Chapter 1

1/15/18

I believed I had reached the plateau of stability as an adult. Thirty-two years old with the highest paying job I had ever acquired, and a relationship with a man that I truly believed would last much longer than four months. I thought I had found the peaceful, stable, path that would make me happy, but then it all fell apart the way it does every time I start to believe in the stability of my circumstances. In the destruction of the external imagery of who I was going to be, my identity became a mash of uncertainty. I lost myself in holding on to the boy and job, warping myself into whatever would keep the fantasy real. But now in the third month of the isolationist life of unemployment, I can’t figure out what to do next. I can’t go back to who I was, and I don’t know who to become.

I need to find the beginning. The earliest point.

I’ll read through the voices of the girl I was. Searching for the earliest point when I began to lose the path the child’s heart and soul wanted for this woman’s life to be. Is the life I live my own? Or just a constant fight to survive as authentically, as true to myself, while the cultural programming and expectations reshape the grand dreams into fantasies that I am told I’ll grow out of. Who is the most authentic self? She must have existed long ago. Perhaps if I remember her, if I find her, I’ll find where I am. All that I let go of to move forward, advised by memes and gurus over the years. “Let Go!” “Let Go!” Do we accidentally allow parts of ourselves to be lost in the departure of that which creates pain?

I remember journal entries that always began with an apology to the blank page for neglect and time away. The guilt of leaving a friend uninformed and only coming to their presence when emotionally charged. After years of returning to that blank page, collecting those scraps of written thoughts and traveling through life with the weight of dead trees, I’ll sort through who I once was to find who I’ve become and how to transform into the authenticity of me.

Before Independence

1994

Save the World Newsletter

Hi, we are Jessy, Siedeh, and Ruby. We are all around the age of nine. We hope our age does not affect our message. That we need to nurture nature. Did you know that everyday a hundred and fifty animal species go extinct or that every day over 2,000,000 trees are cut down? Well if you do know, you know that it is a major problem. We need to do something quick. The future in in our hands and with the way we are now, the future does not look good. If we all help out, we can really change things to the way they should be. Being this young and seeing what is happening, it gives me goosebumps even thinking about what life will be life when I am a grown-up. I feel that I cannot just sit here while animals are dying, and water is getting toxic waste dumped in it, If, you are like me and you want to help and need some ideas, here they are.

Do not litter at all.

Walk or bike sometimes instead of driving.

Do your part in the circle of life.

1/15/18

The earliest piece of writing I could find. Written on a very old chucky and dirty cream-colored computer, even then I was organizing my friends around a mission to save the world. There has always been this feeling of needing to help make the world a better place with in me. I blamed it for years on my father’s expectations of my success in the world, the hierarchy of Cambridge society intellectualizing expectation of their youth, but it developed far earlier than life path consideration or college applications. No, my desire to make the world a better place stemmed from a biological, and intuitive understanding that I had been given so many advantages in the reality that I had been born into, that my life could not be enjoyed until I helped create equal opportunities for all life on earth. I could feel the pain of the world within my body as I read in school of war and destruction. Why had I been born into this life while so many beautiful beings were dying from lack of resources all over the world? That feeling of guilt, anger, desire to fight the powers that hurt so many, penetrated my understanding and life on planet earth from a very young age.

4/ 29/ 1997

The reason for my being absent yesterday. I am sick of the damn teachers and damn school.

1/15/18

My isolationist and loner personality developed early. Despite being an extrovert who was unafraid to speak to anyone, of any age, about anything, I found most did not want to engage my inquiries due to rules of children not speaking openly with adults, or with my peers, the inability to understand what I was passionately ranting about. But I was stuck in concrete walls of years of public school where I felt neither connected to my peers or the teachers, there was always this barrier of understanding between us. I felt like an alien trying to connect to their world but unable for them to even fathom my own.

At the age of nine in Islam, a girl becomes a woman and must start practicing hijab. Fifth grade was the first year my father began requiring my obedience to this practice, despite my lack of desire and my understanding that being the girl with the thing on my head would not serve me well in the American culture of Barbie and bikinis. I wanted to be like the blonde girls with the crop tops and belly button rings in my class. So, I would wear it while walking to school with my mom and immediately take it off when I got near my classroom. Looking back, I am fully appreciative of not being a ten-year-old wearing crop tops and belly button gems, but those girls were just playing out the expectations of American society on women, on little girls who believed to be seen they must be sexy. The opposite of expectations being put on me by my father’s culture but with the same mistake of burdening little girls with the patriarchal warping of womanhood and the female body.

By seventh grade, I wore the purple beret, instead of a scarf. My rebellion to hijab and my father. Turtlenecks under t-shirts and dresses. Leggings. No shorts. T-shirts over bathing suits as I feared my changing body. As I feared someone seeing. As I secretly relished the tits that had grown on my chest, ashamed of my desire to be a sexual woman. I was caught in between an understanding that my body was changing into the desires of the American culture, but that the ruling cultures of my home, Islam and Irish Catholicism, deemed the body I was growing into as sinful, needing to be hidden to protect myself from the men who would jump out of the bushes on the street corner and rape me. Here in the swirling confusions of being a child unknowing of the world and being told of how it would treat me, how I needed to protect myself from it, I began to hate my body, and being female. If I was always going to be subjected to being destroyed because of my physical form or wanted only for it, I would not allow it to be my priority. I will become smarter than everyone else, so that no one can hurt me, because through my brain I will gain power and freedom.

My new goal would only enhance my social issues at school. I had no interest in talking about how cute some boy was or what nail polish color or new tank top I would be purchasing. I buried myself in books to escape the limitations I was forced to participate in and as all anarchist find, sooner or later the masses turn to destroy you. That was the year, our long-term substitute pregnant science teacher decided not to teach and instead read the globe while eating donuts all day. I tried to rally the students around fighting for our education, but they told me to shut up. “We like not doing work! Don’t ruin this!” Rumors started by a pig faced girl, reporting on my desires to murder the baby of the pregnant sub, turned the school against me. All because I wanted to learn science. At the end of the day, I would go home crying begging not to have to go back, but I went back every morning and developed fantasy driven coping skills to keep me submissive but never defeated. How do the coping skills of my youth continue to keep me sane today? Or are they the root of my continued isolationism within this reality?

5/9/1997

A light has shown on a miserable life. Now I am taking a drama lesson in Lexington and I am going to audition for “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” in Winthrop.

I was meant for the theater, I am very, truly sure of that. Mama is wonderful, driving me all these places, helping me live out my dreams.

Baba and her have been fighting. A bright day has suddenly darkened because of a horrible grey cloud. If they divorce, as they have said, I think it will be for the best. Mom hates living with Baba. I hate seeing Mama so unhappy. Life is harder than it seems.

-Siedeh

P.S. If I ever become famous I owe it all to my mother.

1/15/18

I remember that first drama class, the room, the teacher, the other students. It felt like salvation even though I also remember being way more enthusiastic than the others in the class, forced by their parents to do an after-school activity. You always approached situations with passion and enthusiasm. You still try to. It was how you got your first job at 12. You helped the teacher teach summer camp theater program. I remember how empowered and grown you felt.

My childhood passion for musicals began with my mother’s love of musicals, singing and dancing. Saturday mornings were spent doing a deep clean of the apartment. We would listen to Standing Room Only, a radio program devoted to Broadway musicals on the local college station, dance and sing while making sure everything was clean enough to meet my father’s expectations.

My parents never had a healthy marriage or relationship with each other. Perhaps they were too young when they got married and started a family, or maybe their culture differences were too much, or maybe they had not grown self-aware enough within themselves before taking care of newly created humans to be able to understand how to care for themselves, each other, and us. The struggles of my family were not uncommon, but the fear within reaching out for help created a pressure within myself as the oldest child to need to protect everyone. The PTSD of my childhood, still influences my adult life today as I always have a million plans and back up plans, just in case. Hyper-aware anxiety, constant flight or fight, the need to take control whenever it feels the others around me are not equipped to deal with the situation at hand. Yeah, like so many of us, I’m still fucked up, but I have also found that the pieces that make me fucked up are my superpowers as well.