My personal experience and stories from the time I lived in the Middle East, the US and Europe
In diaspora I found home….
I am starting this blog because I have something to say. I would like to share it with you and I would like to interact with you and I hope you find something here that touches you.
If you have been reading thus far, do not worry, I have not lost my peace. The good thing about peace is that it gives you lucidity, it gives you clarity.
Remember in chapter 4 when I said that people like me leave their “home” to the west pursuing some sort of restoration of dignity and dreams?! well, I feel really sad for those children of light. The “West” did not really live up to its potential. Two major things happened post COVID: GAZA and TRUMP.
I, by no means, can educate anyone on the horrors of Gaza and the absolute failure of humanity in preventing a full scale tiktoked genocide committed by the trash of the planet. But I can tell you how I experienced it in Europe.
When you are an immigrant in a country like France you will always get a specific treatment from the French. Specially those who identify as intellectuals or “activists”. They will always try to teach you something. They will even try to teach you about your own reality and your own human experience. I once had a debate with an individual where he was trying to convince me the Hijab is mandated by law in Egypt for example and he would not take it from an Egyptian that is actually not.
Gaza stripped those people naked, morally that is. Suddenly Monsieur and Madame Intellectuelles ran out of arguments to their fellow white man committing animalistic killing rituals against a not very fellow brown man. I could sense their cognitive dissonance and I saw them suffering between their inner moral code and their racist core and oh baby, I loved it.
I met three kinds of people in this crisis: the “c’est tres complique” people, the “mais pour quoi ils ne peuvent pas co-exister” people and of course the “we will march to free the Palestinians” people.
The “it is complicated” are the worst. They chose moral complacency, so I discard them entirely. The victim blaming people asking for peaceful co-existence in a situation like Palestine are usually far right idiots whose brain are suffering from visible rot. The third are the most difficult to deal with.
Most of my friends turned into white saviours. Some of them honestly thought that if they, personally, get involved surely the conflict will be resolved and in favour of the Palestinians.
Of course when you are at peace with the reality of the rotten world order it was not a surprise to me to see the decay of the western civilisation. They keep trying to pin this decay on us, the immigrants, but what Gaza and Trump did was stripping them naked to their own mirror of decay and they did not like what they saw. Welcome to the club, baby. Take a seat beside your brothers and sisters of colour and maybe one day we bring it all down and start over.
I have spilled much ink and spent many trips with you in our discussion of human connection. And we’re no closer to understanding than we were when our trips began. I often feel as if I’m standing on one side of a wide chasm, shouting across, and wondering if the response I hear comes from you, or if it is my own voice echoing back to me. It seems to me, on my side of the canyon, that the search for unity with another is behind much of the world’s unhappiness. You, my odd friend, conduct yourself as though you’re above matters of the heart. But in my candid moments, I sometimes wonder if you take the stance you do because love, for lack of a better word, is a game you fail to understand, and so you opt not to play. After all, if I truly had the purity of all my convictions, I wouldn’t regret so many of the things I’ve done nor would I persist, against so many of my better instincts.
I find you a challenge, one that, in spite of all that you’ve done, continues to stimulate. In every relationship that I find myself into I want to through myself into it and have a full “love” experience. Yet, you stand there looking at me with a smug smile telling me “we are bigger than that”. We keep having those arguments, you and I, where I keep telling you that people need second chances that despite of our convections maybe this specific time “it” will work. Yet, you keep winning. Maybe I created you to take care of me when I am vulnerable and sad. I can always see you taking over when I cannot manage and you always make the tough calls for me. Shortly after you disappear and I stay.
Hunter S. Thompson is quoted as saying, “Love. The word means different things to different people. To some, love is a fairy tale. To others, it’s a nightmare. But for me, love is a drug. And like all drugs, it can be good or bad, depending on how you use it.”
Her name was Rose “Warda”. Yes, this was my youngest aunt name.
She was my first teacher. She taught handwriting. She had the most beautiful Arabic calligraphy I have ever seen. My hand writing is still bad.
She also liked to draw and her lines were soft and beautiful.
Her name was Rose “Warda”, she was my youngest aunt.
She was like her name: delicate, elegant and beautiful.
She used to wait for me and my brother to come back from our universities to visit her in the Oasis. She used to make mango juice and cook Egyptian dishes for dinner for us.
She had a soft heart and a generous soul. She loved us so much but then she got sick. She got really sick and she started to wither. The beautiful Rose became so weak and frail but she still made us the mango juice and cooked dinner.
Then I left Egypt and left her behind in the oasis. Just like I have left everything behind.
I did not call her but followed her news from her sister, my mother. I also never went back to the oasis even when I visited Cairo. I took her for granted.
Last time I was in Cairo she also was in Cairo. She was in the intensive care unit because her organs started failing and she suffered internal bleeding.
I did not visit her in the hospital. I remember my Rose happy and young. I remember her as my teacher who used to get so angry at me for my horrible hand writing. I could not get myself to see her sick.
Then she died. Death took my Rose away and broke my heart. I am so angry at everything. I am angry I won’t see her again. I am angry she left me and the world. I am angry I could not say goodbye. I am angry I had to be strong for the family.
I will miss her until I die. I will miss her and all the other beloved that death took away from me. I loved my Rose so much and I hope she knew it, I really do.
At 6 Am my mother woke me up. She pressed my arm and said “be with us, Dad is not well”.
I hurried to their bedroom and found him half seated, struggling to breathe and clinching his chest with a half fest. I realized what was happening and there was no time for an ambulance in cairo, so I ordered an uber to the closest hospital. He was suffering a level 2 heart attack.
I have never seen my father as weak and suffering that much pain. He was fighting for his life. On the exit door of the building he held me tight and said “I feel so cold”. I huged him and he cried.
The hug sent me in a place I know very well. A place where I meet my odd friend. I, simply, dissociated. I was on autopilot mood. At the moment it was not me hugging my father. I disappeared and there was a dark void wrapping itself It around a frail human who was cold and ready for to go to the place where no one returns.
My father recovered and I can still hear his shriek and feel his tear on my wet shirt.
Was I there? Was that real? At the moment, yes….
I have always entertained the idea of playing chess against death not for any hope that I would ever win in his cruel game but just to see how many moves it can still yet play to surprise me. Of course the easiest and most used technique of death is surprise. A move where the master skilfully takes away a piece of your board, your life, that you for some reason just took for granted. I would say he played this enough I kinda not get or at least try not to get surprised every-time the master pulls it.
I cannot remember how many times I sat on this board just examining with owe and tears the moves he played in everyone’s life and how it completely tears through the fabric of the….the board. his ability to just dismantle your carefully played game no matter who skilfully you through you really played. Yet, the cruellest card death has ever played is: Death by you. the chess master sits with command across from you watching you approach smiling holding the king piece.
I do not know why but I went back. The intrigue of that other world I discovered within my mind is irresistible. I have engaged in a pattern that would resemble a “weekend getaway trip” whenever I felt I need to retreat inwards. DMT is too strong for this so I shifted my recreational weekend trip to LSD. The beauty of LSD is that it is much gentler and it stays long enough to play with. I can perfectly control how far I want to go in my trip, unlike DMT that forcefully shoots me to him, my odd friend.
I remember the first time I used LSD after my DMT experience because it was not the same as prior to the DMT experience. Something happened in my brain and now it processes LSD very differently. First I dissociate, then I lose sense of body, time and place. When I shut my eyes I go there, to the edge. I can see the two worlds very clearly and I go between them with ease. I see my odd friend but for some reason we do not interact, not at all. This is a puzzle I still need to solve.
I feel a strange sensation of peace and warmth in the “nothing” world. My friends are concerned that one day I will go there and I will never come back. This scares me too, not to be there, but to lose control. For now, I will keep dancing on the edge.
I loved my last dissociative/psychotic experience but I did not know what to do with it. I felt it was a premature season finale, then I got it. It was an answer I needed to stop looking back and to start looking forward. Our pasts shape us, they leave us with experiences without which we would never understand ourselves and push our limits. The feeling I have right now is gratitude. I am grateful that I grew up in a loving and caring family. I am grateful I have had the chance to grow up in the desert of Egypt. Every man, woman, and child alive should see the desert one time before they die. Nothing at all for horizons. Nothing but sand and rocks and wild plants and blue sky. Not a soul in sight. You find silence out there, you find peace. I am grateful I was educated in the American University in Cairo and that I have had the chance to travel at a young age to the epitome of western civilisation, the USA. I am grateful I got to witness the Egyptian revolution and be part of it with all the sorrows and horrors that came with it. I am grateful that I have had the chance to start over in a country like France. I am grateful for the many lovers and friends I have met throughout the experience. I have loved and I have been truly loved. I have made peace with the past. I have accepted it.
Now it is a new chapter. Now It is time to live the present that leads to the future, not the present that lives in the shadows of the past. I want to visit my odd friend again and I want to talk to him again. Next it will be Ayahuasca baby, stay tuned….
I was tired that day. In fact I have been tired for sometime before that day too. I consumed my energy in crunching books, working over hours and practicing my guitar. This is my routine when I do not want to face something. I distract my mind into something else but the mind knows and the mind wins.
That day I did DCK for the wrong reasons but maybe the right time. My dear readers: fasten your seat belts….
I am sitting on my La-Z-Boy inclining chair, the room expanded, my friend’s voice sounded too far and incomprehensible, the buzz from the speakers behind me was killing me, I switched them off and my world became 2D. Voices changed into electric noises that were no longer voices but just sound waves with no meaning. I asked my friend to shut up, he shut up. Now there is silence.
My 2D world turns into black metal slabs that collapse one after the other and everything disappears, everything. From here on I will refer to The Odd Friend as TOF. I split not dissociate, big difference.
TOF: Yes yes yes, here he comes, I have been waiting for you.
Me: What is this?
TOF: What is not this, you mean. This is it, this is everything. Every sound you hear, every image you see, every sensation you get and everything you ever tasted, smelled and experienced. This is my world, your world, our world, THE WORLD.
Me: There is nothing here, nothing at all.
TOF: True and not true. You, I (you are me, I am you, whatever you want to call it) are conscience. I have been here first in the nothingness. As you see it is vast what nothingness can be, the void, the abyss. So I created you with your life, your world, your everything. You got bored (well, I got bored) so I created death to give you a new life because eternity is a cruel thing. So now we can have new beginnings and like this we can play forever.
Me: Play?
TOF: I know you are wondering how many times you have reached that far to this point but I won’t answer you and it does not matter. But you have always questioned, every time in every life I gave you. There is nothing to be gained from your pursuit of reality. You can call it a simulation, a matrix whatever you want. You want to breakthrough that matrix and see what is behind hoping for salvation, hoping that the truth would put an end to the endless cycle. Here you are, my friend, this is what is behind the matrix: NOTHINGNESS. In here there is no time, no beginning, middle and end there is just NOTHING. I cannot die, I cannot vanish because in nothingness nothing happens at all. So my existence, your existence are not a choice, we are just here and in here nothing happens. I am sorry if the game was cruel and if the “construct” I gave you made you hope for more.
Now you have it,”the truth”. Do what you want to do with it. The construct can be beautiful and the more you allow it to grow the more the construct becomes for you. I want you to be happy and to feel what we call “life” for lack of a better word. I will be constructing endlessly because my reality is endless so, my odd friend, please forgive me.
DCK stands for Deschloroketamine. It is a designer drug that has the potential of inducing dissociation. When I first discovered and used this drug it sent me into a trip similar to that of Ketamine. The trips were usually longer and deeper. Until I had my psychosis on DMT.
After my psychotic episode on DMT, DCK functioned completely differently in my body. It sends my directly into dissociation. I need to explain what dissociation means, at least for me. After 5-10 minutes from administering DCK dimensions get very distorted. Objects seem far from how they are actually placed, sounds become electric or robotic and the body becomes heavy. Everything turns into a cartoonish 2D a few moments before my normal self is silenced and another takes over.
It is difficult to explain what I mean by “another takes over” because now I am me writing down not him. I am aware of his presence somewhere and that at the right moment he becomes me. When this happens the first thing I feel is that I have no body or that I no longer feel it. What is interesting is what I find when I come back. I might have consumed a food or a drink and I do not remember, changed where I was sitting, had conversations that I cannot recall having, etc. I know you might think it is creepy but so far I can tell my odd friend has been such a cool guy. The moments I enjoy the most is when I can still experience both of me and have a conversation or alternate between the two.
I learned to control my dose and my experience so that I have it under control in terms of duration and space. If you think I am crazy or that it is creepy then I urge you to rediscover yourself and you will be surprised what you find out.
Next chapter will be about the metal slabs, stay tuned….
When I started writing my memories in this blog I unearthed feelings, ideas, and a wave of emotions that I probably was not ready for. However, without talking honestly about what I have been through and what I have witnessed then I would not be where I am now and who I am now. To be fully honest I had a full blown CPTSD where even my dreams were not a safe place. Because I did not know what to do I went to psychoactive substances, it was terrifying.
The most aggressive experience I had with psychoactive substances sent me in an acute psychotic episode that I wrote about in an earlier post. It was a total nightmare that it scared me of my own brain and my own self. Slowly, I recovered and I even felt grateful for the experience because I would have never been able to explore those areas of my mind and soul if it was not for psychosis. I started then doing controlled psychedelics where I only used them for a purpose to answer a specific question or to visit a specific area in my soul. Of course they took me to other places and I finally could see how everything inside my mind was connected even if the connection seemed far and unlikely. I could see the construct.
In neuroscience we say that we have no objective way of knowing what reality is because once sensorial messages are transferred to our nerves the brain will construct whatever it wants out of them and tells you that this is the “reality”. We have no idea how things really look like, smell like, or feel like. It does the same thing to our memories and experiences. It constructs a reality that is plausible enough to be believable and that is pleasant enough to make us survive and exist. Psychedelics strip the brain naked and enable the user to either reconstruct a reality or just observe how the brain mapped out and designed its reality. This will sound silly until you try yourself.
In my next chapter I will talk about the deconstruction of reality that makes me stand on the verge of insanity. It is the place where I meet my odd friend where we together explore the vast universes and realities of everything.
On the Search for Home