Ten Days in the Bookstore

In 2019, when I was living in “A…..” in “E….”, I had just gotten dismissed from a job as a receptionist in Gym called “U………. Gym”; owned by a local businessman named “U….”, who was the older brother of my dear friend “A….”, who died in 2018 from a heart attack.

My youngest aunt told me about a job in the bookstore near us called “W….”, meaning (gleam, or sparkle), I applied to the job as a sales person, and a cashier, they called me to do the interview, I was very excited and anxious, I had butterflies in my stomach, I was so worried, I was afraid of failure and humiliation, I wanted not to go, but I went, but I went, when I went over there all the applicants were young women in their 20s. I felt anxious and worried, I love women so much so I hate to show it, I hate looking vulnerable to them, but I love them so much.

The girls went in one by one, when it was my turn I got up and went in, I was asked some questions and answered them briefly, I didn’t talk a lot back then.

I got the job (For my surprise!) and they called me and asked me to show up after two days.

I worked there for 10 consecutive days with no holidays, it was my training period, on the last day a woman asked me about something, I was exhausted, I just starred at her and said nothing, it was almost 10 o’clock. I had been standing there for 8 hours, I had no energy left. So I said nothing. My colleague answered for me. He was my trainer, he was a high school student 10 years younger than me, and he was the only other male with me in the store.

The fatigue caused by the depression was killing me, I slept all day, and went to work, and smoked! Nothing more! Nothing less! Just work and sleep and work and sleep. I got tired, so I decided that I wanted time off for myself, I will spend a year without a job and get treated from the depression.

I was 27 at the time, I wanted to work there for 3 years. But it didn’t happen, I was too tired to do anything.

I don’t know how to fix this fatigue problem, but I will need to. I called “Mr. M……” the owner of the business, and asked him to excuse me from continuing the rest of my three months training, I thought to myself that I would be lying to him if I said that I was going to stay, I knew I had fatigue and that something needed to be done about it. So he excused me, but he respected that I called, telling me that others used to just quit with no notice previously.

After that I stayed at home depressed and fatigued. Mr. L****, my colleague at the bookstore (who also left at the same time, and who had noticed me since the day of the interview), contacted me on Facebook, she asked whether I’d be interested in studying German with her, she had a crush on me but I didn’t know at the time. I said yes! So we went together to the German courses. The instructor was great; she had patience, wore neat and fancy cloths, and I actually liked her.

She was about my age, but I wasn’t working, and she was. I was devastated; why did God give me depression? I hated it. I wanted to heal, or ‘be healed’ so badly.

I didn’t show up to the final exam; cause I was so unfocused the days before to be able to study. My mind was wandering and chattering all the time, I had ADD like symptoms. I still have. So I didn’t show up for the exam.

And that’s today’s story.

~ Mo!

I want my life back

The fifth of October, 2019. I’m still awake since yesterday. Only one year has passed since my graduation from college. It feels like a long long time ago!.. It’s 4:30 AM, I should be sleeping, but instead I’m binge-blogging. It’s a way for me to be away from Facebook.

I’ve been using Facebook since 2008. In this year I was graduating high school. After graduating I traveled to another city to study Engineering. I was living in a dorm, so I had no TV, and no smartphones or internet. My only connection to the outside world was going to a near cyber cafe and opening Facebook. At that time began my addiction to Facebook. There’s something very relaxing about writing and posting!

Now I’m taking it to WordPress, it gives me the posting feature, but with much less of the noise in the background. I can write where no one is following me. Where I just talk to myself, about myself!

The first year at college went great, I got myself a couple of As and Bs, and was very proud of myself.. I only got one F at the Physics B course. I was going to specialize in Mechatronics Engineering. I’ve always wanted to be great at something special! Mechatronics department sounded like something a few people knew of at the time. I wanted to be great, that’s all. I was 16 when I chose this field. How is a 16 years old supposed to choose what he wants to do with life?! I wonder about that now.. There something inherently wrong with a world that expects teenagers to find their specialty at age 16 or 17. You might find a kid this age who has found his or her passion in life, but is it the average, or is the world forcing kids to take huge decisions about life at an early age?

For me it was hard to choose, but that wasn’t the problem, I enjoyed Engineering and I could’ve easily passed my exams, maybe with an F here and an F there, but I’d have finished it. It was due to major depression that I gradually became numb! So numb that I didn’t want to go to college anymore! I tried to fight it, but it just got the best of me! I didn’t learn that I had depression until 2010 probably; two years after graduating high school, and three years before dropping out of college. It was a painful experience.. painful and frustrating; especially that my depression was just like having diabetes; it’s just a chronic condition, there’s nothing I can do about it except to cope!

I remember the day I walked to my therapist, and I didn’t know yet what was wrong with me, and she told me that what I had was “depressive tendencies”, it was such a nice word for the severe level of depression that I discovered I had! Depression is one of the hardest illnesses to beat! It was a long, long road, and I’m still fighting.

The problem with the depression was trying to find a meaning to all of it; you feel that it’s completely pointless, this sickness that is robbing you of your life one day at a time! You keep watching the days as they flow away from you, day after day! The days then turn to weeks and the weeks turn to months and the months to years, the more time passes by, the more you feel stuck in this condition, stuck in this place.

It’s especially sad when you find people taking waking up in the morning with energy for granted, when you absolutely have zero energy to do anything. Depression interferes with your reward/motivation mechanism, you stop feeling the motivation to do, or the pleasure from doing, absolutely anything.

I reach a point where I’m just extremely angry at God for doing that to me, I lose my belief in religion and in god and become like a nihilist atheist with no sense of purpose or meaning.

At a point in 2016, I took a decision not to make any change in my ideology and philosophy anymore; because it was all stemming from the depression, and the depression wasn’t real. It was real in a sense that I felt it, but in the way it made me see the world through it’s extremely dark glasses it was a distortion of reality, and a very unhelpful one!

Here I defined my main battle: Overcoming, or coping with, the depression. It wasn’t about philosophy or religion anymore, it wasn’t about abstract thoughts about morality, ethics, meaning and purpose. It was my own inner experience, I decided to use a tool from psychology instead of philosophy: cognitive behavioral techniques.

It took me many years after my life has been destroyed back and forth time after time after time to get up again, for the billionth time, to try to start all over again.

I traced back my depression to 11 years old, so now it has been 17 years. I want to overcome it. And that’s my main goal.

I want my life back, and I will get it.

 

What is CBT?

Here I try to write about CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy using sources from Youtube and a book.

CBT is one of the most effective treatments for things like anxiety disorders, depression disorders, bipolar depression, ADHD… and a lot of other problems.

It’s about understanding yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, learning how to get unstuck with your thoughts, developing skills to help yourself manage difficult emotions and also help you be in the situations that you want to be in.

CBT is transparent and goal oriented; it’s not ambiguous and it focuses on the present and developing skills that help you get unstuck. It’s an active treatment, with homework and activities between session and session.

CBT is short-term, and it is a therapy that psychologists have monitored and showed that it statistically improves the lives of patients. CBT believes that it isn’t so much what happened to us through life, but it’s how we think about what’s happened to us in life. Not the life event itself, but my thoughts about it.

As a patient of depression and social anxiety I first came across the word CBT in a book called “Overcoming Social Anxiety & Shyness” by Gillian Butler. Up until this day I didn’t know that there was something called social anxiety, I had it, but I didn’t know it had a name.

At the beginning of the book it gives us an overview of what CBT is:

“Over the past two or three decades, there has been something of a revolution in the field of psychological treatment. Freud and his followers had a major impact on the way in which psychological therapy was conceptualized, and psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy dominated the field for the first half of this century. So, long-term treatments were offered which were designed to uncover the childhood roots of personal problems – offered, that is, to those who could afford it. There was some attempt by a few health service practitioners with a public conscience to modify this form of treatment (by, for example, offering short-term treatment or group therapy), but the demand for help was so great that this had little impact. Also, whilst numerous case histories can be found of people who are convinced that psychotherapy did help them, practitioners of this form of therapy showed remarkably little interest in demonstrating that what they were offering their patients was, in fact, helpful.

As a reaction to the exclusivity of psychodynamic therapies and the slender evidence for its usefulness, in the 1950s and 1960s a set of techniques was developed, broadly collectively termed ‘behavior therapy’. These techniques shared two basic features. First, they aimed to remove symptoms (such as anxiety) by dealing with those symptoms themselves, rather than their deep seated underlying historical causes. Second, they were techniques, loosely related to what laboratory psychologists were finding out about the mechanisms of learning, which were formulated in testable terms. Indeed, practitioners of behavior therapy were committed to using techniques of proven value or, at worst, of a form which could potentially be put to the test. The area where these techniques proved of most value was in the treatment of anxiety disorders, especially specific phobias (such as fear of animals or heights) and agoraphobia, both notoriously difficult to treat using conventional psychotherapies.

After an initial flush of enthusiasm, discontent with behavior therapy grew. There were a number of reasons for this, an important one of which was the fact that behavior therapy did not deal with the internal thoughts which were so obviously central to the distress that patients were experiencing. In this context, the fact that behavior therapy proved so inadequate when it came to the treatment of depression highlighted the need for major revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a treatment was developed specifically for depression called ‘cognitive therapy’. The pioneer in this enterprise was an American psychiatrist, Professor Aaron T. Beck, who developed a theory of depression which emphasized the importance of people’s depressed styles of thinking, He also specified a new form of therapy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Beck’s work has changed the nature of psychotherapy, not just for depression but for a range of psychological problems.

In recent years the cognitive techniques introduced by Beck have been merged with the techniques developed earlier by the behavior therapists to produce a body of theory and practice which has come to be known as ‘cognitive behavior therapy’. There are two main reasons why this form of treatment has come to be so important within the field of psychotherapy. First, cognitive therapy for depression, as originally described by Beck and developed by his successors, has been subjected to the strictest scientific testing; and it has been found to be a highly successful treatment for a significant proportion of cases of depression. Not only has it proved to be as effective as the best alternative treatments (except in the most severe cases, where medication is required), but some studies suggest that people treated successfully with cognitive behavior therapy are less likely to experience a later recurrence of their depression than people treated successfully with other forms of therapy (such as antidepressant medication). Second, it has become clear that specific patterns of thinking are associated with a range of psychological problems and that treatments which deal with these styles of thinking are highly effective. So, specific cognitive behavioral treatments have been developed for anxiety disorder, specific phobias and social phobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and hypochondriasis (health anxiety), as well as for other conditions such as compulsive gambling, alcohol and drug addiction, and eating disorders like bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder. Indeed, cognitive behavioral techniques have a wide application beyond the narrow categories of psychological disorders: they have been applied effectively, for example, to helping people with low self-esteem and those with marital difficulties.”

In A Conversation with Aaron T. Beck he describes the process with which he came to develop cognitive behavior therapy.

تيل ليندمان

 تيل ليندمان المولود عام 1963 في الرابع من يناير، هو مغني وكاتب أغاني وملحن في فريق الميتال والهارد روك رامشتاين.

ابتدأت في الاستماع الى رامشتاين في العام الماضي، كجزء من استمتاعي بموسيقى الميتال بشكل عام. لنفهم السبب في أن موسيقى رامشتاين مميزة جدا علينا أوّلا أن نفهم تعبير موسيقي وهو الريف.

Riff:

noun

a short repeated phrase in popular music and jazz, typically used as an introduction or refrain in a song.

“a brilliant guitar riff”

أي أنّه مقطع صغير مُعاد، أو مقطوعة موسيقية مُكرّرة.

Guitar for Beginners 28 — What is a Riff?

تمتلك رامشتاين مجموعة من أكثر الريفات المميّزة والتي تعلق في ذهنك لأسابيع وأسابيع؛ حتّى بالمقارنة بفرق الميتال الأخرى فهم مُميّزون جدا.

Rammstein – Bück dich (Official Audio)

السبب الثاني لتميز رامشتاين هو الصورة التي يقدّمون نفسهم بها، فمن اشعال النيران في أعضاء الفريق على المسرح الى استعراض أدوات جنسية تسببت في دخولهم السجن في مرّة، لا يمكن أن تنسى فيديو كليب أو حفلة لرامشتاين:

Rammstein Bück Dich live explicit

كبير جدا

صغير جدا

الحجم يفرق على كل حال

كبير جدا

صغير جدا

يمكنه أن يكون أكبر قليلاً

مرسيدس بنز والأوتوبان

أسافر وحدي في البلد الغريب

الرحلة الرحلة، متعة السواقة

أريد أن أستمتع لا أن أقع في الحب

فقط قليلا…

مجرد عاهرة!

أنتِ تملكين مِهبلاً

أنا أملك قضيباً

فما المشكلة؟

فلنفعلها بسرعة

خذيني الآن قبل أن يفوت الوقت

الحياة قصيرة، لا يمكنني الانتظار

خذيني الآن، ألا ترين؟

لا يمكنني الحصول على الجنس في ألمانيا!

قصير جدا

طويل جدا

لا يهم، حجمٌ واحد يسع الكل

كبيرٌ جدا، صغيرٌ جدا

الحاجز عليه أن يُفتح!

أيتها المرأة الجميلة، أنتِ تريدين المزيد

بلتزكريج مع السلاح اللحميّ

الكحول في الرأس، أيتها العروس الجميل

ضعي السجق في المخلل الملفوف!

Rammstein – Pussy (Official Audio)

قد يعتقد المستمع أو المشاهد لرامشتاين للمرّة الأولى أنّها فرقة تسعى لاحداث الضجيج واصدار محتوى لا معنى له، وسيكون هذا الشخص أبعد ما يكون عن الحقيقة.

 خلف هذه الموسيقى الصاخبة والكلمات الصادمة والمشاهد العنيفة، رامشتاين هي احدى تلك الفرق، التي لا تخشى التساؤلات والموضوعات المهمة؛ تستخدم رامشتاين أسلوب الرمز والسخرية والتهكم والازدراء في كلماتهم وأدائهم، وهم قليلو الظهور جدّا في اللقاءات التلفزيونية، ويرفضون شرح المقصود من فنهم في هذه اللقاءات، ما يفتح الباب لجميع التفسيرات الظاهرية والمتعمقة للنص.

 

فمثلا نجد على موقع جينياس، الموقع المعني بشرح كلمات الأغاني، أن حتى معجبي رامشتاين المخلصين لم يجدوا مناصاً من الاختلاف في معنى أغنية “بوسي” أو مِهبَل، فرآها هذا بمعناها المباشر؛ أنّها تحتفي بالجنس، بينما قدم آخر تفسيراً أكثر عُمقاً بُناءً على الفيديو كليب؛ قائلاً فيما معناه: “… يستخدم تيل أسلوب التهكم، كما في أغنية “أمريكا” التي تبدو أنها مديح لأمريكا، بينما في الحقيقة هي ازدراء للنموذج الاقتصادي السام، مطاعم الفاست فود، وعمالة الأطفال في دول العالم الثالث.

في فيديو “بوسي” يصور نوادي التعري، الدعارة وصناعة البورن. وأيضاً يتضمن فتاة تُحضر الى غرفة الأوتيل في حقيبة سفر! فمن الواضح أن الأغنية تشير الى معاملة المرأة في صناعة الدعارة والأفلام الاباحية في ألمانيا. حتى أنا أرى هذا المعنى رغم أنّي أبعد ما أكون عن النسوية…. “

https://genius.com/Rammstein-pussy-lyrics

استخدام فرقة الميتال الألمانية رامشتاين للغتهم الأم في أغلب أغانيهم يجعل للاستماع لأغانيهم متعة أكبر، فالألمانية لغة عنيفة الملافظ، بالنسبة لغير المتحدث بها. وهي تليق جدّا بموسيقى الميتال الصاخبة.

Rammstein – Rosenrot (Official Video)

رأت فتاةً وردة صغيرة

أزهرت هناك في مرتفعات مضيئة

سألت حبيبها

اذا كان يمكنه أن يحضرها لها

هي تريدها وهذا حسن

هكذا كان وهكذا دائما سيكون

هي تريدها وهذا هو العُرف

أيّما أرادت أُعطيت

آبارٌ عميقة يجب أن تُحفَر

اذا أردت ماءً نقيا

حمراء-وردة .. آهٍ حمراء-وردة

الماء العميق لا يجري بهدوء

يصعد الفتى الجبل في عذاب

هو لا يهتمُ حقّا بالمشهد

فقط الوردة الصغيرة في عقله

يحضرها الى حبيبته

هي تريدها وهذا حسن

هكذا كان وهكذا دائما سيكون

هي تريدها وهذا هو العُرف

أيّما أرادت أُعطيت

آبارٌ عميقة يجب أن تُحفَر

اذا أردت ماءً نقيا

حمراء-وردة .. آهٍ حمراء-وردة

الماء العميق لا يجري بهدوء

عند جزمته، ينكسر حجرا

لا يريد أن يكون على الحافة مزيداً من الوقت

وصرخةٌ تُعلمُ الجميع

أن الاثنين يسقطان الى الأرض

هي تريدها وهذا حسن

هكذا كان وهكذا دائما سيكون

هي تريدها وهذا هو العُرف

أيّما أرادت أُعطيت

آبارٌ عميقة يجب أن تُحفَر

اذا أردت ماءً نقيا

حمراء-وردة .. آهٍ حمراء-وردة

الماء العميق لا يجري بهدوء

* * *

روزِن-روت أو حمراء-وردة هي أول أغنية أسمعها لرامشتاين .. الفيديو مثير للغاية، والموسيقى شديدة الغموض والظلامية، روزِن-روت  هي أغنية من ألبوم رامشتاين الخامس من عام 2005 المُعنوَن بنفس الاسم، تتكلم الأغنية عن الأفعال العبثية التي يقوم بها الناس باسم الحب، والتي قد تنتهي بالموت!

   الأغنية مقتبسة من قصيدة جوته المسماة “وردة صغيرة في الحقل” أو هيدِنـروزلين منشورة عام 1799 وتم تحويلها الى معزوفة.

Heidenröslein

Rammstein – Amerika (Official Video)

يُمكننا الكلام لساعات عن رامشتاين.. فهم بحرٌ واسع.. وأتمنّى أن أكون قد شددتك قليلاً للخوض في غمار هذه التجربة الموسيقية الشديدة.

John and Synthetic Weed

Once upon a time, there was a guy named John. John loved to use synthetic weed. Once he was at his friend’s, his friend was an absurdist journalist, he loved to have sex, and read Leftist literature. His friend, and let’s call him Tom, told John: Why are you depressed, man?
John: I love this girl, but her cousin tried to rape her when she was young, he was in prep school, 3 years older than her. She had a love story with someone, but they weren’t able to make love; because she was traumatized, she could not be touched.
Tom: Hmmm…
John: She has a crush on my friend, my friend is in a relationship with another girl!
Tom: Okay…!
John: We are friends, we hang out together sometimes, this is her photo…
Tom: Beautiful. Now let me introduce you to the solution to this complex trauma, I mean complex story:
Introducing: Synthetic weed!
John took a smoke, and then another one, and then another…
He looked at his crush’s picture, he starred at her eyes…
He started to spin, he started to enter her eyes, he woke up next to his crush, he told her: Hi!
Rebecca: I don’t love you, John! You’re so small!
John turned into a cockroach, he saw his legs underneath him, her ran at Rebecca but it was like the more he ran towards her, the further she went!
A man popped out of nowhere…
An old man with round glasses, a white beard, and a cigar…
John: Who are you?
The man: Freud. Sigmund Freud. I’m the founder of psychoanalysis.
John: How can I help you, sir?
Freud: You are to write 2000 words each day for a month!
John: I just want to consume weed!
Freud: I’d rather consume cocaine!
John: Do you know about love?
Freud: Yes. I know what it feels when a son loves his mother.
Freud started to dissolve into the background, taking with him any hope, of finding Rebecca.
Where is Rebecca? Who is Rebecca?…
A blond guy met John in the dark tunnel, he told him:
Wann ist Rebecca?
John: I saw you before!
The blond guy: Ich heiße Jonas.
John had no idea why he is able to understand German!
He asked Jonas to tell him where… or when, Rebecca is?
He told him: In deinem Kopf!
When John woke up it was 4 hours later, he told Tom:
Goddamn! I love synthetic weed!
And since this day, John and synthetic weed never separated.

Gratitude Journal

3 things I’m grateful for:

1. I’m grateful for the air.

2. I’m grateful for the sun.

3. I’m grateful for my father.

And maybe tomorrow is a better day

Hello, blog. This is an update.

In the past year, 8 deaths occurred in my family. That hasn’t been so great.

Some of them were terrible deaths.

It’s mid August 2022. Time has gone by pretty quickly.

I’m going to start my last year of my third college program. The translation program. I want to learn to have grit. My social anxiety causes me hesitation. It’s hard for me to make decisions. I travelled with my family to North Coast. We spent two weeks. It was great. Swimming in the sea and stuff. But right before it a dear family member newly married died in a car accident 😢 with her little baby and husband. And right after it another family member died in the hospital 🏥 💔 😔 it has been a terrible year.

I still don’t have a male best friend, I’ve got some friends but none of them is close enough. One of them really likes me but I don’t trust him. I made some younger generation friends, 10 years younger than me, at my third college. I got a 3.5 GPA in my third year. It went well, and it was damn hard. My hardest difficulty isn’t in the material itself, but my loneliness and lack of friendships and depressed mode. I suffer from extreme chronic boredom and I don’t have active friends to do activities with.

My mother is okay, she’s seeing her doctors regularly, trying to deal with her illness. But she’s okay. My father drove us hundreds of kms across the country to keep us entertained and happy, that was really cool of him.

I’m not seeing Dr. A… my Psychiatrist, and that makes me sad; because I miss her. I got an operation that I’ve been postponing for 7 years now. And I want to have new ECT sessions. I’m taking my new medication but still I’m not committed.

Since A…. my best friend passed away it has been rough for me. I haven’t had many best friends since. The older you get, it’s harder to have fun.

I’m still suffering spiritually; as I’m not able to enjoy spiritual feelings that much. Meaning of life is missing. My brother is good, I was lucky to be able to spend quality time with him this vacation, we’ve spent so much time together at the beach ⛱ at North Coast ❤ 💙 😊

I’m so grateful for my father for offering us these trips to Cairo, North Coast, & Matrouh. I even captured so many photos. My sleep is still not regulated and I can’t say that the Bipolar II is under control. Some days are better then the others. The sea was so fine, the wind that blew, the cool nights, and the moon 🌙 🌚 all of this time was good.

My father is back from his work in the Gulf for good, right now taking care of family matters. All and all I must be grateful.

I’m 30, and almost 31 years into this life and haven’t died yet. That’s so cool.

And maybe tomorrow is a better day.

Hello

Hello, my dear blog. Hello, everybody. If, there’s anybody.

Hello

I’m bored, so I decided to write a blog post.

Blog

I’ve always loved the piano, it’s strange how we don’t pursue our hobbies! I’ve been in love with it since I grew up listening to Dad’s Beethoven CDs when I was a baby in England. I was in Colchester, and my dad used to play Beethoven, Bach, & The Beatles on CD. Also, sometimes, Islamic songs. I have a musical gift. I know it, but never pursued it. My mother is artistic, she loves playing the piano and the accordion. She was in the school choir when she was little. She has a great voice. She was born in Asyut in Egypt. I have inherited her musical tendencies. But because of being painfully shy, I hesitated to play in the music class back when I was in Sultanate of Oman. I’m reading a book on Beethoven’s life, it’s amazing.

Piano

I still have my retroactive jealousy, I don’t know when it will stop. I ‘ve been consistently taking my medication for Bipolar Depression lately. The past 2 months have been positive, and I’m about to finish my third year in the English Translation Program. When Dr. “E” diagnosed me for Bipolar 2, I was shocked, I was trying tom treat it all these years as if it were depression, and it turned out to be bipolar 2. I’m considering not having children, so as my children don’t inherit the disease. Thank God I don’t have any other diseases.

Bipolar II Disorder

I enjoy listening tom Adnan Ibrahim, and sometimes, Elliot Hulse. I love when he says: Become the strongest version of yourself.

Elliot Hulse

I think my blogging is good. But no one reads it. I don’t know why. My Bipolar makes me easily bored. It’s one of the hardest mental disorders. Lately, David the Caveman died, he was an Atheist Syrian living in Sweden. I don’t know what exactly happened, was it suicide?

David Caveman

He was of Muslim origins, just like me.

I have listening to an audiobook on Storytel by Bassem Youssif about the 2011 January Egyptian Revolution.

Bassem Youssef

This is one of my favorite blogs, but I wish it has more interaction. Can somebody give me a hint?

Maybe I don’t speak about one topic. Should I speak about sex?!

Here, in Egypt, sex is forbidden, but people have it, especially younger generations, but in secret. In Islamic Sharia Law it is forbidden to fornicate outside of marriage. But after the Revolutions in 2011, things started changing gradually.

The Revolution began with a Leftist sentiment, and Liberals were the most dominant, but after the Muslim Brotherhood started joining in, it took a different route.

Hassan Al-Banna

The Muslim Brotherhood was established in 1928 I think. By Hassan Al-Banna who was an Egyptian Arabic teacher. His brother, Jamal Al-Banna, was a Liberal Islamist, who tried to modernize Islamic thought. But no one listened to him.

Jamal Al-Banna

I wish somebody would read my blog.

Here’s today’s music for you.

Linkin Park – Nobody’s Listening

See you guys later. Please comment and share and subscribe to my blog.

I’m tired

I remember having low self confidence and self esteem since my childhood began. I don’t really remember a specific reason for that. Maybe someone criticised me, or maybe I was sensitive. I felt high levels of insecurity and anxiety. It could be my biological makeup. Who knows? It could be a million reasons. Being introverted is no problem, but high levels of anxiety are debilitating. I can’t relax. Dealing with social anxiety is frustrating. They say it’s treatable, but where do I start?! With the social anxiety or with my other issues? I don’t know. I feel really tired.

Goal oriented?

Hi. Sometimes I lose my ability to write ✍

It’s like I’ve written so much, I don’t know what else to say.

I’m awake at 4:18 am, listening to a pop mix on Spotify. Writing helps you see your life from the outside.

I have a problem of emptiness; when I wake up, there’s nothing to do. It’s like I’m missing out on something, I just don’t know what it is. I feel that depression caused me to be inactive for a long time ⌛ now I forgot what my hobbies were.

CBT is supposed to be a method for correcting your thought processes. It can be effective, if you follow it religiously.

I genuinely don’t like myself, I get bored of me. I’m 30 years old now. Sometimes I feel really late, but that’s another story.

I had a friend who thought that having a good career was the solution for social anxiety. But it takes so long to have a career.

If you have obsessive thinking, and problem with concentration, you are hindered from becoming your optimum self. I remember my beautiful days in Emirates, in Dubai. It was beautiful. Now they’re gone, but also good days have come. I’m just sitting in my bedroom and writing ✍

After years and years of my mind wandering, my mind isn’t that clear anymore. It started deteriorating at the age of 11. I’m having a fight on more than one front. Sometimes I try to perform mindfulness meditation 🧘‍♂️ but I end up questioning metaphysical notions.

On the positive side I started going to the gym regularly 💪🏻 which is something I wanted to do for a very long time ⌛

But still, my time isn’t being managed well, and I’m not goal oriented. My mind jumps all over the place. I can study more effectively. I can be more organised. I can do more in general. Or is this just my perfectionist self beating me up? Perfectionism is highly related to anxiety. That’s the problem with emotional and mental problems, they are all connected. In some way. I wrote about my maladaptive perfectionism here before, and it’s connected to procrastination and low self esteem. It’s not that easy to change your mind patterns. It needs good strategy. Many things to be worked on.

But now I’m gonna work on becoming goal oriented and organised.

Just wait

Hello my dear, dear blog.

I love you! I love you so much, I love how you look! I want to write inside of you everything about me, about my life, about my years in Colchester, about my years in Muscat, about my visits to London, to Dubai. It was a full life.

When I was young, back in 1992, my went to Colchester to get his PhD in Electric Engineering. I come from a Muslim Sunni family, from southern Egypt.

I would never have imagined how my life would unfold! Many secrets, some can be told, some can not!

Do people who love each other have to leave each other?

Can I write? Am I worthy of love?

I chill to Lupe Fiasco’s music. I love him, since I saw his video “Madonna” (and all the Mothers in the hood).

Some people don’t get Rap music. It’s not about cuss words and prostitution and drugs and shooting. It’s like a Sociological research. It’s about black lives in the Ghettos.

Who would imagined that a guy from Southern Egypt, would get to know about African American life in the hoods? It’s because of Rap. They were able to get their message through.

Who couldn’t love 2Pac? Dr. Dre? Lupe Fiasco? Joyner Lucas? 50 Cent? Eminem? Snoop Dogg? Nas? Jay Z? We live in a multicultural world. We get to know everything about everything! And that’s cool. But also mind wrecking!

I’m reading a book about social skills. I’m totally into the self-help genre. So many books to download, so many books to read. I’m a fanatic for books, there is no better source for information.

My entire family are Engineers and Doctors. I’d never have imagined myself to become a Sociologist! I studied it for 4 years. After I left Engineering in my second years.

It was the Arab Spring. It was the 25th of January Revolution. That was aborted. Just like a child of a single mother. Sisi is killing us. I can get imprisoned just for saying that!

I’m 30 years old, from a middle class family, well educated, most of us live abroad, in Canada, the US, Great Britain, and the Gulf.

I have always been in love with music, my mother is talented piano player, and accordion player, she was in the choir of the school. She was a bright, smart, beautiful young woman. I’m proud to be her son.

Fighting Bipolar Disorder isn’t easy, I’ve been diagnosed with it when I was 27. But I’ve had it since I was 11. When I was a teenager I thought it was masturbation that made me soo gloomy. I thought it was a punishment from God. I was a good kid, I’ve always loved God and prayed. In Islam you pray 5 times a day. You can’t commit adultery or look at women. I was raised in a perfectionist conservative Muslim family.

The Muslim Brotherhood had a great influence on my family’s morality and spirituality. I read to Abdel Wahab Al-Messiry when I was young. When I was 19 I joined the Salafi movement. But after the Revolution, everything changed. Sex became the topic of everyone. Sex and Atheism. Many Socialist and Leftist kids where in the universities making riots. Marx’s children. You cannot not be attracted to Marx’s revolutionary thoughts, hardcore revolutionary angry stuff. Justice and social equality, who can’t relate to this.

Meanwhile I was changing my thoughts too. Experimenting with weed and alcohol. Getting into relationships with girls. I created a Facebook page and wrote, and wrote and continued writing.

Until I dumped (M.A) in February, 2017. Then I returned to my religion, and became myself again.

It was a long journey, I would never have imagined my life would be so full, as a socially anxious kid and a kid with Avoidant Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder I thought my life would be doomed by my mental illness.

But I kept fighting, Just like Eminem. I joined college to get my second degree as a translator, I wanna do something with my life. I will not submit to my mental illness. I will travel the world, learn the drums, do everything I wished for.

Just wait!

German

Hello 👋

Today, I received the grades for my second year’s final exams. This is my third and most successful university experience. And although I got an F for my German class, it didn’t feel like a catastrophe. That means that I’m growing more of those resilience muscles 💪🏻

You can know more about resilience from my best friend’s video about Positive Psychology:

In high-school I found German to be difficult. I loved English as a foreign language, and enjoyed Arabic, Maths, Physics, but German and Chemistry ⚗ were not my thing. I got 25/25 in English, 28.5/30 in Arabic, 49.5/50 in Mathematics in the first year, but I got 35/50 in Chemistry and 37.5/50 in German and that made my grade drop to 85.5%.

So German was a problem to me back then, and now it needs to be fixed.

I’ll start studying it this summer. I’ll take the summer course.

No harm no foul, if I pass it I return to the third year fresh and ready for a new challenge.

It’s a good day to be alive.

~ M

Awake at midnight

Couldn’t sleep 😴

I woke up again after 2 hours. My biological clock is still not adjusted. I’ve only taken the holiday 2 days ago. These past months I’ve been hectic mood-wise, ups and downs. My best friend told me maybe it’s your final battle against the illness. Been reading 📚 “The Fear Cure” for a couple of days now. It’s very interesting. I have a big reading list on my mind. I’m becoming spiritual 🙏🏻 This year I’ve been hanging out a lot, I returned to knowing the streets and coffee ☕ shops of my hometown ♥ me and my best friend have discovered many new places.

The lights in my living room went out a couple of days ago, so when I wanted to read, and found the room to be entirely dark, I headed to the balcony, to be shocked to find my turtle 🐢 to be dead and bleeding! It was a horrific scene to me, and I couldn’t approach the balcony doors for two days.

I have sinusitis, and I have a small headache 🙃 couldn’t sleep because I think I need food. But today was very productive, I finished many tasks. We are only two days into the holidays and many things have happened.

I hung out with my friends, visited my grandma 👵💕 withdrawn some money, finished a freelance translation and sent it to my teammate for timing of the video 📹 fixed my vape, spent time with my best friend ❤ bought some bread 🍞 and gave out clothes for the poor.

Previously I’d decluttered my closet off old clothes that didn’t fit me anymore. So I’m sending the bags 🎒 to charity.

Bipolar depression is an ongoing commitment to live everyday as best as you can. My psychological growth is my highest priority and my top value on my life compass 🧭

I’m learning more, reading more, understanding more about the human psyche. I bought 400 pounds worth of books about psychology a couple of days ago, and they got delivered from the big city.

My life is going good, my 30th year in the world 🌎 is progressing in an interesting and dynamic way. I just hope I pass the German exam 🙏🏻😩

This is my 12th year of university life. It’s been a long ride. 2 years from now, I’ll hopefully be stepping into the job market slowly 🐌 and finding my way through a career, one step 🚶‍♂️at a time ⏲️

I’ll probably delay the step of marriage, probably until my forties. Because the freedom will ease the progression of my career, and hopefully I’ll enjoy the game 🎮 of building 👷‍♂️ myself.

Listening 🎶 to 50 Cent & The Game “Hate It Or Love It”. Chilling to my old teenage songs 🎵 Spotify is just amazing. But sometimes I don’t find old albums on it.

I want to return to learning the piano 🎹 or the drums 🥁 but that would need me to organise my time ⏲️ and commit. I started going to the gym. Life is going right ✅ for me. I just need to keep the flow going.

That’s it for today, see 👀 ya!

~ M

11 o’clock

Hello, Journaling Blog! What’s up?!

I’m fine, thank you!

It’s 10:49 pm, Wednesday, 30th of June, 2021.

I just finished reading 📚 some pages of my previous year’s journals. I tried to look at dates similar to now, but a year ago. I started at the 5th of May. I wanted to give up the vape; that’s a dream that hasn’t yet come true.

Also, the smoking 🚬 is still happening. I’m no longer with the girl from the bookstore, but I have a new female best friend.

I’m reading a book called ‘The Fear Cure”; it is making me widen my spiritual awareness deeply.

I don’t want to be distracted from my field of English <> Arabic translation. I want to learn it more and more. To become a pro, you need to keep repeating the same thing for years.

I thought about getting an MBA, or a degree in Political Science, but what good would it be?!

I’m gonna sleep 💤 in 4 minutes 😴 exactly 💯 !

I just wanted to enter a registry here, in my public journal.

My apartment in the big city needs to be furnished. Maybe if I’m not anxious anymore I get myself a car sometime; a used one.

I’ve hung out this year for more than the five past years all together.

My tortoise 🐢 has died 😢 it was a very sad experience.

Now I’ll be gone, it’s 11 o’clock already!