I want to tell my story with care. I want to tell it because I believe it matters. Because I know for a fact that my weird sisters** are reading this and relating. So I will go back to the beginning for a little bit, and let you in on a little secret: I have always, always been aware of my status as the “weird” one. Ever since I was a little kid. For as long as I can remember. 

Inevitably, and without trying to, I always seem to stand out. Even when I am trying my absolute best to blend in, like in situations where my weirdness would invite violence. I say things I shouldn’t. I don’t act the way I’m supposed to. I overshare. I’m an open book by nature and not necessarily by choice. I call out hypocrisy and bigotry instinctively. I speak about my traumas. I’m straightforward, blunt, and I don’t play games. I say it like it is. And I don’t beat around the bush when I want or need something. I don’t even look right. I’m fat and I have piercings and big curly hair and visible tattoos. And I always, always, stand up for what I believe in. Even when I should instead consider my safety.

There are also things I really truly don’t understand, like fashion, influencer/celebrity culture, the desire to accumulate wealth and/or achieve social status. I tell potential bosses during first interviews that I don’t work late and work is not my priority (imagine their shock). I don’t care about making money or making sure I look like I have money. I wear the same clothes for the most part, like a uniform situation, a rotation of sorts, and don’t really have a “fashion sense”. I still wear clothes daily that I’ve had for over 10 years. I don’t know how to accessorize or apply make up, except very minimally. I don’t know how to perform femininity in a way that is socially acceptable, even though I consider myself extremely feminine. To me, femininity is a grand and complex performance which requires a lot of effort and acting, and I’m not a good actor, despite how hard I try. I have always been lacking. And that creates discomfort for a lot of people around me.

I am also constantly baffled by arbitrary social rules and find myself failing time and time again to adhere to them. I can’t count how many times and ways that has gotten me in trouble. For example, when I got gastric banding surgery in 2009 and people started to ask me how I got so thin, I told them I got surgery, much to my family’s horror. Apparently I was supposed to lie and say “I lost weight by eating healthy and exercising” and never disclose the shameful fact that I needed surgical help to look socially acceptable. It didn’t matter that I dropped 15kgs in 2 weeks, I was still expected to lie right to people’s faces, even though I knew they had eyes and a sense of time. And it didn’t matter if they believed me, because they wouldn’t, it mattered that I cared enough to lie. And I didn’t. I told the truth, every time. And that was a bad thing.

There are a lot of things that come naturally to people that I have struggled with my entire life. For years, people were put off by my directness, by the fact that I share my feelings and thoughts and political opinions openly and on public platforms, by the fact that I apparently have a “resting bitch face” and am “intimidating” (even though I think of myself as a smiley, kind person), by something about me they couldn’t quite put their finger on. Something about me was “off” and people could sense it. Even when neither they nor I knew what it was. I was very “intense”. I gave way too many impassioned speeches and started debates when provoked or intellectually stimulated. People would inform me I had “enemies” I didn’t even know about. A lot of people I’d never even met, I’d be told, actually hated me. I was “too much”, always, no matter how little I said or did. I never understood that.

But I managed (or tried) to teach myself, by watching my family and friends, how one was supposed to act. The general do’s-and-don’ts of existing in a Saudi public space. With time, I learned how to fake it, but only to a certain extent. I could attend an event and put up an okay performance, but it was never perfect. I stumbled over my words. I didn’t know the correct responses to traditional Saudi greetings or phrases. I embarrassed my mom by being too shy to talk to her friend’s daughters. My grip on the Arabic language was never too strong, especially under pressure. I wouldn’t know how to respond to questions. I couldn’t find my words. I stuttered and stumbled over them and over myself. Or I would just sit there, quiet and eerie-looking. I hated dressing up and I hated wearing make-up and you could tell. Heels were the bane of my existence. I dreaded those situations to the point of tears sometimes. But they were a natural part of life, something I had to do, never a choice. “Beauty is pain”, right? So I kept trying to be the person who did those things. Not out of choice, but out of necessity. I kept twisting and contorting myself into the person everyone told me I should be. I never wanted to be the odd one out. But it happened every time. 

I managed to find kin along the way, thankfully. People who not only were not put off by my too-muchness and my weirdness but rather were drawn to it. Who appreciated my truth-telling and openness. Who respected my politics and my opinions. Who respected me and loved me for exactly who I was. Who didn’t force me or ask me to be anything other than myself. Who saw my intensity for the passion that it was. I found them at different points in my life, but each one of them saved me. I owe them everything. Thank you, beloveds (you know who you are).

It was around those people, and my family, that I could be a little more like my real self. A version closer to who I really was than the version the rest of the world sees. With my loved ones I could, to an extent, be me. And be loved. And accepted. I could be fun sometimes. I could give myself permission to be silly. If I had a bad day, they would comfort me. If I had a panic attack, they would try to help me come down from it. If I had a meltdown, they’d make sure I could get home or feel safe. If I over-shared, they would listen, and thank me for opening up to them. If I went silent and could not speak, they wouldn’t ask me to. When I was grieving the death of my father, they carried me through that period of intense madness and grief. They were my safe space. 

It was within that space, that beautiful and safe and loving space my loved ones created for me, that I was able to maintain my sanity and feel some sense of belonging. A belonging I craved but always felt out of reach. But it was also the spaces I was able to create with their support that helped keep me alive and find a sense of purpose. 

Because of my weirdness, I realized pretty early on that I would need to create my own communities if I wanted to survive. I knew this world was not made for me and I would have to make my own. But I couldn’t do it alone. So at age 18, in 2009, when that need for belonging plagued me, I went to my best friend for help. She was my first ever weird sister, the first person in the entire world who made me feel seen and whole from our first encounter. Even though she and I had only recently met, she was quickly becoming a big part of my life and I’d felt a closeness to her and an acceptance from her I had never felt before. I knew she could see my weirdness and that it was the part of me she was drawn to and loved. She felt similar. She felt like a mirror. I felt safe around her. She was the first person in my life who taught me what a friendship actually could be. I refer to her as the “platonic love of my life”, because she really is. Her friendship and compassion have made me the person I am today, and she continues to show me the same love and support, even though we now live on different continents. (May we one day reunite, my sister, my platonic love.)

Together, we co-created our first weird community. The Writing Club, as we called it, was a space for girls and women like us to be creative. It was the first of its kind, and we poured a lot of love and thought into it. Our meetings were very intimate, and while they mostly were centered around our writings, it was a space for us to be ourselves – our real, unfiltered selves – without judgment. We had strict rules about that. It was an explicitly “safe” space, and open expression was not only tolerated but encouraged. Bigotry was a big no-no. Criticism had to be kind or it wasn’t tolerated. Our members wrote about their love lives, their pain, their sexualities, their desires, their politics, their grief and joy. Nothing was off-limits. We could talk to each other about everything, and then share our work with the entire world if we wanted. We would go on to create the first english-speaking literary open-mic night in Riyadh in 2012. It was my first time performing my poetry on a stage and to an audience. We filled the hall with over 400 people. Guests had to sit on the floor for lack of enough chairs. Our members all got the chance to perform their work to their own local audience and it was a huge success. And I would continue to be a spoken-word poet for the rest of my life. That experience shaped me.

It was a beautiful project. And my best friend and I would continue to run the club until around 2016. By then, we’d even branched out and helped with the creation of sister-clubs all around the region. We traveled all over the SWANA region meeting members of our sister-clubs and performing at their events alongside them. We were making our voices heard. We were doing big important things all on our own. We had created our own little beautiful oasis in the desert. 

The Writing Club died a natural death, I like to say often. It was time. Our job was done. And we did it beautifully and with love and so much care. My best friend and I still celebrate everything we were able to accomplish through it. It was our baby. In a lot of ways, it still lives in us. It was so, so beautiful. It was a time in our lives where it felt like anything was possible.

Then in 2017, a year before I left to Barcelona, I started to feel the void left behind by the conclusion of The Writing Club. I missed that feeling of belonging and community. The problem was, I had been suffering from a severe case of writer’s block – which was one of the reasons the writing club had to end – so another writing club was out of the question. Which is how, together with another very dear friend of mine, I got the idea of starting the Women’s Book Club. It was a book club by name only, in the sense that it didn’t quite operate the same way a conventional book club would. There was no set selected book we would discuss. The members were not actually required to do any reading (though most of them did). What it was, essentially, was a little debate club, where members were free to discuss any book they’d come across that had any kind of feminist themes. We stressed inclusivity and openness and safety, and our meetings were hotbeds for debates on feminist and queer theory and intersectionality, racism, sexism, and classism. We talked about everything and everyone was treated with respect and dignity, everyone was valid. The conversations flowed freely and everyone would leave with a sense of catharsis and the feeling of being heard. My friend and I had the time of our lives running it together. I was sad when I had to leave and we had to end it.

I will end the history lesson here. I wanted to give you a glimpse of the person I was before. The person who was willing and capable and able and did Big Things and started clubs and was successful and had a steady job and got on stage and did a TED Talk and charmed entire audiences. I wanted you to know my old self. Because she was important and she mattered. But she was also in a lot of pain. She never really felt like she fit in. She felt extremely alone, a lot of the time. And she put an extraordinary amount of pressure on herself to be and do all those things. It took so much energy. 

When I came back from Barcelona, I couldn’t be her anymore. I was expected to, but I didn’t know how to. I spent 27 years collecting the data I’d need to be seen as a Normal Human, but I could no longer apply any of that knowledge anymore. 

I felt broken. I felt like a disappointment. And the crash that followed when I tried to be her again and failed spectacularly was inevitable.

*For M and N

**A reference to Joanne Limburg’s book, “Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism”.

There was a small lie in the last sentence of my previous essay, part 2. In a therapy session a few days after I took the online test, I tried to find the courage to say something to my therapist about what had happened. I will refrain from detailing what exactly happened next, but I will say that I went into it with so much doubt and uncertainty that I was dismissing myself as I told her. I gave her no space to respond.

So she did the best she could with what I could give her at the time (I think I might be autistic but I’m probably wrong, right? It can’t possibly be. I’m not autistic. There’s no way I’m autistic. I would know!) and helped ease my obvious distress by moving right past it. And I don’t blame her. She didn’t know me well enough by then. She’d heard of my struggles, but she’d never witnessed me in meltdown mode. She knew I had social anxiety, but who doesn’t these days? For all she knew, I was a smart, charming, well-spoken, determined young woman-poet who just had a little trouble with anxiety sometimes. Nothing serious. We’d work through it together. She had my back.

This probably would have been the end of it if I didn’t move back to Riyadh in September of 2020.

While I was overwhelmingly excited to be around my loved ones and back home again, I was nervous. I felt like (no, I knew) the version of me that was coming back now was not the version that had left them 2 and a half years ago. That version had disappeared. She was gone. She was dead. They didn’t know the new me. They never met her. She was a stranger. I knew that in order to survive going back home, something had to change. And it was either going to be me or my circumstances, and I’d already done too much work on myself to ever dare change her again. 

My initial plan pre-covid, like I’d mentioned to you before, was: go back home, move out of the family house, get a job, learn to drive, and be a productive and independent member of society. This was quickly becoming a distant dream (nightmare?). Because the me that spent 6 months in isolation could no longer do any of those things that the old me had planned. 

First of all, my plan to move out was completely off the table now. My mom had gotten wind of my desire to leave and pleaded with me to stay home, offering to build me an entirely independent little apartment structure outside in our backyard. She wanted me to stay out of love, not out of control, and that made all the difference to me. I’d been away from her for almost 3 years and because she and I were so close, she’d missed me and wanted to have me within reach again. It was a compromise I could live with. It was a request (not a demand) and it came from a place of love and longing. So I agreed. Anything to make my mom happy. 

But because my new little home was being built from scratch, I spent the first year back inside my family home. And I had to face everything I ran away from when I left to Barcelona almost 3 years ago. I was back in my own society, in a bedroom at home, right where it all started – and all the social responsibilities I’d left behind were about to attack me with full force. 

The other thing that had changed for me in those months of isolation bliss was that the idea of “work” as we know it no longer appealed to me. I no longer wanted to get a job – any job, at all – or to perform labor ever again. This is where my anti-capitalism and my autism intersected: both sides of me now refused the idea of being exploited for labor. I had tried rest and I couldn’t go back to hustle. I didn’t want to. Nothing in the world could convince me to apply for a job. I could no longer stomach the hypocrisy and exploitation necessary to thrive in a capitalist work environment, much less justify my participation in a system I didn’t believe in. How can I possibly go back to an advertising job when I wanted to burn the whole capitalist order down? (I realize the privilege inherent in this choice and the sentiment behind it – this was a choice I could afford to make that many, many others cannot. It is luck, pure and simple.)

So that meant I was unemployed and had a lot of free time. But it wasn’t my own time. Because I was around people, so many people, all the time. It was proving really difficult to be sociable. Even though they were my people, my loved ones, my family, the people I spent almost 3 years desperately missing. I’d adjusted to being alone so well and I’d come to love making my own decisions, deciding for myself how my day was going to look like, only doing things I want to do. For 6 whole months, my time was mine and mine only. I didn’t do a single thing I didn’t want to do and I didn’t put a single ounce of pressure on myself. I was living that easy breezy life. For 6 months, my calendar was blissfully empty. 

But now I was back home and the pressure was building. There were aunts and uncles and distant friends and acquaintances who felt entitled to my presence. There were gatherings I’d have to go to – the ones I could previously manage with some sort of (rehearsed) ease. There were weddings coming up. The thought of being around people who were now virtually strangers made my stomach turn (literally, hi IBS!). I thought of the small talk necessary to keep these pointless conversations going. I thought of the comments that would be made about my body, the entitlement some relatives feel to throw around snarky comments. I thought about having to fake-smile and fake-laugh and lie and say things like “I missed you too!” when I didn’t mean it. The thought of all of it was too painful. It was a life I wasn’t sure I could go back to. I no longer had the skill-set to manage those situations. My ability to “fake it” had disappeared. So had my will.

And it wasn’t just who I was on the inside who had changed beyond their recognition. Since I left to Barcelona in 2018, I stopped doing one thing I had done consistently for 27 years of my life: straightening my hair. For the first time in my life, I began to embrace my naturally curly hair, and it was a very big first step in my mounting rejection of eurocentric beauty standards. This started even before the months in isolation, only a few months into me moving away. And it was also something I could have never done if I’d stayed back home. And in those 6 months in isolation, I stopped wearing make-up too. Not that I ever wore too much of it anyways (it always felt too icky on my skin) but I was known for my signature cat-eye look and I was something of a pro with a little bit of liquid eyeliner. But then I was all by myself, and I didn’t need to make myself up, so I ditched even my little secret weapon. I even stopped applying the occasional signature red lipstick. 

There was also the issue of the weight I’d gained. I grew bigger, physically, in isolation, and I had no desire to shrink myself ever again. I had taught myself to love my body. I had stopped hearing other people’s opinions of it in my head. For the first time in my life, the cognitive dissonance of adhering to beauty ideals while simultaneously fighting against them disappeared. I was who I said I was, and my morals matched my actions. It was a peace I didn’t know I needed or could achieve.

But this meant that when I came home I was pretty much unrecognizable. The thin (or always trying to be thin, like a good fat girl, to the point of surgical intervention), social, charming, straight-haired, black eyeliner/red lipstick, overachieving, rebellious, fiery, people-pleasing, always-ready-for-a-debate girl everyone knew was gone and I was a brand new person, a stranger, playing pretend, trying and failing at faking my previous self. 

I was unapologetically fat now, for a start. That alone presented the biggest social barrier. Most people I knew (like most people in the world) are incredibly unkind to fat people at best, and borderline aggressive and hostile towards them at worst. My body was bound to dominate every conversation – people always feel entitled to an opinion – and I wasn’t ready to put myself through that. I’d been (apologetically) fat before my thin phase, and I knew how cruel people could be. But now I loved myself too much to put myself in situations where I’d be ridiculed and teased. I simply wouldn’t tolerate it. I’d explode with anger. And exploding with anger (at your elders, especially) is not socially acceptable, unlike blatant and explicit fatphobia.

So began the first of many difficult boundary-setting conversations with my family. This would be the first tough conversation I would have with my mother because it was the most important one to me. I sat her down, and gently and diplomatically informed her that I would no longer be present at any social functions that included anyone outside of our immediate family (basically: her and my siblings and their kids). I don’t enjoy them, I never did, and I would no longer allow anyone to force me to be somewhere I didn’t want to be. I told her how being forced to be around people I didn’t get along with or necessarily like – who were bullies by nature and who never had a nice thing to say or any depth to their thinking, who thrived on pointless small-talk and malicious gossip – was exhausting to me. I told her I no longer had the energy to swallow my pride and smile and be polite. I told her there was a risk I wouldn’t be able to hold my tongue and I might end up saying something to them that she’d regret. I had to be a little stern, which she wasn’t used to – but I did it. I also told her that I would not tolerate any kind of negative comment on my body anymore, not from her or anyone else. My body, I explained, was now completely and totally off-limits. To everyone.

She made one request of me. I’d see my aunts just one time so they’d get a chance to welcome me home. They’re my dad’s sisters, so she implored me to think of what it would mean to him. They were excited to see me and they missed me, she said, so I hesitantly agreed. What I didn’t know was that they were about to make my point for me, and convince my mom that my choice to abstain from future events was definitely the right one. 

The very first thing my aunts said when they saw me was “someone’s been eating a lot in quarantine!”. I almost laughed. It was entirely predictable and I saw it coming a mile away. But I was ready to make a point, ready to show my mom the new no-nonsense person I’d become, so I unleashed a torrent of anger at them. 

“How dare you? Do you think I don’t own a mirror? What exactly did you hope to achieve with that comment? Tell me exactly how you think you’re being helpful? Oh, a joke? Do you see anyone laughing? How about from now on we become decent people who refrain from making comments about people’s bodies? Unbelievable!”

I couldn’t believe what I’d just said and done, and I half expected my mom to be red with shame. I’d just violated all kinds of Saudi social codes by talking back to my elders. It was glorious. I felt powerful. I just yelled at my aunts. In front of everyone. I was shaking, but you couldn’t see it from my straight, angry poker face. But the next thing I heard took me completely by surprise: it was my mom laughing out loud and saying “She told me she’d do this. She’s no longer tolerating anyone’s shitty comments on her body. You had it coming and you deserved it!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. She wasn’t defending them, she was defending me. She was… proud of me? She also knew that I was right a few days ago when I told her I could no longer do this. And that I was right about these kinds of settings being triggers for me. 

So that was the last time she forced me to be someplace I didn’t want to be. And it was only the first of a thousand compromises she would make afterwards to let me know she wanted me to feel safe and loved and comfortable at home. In the coming year, she and I would grow together, around each other, and learn to make space for one other. In the coming year, my mom would evolve too, right alongside me, even out-pacing me sometimes. She would show me kindness, and patience, and respect, and she would go out of her way to make sure I was happy – or at least less miserable. 

It’s still strange to me the way that things worked out next. The coming year would be one filled with heartache, anger, shame, pain, loss, and endless tears. In the coming year, I would unravel, completely and wholly. I would lose my speech. I would start to hate my body again. I’d lose half my friends and lose faith in the other half. I’d spend days in bed, unable to move, unable to eat. I’d snap and yell at my loved ones when they’d try to help me. I’d turn my phone off for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. I’d explode into fits of sobbing unprompted and for no apparent reason. I’d become a monstrous person, full of rage, full of anger, hell-bent on pushing everyone away while at the same time yearning for connection. I’d feel profoundly and deeply isolated and alone. I’d feel like an alien in my own hometown, in my own home, in my own skin. I’d spend most of my days thinking of ways to die without hurting my loved ones. I’d want to die, all the time. Because being and staying alive seemed impossible.

And then I started to notice a pattern. And I began to investigate. And suddenly, everything made sense.