The question I get asked most when I meet people is: What was it like growing up in Saudi Arabia? It used to bother me so much. I could never tell if people were genuinely asking. It's such an open-ended question and hard to answer. Where to start?
I just finished reading Middlemarch. I think this is my favorite novel? The narrator has an extraordinary range in the novel that I haven't seen before. I genuinely wish that this is how God talks about us or narrator our stories? No judgment. Lots of attention, understanding, and
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. – Howard Zinn Love the most powerful force we have. Many of us love deeply (which is good) but we don’t love widely. Loving deep but not wide can blinds us: we excuse the cruelty of
Oh, I've been running around like a headless chicken! It's that time of year again: New York Climate Week and the Brooklyn Book Festival. Last fall was probably one of the best eras of my life, and I'm excited to create many new memories
I grew up praying 5 times a day. I started at the age of 9 or so until I was around 24. This adds up to 25,550 or more prayers. I found it inconvenient. So I stopped. Now I find myself yearning to pray again. Not because I should,
Below is an excerpt from my journal from last year. I remembered it again because I came across The Michigan Quarterly Review, which is dedicated exclusively to the subject of "The Female Body." +++ Feminine solitude, at high altitude The feminine life is so short. Not biologically, but culturally.
I might delete this later, mostly because it is quite personal and involves other people. I concealed many details about this relationship to protect the identities of others, and that was many years ago; we don’t have many people in common. I'm also not sending this to
“In 2024, believe it or not, (or believe it and pity me if you’re comfortably atheist), I remain as open to any notion of God as ever. In fact, I want to be the next prophet. This is not an easy goal. For life is too short, the task
Sometime in April, I started fantasizing about the idea of a flip phone. Sadly, this doesn't work with my job. So instead, I downloaded the app Foqos. I have a setting called "flip phone" which I turn on in the evenings and on weekend. It'
This is a slightly vulnerable and in-the-moment post. This was my first Instagram post. Back then, I was in the thick of what felt like my life falling apart before it even started. A sudden, taboo divorce had cost me every friendship I'd built up to that point.
I love Iris Murdoch as a philosopher and a novelist. I discovered her work two years ago and I know that I'll slowly make my way through all of it. Every single thing she wrote. A few weeks ago I finished the Bell. I relate to Dora Greenfield
I collect quotes from books I like about different topics. One of those topics is poverty. Poverty impacts and defines people in different ways; some are blatantly evident, and some are deeply hidden. This post is not meant to be educational. It is meant to capture beautiful writing that resonated