Field Notes — wearing two uniforms

As I build my second life post recovery… I have been more in tune with my actual purpose. Sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to widen the frame.

These upcoming chapters feel like debts I owe to the world. I learned early on that my memory is a border checkpoint. Some thoughts get held, while others get searched so much they don’t even look like themselves anymore. I have been paying more attention to the economics of my art because, after 10 years of being an artist, I’ve watched my art get taken from me by heroes that have now turned into stolen valor.

I catch myself getting more offended by how people value and price my art. I feel the pressure of the diaspora more than ever nowadays. It’s a quiet war that I battle. Everyone in my life lately wants me to represent them. How do I represent so many people when all these people contradict each other?

What’s more confusing is being selected by a homeland that I can’t even fully return to for the time being. Both sides watch. Some with love. Some with suspicion. Some with the kind of hunger that doesn’t want you fed—only consumed.

This tension has cost me my health, not directly but 100% metaphorically. Whenever I wanna change and evolve, I am called crazy by people who want me to stay the same. It shows up as backlash, backbiting, jealousy, and limitation disguised as imitation. My new philosophy is to keep the truth to myself, lower my ego’s volume, and play dumb. Not because truth is negotiable, but because my life isn’t. “الصبر مفتاح الفرج”

— Younis W Dhaher