It has always been hard for me to explain “who I am”… especially now that I’m experiencing both an identity crisis, and a midlife one.
I don’t really know who I am… During the past years, whenever I had to write a Bio for myself on social media, I went on without giving it real thought, and wrote, “I am a human. And I’d like to stay one,” in English…
However, after a few years of research on Green Criminology, I found out that there really isn’t that much to be proud of in that sentence… Going down the history lane, humans have done way worse than poor animals couldn’t even think about… So I forgo this cliché sentence of mine, which is probably up there on my Instagram page or Telegram bio.
After my inner canary became a rolling stone, jumping on different branches, it finally landed on the branch of law and continued forward until I got my Doctorate of Criminal Law and Criminology degree… it kept on going and at the end of the day, found itself behind a rhino mask under a thick skin… That’s how it ended up going through a crisis…
The crisis had it going back into its shell and keeping its distance from the rest of the world… It then looked upon its past fourteen thousand days on Earth, during these 6-7 months of personal distancing which became a social one after Covid-19. She wanted to know, what it was that she was really interested in.
Then she discovered something very important and that was the fact that she had a low interpersonal intelligence…! This person seemed as if she were interested in everything, experienced whatever she could, and being good at some of them, she thought she was going to end up doing that as a job… But the thing is that a nice job and a nice mood are two very different aspects…
I had a nice job but was not in a nice mood… I was… – hmmm I don’t like the word “successful” but till the day I find a better word instead of it – successful at doing some things, but never happy because of them… And the bigger problem was that I didn’t know what it took to make me happy… If studying law, becoming a faculty member of the law group, turning into the head of the department of the law faculty, and writing essays on the law (which is one of the most disgusting things in the world, especially the so called blind peering part) couldn’t make me feel better, what should I do?
I mean because of the aforementioned low interpersonal intelligence, I still have no idea who am I and what am I supposed to be… So I found a shared word between all of these branches I walked upon; from studying science and math and foreign languages and law and then a bit of philosophy and political science and economics just for the sake of myself to different art forms, such as playing 3tar and calligraphy and singing and playing the piano and drawing and photography… The word that made me feel good no matter which one of these I was working on, as long as it existed, was “learning”!
Unfortunately for a fast-motion person like me, learning from a teacher was never enjoyable… Classes were always exhausting for the curious and playful me… So I only like learning from the books… That’s why my small library is filled with books on different topics…
I remember when I was younger than three years old and among all of the things in our house, I became infatuated with books. I can perfectly recall that Amid Dictionary was my most favorite among all the books; especially those pages that contained pictures of different types of knots or stages of the growing embryo in the mother’s womb. The pictures of Rosa Montazami’s cooking book were more interesting than the food on the table or in our fridge. Looking at pictures at the beginning and ending of The Story of Civilization books by Will Durant – even though I didn’t get what they were about – entertained me more than the other kids’ favorite toys; especially dolls! I both dislike the word “doll” (I might state the reason here someday) and the dolls themselves, which I think are very creepy… Those people who’ve read Devil-Doll books or watched the Annabelle movie can understand where I come from… However, I suffered from pediophobia since I was young (which isn’t the same as pedophilia!)…!
Oh, I’m being a rolling stone again… I used to teach my poor students in the university like this, too…! And of course, as soon as I’d realized what I have done in the middle of teaching, I’d be like, “I’m going to gather our thoughts till here. The question was, “who am I?” And so far we’ve answered that I don’t know who I am, during social distancing I went back in time, and found a lost child in the middle of my inner zoo, who loves learning from books and doesn’t like classes…
Nevertheless, he had become a teacher of those boring classes himself and is already turning into one of those strict professors that the students like to gossip about…”
So now, to shed her skin, she’s woven a cocoon around herself and she doesn’t know if an angel would come out of it, once hatched, or a monster… a worm, a butterfly, or maybe the same old zoo with a lost baby standing in the middle of it? she’s become accustomed to writing for a while now, and most importantly, she’s feeling good…
In the middle of this nice mood, she got to write short stories and flash fictions . Now, she’s opened this site, to see how she evolves in the future…
