For a long time, I talked about my decision to go to therapy as the beginning of my personal transformation. But over time, I’ve come to realize—there is no single beginning. Change doesn’t wait for when you’re ready. And if you’re Syrian, the revolution became that moment for all of us, whether we chose it or not. Every Syrian has their version of the story. Their own entry point into a collective earthquake that changed everything. Some were in the streets. Some fled. Some stayed silent. Some shouted until they lost their voices. But no one walked away untouched.
I was in Syria when things started unraveling. Tensions were building—loud, sharp, unpredictable. One day, one of my bosses called to say there was a tank parked in the neighborhood and told me not to come to the studio. Another boss, who was also a teacher I respected, was consumed with rage over the regime’s crimes. I tried to calm him down. Told him not to take risks. That he had a family to think about. He looked at me, stunned. Your father’s been in prison since 1996, he said. You, of all people, should understand injustice. That moment landed like a crack across my chest. I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. But I never forgot it.
Soon after, I left Syria and found myself in the Emirates, working with others in the digital back-end of the revolution. I was editing videos—raw footage of protests, massacres, people being gunned down in the streets. Mothers screaming. Children with vacant eyes. Scenes that should never be seen, but had to be. And this, too, is a common Syrian story. We didn’t all experience the violence directly—but most of us watched it. Over and over. On our phones, on our laptops, in offices, in bedrooms. The volume was always too loud. The quality always too real. The images burned themselves into us.
I moved again, to Jordan. I was barely 17. I worked with the first online radio station of its kind—hosting programs, interviewing people, streaming resistance through music and words. But even then, the weight was too much. One day I told my manager, I don’t want to be treated as Syrian anymore. I don’t want to feel all of this. I just want to do my job and go home. What I meant was: I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was overwhelmed. Drowning. Work became my way of coping. My escape hatch. But even that had its limits.
Nothing prepares you for the psychological toll of seeing so much death—of knowing it’s your people, your cities, your childhood landscapes. Of hearing people suffocate from chemical attacks in the suburbs of Damascus, and not being able to do a thing. That sound—of children gasping for breath—never leaves you. It echoes forever. And the guilt… it’s relentless. Because at least you’re not the one dying. At least you’re not under the bombs. At least you have a passport, a room, a paycheck, a moment of quiet. And that “at least” becomes a heavy chain around your neck. A long, internal guilt trip that you never really get off of.
This is the Syrian condition that few can name: being brutalized by what we saw, not just by what we lived. The pain is layered. It’s complicated. And it’s collective. We carry it with us. In our silences. In the way we scroll past headlines. In the way we tense up at certain images, even when we pretend not to notice. And then we arrive in Europe. We start organizing, building community, fighting for justice in a different language, under different rules. We talk about inclusion, gender equity, voting rights, anti-racism work. And these things are important—vitally so. They matter to the people living here. They matter to us, too.
But in the background, always, there’s a scale. A moral urgency scale that quietly judges every conversation. And it whispers: Yes, this is important—but did you see your city flattened? Did you watch children buried in rubble? Did you edit the video where someone bleeds out in front of their mother? I remember when I first started working with an organization fighting racism in Germany. My first thought was, Yeah, democracy is nice. Anti-racism is necessary. But also—there are kids being brutally killed right now, and no one seems to care. It almost felt absurd. Like fighting for better policies in a country that’s already functioning, while your homeland is bleeding out in silence.
And yet, I stayed. I worked. I fought. But for years, I carried that quiet conflict inside me. The question that still lingers: How do you fight for rights here, when the horror back home has no language, no policy, no resolution? Eventually, something else happened, too: I lost hope. I internalized the idea that the killing and the brutality in Syria—and not just Syria, but that entire region—would never stop. That there was no saving it. No way back. So I stopped looking. I turned away. I numbed myself.
I focused instead on what was happening here, in Germany. I poured myself into building platforms that center marginalized voices. I created media spaces that reflect people who are usually kept out of the frame. I used my skills, my experience, my grief, to try and build something that feels like justice—even if it’s elsewhere. And when news from Syria came—when another massacre, another tragedy, another crisis surfaced—I barely reacted. I’d see the headlines, the videos, the images, and feel… nothing. Just numbness. Not because I didn’t care. But because it had become normal. That level of pain had become normal. And that’s the most terrifying part. Because once that becomes normal, how do you ever find your way back to feeling again?
Ironically, or maybe tragically, it was here in Germany that I finally started therapy. I started learning how to name emotions, to feel them fully, to process things I had locked away for years. It was a life-changing period—something I’m proud of, something I’m endlessly grateful for. It gave me a language I never had. But it also brought another layer of conflict. Because before therapy, numbing my emotions was survival. It was daily. It was necessary. But after therapy—after learning to feel—I couldn’t go back to watching those brutal videos anymore. I couldn’t expose myself to that horror again. Not without collapsing.
And that’s where the contradiction lives: Yes, you should feel all your feelings—but what do you do when feeling means opening yourself up to an endless reality of blood and loss and horror that never stopped? The truth is: I come from that place. From that reality. From that region of the world where what’s brutal is not the exception—it’s the atmosphere. And no matter how much I build here, no matter how solid I try to make my identity in this new language, this new country, with these new values—I can’t erase that I come from there.
I can’t unsee what I saw. I can’t un-feel what I tried not to feel. And I can’t pretend the moral compass I’ve built here exists in the same dimension as the one shaped by war. And recently—or maybe not so recently, but a while ago—while talking about PTSD, something clicked for me. One of the things I realized is that once something truly horrible happens to you, healing isn’t about erasing it. It’s not about “getting over” it. You don’t heal from it—you learn how to live with it. You carry it differently. You manage the weight so it doesn’t crush you completely.
And I think that’s exactly what’s happened to us Syrians. What happened to all of us. We’re living with a kind of collective PTSD. A communal trauma shaped not just by what we lived through, but by what we were forced to witness. Watching those videos, hearing those cries, seeing the destruction—it rewired something inside of us. It taught us how to survive. But it also took something from us. And now, consciously or subconsciously, we are all just learning how to live with it. Day by day. Breath by breath. We carry it with us. Sometimes loud. Sometimes buried. But always there.