking.and I think it is about that the memory doesn’t fade later, it never fully forms in the first place. that’s the clearest description I have for what I have always felt before. and you can’t retrieve what you didn’t absorb. I spent a lot of time blaming myself for this, as if the problem was a character defect rather than a pattern I could understand and maybe do something about. but the blame didn’t help the gaps fill in, and the gaps kept widening. There are places I have been where I now retain only the feeling. not what anyone looked like. not what the room smelled like or how the light fell. just a general emotional residue, like a color with no shape. places that mattered. people who were real to me. This is a repository. I want to capture what I remember, people, places, fragments of who they were and what it felt like to be near them. before the blur takes the rest of it. some of these I will share. some are just for holding. but the act of writing them down is its own thing, a way of training a muscle that was always a little underdeveloped in me. presence as a practice, even retrospectively. even now, after the fact. it all ends.
My friend Yahia once asked me how I coordinate between everything on my plate. not how I manage the volume, he understood that part. what he wanted to know was how I handle the context switch. one hour I’m deep in SQL queries and database design. the next I’m reading a machine learning paper. how does that work, he asked. how does the mind move between places that different without losing something.
When I was a kid, I wanted to learn almost everything. theology, physics, chemistry, computer science, artificial intelligence, biology, not as curiosity for curiosity’s sake, but as a genuine orientation. I was drawn toward knowledge as a category, not toward any subject inside it. I wanted to understand how things worked, and I wanted to understand how they related to each other.
The problem was the people around me. not their fault, but they were the evidence I kept looking at. no one I could see excelled at all of it. not even close. the picture the world was showing me was that you pick a lane, you go deep, and that depth is where the results live. every system I was in, school, university, the way people talked about careers, rewarded the vertical. the specialist. the one who knows one thing completely. and I was not that. I was the one who kept moving horizontally, touching everything, carrying a general picture without owning any particular depth yet.
Almost everyone can build a machine learning model now. you can prompt your way into a working pipeline in a matter of five minutes. building a model is not the problem, optimizing it is, understanding how and what it is doing are two completely different things, and that gap becomes very visible the moment you step into a competition.
I spent time participating in competitions on Kaggle and Zindi , joining teams, reading solutions, watching people work. and the pattern I kept seeing was the same: build a baseline, iterate, submit, repeat, and that’s fine, that’s how it works, but without ever asking why the iteration was moving in a particular direction. not having a compass. is what mostly happen. the leaderboard becomes the only signal, and you start optimizing for a number without understanding what the number means. that’s not learning. that’s just another form of guessing.
My earliest memory of a real community is 249 Unit, a video editing group I joined in 2018, when I was around fifteen. I don’t remember how I found it. I only remember the texture of being inside it: the average age was seventeen, a few outliers in their early twenties, and the whole thing had the specific energy that comes when people are young and making things together before anyone is doing it for money.
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.