I'm Not a goldfish in a bowl

 when I was 16, I felt like I was trapped in my own mind, unable to express myself, unable to speak, unable to find words to describe everything inside me. I am Egyptian, raised in a Muslim environment, though not one that was very strict, described as moderate and balanced Islam, with the expectations of my family and the small community around me. Be good at your studies, love your family, respect your parents, and never go against the norm. Stay average and go under the radar.

But all the time, I felt like I couldn't meet the expectations of my family, society, and the people around me. I couldn’t understand or find words to describe this, or I would avoid the available words because all the words I had at that time were inherently degrading. I spent my early teenage years trying to deny, escape, and suppress anything inside me that was telling me who I was. I built a prison in my mind for myself, and the result was a depressing period, one that felt like half the time of those who have gone through the experience of being in prison. The days repeated themselves, sadness, depression, and a constant struggle with nothingness. I hated my body, I hated myself, I hated my image in the mirror. It was as though I had adopted society’s view of homosexuals and queers in general, and looked at myself through it. I was the biggest homophobe in the world, and I was the most gay person I hated. These years ate away at my mental and emotional health, at my self-respect. At the time, I turned to writing to express myself. I wrote a short story about a goldfish, alone in a small bowl, its colors were beautiful, but the fish itself was sad, moving slowly. I was the trapped fish. Even while writing about myself, I couldn’t describe myself as sad or depressed because I also hated my sadness, my depression, and my prison. Mental health treatment in my culture was taboo. It was for the insane and the disturbed, not for people like us. There was a general sense of denial and the delusion that everything was fine because I inherited it from my family and applied it to myself.

I tried to search for a treatment or solution to the problem, but what was the problem? I tried to squeeze my brain: Did I suffer from abuse or assault in my childhood? Was my relationship with my father bad, or was his influence absent? These were all things I thought about, but there was nothing. All the reasons I found online didn’t apply to me. So where was the problem? Maybe it’s genetic, I thought. And the search journey began. This time, the information in Arabic was limited, so I started searching in English. That was the moment of shock for me: What do you mean? I’m not sick, I’m not disturbed, I’m not perverted. What is this madness? Slowly, the denial began to fade, and my mind started working and understanding. I began to realize that it’s normal for some to love the opposite sex, and some to love the same sex. It wasn’t an easy journey, nor something that happened overnight. Just as I spent most of my adolescence suppressing and denying my identity and hating myself, I spent the end of it and the beginning of my twenties trying to understand myself, trying to accept myself, and most importantly, trying to love myself. Overcoming my fear of my emotions, my identity, and people’s views of me wasn’t an easy journey. It was a long and exhausting journey, a long fight between me and myself. In it, I was both the perpetrator and the victim. But the time came when I stood in front of the mirror and loved myself. I looked at my reflection when I was 16, when I wrote the story about the fish, and I said to myself: "I’m not a fish, I’m not trapped, I’m a human with dreams, feelings, and rights." I still have a long fight, but this time, I’m not fighting with myself, I’m fighting with stigma, discrimination, and hatred. A fight where I am my biggest ally. I love myself, I love my life, and I will live it the way I want… and I will heal from the old wounds.