It’s taken me some bravery and some “I-don’t-care-anymore” attitude to write this, but the thought of writing this and the desire to write it have pushed me out of bed several times before. More often than not, pain—whether it be mental or physical—had led me to push the button on my nightstand lamp and scribble a few words in my journal, or open my notes app and type. But this time I wanted to head straight to the laptop and spit it all out.
I remember reading a lot more when I was younger, but it was reading of a largely different kind than my current reading. One of the things I read and liked was The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which was a banger and absolute mainstream media among teenagers of my age. I remember the crazy author the protagonist was obsessed with wrote this line, and it ended up being repeated by the cancer-plagued heartthrob, Augustus Waters:
“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”
It just so happens that I still enjoy sad stories even after all these years.
Most of my childhood I was considered a happy child, yet a rather “overly sensitive one”. Friends and cousins would walk on eggshells around me, trying not to upset me; I would burst into tears the moment someone snatched a toy away from me, or when someone won me over in a video game or a race. I would cry over not getting first place in a running race with cousins, or getting a goal scored against me when I was goalkeeper in school’s PE class. I’d feel like an utter failure because at thirteen, the endurance race around the stadium that took others 10 minutes to complete would take me a bit over 20 minutes. It also extended to intellectual abilities, not just physical ones, despite getting a really good rank amongst my classmates. Those are some of the incidents which left me in shambles about my self-image; am I really overly sensitive, is there something wrong with me, or am I just really unlucky, and bad things keep happening to me? Am I lazy, am I not fit enough? Am I perhaps too fat, too stupid, too slow?
Being thirteen and always feeling tired, being sixteen and constantly feeling like I had no interest in participating in life, and then being eighteen and being in continuous emotional and physical pain… none of it seemed to make the image any clearer. It was a constant fight of ‘my life on the outside looks normal and fine’ but also ‘I do not feel normal in any way, shape or form’. Whatever the definition of ‘normal’ was, I felt alienated from it. Fast forward to being halfway through my twenties, after graduating with a mildly elevating degree, being a first-generation healthcare professional, working at a top institute in the region, my overbearing and insanely emotionally charged father dies out on me.. It’s safe to say I had no sense of self at that point. I was fully liquid, and ready to evaporate.
It would take an insanely long journey through my early teen years, through uni, and now towards the end of my 20s to realize that there was somewhat something wrong with me. It took some socializing, some support, and a lot of internal work to figure out that it was not normal to break down over losing a new game at an expert/hard level. It would take some time to realize that not everyone has thought about multiple ways of ending their lives at fourteen, and not everyone goes through an existential crisis about whether their family likes them or whether they should just run away from home. If my family ends up reading this, I’m sorry in advance, especially to my mom, because she still hates to see me write about pain. But that’s the thing about pain: it demands to be felt.
Ever since I’d been able to read and write and express my feelings in full sentences, I was told that I needn’t be so negative about my life, and that pain shouldn’t be talked about because it sounds like lamentations, that it’s an act of rumination, and that Allah doesn’t like people who complain. I even struggled to identify as a ‘writer’ because I was so young when I started, and I wasn’t doing it for a living. Being a writer was attached to a certain visual and ideological label of what a writer should look like. Coming from a very traditional Levantine family, your family was either inherently artistic and did this for generations, or they had no idea what it was like to be plagued by the constant need to express yourself.
I was initially going to title this post something along the lines of ‘The Paradox of Wanting to be Heard but not Wanting to Speak’, but it almost always seems that the catalyst for my writing is personal and selfish; I have pain that demands to be felt, and I want to scream it out in coherent, melodical sentences that make it sound less ugly. Perhaps as a byproduct of this, someone would feel less alone knowing that another soul, somewhere, some time, has felt their agony. Those two reasons are the main drivers for why I write. I may have ideas that I feel strongly about; I will express them when I feel strong enough, mentally and physically, to compose solid arguments and research all the complex little things it takes to sound confident about them. I know fully how arrogant and self-serving this may sound, whether you personally know me or not, but after a small but packed lifetime spent catering to others’ needs, you get slightly fed up with the whole notion of ‘being a candle burning to light others’ lives’. I’d like to carry a candle that can light up my way, and I will share it with others if and when possible.
Until then, I have pain, and it demands to be felt. The only way for me to feel my way out of it is to write it out. So writing I will..
