Writing
One of the most common questions I get is how I managed to learn so many media formats in such a short amount of time. people often assume I learned everything simultaneously. that is not true.
Why I am writing in English and not Arabic.
There is a guilt that comes with it. shame on me for writing in English while being Arab by mother and father. I have never fled to a western or European country. I was not obsessed with western movies, in fact I barely watch movies at all. I accidentally watched two movies in the past two years and that was it. yet I am still influenced by the west. that is simply the reality of the world we live in today. influence no longer requires migration. it travels through knowledge, through the internet, through science, through code.
do things badly
As the years pass by, I find myself adapting to different reasons to keep living, and to share, I’m not as clear as I used to be about why I should be posting something publicly, but looking back over the years, I recall how writing started. How reasons changed.
One of the main incentives behind sharing my notes in public is not the urge to talk. As social creatures, we naturally love sharing experiences, stories, and ideas. But I buried that essential human feature for a long time. I used to post on Facebook , not consistently, and then I went through what I called “ Manulasis ”(I heard of this back in high school in one of the articles but I forget the spelling/word but never the definition): the tendency to give up explaining things to people. I essentially gave up sharing altogether. I became detached from the external world without even noticing, day by day.
There’s an anecdote about Richard Feynman when a historian walks up to his desk and sees all the sheets of paper lying around on Mr Feynman desk and makes a comment about these being a record of Feynman’s thinking and then Mr Feynman corrects the historian and says that: these are not a record of my thinking I think on paper and then the historian presses on and says that surely you’re thinking in your head and these are only records of the thoughts in your head and that’s when Mr Feynman says: no they aren’t a record of my thinking process they are my thinking process. I actually did the work on the paper.