Schizophrenia

Sometimes I wonder, and start to question myself… sometimes I get confused of who am I? not because I don’t know the answer but because I am in constant  monitoring of myself; for me I might sacrifice any part of my personality but I would die trying to keep three parts, my soul, my humanity and my moral sense.

Recently, I have been receiving a tremendous negative feed backs of the stand I am taking in this life, people I know very well being unsatisfied by my behaviors, funny enough people I don’t know or never met also sending me advises and criticizing the aspects of my life and the most importantly, people I love are finding difficult time to accept me as a person and human being away from all our intellectual/ behavioral differences; which I find might be very harmful in many aspects but lucky for me I was born with strong personality that these types of criticism don’t affect me; raised by an amazing father who supported me while I was growing up really shaped my character and made me more open to receive criticism without letting it affect me psychologically because I know and accept that difference is crucial part of this life and no matter what I do it will always make someone unhappy.  though I usually start with my own experience but usually it is not the main point, I try through my writings to highlight the obstacles women, and young people face in the Arab world, try to relate to these problems from my own experiences with enormous certainty that most of young generation had to face similar situations.

Coming from the Arab world set some rules for your life, whether you accept them or not; in most cases you have to live by them because breaking these rules may cause unrepairable damage but as well living by them make you live a double life; secret life “your own personal life that you chose for yourself” and the life that you will show to the family, friends and the society you come from, and living this way is not healthy choice … after a while you start to feel a little be schizophrenic and you get confused of who you really are; even in the best cases when you overcome this feeling then you have to be in regular monitoring for your life  because the hidden feel of guilt will always be there, sometimes it will be blurry for you to see clearly and other times you will be just cautious of being caught living your life. Of course I wouldn’t describe myself as schizophrenic but living under these rules for so long made my life schizophrenic somehow, which make me really think of how other young Arab people are living this life, as I said before I am pretty strong which make me able to face a lot and I am actually living my life the way I want; not hiding anything unless it may hurt people I really care about but this make me really question how these young people survive this hectic life, how they survive in day to day basis and how much they could enjoy the life under such prohibitions and pressure …. I spent hours trying to find a way to help those young girls and boys including my own self but I always reached the same result, that it is personal and every person should assess the damage that he/she can or want to manage and start from there because every person is  unique character and have different priorities. Sadly enough it is not something I can do an initiative for, or start a campaign to fight it, it is social structure need to be changed slowly to be more lenient to accept difference and giving the personal freedom to people so they can live their life healthier without any psychological damage and without hypocrisy, without having to think twice about who we are in public and who we are in private because it is emotionally and psychologically draining to be forced to be someone but the real you.

I know most of the times what I write is dark and negative but I really believe we have to admit the problems so we can fix them, we have to assess the damage to be able to measure the effort and know the tools we need to fix these problems, I certainly believe that admitting the problem is usually 30% of the solution because it allows your mind to take a neutral stand from the case and make your mind able to assess everything clearly. I might sometimes get so hard on the Arab society, and that’s because I do care about people more than anything else and I hate to see my friends, colleges and other people suffer because of social traditions and norms … I wish for my daughter, friends,  myself and other people a better society where we are accepted for who we really are, not what we chose to do or how we chose to live our lives, a society where we can feel safe enough to express our own beliefs and ideas without the fear of being expelled or treated differently just because we have different mentality or life style. To sum up, I really hope that every young Arab person stand for his/her life and live by their own rules, assess the situation and make the sacrifice they need to make, if they have to … to live their lives the fullest they can, we only live once so we should take the initiative to change the life to be more tolerant for our hopes and dreams, more liberal to our different choices and lifestyles because the society we create is the world we will live in.