Hair, skin and size: a sociopolitical mapping of turmoil, reconciliation and triumph.

Identity politics. This sister-term only attained sisterhood in my life as I neared my late twenties. Once upon a time, my identity wasn’t political and I thought politics was something around partisanship and some electoral campaigns … was I ever mistaken. There’s glory and grace in finding culturally-imposed restrictions and overcoming them, breaking them apart then choosing what matters. My adulthood was mainly about challenging the things that I had always been told – the things I refused to accept. From my upbringing that was engulfed in colonial influence, to my career choices, my educational sphere and my social practices, everything had to be re-examined. Each one of these elements (my social circle, my career choices, my upbringing, my education) was both the building block and the destruction force I needed to form an identity that I embraced wholly – and an identity that’s inarguably my own. The multitude of crises around that unlearning process never end. That’s alright though.

THE POLITICS OF HAIR.

Not only was I raised to believe it in the messaging around me, but I was taught to see my hair as problematic. I was told that my “difficult-to-manage, kinky, weird and  not-very-elegant” head – in other words – that my naturally growing hair can’t be a source of pride. In fact, I was expected to see it as a burden, as a pain that required elimination by straightening, controlling and concealing. In my community of family and family friends, subtle and seemingly humorous remarks were made about my messy hair, my not hireable appearance, and about the classlessness of my curls. And it was all said as often as possible. I was told to straighten my hair for anything that required some form of formality; weddings, graduations, jobs … anything that earned “acceptance”. In more ways than one, it was an emphasis that my identity at its realest was informal, inauthentic and probably undesired.

That line of thought had no alternative in the world my family grew up in, especially because their country proudly celebrated women who are white-passing at best, and accepted olive-skinned, “gently” tanned at the least. We were neither.

That illusional spectrum of beauty was one where my family and myself had no place, certainly not as a minority group of darker-skinned southern Egyptians. Egyptian society was loud and clear in what it saw fit to be beautiful, irrespective of its non-white, African history. The Egyptian ideal of beauty was anti-black. As a result, the only standard of beauty was that of the straight-haired, fair-skinned Arab women, which my family and myself obviously were not, but were taught to try to resemble in any capacity. By straightening our hair, and by dying it as a means to give it some twisted, western appearance of elegance, and even as far as changing it if by any chance it happened to be in its natural state, the so-called “holding it together” before it goes crazy. There are women in my family who refuse to show their hair anywhere or to anyone unless it was flattened to a so-called “perfection”, there are women today who still think that who they are needs correcting. And that’s a heartbreaking truth especially when these women share my blood. It’s a systemic paradigm I am fighting to crash to its death, albeit the fight alone is a hard one.

It’s a fenced-in notion, an outcome of years of  colonial influence and a socially upheld practice that tells you that you need to work against your nature. Despite the identity that you own, it tells you to love yourself conditionally, misguiding women to believe that aesthetic  “betterment” is a process of self-erasure. That practice is so permanently destructive – so regressive – that those who had to live through it and understand its dangers spend their lives fighting for their truth, for the integral wholeness of their identity, for the power of their appearance, and for their hair to be as loud, as space-occupying and as non-conformist and resistant to “straight and linear” lines of thought as possible. That’s why my hair is a political statement long before it becomes a fashion statement. Plus, it was mine before any false notion of acceptability. That’s why identity politics are as essential as breathing to me. I had to learn to love my identity, when many people innately embraced theirs.

While the self-movement is a work in progress (more so in the last decade), the influence that plagues whole societies and countless generations in North Africa and elsewhere exists, and it needs demolition. The phenomenon that taught women that aesthetic proximity to whiteness is the acceptable practice, in fact, the only practice, very much resonates in the narratives of the generations that preceded mine. It taught them to ascribe to a systemic polarisation that places straight hair and white skin in framework of superiority and as an ideal of beauty.

DARK SKIN, WHITE RHETORIC.

For the majority of my life, my identity, the Black-Arab-and-Arabish-Black female, was placed somewhere far enough in my mind that it never needed addressing, but remained close enough in a twisted, comfort zone of understanding, like being aware enough.

In other words, I never had to identify myself or explain much; because I spoke enough Arabic, looked African, had lived almost my entire life in Canada and never needed to go to Egypt to relive any my traumas, also saying I was Nubian never needed an explanation when talking to another black person and so  I seemed to function “just fine”. My conscience had more questions though, and it was a matter of time before my identity erupted into being. That old place of basic functionality that I created was an unsafe place, it was a system of evasion within the confinements of whatever was familiar enough. I thought, “I know who I am, but do I really need to talk about it?” and that statement became the placeholder for most of my worries and my crises, which as a I got older, exploded into existence.

So yeah … yeah: I do need to talk about it, and I won’t finish talking about it for a very long time.

The constructing of my identity required the act of dismissing everything I had been taught about who and what I was. In other words, unlearning. I had to acknowledge that I was the product of a community of women and men who were heavily thrice manipulated, first by colonialism, then by the Ottoman empire, and then again by Arab conquest. In Egypt, Black Egyptians aka Nubians are considered a “sub” group in a country battling a crisis of authenticity and that projects that onto them by nicely telling them that they don’t exactly matter, that they were the additional ethnic group, to a “beautiful, diverse, historically rich” nation — a false promotion of inclusivity, the I don’t see colour, we’re all brothers and sisters, we’re all one Egypt, but you’re black so don’t get it twisted thing. Nubians were told they were exotic and foreign, that they dance nicely and speak an interesting language and that Egypt “so kindly” granted them a space at the very south after displacing them four fucking times. It gets worse: not only were they expected to be thankful to have existed after displacement and after the erasing of their language and history and their reduction to a minority, they also have no room to appear in the forefront of their country’s image. In some cases, the southern Egyptian male gets a patronizing “donation” of worth, that same worth where a black man is traditionally liked enough and exoticized globally but where the woman of any shade of dark is essentially invisible. I mean, black Egyptian women are non-existent in film, in political dialogue and in social discourse. Not one lead actress (only the nanny/maid, still talking about Egypt by the way … ), no southern Egyptian/Nubian woman in a place of political leadership, and not a single dark-skinned news anchor or host on any station. How the hell do you tell your daughter that she’s beautiful, and important, and authentic, in a realm where she cannot – and does not exist? That’s why the influence on my family/community and the consequences of that miseducation became so apparent to me.

So for a long time, I didn’t know who I was, the reconciliation process took an immigration journey, countless fights about societal miseducation, a handful of reality checks plus a few good rounds of identity crises. I call it reconciliation because I knew I existed, I just didn’t exist loudly. But I’m here, and I’m glad, and I’m pretty loud too. I don’t need to identify as an Arab (I am ethnically not), but I can drop a great Arabic-one-liner ripping someone to shreds if any lines are crossed in any way, or if/when it comes to the authenticity of my being Egyptian. My blackness is as present and as powerful as it can be, and I will happily regulate anyone one who tells me to stay out of the sun, even if they share my DNA.

SIZES THAT MATTER.

I left this for last because it’s global and also harmful, also because this is a conversation that many women can lead better than myself. I’ve been relatively consistent in size, although I’ve recently shed major weight because of an array of issues — that’s weight I plan on gaining back. Weight can be a win, growth is a win, abundance is a win, and self-love is a victory. It’s a triumph in a terrible world where size is somehow a calibre of value.

I’ve also been taught to abide by a system that celebrates only small sizes, the same system that fat-shames and tries to dictate who and what size is beautiful, the same patriarchal system that polices women’s bodies and tells them what is and what isn’t enough. I really dislike the word enough when it has a societal expectation attached to it and no individual choice.

I have family members: sisters and cousins, and cousin-sisters (that’s a real thing) who have been verbally mutilated, and told over and over that they’re not attractive enough because they’re not skinny, and that their size is a problem because it poses the risk of never being in a partnership — wrongfully suggesting that it’s never about what they love, but always about who can love them, a terrible, toxic circle of deservingness in exchange of acceptability (or vice versa). I’ve always been on the shorter end, and relatively curvy, and for most of my teenaged years, all the way to my early twenties, I hid my dark knees, avoided short skirts, and ran away from any attire that attracted attention because I (mis)/believed that exaggerated sizes needed to be reduced or concealed. That was a short-lived misunderstanding that my journey of self-love shattered out of existence. On some days, I can still hear the walls of societal deceit collapsing. You should see my collection of very ripped jeans, high-waisted shorts and short dresses now.

Size is greatness, it’s an importance people don’t want to accept, and it’s a loudness no one wants to hear, but my goodness, it’s a glorious abundance, and one that needs to be screamed into fruition. I’m certain that I’m not the only female who’s had to hear some numerical measure of what size I needed to be, based on the (fabricated) fact that my aunts, mother and grandmother were a fab 48 kilos when they were my age. I work in pounds by the way … so 48, 50, 70, 100 kilos mean nothing to me. Whether that number is true or not, no one’s size or image is a measure of my aspirations of weight or appearance, I grow and I shrink into what makes me happy, that’s all of me, any day, and in any shape or form that I love. Point blank period.

Advertisement

April 2, learning to love autism.

I’ve talked about autism many times, but I’ve never been completely honest about its complexities. I have told and retold the story of my brother’s life with ASD in order to simply send across the message that “autism exists”, but in an era where there are more ways to send messages than there are to speak, it’s easy to tell the world that something exists. I’ve been saying the wrong things the whole time.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Jalani Morgan photography

Over the last three or four years, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting siblings of autism and finding an immediate connection. I recently introduced two women I know to each other – both of whom are now friends of mine – and these women could relate to the things I saw in my own household with almost no exception. They know the autism that no one outside of our families has ever seen.

Yes, there’s an autism that you have never seen.

Everything I talked about, they understood. They’re both the eldest sisters of young men who live with autism and more than anyone, they understand the battle of growing up trying to adapt to, understand and love the diagnosis. We never really reach an end point. We also can’t love autism 24/7, because it’s an endless learning process; it’s a challenge folded into countless brutal and beautiful experiences. When we speak of awareness, we speak about the autism no one understands except for us. We speak of the danger(s) of people thinking they know, and offering sympathy on the basis of assumptions. When I ask for awareness, I’m not talking about the seemingly functional autistic characters that we’ve seen on television.

No … I’m not talking about Rain man or I am Sam or Snow Flake, I’m trying to fight the social practice of oversimplifying the diagnosis to rocking back and forth, being good at math and minimal eye contact. I’m talking so much more than that.

I will no longer lie about how real, raw and relentless autism is.

The conversation with my friends, Sara and Faduma, wasn’t sugar coated, they know exactly what I mean when I say autism is an emotional and spiritual journey. For siblings like us, it’s a relationship that needs nurturing, faith, self-assessment and so much patience. It has everything to do with who we are as women, and even more to do with the women we are trying to become. We laughed knowing that the stories we shared helped untangle the knots that we’ve had in our chests for many years.

I think awareness needs to especially be about saying the things we are often conditioned to keep as secrets. Autism is not a secret; nothing about it should be concealed, and I mean nothing at all. In my late twenties, I’m still building the courage to tell my brother’s stories as openly and as proudly as possible, and it’s a lot of work. The autism I’ve known in my home is continuously redefining my views on love, passion, relationships and dreams. It’s slowly forcing me to change my comfort zones and it hurts. But I couldn’t be any happier about that level of growth, even if it comes with a little bit of pain. Very few siblings have what we have, and regardless of its nature, autism is something special, and it’s ours.

My brother has spent years changing me – and my brother and I don’t have conversations. We don’t share stories of our relationships, news about our jobs and we don’t argue but we know each other with an indescribable perfection. We have a bond that doesn’t require words, in fact, our love never needed words – I’m finally understanding that it’s because our love has no questions. I stopped asking questions and I stopped wondering why, because autism is not in need of a ‘cure’ or a solution. In order for real awareness to exist, people need to stop asking ‘why’ there is autism.

My 19-year-old brother, my baby brother still eats with his hands when he feels like it, and I will never ask why. My brother uses scissors to cut his food, and I mean all his food: his hot dogs, his sandwiches, even his pasta – he won’t eat anything otherwise, he finds comfort in knowing that his food is a product of his own craft and the sound of scissors gives him appetite. Who am I to deny him that right?

My brother – like both my friends’ brothers, has run out of the house, in broad daylight and mid-evening, and in negative degree weather, with no shoes on and no destination in mind. He just ran without worries. Oh … and that’s shoeless on a good day, on a real day, he could bolt out of our home with no clothes on. And I won’t ask why, because so what if he needs to feel free for a change?

These siblings know what it means to have 5 different locks installed on our house doors, keys to our bedrooms with hiding places for our expensive things – because laptops and kitchenware have gone flying in all directions. With these ladies, the stories needed no elaboration.

My brother will hum a Christmas Carroll when he’s edgy, and we know that it’s the prequel to a meltdown, why would I ask questions when all he’s doing is singing to express his pain? It’s such an essential part of his character. My brother has never been to a fancy dinner or a family function and he hasn’t seen our extended family in almost a decade. My brother doesn’t need physical proximity, he knows exactly what he feels, and he’ll hug only when he feels like it and when he means it. He can’t lie, he can’t break hearts, and he can’t deceive.

My brother, who I thought never understood the act of giving gifts, openly embraced me when I bought him new clothes on his birthday and called him handsome, so how people assume that those living with autism don’t understand words is beyond me.

It isn’t true, they understand everything, and they know exactly what they need.

Yes, they can hear you, they can feel your energy and they do get offended when you speak to them like 4-year-olds when they’re teenagers. They can tell when you’re preventing them from being themselves. The awareness we need is that of diversity and difference, we don’t all have the same process of self-expression.

My brother will turn the lights at home on and off for 30 minutes non stop because it’s comforting. In our home, we have the Sponge Bob Squarepants, Super Mario Bros. and the Backyardigans on repeat from 1:39 seconds over and over and over … sometimes for as long as half a day, and we all have the songs memorized.

In my house, we throw a celebration when my 19-year-old brother says all of our names, slowly and with hesitation because he’s really really trying and he wants us to clap for him. Autism isn’t always about words, but when we have that moment of triumph, we love it.

My brother is also a badass. Yeah, he’s a badass. He has single-handedly shut down a busy Toronto highway at 7 p.m. and was followed by two police cars simply because no one with him understood why he was kicking and screaming in the van. My non-verbal brother was pinned down by his workers on the ground while waiting for the cops to come and “resolve the issue” – I’m still not sure what the issue was.

My brother’s worker came to my parents’ home yelling that my brother took a leak in her car while she was driving him around, and I didn’t understand why pee was such a problem. My brother is a visionary: where people see seats, my brother sees the opportunity for urinary release. Seriously, she should have been told that autism is as unique as it is unpredictable. Plus, plastic seat covers are always on sale at Walmart.

But it’s easy for us to hysterically laugh at all of this now, autism hasn’t always been funny. Sometimes the tears were not those of careless laughter. My brother is the teenager who tried to run out of the hospital as he was suffering from a stroke because he didn’t care that half his body wasn’t moving. It didn’t matter. He wanted to run again, he wanted to fight the weakness away. He doesn’t have the patience for pity.

Anyone who lives around autism and who truly knows its severity, lives on the hope that they will one day no longer have to pretend to live like a nuclear family.

In my home, we can break out into dance at 9 a.m. because my brother is playing music out loud at breakfast time. I carry my almost 20-year-old brother on my back and chase him around the house in a Scream mask for no reason. We don’t take life seriously all the time. But I honestly don’t know how to believe in ‘normal’ anymore, I don’t think I want anything to do with the idea.

I don’t want the autism community to be a product of preconceived notions and limitations, or for autism to be the outcome of cultural definitions or a receiver of sympathy. The only ones who can try to define it are those who know it, not those who observe if from a distance. As families of autism, we re-understand it daily, and we haven’t gotten over how difficult living around it can be.

I don’t think the knots in our chests will ever really go away.

On some days, when my brother is feeling sick or being fussy, I could give this 19-year-old a bath without batting an eye. I can talk about my brother on a first date because I know it’s real and incredible and difficult and it has everything to do with me, and I now know that difficult can be beautiful too, but I live with a constant fear in my gut because I know some relationships aren’t made for that challenge.

Siblings of autism can recognize someone who lives with it in a millisecond, we know how their eyes speak, we’ll recognize that unwarranted smirk anywhere. We know that a man in his 30s holding his mother’s hand in public, wearing an oversize jacket and periodically grabbing his groin is not harming anyone.

We know the bounce in their steps, we know the head lean and we know those dancing hands way too well, and it’s still not simple. I don’t think I like anything simple anymore; I love songs on repeat, I can handle a day out of sync, I love oversize clothing. Autism is a part of my own being too. The real awareness needed is the understanding that autism will never look like anything familiar. The truth about autism is that it’s something new everyday; a new quirk, a new gesture, a new song, a bigger smile.
For us, it’s a love without limits, and it’s a story without secrets.

I love someone with autism, and I love them better than words. I love autism because it makes a better me every day. It forces me to constantly discover. I love it as shamelessly, as openly and as freely as possible

On filling emotional void(s) through narrative: my cultural/social experience as a first time filmmaker.

Nearly two years ago – at a time where life couldn’t be any more confusing and where my on-again, off-again millennial crisis was reaching its peak – I made the decision to go back to school and pursue filmmaking. I wasn’t hesitant about my own capability to tell stories as much as  I was worried about the concept of taking risks. I knew deep down that almost everything in this world was built through risk-taking, but I felt paralyzed whenever I took any decision pertaining to my own future.

I knew two things needed to happen before I took that step: I had to be mentally and technically equipped to turn a story constructed in the depths of my imagination into a real motion picture, and I had to defeat the traditionalist subconscious demons that constantly told me I wasn’t ready (for anything for that matter). All I really had in me was an idea and a semi-sustainable dream.

Today, one year and nine months after getting into graduate school and two months after getting my MA and making a short film, I can safely say that taking risks and acting on impulse is the recipe for my happiness. This whirlwind of an academic year came to an abrupt, but well-received end, but in order to rationalize what happened in the past 20 months and really build a vision for what’s to come, I had to write this – and get a number of things off my chest.

We tell stories to make sense of things and heal – we really do. I knew that my film would be about ASD, I knew that I wanted to tell the story of my brother’s life with Autism Spectrum Disorder and especially to reflect my family’s experience(s) for the past 19 years. I wanted one of my two brothers to play his younger sibling, I wanted a passionate woman to portray the pain and challenge(s) of a mother raising a son who is non-verbal, and I wanted the story to take place in Toronto. I wasn’t willing to change my vision or compromise my beliefs. The story and family were really mine, and the film – whether I admit it openly or not – was my own source of healing. There’s a huge misconception about film makers, it’s a poorly-supported notion that they are demanding people who make films without always being emotionally invested it them. That isn’t true. I believe filmmakers are storms of emotion, that they’re vulnerable enough to tell stories that matter, and I think that’s perfectly fine. The emotional attachment I developed for people, moments and places is something from which I can never recover. To be quite honest – making my first film was the best emotional roller coaster ride I could have taken.

Doing what scares you the most tells you who you are. I thought that I wasn’t established enough to learn about the film industry, I also believed that I was too old to try something new and that I was slowing down my own progress by becoming someone/something I dreamt about. I lived through cycles of challenging  cultural beliefs – especially in the context of my own family: I had to try to express to them that passion is something that actually counts. I had to prove to them that the safe routes aren’t exactly solutions – that they’re just evasive ways for people who are too afraid to fail. I really don’t know how people live trying to dodge failure. This experience left no room for my own ego, it made me comfortable with the idea of failing, and it made me fall in love with the idea of trying (again).

Your well being/health matters. All the time.
My film screening is scheduled for early 2016. I had to push many things forward after the DOP of my production took her own life on September 29th, a day before my film screening in school. Although I had my own minor battles with stress and anxiety which are not comparable to her struggles, I now realize that we live in a society where we don’t talk about emotional well-being enough. We have very little courage when it comes to understanding, seeing, and actually believing in depression. Mental health is a necessary conversation, and depression is very real, I learned that the stigma around it could not have been more present. I had the honour and pleasure to work with this young woman whom I later found out was suffering immensely and who was unable to express her own pain. I learned that making films (or any creative work that matters) hurts as much as it heals, I learned that people are very fragile and that the idea of giving up and losing hope doesn’t apply to two people in the same manner or on the same scale. It’s really difficult to lose someone you’ve built a rapport with, and it’s crucial to acknowledge and reiterate the importance of constantly caring for our emotional well being. No one has it together, no one.

Today, I don’t give up as easily. I’m almost 30 and I’m still eager to learn, screw up and change. I don’t want to hurt people because I know we all ache differently. One of the many purposes of my film was to bridge the narrative gap between disability and race, two concepts that I know are miles apart in contemporary North American cinema. I wanted to work with women filmmakers – and I did. I had an incredibly diverse cast, and so many intelligent women/men took part in my project. I wanted to see a woman of colour star in a Toronto production – and I did. I  recently spent an evening with a friend who is very dear to my heart and I was – as  usual – conflicted about a number of things in life. I looked up at her wall and saw a C.S. Lewis line that I knew but didn’t repeat enough in my own mind. I needed to see it then more than ever.

cs lewis

Regardless of how my film is received, regardless of how loved or hated it will be, I cannot wait to take risks again. I cannot wait to fail, fall and try again. 

 

 

m.

 

 

 

 

Tales of Toronto: Sid Naidu

Periodically, I will feature people and places that I believe have played a part in making this city magnificent. Sid Naidu is the first one.

I remember being extremely lost on my first week of university – that was TEN years ago.
For many reasons, I felt like I wouldn’t belong in a place that I told was made for a special class of people. I, like thousands of others, have experienced a sense of unpreparedness for higher education, because of the financial privilege it requires, because intellect is often a racially defined concept and because we are taught that success is a form of superiority. Failure is unfortunately a sidelined concept in life. The truth is, many of us don’t fail enough.

During my first month of school, all these preconceived notions of university started being redefined, mainly because I met  Sid Naidu. I remember being at Ryerson’s cafeteria/hub space and seeing Sid handing out flyers for a hip-hop event at the pub and I thought  to myself:

“Hip-hop? At a university?”

I didn’t think there was room for anything extracurricular, let alone anything that interested me. I met specific people who told me where they came from, Sid being one of them, and who made this new chapter feel less foreign to me.

SN_OVRCME1_1

What Sid was doing was making the university a space for people, not just special people, not just seemingly smart people, not just the obedient ones and not just those who were looking for praise. He was fighting exclusivity and making sure that not one person was more deserving of being there than the other.

Sid told me that he was a second-year student in Arts and Contemporary Sciences and was hosting what he described as a “revolutionary” event, and told me that I should tell all my friends about it. While revolutionary may have been an adjectival term then, it’s now built into everything Sid is. He’s a Scarborough kid, which meant that back then he was commuter, which also meant that he understood that the university dynamics needed to change (not everyone there came from luxurious places) and that post-secondary elitism it all its forms needed to go. He believed in changing anything that didn’t feel right. He wore a ponytail and a baseball hat, and despite how strange it sounds to say it now, back then you could count how many men walked around a university looking that different and feeling 100% comfortable. He explained that “because of how racialized we were, we couldn’t look ambitious.” Cultural diversity may be a Toronto highlight today, but those who are in their late twenties know that racial diversity made its way into academia much later in Toronto’s history.

VoteYesKid

Immigrants’ children know this: they live with a constant pressure to succeed, in order to compensate their parents’ hard work, yes, but also to challenge the notion that immigration is synonym to social inferiority. It isn’t, and one by one, second generation immigrants have shattered the idea that being sons/daughters of taxi drivers, caretakers, construction workers, store clerks and cooks is a limit, and instead proved that it’s a motivation folded into pressure.

“I was raised with the idea that race classified the world”, from Bahrain to Canada, Sid looked for a sense of belonging and had to build it from experience. Some east Indian, twisted into some Arab culture, flipped into some Scarborough … but the picture is still being pieced together. Sid’s search for self is far from over. For him, getting lost in the search is a lesson, not a challenge.

HKLWeMadeIt

Being the son of Indian parents and having had a culturally and religiously mixed childhood means that Sid Naidu doesn’t believe in simplicity, in limits or in anything conventional for that matter. He founded the Urban Hip Hop Union, which grew to be a hub for the music, culture and dance enthusiasts. He ran for the students’ union and left a pretty heavy imprint at that school. While many people settle now, and look for ways to be stable and reasons to be content, Sid doesn’t, he believes in the power of telling stories, so his art shapes his vision, he believes in the magic of connecting (those who know him, know he loves that word), so he’s on the go, all the time. He doesn’t believe in comfort zones. He had heard – many times – that he wasn’t deserving of success so he now molds it with his own definitions. And because he’s story teller, he makes the success story his own.

Short attention spans are good for you.

I don’t know how to pay attention. I cannot pay attention. I have had this problem since I was a child.

I can’t multitask, I can’t study with music, I can’t sleep (well) with sound or people in the same room and I can’t watch television if someone is speaking next to me. I get distracted extremely fast. If I don’t like something, I can’t read it, I can’t watch it, I won’t listen to it or even understand it.  I interrupt people constantly because I don’t know how formulate thoughts as accurately as others. What people learn in an hour, I take days to process. As an adolescent, I couldn’t get myself to listen in a classroom or in lectures. It was impossible for me to focus. For years, I assumed it was a learning disability, or some sort of a challenge, but with time I discovered that it was something manageable.

This is the most appropriate time to bring this up because I think that I’ve finally managed to solve this issue, or at least better understand it. It only took me 28 years. It has troubled me for ages and it was the reason I often failed in school when I was younger. There are too many people who discover this issue well into their adulthood and who are simply deemed by others as being inept academically or intellectually. People’s capacities vary; we all know someone who is very well-spoken but who is  horrible at spelling, or another who is extremely achieving but not very social or others who are highly social but who always academically under perform.
We all function at our best in some situations and not so much in others.

This is not an uncommon thing, short attention spans are something  lot of people battle and their magnitudes vary from one person to another. I am not going to scientifically break this down because I have no theory to back any of this up, but I think I’ve discovered a way to deal with it rather than eliminate it – because I don’t actually believe that it’s a problem.

Narrowing down the things that you like so you can better understand them.
You don’t like reading the paper? then don’t read it, listen to the news instead. Podcasts!

You don’t like numbers? Screw them! Audiobooks are a fair alternative if you can’t concentrate while reading. If you can’t listen to a lecture, try reading it instead. There are hundreds of solutions out there. If what you like helps you better navigate your attention, then stick to the things that help you better focus, not the things that wear down your attention span.

Maximize on your creativity.
Being easily distracted means that your brained is constantly wired, that you’re very perceptive and often better at absorbing ideas. You think all the time, even in your sleep (light sleepers, I feel you). Take note, jot things down, brainstorm. Short attention spans are often caused by frequent light-bulb moments, keep note so you can revisit them. A creative idea will dissolve if you don’t nail it down and archive it. Sketch it, sing it out loud, tell it to someone. Don’t let ideas disappear.

Isolation.
Read in solitude, work in silence and limit teamwork time. If you’re extroverted like myself you are most likely more focused on conversation rather  than work. Interact less with people when working if it infringes your concentration and diminishes the quality of your work.

Manage your energy.
Sleep. And I mean actually sleep. Don’t skip breakfast. Walk all the time.
Talking to yourself is not unhealthy, it’s actually beneficial.
Stress is the worst thing to combine with a short attention span, it actually destroys concentration.

I was relieved to discover that the right habits help me retain information better. I never multitask and it saves my life (literally, my phone is turned off whenever I drive a car). I don’t do work with friends, because I can’t handle distraction. I don’t force myself to resort to ways I don’t enjoy (I won’t sit through a lecture with a monotone presenter). I ask questions, over and over and over. This is not a problem, it’s just a different ability to process information. I don’t lose sleep over it anymore (I mean that in more ways than one).

m.

Fear and fearlessness in 2015

… I mean fear in a good way.

Happy new year!

It hasn’t completely sunk in that it’s a new year – partly because I’ve done nothing but recover from a 14-day trip and mostly because 2014 came and left too quickly. Also, because a new year is not the biggest deal to me. I know we all fall into the resolution trap annually – many of which we don’t stick to – but that doesn’t mean that they’re not worth having. I know there are hundreds of posts and statuses announcing how incredibly amazing the past year has been and how much people are looking forward to 2015, but this post is about something a little different. 2014 didn’t end as brightly as I would have hoped. Two of my closest family friends have fallen ill this past year and if I can hope for one thing in 2015, it would be their physical and emotional recovery.

I spent the beginning of my Christmas vacation in Paris and the rest of it in Cairo. I left Toronto with last-minute travel plans and left behind a load of things desperately waiting to be finished (scripts, interviews, applications, etc.) and my procrastination has come back to drag me from the eyeballs. Despite being congested and sick for most of the trip, I was able to find some time to enjoy it and see family/friends I hadn’t seen in ages, but I have to admit: I was dying to get back to Toronto. Never have I ever look forward to coming home so badly.

I mean it when I say that 2014 has been incredible in many ways, even the problems I had rolled around in style. I learned that being confused is good for you (at least it means you’re thinking), that overt and aggressive honesty is necessary and that getting old is an amazing thing when you’re content. This is has also been the year of a severe identity crisis (which is still at its peak, by the way).

I spent a few days in Paris with my friend D, who so kindly put up with my chronic coughs, sniffles and constant nose-blowing and who knew Paris a little better than I did. It’s not a winter destination, I’ve learned that the hard way. The temperatures sat between 1 and 4 degrees with strong winds so walking around was a pilgrimage. However, I still got to see things I wanted to see, reconnect with people I met in Toronto and enjoy my time there.

IMG_4768IMG_4771IMG_4780IMG_4777

I also met some wonderful people on the way to Egypt from France. While on a connecting flight from Istanbul to Cairo, I had the pleasure of meeting Imran H., a hilarious and chatty British dude who did a stellar job of entertaining me during what was supposed to be my two-hour power nap. It was a nap worth skipping that’s for sure. I thoroughly enjoyed the pause-proof conversation with my raspy voice. A virtual shout out to him is in order. He and his friends were taking a Christmas trip through Cairo, Amman, Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Egypt, on the other hand, was a homework trip that I had to find ways to enjoy.
By homework I mean that I had to go there immediately for multiple reasons (not for tourism) which included a cousin’s wedding, visiting my grandmother and making time for reunions with family members who were never in Cairo at the same time as me. I also collided face first with a reality that I was secretly aware of but never admitted, Egypt is far from home. It’s a heartbreaking truth to some, but it’s a truth I am very comfortable with. I met with some family friends who left Canada for Egypt and who openly expressed their discomfort with living there. I didn’t even need to completely relocate like them to feel that way, just landing at the airport I was forced to deal with a bitter agent who decided to scold me for forgetting to renew my Egyptian passport. A dose of foul sarcasm was not the nicest entry into the territory.

Two days after my arrival, my siblings, my cousin and I took a short trip to Hurghada, a coastal resort Southeast of Cairo. December is a little before peak tourism season so the resort was calm enough to keep me sane. It was a nice hotel with a gorgeous view of the red sea. However, the walking strip was limited and the party scene (which is already not my scene) is pretty lousy – I highly advise against Little Buddha Hurghada, everything from the security to the service is downright terrible.

hurghada

Returning to Cairo meant diving right into family visits, wedding plans, and catching up with hundreds of people. I ended up attempting to squeeze too much into the 10 days that I missed out on meeting up with a number of people that I needed to see (Sara, Mary, Yomna, Sundus and Hager: I sincerely apologize). It’s extremely difficult to move around solo. I don’t know directions, I can’t help taxi drivers with shortcuts, I am not in the know when it comes to places to go and I apparently don’t sound like I’ve lived in Egypt long enough. There’s a huge difference between traveling for leisure and traveling for obligation. When someone takes a trip abroad, they tend to be comfortable knowing they’re not from that place and exploring it however they want. When someone goes to a place she/he is taught to consider home and isn’t able to adapt (especially as an adult), they feel like outsiders among people who look just like them, so it’s almost like not being understood and not being welcomed either. It’s strange and at times disheartening. Cairo is a terrific place to live if you understand it, but a very difficult place to get used to. I don’t understand the traditions, I miss the punchlines, I can’t communicate like I live there: too polite means you’re foreign, too vocal means rowdy and too friendly means some kind of vested interest. You’re extra considerate with family (never say no), too careful with family friends, too conscious of what you wear, too controlled in social situations and too alert in public. Staring is a national language: you can’t tell if you’re doing something wrong of if you’ve got something on your face. At 28, it’s challenging to change everything from the tone of your voice to your body language and to second guess things that you’re comfortable doing and saying. This is a culture I will never be familiar with and there’s nothing wrong with that. I finally realized why home is more about comfort and less about ethnic similarities and language. The last thing I should care about is looking like everyone around me.

10897095_10152927161753186_2266187247713725132_n 10885326_10152927160683186_5186793597761226921_n 10391037_10152927161893186_7224938943416087428_n

As I approach my 28th birthday, I don’t get discouraged by age (I don’t know why anyone does to be honest), I just realize I have to stop finding reasons to conform with things that don’t feel right to me and not to look for meaning in things I don’t need to understand. This may sound very abstract now, but I hope to spend the next year making sense of it.

If starting this year a little scared means finishing it off with a better understanding of who I am, then I am starting it right. I also can’t help but be a little nervous about what’s to come: collaborating with my brother on one of the most important projects of my life, re-starting writing after shying away from it for some time, saying/showing my ideas while doing things with less hesitation – yeah, this year can’t be any more frightening and I am pretty sure that’s a good thing. Getting older means totally shafting the comfort zone and doing things as organically and as honestly as possible, you sit less on the fence, you don’t dance around things, you sort of just do them regret-free. Along with being too old for a lot of shit, you get pretty content with what you have, very enthusiastic about what you want, extremely satisfied with making mistakes and insanely nervous about change. You demand less and hope a lot more. Happy beginnings!

m.

Toronto: fertile ground for everything amazing.

I’ve lived in Toronto for a little over 15 years – my family relocated here in 1999, leaving behind a Montreal that was (once) tougher on the anglophones and unnecessary for a trilingual 12-year-old who didn’t have to feed four children.

Toronto’s home to me in more ways than one. All of my firsts have been here – all of them.

I finished middle school, high school and university here, I had dozens of jobs, hundreds of friends and thousands of acquaintances. I’ve networked over and over and always benefited from it in one way or another. I know I’ve lived here for a long time because almost everyone I meet is affiliated with someone I knew or met a decade ago – with almost no exceptions.

I may be a little Toronto biased, but I love this city. I honestly believe there’s something here for everyone. We’ve all been a little discouraged by this city before: we’ve lived through the aches of not hearing back from our dream jobs and our dates, or getting laid off (or just laid really) and reaching some form of dead end and I get that it’s difficult, but I don’t think Toronto is a terrible place to live. I know sooner or later that I am going to have to leave here, but I don’t plan on leaving for good.

Those who truly know this city know that being a Torontonian is not about being downtown-savvy – I’m sorry, it’s far from that. Those who have immigrant parents know  that the GTA is the vessel that connects the sharpest, wittiest and most diverse crowds to the downtown core, there would be no T.dot without them. Having been here for over a decade means I pretty much grew up with this city and moved around quite a bit too. I (un)/fortunately know its transit system all too well – from one end to the other, I’ve been up and down all of its main highways at the peak of rush hour and on the verge of a panic attack. I remember some malls before they were malls and when they were limited to a one-lane with an ALDO, a Taco Bell and a Famous Players. I’ve lived through its toughest winters, pre and post vortex, and I know that this place is incredible regardless. If I leave it will be to come back better. This city has its glory and its character, it doesn’t deserve all the hatred it’s getting. I know there’s something here for everyone.

In the next few months, starting 2015, I will be interviewing and profiling a number of people whom I believe have contributed to the greatness of this city, people with talent, passion and a lot of stories to tell. Artists in the making, community builders, architects, musicians …  people who know this city’s worth. The reason I am doing this is because I recently discovered that people in Toronto don’t know where to go to exhaust its resources, and so I decided to tell them (and re-learn in the process). This year alone, I got a rush of information that forced me to discover that we’re truly being spoiled and are dangerously unaware of it. In the past year, I started working at an agency while juggling a freelance job, I started graduate school, traveled to 6 countries, 10 cities, networked endlessly and realized that there’s enough creativity right in my residential radius alone to help me kick start the project(s) I’ve been brainstorming for years. It’s a matter of knowing who to go to and where to go.

If you know Toronto like I do, you know that “cool” doesn’t have to start at Parliament and end at Jameson (stop the suburb hatred people). I didn’t always live downtown, and neither did you. A true Torontonian would have ridden the subway from Kipling to STC and from Downsview to Finch multiple times. He or she would be very well aware of the fact that beef patties are at their finest only at Warden station and Islington, that real Shawarma is only edible on Lawrence avenue, that Hakka food and Red snappers are only good in Scarborough and eastward. That no human being in the right mind shops at the Eaton center for good deals, especially during boxing week. You know that the best Persian restaurants are in the north end of the city, that Queen West has overpriced groceries, and that the hipsters in Trinity Bellwoods were once Burlington kids too. That Starbucks is an embarrassingly bad option when local goods and real coffee exist. Ethiopian food is on the Danforth, Gerrard East is for real grocery stores, and ice cream in Leslieville is fabulous. You’d know that Cherry beach is majestic at sunrise and that Food Basics is an amazingly diverse place to mingle and grocery shop. You’d know that Flemingdon Park, PO, Regent, Jane/Finch, Rexdale, Jungle, Malvern are all REAL neighborhoods too (and there will always be a regent) and unless you have neighbors who hail from every corner of this planet, you haven’t seen Toronto at all.

m.

The Global Dialogue, episode 2. International development week

Episode 2 of 5 of The Global Dialogue podcast.

Hosted by my colleague Trinh Theresa Do and myself.

The Global Dialogue – The New Delhi gang rape trial

The Global Dialogue is a weekly podcast that is hosted/directed by my collegue Trinh Theresa Do and myself.  This week’s topic can’t be discussed enough, it’s worth every thought, every debate and every milisecond of anger.

La grève étudiante du Québec : les étudiants doivent se plaindre.

Malgré l’intensité du débat qui se déroule autour de cette grève étudiante, les nouvelles sur les manifestations, le bagarres en plein milieu de la journée et la réaction de peur absolue du gouvernement m’inspirent …  et me rendent un peu l’espoir.

C’est rare qu’un étudiant s’exprime aussi « aggressivement ».
Pour les gouvernements et les autorité, la parole honnête est une menace, et ces manifestations ont si fructueusement effrayé le personnel universitaire et surtout ceux prenant (et soutenant) cette décision.

C’est vraiment le principe d’une hausse injustifiée qui est frustrant (aussi frustrant que que le montant de la hausse, d’ailleurs) et surtout le « motif » de cet augmentation comme dans le but d’offrir du soutien financier. C’est un petit peu comique, n’est-ce pas? Faire payer ceux qui n’ont pas pour aider ceux n’en ont pas non plus pour enfin rapporter de l’intérêt à soi-meme … et s’assurer que tout les étudiants finissent par prendre une dette énorme dans le cul!

En faite, ça vraiment le modèle des hommes d’affaires –  C’est tout simplement  le maquillage d’une arnaque avec une « résolution » invraisemblable pour génere du revenu.

Je suis une Torontoise, ça veut dire que mes expériences (pénibles) avec les frais de scolarité existent déjà depuis plusieurs années. Je paie presque 6000 $ par année pour un diplôme qui pourrait très facilement  m’amener nulle part si on est frappé encore une fois par une crise économique. Et ce diplôme peut, et je dis peut me servir, pour premièrement tout rembourser avec mon premier vrai salaire, et me permettre peut-être un jour de vivre comme du monde. Et  non…ça ne suffit pas de me comparer aux étudiants du Québec et arriver à la conclusion imbécile qu’ils sont chanceux de payer moins que moi. On ne peut pas comparer deux provinces avec des économies très différentes de cette façon.

Ils ont la chance de faire des changements que je souhaite inspireront des changements du côté  Ontarien aussi.

Je connais super bien le mot « endetté » et la douleur de se faire harceler sans-cesse par le bureau du recouvrement universitaire. Et je connais surtout l’expérience pénicle du surmenage et la pression d’équilibrer les études et plus de 25 heures de travail. Si un frais de 2500 $ devient 2800 $, c’est du vol, et ça se ressent !  Les frais de scolarité sont incroyablement difficiles à payer et à surtout rembourser. Il va déjà falloir se casser la tête dès le lendemain de la remise des diplômes pour trouvez un travail assez payant. Cette hausse n’empirerait pas mal la vie.

Les étudiants ont le droit (et plusieurs raisons) de s’énerver. Les universités et les collèges sont faites pour quoi, sinon?  Si ce n’est pas pour récupérer et garder ce qui nous appartient?