For ten years ROOM has been a weight-bearing bridge for hundreds of writers, mental health professionals, poets, artists, and community leaders from all over the world. Some are well known, but for many, it has been the first time they have been able to be heard.
If I was refusing the war, my patients were doing something no less striking. In the first week, nearly all of them spoke not of explosions, fear, or death but of boundaries in their relationships. Of partners who failed to understand them. Of things left unsaid, now expected to be intuitively known. The war remained almost entirely absent from the room. It appeared only in fragments—quick references, passing remarks—never staying long enough to be examined.
My patient and I, both presently in the US, are originally from neighboring villages in south Lebanon. She, Shia from a predominately Shia village; I, Orthodox Christian from a mixed village. I can see her village from the veranda of my three-hundred-year-old ancestral home. It’s a view that I know and love well.
My patient and I, both presently in the US, are originally from neighboring villages in south Lebanon. She, Shia from a predominately Shia village; I, Orthodox Christian from a mixed village. I can see her village from the veranda of my three-hundred-year-old ancestral home. It’s a view that I know and love well.
While I could not imagine coexisting within the intimate space of the psychotherapy session with a white patient, I could imagine numerous other things.
What I carried within me, the quiet measuring of worth, was part of something bigger, a system of internalized racism and lateral violence born from the dominance of whiteness. It is oppressive and heavy, a hierarchy that demands we look down even when we are being looked down upon. Mimicking the outside white world, I became judge and jury of worth, and I aimed that power at people of colour.
What I had experienced as confusion was, in fact, a system. What had felt like silence was enforcement. What had gone unnamed in my family had already happened, clearly and repeatedly, in public space.
It was a time of epic excitement as the conveyor belts of burgers bagged and selling, of bodies bagged and arriving, enthralled me.
When I was able, finally, to hold both emotions at once, I remember the instant sensation of gentle stillness, muscle fibers giving up their tension. There was space to choose, to respond. For the first time, I understood freedom.
Most people are good. I wish I’d had these words handy when a woman yelled at me the day before Christmas because I couldn’t let her return her puzzle without a receipt. I called my manager over to handle it, stepping aside and allowing my eyes to glaze over as he authorized the return. The customer thanked my manager, saccharine-sweet. I refused to look at her until she was gone.
Death anxiety. These words were on my lips as I emerged from the dream. Was it a lay interpretation? An existential explanation offered by my returning consciousness? A consolation, like wiping the brow of a child at night, whispering, “It was just a nightmare”? An attempt to convince myself that the dream signaled a common, if repressed, fear?
Mahsa Nourzadeh (Mahsa Nouri) is an Iranian poet who writes in both Persian and English. She has not only found poetry a means to share her feelings and heal her wounds but also considers translation an adventurous and helpful path. She translates her thoughts and feelings into poetry, her poems into another language, sometimes into another art form, and finally into the feelings of the audience, using translation as a way to communicate. With each step along this path, she aims to shed new light on the depths of her own and the audience’s feelings, beginning the healing of unspoken pain. You can read her other works in Spellbinder magazine and Encyclopedia Prismatica.
At the heart of EFL is a single, luminous idea: The overarching goal of the system is to help each student develop maturity—defined as “the ability to relate appropriately to realities other than one’s own.” And from that maturity flows something even more precious: true success, defined as the ability to face life’s challenges with joy, wisdom, and inner strength—creating a life that is both personally fulfilling and beneficial to others.
It was January 2023. Life in Afghanistan had become unbearably difficult for girls. For us, education was not just about books or classrooms. It was our only path to freedom, to dreams, to proving to our community that we too could build our country alongside our brothers. For me, school was more than a building; it was a sanctuary of hope. I dreamed of becoming a doctor, of healing the sick and giving families a reason to believe in tomorrow.
We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.
My parents, roaring inside me, showed me that when you are dismayed by something offensive, and unconscionable in the world, you pounce into action. You do not pause to sit and muse or cogitate. You know. You feel. You hurl yourself in.
There is a big difference between a bird that has always been inside a cage and a bird that has tasted freedom and then is forced back inside.
I had asked myself, if I choose silence, if I closed my mouth and quietly endured oppression, would the world even notice? The answer was no. That’s why I promised myself that now was the time to speak up—to accept the risks.
I know not what
A mother can say
To a daughter
Who was ripped from her
Before they’d barely begun
The long alliance usual to a mother and child