on the week of my birth, I gift you a list of my unmilled thoughts

as a treat

• In a voice note to Ola, I declare that I’m releasing the need to make sense this year. Later that week, we spend 7 hours on the phone making sense of things. Exactly. Never let them guess your next move.

• Attachment theory is not enough; we need a new one that explains the relational impact of growing up in a city that routinely tries to kill you and your loved ones but you still love it and long for it.

• [Lauryn Hill’s verse in Nobody]!

• Sometimes it feels like a lack of gratitude is a kind of commitment to misery. Loyalty to despair, even.

• In every rak’ah of every prayer, we say, “Allah listens to the one who is grateful to Him”. This makes sense. Why would you be given more when you are not grateful for what you have been given? How the birds sing for you? How the sunset paints the sky?

• As Sudanese girls, we are socialised in many more insidious ways than we realise into making our entire lives an audition for society’s approval (with the end goal of getting married). It’s all just so boring. Khalas.

• People keep asking about sustainable alternatives to searchbots but I don’t even think the alternative should be Google. Ask the people you love questions. When you have a question, pause and think: who might know about this? I do this all the time. Why would I ask Google how something works when I know my father can explain it better and with more passion? Why would I Google the meaning of a word when I can ask Asiya or Kunmi? Every question is an opportunity for connection.

• People who would deprive you of the best of them or hold back what you deserve unless you demand it from them are untrustworthy and lack integrity.

• Becoming a woman is recognising your mother in yourself in tiny ways every day. In your preference for chocolate with tree nuts, for the sharpness of ginger tea after dinner. The way curls frame your face. How you feel prettiest in gold and in necklaces that wrap tightly around your neck.

• Matteo exclaims in Portuguese when he takes his first bite of good food. My parents’ first response is in Arabic when the conversation they’re having with my German aunt in English features shocking news or a hilarious anecdote. I like that about us (humans). I like how when a feeling is intense, we return to the first words we learned for it.

• Been really into songs about people who simply cannot stop dancing ^{1, 2, 3}

• The best part of this whole self-love thing is that I now trust my impulses fully. She (me) would never want anything that hurts me. So if I want it, let’s have it!

  • Ingmar Bergman said, “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.” Exactly.

• The human lover is completely indistinguishable from the motherland in all of my recent poetry. Every poem about one holds within it a poem about the other.

• I recently gifted myself some distance from someone who was habitually inconsiderate and unreliable. As I return to an equilibrium state of peace, I’ve been noticing how being at ease allows you to become a source of it. When you are not regularly being disrespected or neglected, you’re not quick to assume disrespect or neglect from the world. You don’t take things personally. In serenity and safety, I am rarely irritable. Much more gracious. I operate from the well of consideration my beloveds have filled. I give freely because I trust that it will be replenished. I tell my colleague who is late to a meeting to take their time, I wanted to make a cup of tea anyway. They exhale. They’ve had a long day. I jokingly tell the trainer who runs a tiny women’s gym that it’s okay if the wobbly chair on the machine wasn’t fixed yet because it helps engage my core. We both laugh. She tells me she was worried that I would write a bad review. Of course I won’t. I can only imagine how much she’s got on her plate. It’s really okay. It’s okay if things don’t go as planned. It’s okay for there to be delays. I have room for your mistakes. You’re only human. And I don’t get upset with myself when I do something clumsy. I’m also only human. I am not in a rush. I am not occupied with any worrying thoughts. I’m in tune with my surroundings. Little girls with afro-puffs smile at me on the bus and I smile back. I tell them their hair looks beautiful. I notice the parakeets. I notice the cherry blossoms outside the window. I lock eyes with a lost tourist and they know that they can ask me for directions.

  • That is to say, someone or something that disturbs your peace is also robbing you of a thousand tiny moments of joy and connection.

  • Equally, someone or something that gives you comfort and security is also freeing you up to experience the world in its most vivid colours.

• Lifestyle content on social media is filling the gap left by tight-knit, judgmental religious communities. The people yearn to be told how to live, what to wear, what to eat and how to raise their children. But what if we each developed lifestyles unique to us based on our actual preferences and principles? What would happen then?

• My speciality when we were kids was that I could freestyle a bedtime story on the spot. Years after we both left home, my sister and I spent a night together in London. Half asleep, she asked me to tell her a story. Half asleep, I did. I think about that often.

• I still have all these Khartoum phone numbers memorised. Back home, they’re cutting up wires to sell the copper in their guts.

• It is astonishing how much of the world becomes possible when we learn to hold multiple truths at once. The narrative never required unidimensionality from you. You can hate it and still do it. You can love it and still leave. You can be miserable and still find joy in the warm sliver of sunlight that appears on the hardwood floor in the morning. No experience erases the other, no matter how contradictory. They all just stack up like this.