I’m not young.
I’ve been through a lot.
A lot of things have changed in my life.
I come from a middle class family.
We’re well-off, thank God.
The first real shock I went through,
Happened when I was young.
Not very young;
I was in high school,
When my grandmother passed away.
She was like a mother to me.
She was everything to me.
But I didn’t have time to mourn her, unfortunately.
My mother needed me.
She was devastated.
I don’t know what happened,
But I had to be strong for my mother.
I was 16 years old at the time,
And my thanaweya amma [Egyptian high school diploma] exams were coming up.
I couldn’t break down.
I spent 5 or 6 years without shedding a tear.
That wasn’t a conscious decision, of course.

That’s why, at times, I felt like my relationship with my mother,
Wasn’t like other children’s relationship with their mothers.
It felt normal sometimes,
But I also sometimes felt that this dynamic was forced on me.
My mother became a different person.
She’s weak.
I can’t keep taking care of you forever.

Yes, I’m staying with you now.
But I could go away at any moment.
In three or four days,
Or a year.
They depend on us,
And we also depend on them.
But we don’t like to admit it.
It confuses me sometimes.

When she was travelling last week,
I found out that I’m just like her.
I say the same things she says.
We don’t really realize it.
We think we’ll grow up to be different than them.

I got a scholarship and travelled to France.
I didn’t take any money from my father for 10 years.
I’m independent of him, thank God.
But when I came back,
He went back to being a typical Middle Eastern man.
He wasn’t worried about me while I was there.
But here, he would tell me to come home before dark.
What’s going on, old man?
I lived alone for two years,
So this came as a shock to me.
I did everything I wanted there.
But it’s not like I was out partying all night.
God was watching me,
Even if my father wasn’t.
But I won’t deny that I felt free.

I got a job at a multinational company there.
It was a lot of people’s dream job.
Everything was going great.
But I wasn’t really feeling it,
So I quit.
I started getting into fights with the sales people.
Everyone was arguing with each other all day.

Then came the yoga phase.
I didn’t know that this was my real passion.
I casually went to a class,
And found something that regulated my breathing.
I felt happy when I practiced for an hour or two every week.
The trainer was one of my very best friends.
She was American,
And did her job really well.
When she had to leave, she told me,
“You’ll teach the classes instead of me.”
I wasn’t prepared for something like that.
And I had another job.
I made the transition over six months.
I worked, and gave yoga classes.

I did both things for a while.
People thought I was a good teacher,
And I received good feedback from the students.
But then there were some problems at work,
And I decided that that was it.
I refused to go to the office,
When I knew that I had no work to do.
That’s not how I wanted to make a living.
I’d rather stay at home.

Working as a yoga teacher,
Provided me with a fraction of what I used to make at my old job.
It didn’t even cover my gas.
Now I work as a yoga teacher,
And a Thai masseuse.
I studied Thai massage in Thailand two years ago.
My clients sometimes treat me as their therapist.
As soon as I touch them,
They start venting.

These things affect us.
It either calms us down,
Or stresses us out.
We really need to be nice to one another.
We exist for one another.
The world is a tiny place.
It’s not worth getting worked up over.