Author: 7ala Abdullah

Hala Abdullah is a poet and a feminist from Saudi Arabia. She has founded and is currently the co-president of the Writing Club in Riyadh - a project that aims to help young men and women find their voice through writing.

sentimental/archivist

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ Leave a comment

i know an archivist
who sits by her window
taking note of everything
that no one else sees.
there’s an archivist
i know, and no one knows
she’s an archivist –
a secret for no other
reason than secret-keeping.
the way that tree
over there is losing its
leaves, 5 to 6 at a time,
even though it’s spring
– noted.
(i know the feeling)
entry 1,232,154 done.
that bird with the yellow
streak across its back
singing at the top
of its lungs,
looking thirsty
(i know the feeling)
– that’s 1,232,155.
and the little cloud
moving faster than its
sisters, trying so hard
to catch up,
(i know the feeling)
even that is noted
(1,232,156).
even the little
bumble bee mistaking
window-glass for
free space – a soft
tap only the archivist
can hear
(i know the feeling)
– that’s entry 1,232,157.
every little thing is
archived, made note of,
noticed – and sense can be
made of everything later:
in the shadows, where
it’s safe.
taking her place by the
window, counting 1 2 3 4
under her breath,
the archivist lives in a
house without a door.
no, the archivist lives
in a house where the
door has been barricaded
shut.
no, there is no barricade,
but the door is made of
steel and can only be
opened from the outside.
no, the door is not made
of steel, but i promise
you it’s locked.
silly archivist, reach
out and try turning
the knob.
come on now.

*

i know a sentimentalist
whose body’s created a
whole separate heart just
for her memories.
there’s a sentimentalist
i know and no one knows
she’s a sentimentalist,
a secret for no other
reason than secret-keeping.
the day she first touched
the hand of the love
of her life –  she remembers
all the details, grand and miniscule.
(how could i forget?)
that one takes up a lot of
space.
the first time she noticed
a prominent grey streak on
her father’s head,
she cried
(how could i forget?)
that memory birthed a
poem.
and the day her siblings
collectively consoled
her through her first
heartbreak; they were
so gentle with her
(how could i forget?)
that one makes her
feel like a candle’s been
lit inside her
(it was belonging for
the very first time).
even the little things
like the feeling of
mama’s hugs and how they
smell like safety – a
faint scent only the
sentimentalist can smell
(how could i forget?)
that one she craves
often.
nothing she sees or
feels can be forgotten –
the good and bad alike:
all with the same intensity.
some days the grief is
louder and some days hope
wins; it’s a gamble
and there is no reward.
the memory heart is in
her gut, and some days
she’s sure she’s having
a heart attack.
no, the memory heart is in
her throat, and if she tries to
speak, she chokes.
no, the memory heart is
a door to a room where the
windows open straight
to the past.
silly sentimentalist,
there is no such thing
as a memory heart.
come on now.

*

i know a woman who lives
in a house without a door
and has a memory heart
in her gut.
there’s a woman i know
and no one knows what
she’s thinking.
no one knows what
she’s thinking.
she’s lost it.
it’s not even a secret.

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debris

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ Leave a comment

there will be days when you lose
me completely
when i will try to open my mouth
to speak to you and the words
will just sit there on my
tongue: heavy, large,
entirely unable to become
sound.
there will be days when i am
just a shadow, when you
will try to look at me
but only be able to see right
through:
the ghost of who i once was –
an empty shell.
there is a sickness inside me
which constantly beckons me to
disappear.
there is a monster clawing
at me from the inside
and these days it’s always
winning. the bleeding will
start soon, i can feel it.
there will be days when you
lose me completely, where
i will disappear so
professionally you will wonder
if i ever really existed.
grand and alive as i was.
once teaching hope and wonder.
there have been days when you
have lost me, completely,
i know. you’re still looking.
every time, there is less and
less of me to be found
in the burning debris of
my breakdown.

bruising

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ Leave a comment

today the past has come to life
and my place in the world
(or lack of)
is loud and clear,
nonbelonging painted over my
skin – shades of black and blue.
what is a bruise if not
an acknowledgement of pain:
hurt made visible?
who am i if not
an acknowledgement of pain:
trauma made visible
and too human to ignore?
the past has come to life today
here in my house,
and it is breathing in all
my oxygen, leaving me reeling
on the floor.
the past has come to life today
and it is pushing knives deep
into my flesh.
what is my body if not
proof that things can grow
in places where they are not
welcome?
this -my- body is proof
things can grow where they
are not welcome,
where they are not loved,
where they are always
on the outside.
things can grow when they
are not welcome (look at me,
look at the size of me)
but when they die,
they still die alone.

Finding (my) Autism – Part 5

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ Leave a comment

I made a huge and entirely preventable mistake when I got home in September of 2020. I decided to wean myself off my SSRIs (antidepressants/anti-anxiety meds), which had been prescribed to me just before leaving to Barcelona in 2018 (but definitely not for the first time). 

I made the decision to stop without consulting a doctor. I made it because I was tired of taking a pill every day just to feel and be normal. I made it because I didn’t really believe the meds were helping me too much, or doing anything at all – I was taking them and yet I still didn’t feel okay, let alone “normal”. I made it because I thought I was ready. Because my psychiatrist, when prescribing them, had said “these will help you in Barcelona”, and I was back from Barcelona now, so I thought I could stop. That rookie mistake almost cost me my life, but it brought my attention to something I strongly doubt I would have noticed otherwise. 

When I started to crumble mere weeks into coming back, I blamed it on the pressure of re-assimilation. After being all on my own and living entirely independently in a foreign country for 2 and a half years, I was bound to have a reaction to coming back to my old and very busy  and very full-of-people life. But the depressive episodes I started to experience were far too intense, and far too frequent and debilitating. And the thing that scared me most about them was that they came out of nowhere. I had nothing to trace them back to. Nothing particularly painful or distressing would cause them. One day, I’d be laughing with my family and friends with an almost ease, and the next: I’m a mess. That terrified me. I didn’t know when to expect the depression or the rage or the tears; they came out of nowhere. Everything was suddenly triggering, and my skin was constantly on fire. When you don’t understand what is happening to you or why, it can be horrifying. I thought I was losing my mind. And in many ways, I was. 

One of the worst parts about what was happening was that I could feel myself disappointing the people who loved me. The people I loved. I’d have all my friends over, in my little room in my family house, and I wouldn’t know how to speak to them. I would sit silently, overwhelmed and anxious, one wrong word or move away from exploding. My friends would ask me what I wanted to eat and I would get so irritated I would snap and say something cruel. My mother would ask me to come sit with her and it would take all my energy to sit with her without suddenly starting to cry. “You’re different since you’ve come back” is something I had to hear almost daily. And I was. I knew I was. I was so different I could feel the people I cared about reassessing our relationship, taking a step back. 

I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I knew there were some things I could simply no longer tolerate. One of the biggest was the obsession with diet talk and thinness and beauty and how it seeped into nearly every single conversation with my friends. It was too much for me to handle, even though in the past I admit I must have contributed to such conversations sometimes. But now, I was noticing everything. How my friends’ obsession with the thin ideal was starting to trigger me, how it was taking me back to a place of body-hatred I thought I was past. When they talked about fatness (their own or otherwise) with repulsion, I felt shame again. And that made me awfully angry. I thought back to all the work I’d done on my self-image and self-love and felt it all slip away from me. In the past, these conversations happened around my thin(ner) body, so I could lie and tell myself it was well-meaning, nothing harmful! But now my fat body was right there with them in the room while they engaged in casual fatphobia and I didn’t know how to react. When I gathered the strength to do it, I tried to share how triggering that was for me, but it fell on mostly deaf ears. It was still keto this, cheat meal that, “I deserve these fries because I worked out today”, “I feel so fat!”, all day every day. And the isolation that created for me was incredibly heart-wrenching. 

Another was how empty and shallow my relationships began to feel. I would push myself so hard out of my comfort zone and through incredibly painful depressive episodes just to be around my loved ones, but then I was an irritable mess in the room, bringing everyone down. This hurt because I defined myself by my love for my friends. I put a lot of effort into creating and maintaining my friendships, a lot of work. But some friends mistook my sadness and anger and silence as anger at them, or as a newly-acquired boringness, or as sudden rigidity and/or an annoyance. I was no longer the “fun” friend. I was also no longer the “mom” friend either (signature me!), who was available to them at any given time for comfort or safety or a good time. I didn’t take care of them anymore the way I used to, or cater to their needs and whims (I could barely take care of myself!). I didn’t debate them on demand like I would before.

I started saying “no” to a lot of things, and that made me difficult. I was difficult to be around. I was suddenly very quiet, all the time, and when I spoke I had nothing good or interesting to say. At the beginning of my meltdown, I remember having an emergency session with my therapist, and through sobs saying something to her like “I have this nagging feeling I can’t shake that I’m gonna lose a lot of people by the end of the year”, and I was right. I said that to her sometime in January, some couple of months into me being back. By October of that year, almost half my friendships had dissolved. There was some hurt and betrayal and a lot of grief, but eventually it was best for all involved. We simply no longer got along. And that’s okay. Friendships end.

Pivot: remember when I told you at the end of Part 3 how I noticed a pattern and everything made sense? Let’s go back to that. And to the beginning of this essay, where I told you I stopped taking my SSRIs. I’ll tell you how those two things are connected.

I don’t want to be angry at my previous self because she didn’t know any better, but stopping my SSRIs when I did was… not very smart. Things went downhill from there really fast. You know about the depression and the anxiety and the difficult conversations I had to have with family and friends to keep myself from losing myself. All those goddamn boundaries! I thought I was overwhelmed and sad because I felt isolated and alien and exhausted from all that emotional labor, and that was a big part of it, sure. The confusing part was the rage I started to experience. Now, I’m comfortable with rage in the right setting. Context matters, and anger can be right and righteous. But this rage would  implode inside of me out of nowhere. I was angry, all the time – at everyone. And because I was angry, I couldn’t speak, because if I spoke up I would say something hurtful, and I didn’t want to hurt the people I loved. 

I’ve mentioned silence and not speaking a lot since I’ve started writing this series. I’ve done that because silence is really, truly excruciating for me. Those months where I couldn’t speak came after years and years of me suffering writer’s block after the death of my father (in 2015), and compounded that immense pain. Reader, you are reading an essay series of mine, so you have some idea what words mean to me. But let me elaborate briefly: I am an incredibly expressive person and words are my weapon of choice. They always have been. When I was very young (I’m talking 7/8 years-old) and got into fights with my mother and couldn’t confront her face-to-face (because I’d lose my voice, see?), I’d write her long extensive letters of apology or sadness at the injustice I’d thought I’d suffered. I’ve been a writer for most of my life now, and a spoken-word poet, so I don’t just have the need to write, but also the need to read it out and perform it. Words have always mattered to me. They have been my lifeline and my saviors. And silence was starting to kill me.

The depressive episodes and the rage and the silence led to isolation and shame and a lot of suicidal ideation. I won’t pimp my pain out, but I will tell you it hurt. A lot. And it made me feel extremely alone, so much so that I would turn my phone off for weeks convinced no one would give a fuck. Which made people angry at me. Which in turn made me angry. It was a vicious cycle. And no one was happy, least of all me. I was suddenly Crazy, with a capital C. Watch out, she’s gonna explode!

But I was lucky to have my therapist. She knows and I know that I couldn’t have survived those months without her kindness and love and her availability in my emergencies. She stuck with me and validated all my pain and hurt, even when that meant just an entire 50-min session of her watching me sob, wordless and without explanation, through video. (Thank you for always making me feel seen.)

My mother was my anchor in a lot of ways too. I will admit, with shame and a lot of regret (because I was wrong, so so wrong), that I thought my mom would be my biggest obstacle when I came home. I thought it was with her that I’d have to have all those difficult boundary-setting conversations, that it was with her where the struggle would be. But to my surprise (and I will never again be surprised by her love), she was the one who gave me the most space and unconditional love. Every single boundary I set, she accepted – at face value. Every request I made – for privacy, or help, or space, or love – was granted, no questions asked. She accommodated me so much, I’m getting teary right now just thinking about it. She accepted it all. I don’t know what I did to deserve a mother who, in a time where I felt all my friendships and siblings slipping away from me, showed me love and understanding and respect and compassion. She could see that I came back different, but she was ready and willing to accommodate the new me anyways. No questions asked. With love and open arms. She even got me new size 14 clothes so I’d be “comfortable in my new body”. My god, the ways she saved and loved me. (May I never breathe a day without you, mama. I love you so much.)

So I had some okay(-ish) days sometimes. Days I could semi-function, anyways. Somehow that was the most confusing part. Because I didn’t know which days I would wake up and want to call up my friends and which days I’d wake up crying and wanting to die. It was the perceived randomness that freaked me out. I didn’t know when the next episode was coming, but I knew I only felt “okay” about one week a month (at most). The rest: a mess, a bitch, insufferable, sobbing non-stop, beating myself up for texting my therapist on her holiday. In one of those emergency sessions, sometime in June, in passing, I say to her: “I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it’s starting to feel cyclical”. 

For some reason, my own thought sticks with me, and weeks later I am analyzing my period app data and trying to figure out a pattern – trying to figure out if when I said “cyclical”, my mind had noticed something my conscious self hadn’t. My mind does that sometimes. And I notice a correlation between my period dates and my episodes at their worst – a very strong and significant one. And I google “severe depression around period”. The first result:

Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a condition in which a woman has severe depression symptoms, irritability, and tension before menstruation. The symptoms of PMDD are more severe than those seen with premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a more serious form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS). PMS causes bloating, headaches and breast tenderness a week or two before your period. With PMDD, you might have PMS symptoms along with extreme irritability, anxiety or depression. These symptoms improve within a few days after your period starts, but they can be severe enough to interfere with your life.

How is PMDD managed or treated?

Your healthcare provider may recommend one or more of these treatments to help manage PMDD:

  1. Antidepressants to help manage your brain’s serotonin levels.

First thought: holy shit! Second thought: how the fuck has no one ever taught me about this? Third thought: how exactly am I gonna get an official diagnosis when I can’t function or trust doctors enough? 

Things made sense: I had been treating a condition I didn’t know I had, PMDD (that “activates’” or “develops” at any point in life, apparently), with my SSRIs. And when I came back to Riyadh and stopped taking them, the re-assimilation without the support of the SSRIs was a deadly combination for me. Of course I crashed. Of course I crash cyclically.

Convinced I’d solved the entire riddle of me, I send my therapist a text saying: “I think this is what’s going on with me. Can we discuss on Thursday?”

Within minutes: “Yes, let’s. You shouldn’t have to suffer like this.”

Finding (my) Autism – Part 4*

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

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”.