I’m your mother and I have your best interests at heart.
I’m telling you it’s not going to work out.
Building your lives together is not something that’ll work.

“Where are you?
Tell me where you are now.
Why are you so late?
Tell me now.
I’m not going to hang up.
We’ll continue this conversation when you come home.
Right now.
I want you here in five minutes.
I don’t care how.”

I am not obligated to have my headphones on whenever I’m walking so I wouldn’t have to hear what they say.
Because even if I can’t hear them, I can still see the way they look at me.
social stigma, social pressure, masculinity, bullying, the street

Everytime I park in the street,
Everyone drops whatever they’re doing to watch me.
It makes me nervous.
“They’re watching me. I have to show them that I can park!”

I wanted to move out and live alone.
My father, in order to prevent me from leaving,
Locked the door and chased after me.
My mother came after us.

I honestly don’t understand people who ask me that question.
“How could you let him?”
It’s not like when a man’s about to beat up his wife, he stops to ask her if she’d let him first.
Why is there an assumption that just because something happened, she must have agreed to it?
gender violence, marriage, social pressure, romantic relationships

I know that a lot of women unknowingly enter into marriages with similar types of men, and that I was lucky and all that.
But I never imagined that something like that could ever happen to me.

Every day, I feel guilty towards my daughter.
There was a time in my life when, unfortunately, I had looked up to certain people in my life and felt that I had to act like them.
One of those people was a cousin of mine.

My sister once gave me a card with pink flowers and pearls on it and some words on the back.
“My friend made them,” she said.
“She’s giving them out for free.”

No, no, no, no, you need to go to the hairdresser’s.
You are Egyptian now like us!
We just want...you know... for you to look cute and pretty.
Come on, especially so we can find you a man!