O Allah, make me a happy man, content with the immense bounties showered upon me. Ya Allah, take this inexplicable melancholy away from me. Ya Allah, lift me up.
I have an invisibility cloak. I don’t know where I got it from, but I have always carried it with me. I don’t exactly know how it works. All I know is that whenever I utter a word, it seems to activate immediately, causing others to carry on regardless. In a team meeting just a …
I suppose I was a rather serious teenager thirty years ago. But then why not? That was the era of the Bosnian War, Rwandan Genocide and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. While my peers were enjoying a party life, I was found publishing a homemade magazine devoted to human rights and development. No …
When my father was my age, he was several years into his role as managing partner of the foremost firm of solicitors in our region. My eldest brother is a top tier lawyer at an international law firm, ranked Band 2 on the Chambers scale. My middle brother is a senior diplomat, my sister an …
I am never going to be part of the crowd. In my youth, I had twenty years of training, preparing me to walk alone. A denunciation which once rang in my ears — “You must be joking!” — when a stranger attempted to push me towards another seemed to encapsulate the situation. I was and …
What’s the likelihood that someone else with exactly the same name as me should also be Muslim? More likely than you’d think, it turns out. I thought I was unique. My surname is relatively uncommon; I’m not a Smith, Green or Brown. In England, about 1 in every 10,000 people have my surname, so there …
It is strange that recollections of school still dominate my sense of self so much. And not even the experience of school as a whole, but particular moments which loom large in my mind’s eye. Even now, over thirty years on, I still blame my failings then for my perceived failures now. Rarely do I …
I don’t know if I am normal. I don’t know if my brain functions the same way as everyone else’s. I don’t know whether my emotional empathy is appropriate, or veers widely off course. These thoughts stirred by another of those encounters, repeated throughout my life: a complete stranger yelling at me at the top …
It’s a cop out, I know it is, but I’ve spent my entire life hiding. In my youth, hiding my background: a middle-class, practising Christian family, living in a great big house in the affluent suburbs. In college, I told no one where I lived. Even the one I called my best friend knew nothing …
It’s tough being a kid, when you’re likely to be relentlessly bullied by your peers for having the wrong logo on your bag. This is the age, apparently, when everything must be branded. If it’s not, it must immediately be discarded. Last night’s battle was over a flimsy sports bag with bad reviews not large …
What I doubt more than anything is my own perception of the world. I say I am only concerned with the truth, and yet I cannot verify that my interpretations or understandings are correct. Indeed, I don’t even know that I have typical brain morphology capable of establishing reality as others do. It gets so …
I guess you could say I was still a kid when I got married. I certainly looked like one. Though I was twenty-four, in most photos from the time I look much younger. Who would believe that at twenty-four, she was my first-love? My first real love, that is. Naturally I’d had all manner of …
In many studies investigating the experience of living with a chromosome variation, there are often common themes. While healthcare interventions focus nearly exclusively on endocrine issues, those living with condition are often more concerned with its psychosocial impacts. Many, for example, recall struggles in education. Others focus on the challenges they encountered at diagnosis, their …
