When I was in college, a joke started about someone in our group and spread throughout the entire university:
“Is that your body, Ahmed, or your mother’s?

Am I ugly? Yes, I wasn’t beautiful, or maybe that’s what they wanted me to believe.
I was chubbier than them. I wasn’t good at socializing like them. They made me think I was different.
body image, bullying, school, social pressure, beauty standards

“Why do you talk to boys?
Why’d we send you to an all-girls school then?”

My upbringing was very conservative and restrictive,
The house and Amm Salah’s supermarket at the end of our street were my limits.
Just these two.
From kindergarten to the second or third grade
I went to an Islamic school.

The kids at school were the first to surprise me.
It was their first time dealing with a Christian.
During class,
A kid would interrupt me to ask,
“Do you speak Arabic like us?

I was in the third grade and we took the same bus to school.
He was fair-skinned and had rosy cheeks.
He had thick, soft, jet black hair.
He had thick eyebrows and piercing eyes.
He was the class and bus clown.
He was that kid who joked around all the time.
I loved him.
romantic relationships, school

Why does everything bad happen only to me?
I weighed myself yesterday.
I’m gaining, not losing, weight.
I’m depressed.
My body’s a mess.
I need to change.

Girls, I know that at this age, you like to flaunt your beauty.
“Look at my long hair!
Look at whatever!”
Here, you must forget about all those things.
The uniform you must wear is a galabiyya.
The kind your mothers wear.

The French teacher, Miss Lubnah, was very sweet and petite.
She spoke in broken Arabic,
But her French was perfect.
She was a great French teacher.

No one has ever experienced what my father put me through.
It’s such a difficult thing to live through,
When you’re a kid in first grade,
And your father takes you home from school,
And beats you with a spiked rod,
Nails penetrating your entire body.
It was a long walk home,
And I was being beaten up continuously,
blood gushing out of the wounds.
All of this for something I didn’t do.
Something that wasn’t my fault.