You’ve crossed borders, but borders also live inside you.
Some are visible: language, passport, skin tone.
Others are quieter: expectation, memory, the weight of two histories stitched into one body.
Your tongue carries two languages, sometimes three.
You can shift between dialects, between English and Arabic, between who you are and who they expect you to be, often in the same sentence.
Your heart beats to the rhythm of more than one homeland.
You feel longing for a place that isn’t on the map anymore, or maybe never really was, except in your grandmother’s stories.
You move through the world fluent in contradiction:
Not “either/or,” but always “both/and.”
In the Arab world, you’re the one who left.
In the West, you’re the one who doesn’t quite belong.
In one place, you’re too free. In the other, too different.
You are watched. You are romanticised. You are misunderstood. You are told you are brave, but also “hard to read.”
And for those in the West who haven’t lived this:
It’s not always about rejection or racism. Sometimes it’s the quiet weight of never being fully seen, the way a question like “Where are you from?” can feel like both curiosity and exclusion.
It’s having to explain your holidays, your silence, your surname, every time you enter a new room.
It’s knowing your story is always seen as “other”, even when you’ve lived here your whole life.
You’ve learned how to adjust.
To make yourself legible.
To translate your own identity before anyone asks.
But this isn’t confusion.
It’s complexity.
It’s the lived experience of moving through layered worlds, where culture, politics, language, and faith meet and sometimes contradict each other.
It’s a kind of education most people never receive, the one that teaches you to carry grief and pride in the same sentence.
To miss places you couldn’t fully stay.
To soften parts of yourself to feel safe, and then slowly reclaim them.
For those who come from the West, this piece is an invitation:
To listen.
To hold space for stories that don’t fit neat narratives.
To understand that for many, identity isn’t a box to check, it’s a long, often painful negotiation of belonging.
Because the truth is:
You don’t have to choose one version of yourself.
You’re allowed to be Arab and American.
Rooted and questioning.
Devout and doubting.
Tender and strong.
The borders inside you are not failures.
They are places where empathy begins.
Where the East and West don’t collide, but converse.
You are not too much of anything.
You are not a contradiction.
You are the bridge, and that is something to be proud of.
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