I spend hours thinking about Jannah. What it will look like. What reunions will feel like. The peace. The perfection. The eternal rest after this difficult dunya. But yesterday, my neighbor knocked on my door asking for help moving furniture. I said I was busy. I wasn’t busy. I was reading about Paradise. My wife
I posted the same photo on three platforms yesterday. LinkedIn caption: “Grateful for this amazing team and the work we’re accomplishing together. #Leadership #Growth” Instagram caption: “Squad goals Twitter: I didn’t post it at all. Wrong audience. Wrong tone. Wrong version of me. Three platforms. Three different people. All supposedly me. My wife noticed I
I tell strangers on Reddit about my depression while pretending to my family that everything’s fine. Last night, posted three paragraphs about feeling empty, purposeless, like I was watching my own life from outside. Got supportive comments from usernames I’d never recognize again. This morning, Happy asked how I was. “Fine,” I said. Smiled. Made
My teenage tweets haunt my adult job interviews. The HR manager pulled up my Twitter from 2009. Edgy jokes I’d made at seventeen. Political takes that seemed profound then but mortify me now. Casual language I’d never use today. “Can you explain these?” she asked. How do you explain being seventeen? Being stupid? Being the
Inside vs Outside I know my anxiety intimately but only see others’ achievements. Scrolling through Instagram at midnight, comparing my 3 AM panic attacks to their vacation photos. My imposter syndrome to their promotion posts. My crushing self-doubt to their perfect family portraits in golden light. Fundamentally unfair competition. My unfiltered internal reality versus their
I understood calculus only when Arash asked me to explain it. Fifteen years after passing the exam, supposedly mastering the material, I finally comprehended what derivatives actually meant. Not the formulas—those I’d memorized. But the concept itself. Something alchemical happens in transformation from student to teacher. Arash was twelve, struggling with pre-calculus. “Baba, what’s a
The meeting ended with unanimous nodding. None of us understood the proposal. I walked out with my colleagues, all wearing the same expression—vaguely confident, professionally engaged. The performance of comprehension while drowning in confusion. Back at my desk, I stared at my notes. They made no sense. Technical jargon, acronyms I didn’t recognize, references to
Learning How to Learn At thirty-nine, I discovered I’d been studying wrong my entire life. The revelation came while watching Arash do homework. His methods looked chaotic—drawing pictures for math problems, pacing while reciting French vocabulary, acting out historical events with his toys. My educational conditioning screamed “inefficient.” But when I tested him later, his
I remember Anne Hathaway was Shakespeare’s wife. I don’t remember what my mother said to me three days before she died. The conversation happened. I was there. She said something important—I remember knowing it was important at the time. But the actual words? Gone. Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway sits permanently filed in my brain, taking up
The Fear of Being Too Late to Start At forty, I discovered I was born to teach. At forty, I could no longer afford to learn how. The recognition came while helping Arash with his science project. We were building a model solar system, and I found myself explaining planetary orbits with a patience I’d
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