What Truth do we seek to realise in ourselves?
We are not truly free until we let go of what others have molded us into. When the sticky notes of judgment peel off your skin, when the labels that nailed you into a polished image lose their grip, and the titles you were taught to respond to no longer resonate, you arrive at something sacred. You become existentially nude, like a newborn, with the will and the right to shape your own life. It is a terrifying, exhilarating epiphany: all illusions dissolve, and you stand alone as your own decision-maker: responsible, mature, and attuned to intuition. The only one holding the key is you.
I dared to hold that key five months after arriving in Luxembourg from Syria, in August 2023. I had reunited with my brother after more than 11 years of separation and came with the hope of pursuing a master’s degree. But I was not prepared for the emptiness, the void, that awaited me. Overtaken by panic attacks, dissociative episodes, and seizures, I was forced to confront a past I had tried to outrun… a past that pulled me away from the peace and connection I so deeply craved. Yes, I had left the country. But I wasn’t free.
Following a suicide attempt, I picked up a pen and paper and retreated for days, desperate to voice the conflicts inside of me. I had no answers, only a deep, raw desire to know the truth, no matter how morbid. And in that intention, I broke open. Words poured out, unraveling the stories that shaped me. At the heart of it all was the silence around sexuality… the oldest, most taboo fear. Shame, trauma, and repression moved my pen, compelling me to write the unspeakable.
That was the beginning of my sexual healing.
Healing – of any kind – is an act of inclusion. It is the radical embrace of all your parts. When you hold them together with compassion, you become whole. Judgment slips away, and the creative expression you have unconsciously longed for begins to emerge.
For me, healing began with writing – the only activity that remained functional after my nervous system had collapsed. Through writing, memories rose like ghosts asking to be seen. I listened to my past selves… The devout girl who never missed a prayer, who walked all covered to the mosque every week, who excelled in pharmacy school and became the family’s pride, who lived in a sterile room in a war-torn land, finally spoke. She whispered to me of her dysmorphia, her fear of intimacy, her secret longing to shave her head and cut off her breasts, to become a man… not for identity, but for freedom. To boldly walk the streets at night, to rebel for a revolution she missed out on, to disappear into the old, narrow Damascus alleys with no gaze tracing her chest, to join a martial arts club, gain the bulk and bearing of a man, dwell in the stench of sweat and overused boxing gloves, and feel the high of stumbling home past midnight after a brutal sparring session that nearly shattered her nose. She longed to be a man who counts purple bruises like medals, redeeming the absence of scars earned in a failed revolution, and consoling the silent shame of an expected femininity she never managed to live by.
And then came the dance floor…
The courage it took to go to an EDM event with my head uncovered was something I never imagined I could do. My body released years of silent ache. What others mistook for a trained dancer was simply me exploring movement for the first time with my head bare, my skin kissed by air. The neon lights reflected on unfamiliar faces of glittering eagerness, my mind recreated bright illustrations of gestures and expressions overlapping with the music. I felt an afterglow that hasn’t left me ever since. I saw the repressed faces of my homeland’s youth, longing to dance. Longing for connection. Longing for safe, embodied sexual expression. For the first time, I met people from the underground queer network in Damascus. My eager ears listened to stories of abuse, torture, imprisonment, and shame.
I faced moments when I realised that affection in the streets was a big risk… when a simple kiss would summon officers from thin air to threaten and confiscate ID cards until they are bribed away. The terror that followed didn’t stem only from the deep-rooted belief that a woman is powerless there, but also from the looming, intrusive fear of being seized by officers or even random passers-by at any moment.
In my final year in Syria, I injected my days with the darkness of politically censored literature and the social and sexual reality of silenced voices. I felt like a foreigner in my own land… a curious journalist, a silent witness, and a cautious explorer of sexual freedom.
In Luxembourg, I underestimated the time and space I needed to process my personal rebellion–until my body and psyche sounded the alarm through seizures. What proved to me more healing than any antidepressant or anti-epileptic drugs were the creative tools I clung to. I journaled obsessively, with some writings slammed as poetry across stages in and around Luxembourg. My heart fell in love with the African dunun drum. Rhythm became trance. Trance became meditation… I read Jung, Campbell, Huxley, Yalom, Maté… I fell into a web of authentic human connections, into a shared wound I had never known others carried too. I began to see both my existential struggle and the overwhelming beauty of this miracle we call life reflected in the eyes of every human.
Raw cacao, community fires, performance arts, festive intimate settings… Every step I took was guided by freshly unlocked intuition, a subtle compass rising from my body and heart. Slowly, the past lost its grip. The trauma didn’t disappear, but it no longer ruled over me. The fully covered woman that once was, with her long blonde-dyed hair covered with her terrors, transformed into a bold being of movement and fluidity, with her dark hair cut short, face adorned with tribal paint, twelve piercings glinting in the light, and bells chiming at her neck as she dances ecstatically dressed in black that grieves her former self.
I began to see life as a skin-to-skin or eye-to-eye contact improvisation dance: knowing when to respectfully lean in, when to hold space, when to retreat. I learned the sacredness of presence, the power of touch, the importance of gaze. I became fully sensate again. Alive.
As I reclaimed my body and my expression, I also reclaimed the pieces of myself I once feared. What was once taboo… desire, nudity, affection… became natural again. Human. Innate. Through dance, I told stories my mouth couldn’t yet speak. I connected, shamelessly and tenderly, with those who felt like mirrors. My social life aligned with my truth. I began to distinguish the sexual from the platonic, the loving from the lustful. I stopped confusing connection with danger. The openness I once judged within myself was finally expressed free from fear, free from my own judgment and the world’s.
I spontaneously bloomed into a growth-oriented approach in my love life, holding an open and expressive space with multiple partners. We gather and name our fears. We speak our desires. We move in truth. Intuition leads us, not possession or control. And I’ve learned that love, whether sexual or not, is genderless, ageless, and abundant. And that the sweet spot between security and openness does exist.
The moment you set foot on the journey of healing, there’s nothing left to live for except your truth. That is the art of living. And in choosing it, I made a vow: zero tolerance for lying to myself.
My academic path in pharmacy gave way to art therapy. My pen writes my heart aloud until it kisses the microphone as vulnerable poems, and my playfulness guides me to dancefloors, to music, to passion in bed, where I can equally name insecurities and desires and play out my personas in the liberating and theatrical act of sex.
Every heartache and every moment of wonder is now received by the inner child in me with curiosity and freedom. Life, in all its bitterness and sweetness, is witnessed through the lens of potential growth and savored like a quiet night at the cinema.
You begin to grow aware of the shared human ache, the quiet agony that flickers behind strangers’ eyes. You sense your story swimming in the iris of every gaze, a piece of you shivering in every puzzled soul, and a potential for blooming, waiting to be watered in each being you meet. You begin to dance as an open book, a story willing to be read, with pages just as stained and wrinkled as the battles it has survived.
In healing, you connect.
In healing, you wake up to Truth.
And just like falling in love, every experience in life becomes a first time.
