My Story

I was not supposed to become this person.

Not in the way people imagine—through ambition, or design, or some carefully constructed plan.

It happened more quietly than that. And more disruptively.

I left home thinking I understood the world.

Or at least my place within it.

What I learned—moving through Turkey, through Iraq, through spaces that did not recognize me as familiar—was that identity is not something you carry unchanged. It is something that is read, interpreted, sometimes misunderstood before you have spoken a single word.

There are moments that divide a life.

I Standing on a street where conversation stopped when I appeared.

Being asked for photographs not because of who I was, but because of what I represented.

Lying on marble in a hammam, stripped of everything I thought I needed to feel whole—only to realize I already was.

These were not dramatic moments.

They were quiet.

But they rearranged me.

I began to understand power differently.

Not as title or position, but as movement—who is allowed ease, who is required to explain, who is seen as human without qualification.

And I understood something else, too:

That most people move through the world without ever questioning the lens through which they see it.

I could not return to that.

What I write, what I speak about, what I build now—all of it comes from that shift.

I am interested in the spaces in between:

• between visibility and invisibility

• between belonging and otherness

• between perception and truth

Not as abstract ideas, but as lived realities.

This work is not about travel, in the way people usually mean it.

It is about what happens when you are placed in environments that require you to see differently—or to see yourself differently.

The podcast, the memoir, the experiences I curate—they are all expressions of the same question:

What does it mean to move through the world with awareness?

And what changes when you do?

I am not interested in offering answers that make people comfortable.

I am interested in clarity.

Because once you see something clearly—

you cannot return to not seeing it.