April 2012. Cairo’s Tahrir Square is a storm of chants, tear gas, and hope. I’m 22, clutching my friend’s hand as we dodge batons swung by the Military Regime thugs, as well as religious fundamentalist thugs. This isn’t just a political moment—it’s my first taste of freedom. For years, I’d been suffocating under my father’s abuse, my weight, and my silenced queerness. But here, in the chaos, I learned to breathe.
The Arab Spring wasn’t just about overthrowing a dictator. It was about reclaiming our humanity. My master’s research on “revolutionary spaces” became a lifeline. I talked to street vendors, students, and mothers who’d lost children to police brutality. Their stories mirrored mine: systems built to crush dissent, bodies policed by both state and family. By 2014, I’d shed my hijab, come out as queer, and faced my father’s first attempt to kill me.
But activism came with a price. When I led a pro-bono urban design project in a slum, the firm’s director (a Military Regime loyalist) sabotaged my work. “You dared dress like you own your body?” was always the implicit charge against me. Later, a university dean would collaborate with my father to trap me back under his roof, spreading rumors of “immorality” that nearly got me murdered, eventually pushing me to flee the country, leaving my whole life behind.
Yet, the square taught me this: trauma isn’t a straight line. My PTSD, diagnosed after fleeing home in 2014, isn’t a weakness—it’s a map of survival. Every panic attack, every flashback, every dissociation was a strategy to endure a world that saw me as disposable: a fat, queer, Atheist woman in a patriarchal autocracy.