When I think of my childhood, I see a house in Cairo, its walls thick with the echoes of my father’s voice. He was a man who believed authority was inherited like DNA—a legacy passed from grandfather to son, crushing anyone who dared defy it. My sister and I were born into this hierarchy, two girls navigating a labyrinth of expectations. Our father, a full professor in engineering, measured our worth by how closely we mirrored his own academic brilliance—and my body became the battlefield where his control wars were fought.
Let me take you back to 2005. I’m 13, standing in front of a mirror, my fingers trembling as I adjust the black hijab that now clings to my head. My father had decreed it was time to “purify” me, to mold me into a “virtuous Muslim girl.” But the hijab wasn’t just fabric; it was a cage. Every glance at my reflection screamed failure: too loud, too curious, too *human*. By 16, I’d ballooned to 130 kilos, my body a physical manifestation of the shame he weaponized against me. Depression clung to me like the heat of an Egyptian summer, and anxiety became my silent companion during those endless nights of studying.
Yet, academia was my escape hatch—or so I thought. Engineering school at Ain Shams University should’ve been my triumph. Instead, I became a ghost in my father’s shadow. Professors treated me like a curiosity, a “professor’s daughter” who’d inherited her father’s brain but not his authority. When I defended my PhD thesis in 2018, I didn’t feel relief. I felt hollow. The accolades meant nothing when my father still compared me to his younger self, still called me “defiant” for refusing to apologize for existing.
But here’s the twist: my ADHD, undiagnosed until adulthood, wasn’t a flaw—it was a rebellion. My “messiness,” my “chaos,” was resistance against a system that demanded conformity. Every failed diet, every late-night research binge, every time I questioned the ethics of urban design in a country where slums were erased from maps—it was all part of dismantling the very structures that tried to erase me.