Notes from Someone Who Lived on Both Sides of the World.

I. Two Lives, One Consciousness

I am writing from the position of someone who has lived two completely different lives. One life was lived under occupation, siege, and enforced isolation from the outside world the world most of you come from. The other began only recently, after leaving Gaza, when I was suddenly exposed to what calls itself “normal life.”

I am neurodivergent. A perfectionist. Obsessed with detail.

Cursed and blessed at the same time with an awareness that does not turn off.

That matters, because awareness changes how you see systems not just events, people, life, and the machinery underneath everything.

For twenty-five years, I lived inside an environment that was tightly controlled, controlled by violent.

Yet paradoxically, that environment trained me to notice patterns, intentions, and outcomes.

Nothing happened randomly. Every action predicted a reaction and survival demanded attention.

Only after leaving did I realize how similar that logic is to the one governing the so-called free world!

II. The Minority That Decides for the Majority

When I say “they,” I am not speaking metaphorically.

I mean the minority, the three percent who decide the fate of the ninety-seven percent.

The ones who have everything and for whom nothing is ever enough.

The ones who own the tools, the platforms, the narratives, and therefore the machine itself.

When you own the tools, you don’t just build machines.

You program behavior!

You shape desires!

You normalize harm!

And if this is done slowly enough, across generations, it begins to feel natural.

The ones who do notice are usually the same ones who are denied power: the colonized, the poor, people in so-called “third world” countries.

Their awareness is dismissed as cultural, emotional, or irrelevant.

Ironically, they often have higher awareness precisely because they live with the consequences directly. And for that reason, they are dismissed reduced to culture, religion, geography, or geopolitics.

Awareness without power is not an accident. It is part of the design.

III. Consuming More, Producing Less

Since leaving Gaza, I have seen more consumption than production, and more reaction than action.

That observation alone answered many questions I had lived with for years.

It explained why people abandon logic under pressure and why expectations collapse.

Why collective action never materializes when it is most needed.

It explained why a revolution was never on the table, even when danger was shared by everyone as the enemy is the same.

It explained why no one was able to stop an aired genocide death broadcast live, inflicted on anxious, social creatures who are supposedly connected to one another.

That's where i learned that connection, does not equal agency.

IV. The Rotten Tree

There is no difference between the branches of a tree if the tree itself is rotten from the root upward. Some branches may look different.

Some may appear healthier.

Some branches appear cleaner, Some look modern.

Some are rebranded as ethical or progressive

But it is the same tree.

And for humans, consuming anything from that tree is poisonous.

Consuming is not inherently bad, Extremism is!

Extreme consumerism was never a human nature, we lived to live.

It is a product of colonization and capitalism, It is learned behavior shaped by colonization and capitalism, A marketing gimmick escalated into a way of life!?

Then sold back to us as freedom.

It was not resisted so it expanded.

That expansion was not an accident. it is deliberate.

And when everything becomes a product, even resistance turns into performance.

V. A Gaza Example

In Gaza, I was never drawn to soda or fizzy drinks.

Not for the reasons you think of (boycott, scarcity)

Simply just because they were unhealthy.

I consumed them occasionally, but nothing close to what I later saw outside Gaza.

A balanced diet was not a personal preference for us Gazans, it was our way of living and loving ourselves and was more like a common sense thing.

Many people lived that way.

When I left Gaza, I adapted and blended in.

In six months, I consumed what's normal for everyone else which was more fizzy drinks than I had in twenty five years and that alone should tell you something.

That shift did not feel accidental, not one single bit.

Some products had no healthy alternatives and some felt subtly forced even normalized to the point of invisibility.

That is where my Gazan mindset saved me, i returned quickly to what had once been normal to me, but not before realizing how deeply consumption is embedded into daily life elsewhere.

(Force a Gazan to do something, and you guarantee resistance.)

VI. Isolation as a Form of Protection

My rejection of this plastic, tasteless reality wasn’t ideological.

It was physical and Mental.

My body and awareness rejected it.

I isolated myself when necessary, something I had done before in Gaza when social environments became mentally toxic.

Gaza was traumatized, yes, but trauma wasn’t the issue. The issue was when harm became normalized toward others, toward oneself.

I learned early to step away without making noise, learned to avoid situations and fractions.

It saved me energy and avoided me possible damage.

What shocked me was discovering the same patterns outside Gaza, across different countries, cultures, and languages.

that's where i realized oppression changes form!

VII. The Illusion of Freedom

For seven months of genocide, we screamed, we begged, we documented and nothing changed.

What disturbed me most was not just the violence itself, it was realizing that the rest of the world screamed with us while supposedly possessing more freedom, more rights, more power.

You cried.

You marched.

You posted. And still, nothing changed.

That is not solidarity. That is containment.

Mirroring our grief was not helpful as some think.

VIII. Social Media and Performance

I am not on Upscrolled, and I will not be.

I have my own reasons.

This is not a call for you to leave Instagram or any platform.

Diversity is exactly what those in power fear.

Unity across difference is the only real threat.

But social media, in its current form, is more negative than positive, it produces consumers faster than it produces change.

Content outpaces action.

Performance replaces disruption.

Marches became gestures.

Gestures became comfort.

Comfort replaced revolution.

Shutting down life for a few hours was never enough.

Real pressure requires everything to stop but in reality what happened instead was not different from liking, sharing, and commenting inside a digital illusion.

The most effective action people took was direct financial support and even that was actively sabotaged by scams, grifters, and organized diversion, manufactured chaos that felt familiar to us in Gaza.

Charity itself became a consumer product.

IX. Proximity to the Enemy

Our heroes and now everyone's heroes were always closer to the enemy than anyone else.

They learned their language and listened to their media more than they listened to theirs!

They studied them carefully, and that is the difference between consuming with intention and consuming because you were programmed to.

I personally would rather be close to my enemy and aware than distant and controlled because platforms don’t matter, intention does.

There is difference between intentional engagement and passive consumption.

Platforms are not the issue.

Awareness is.

X. Why I Remain

I am not an influencer.

I am still here because this is what I know how to do.

Because surviving what I survived and staying silent would be another kind of death.

Someone who survived what I survived should not disappear quietly.

And witnessing death and continuing to speak is itself resistance.

I was not supposed to be here.

I was supposed to heal.

Instead, I work.

I delay recovery.

I survive again.

I rebuild while wounded.

Because the world keeps consuming.

Because creation is rare.

Because performance is rewarded more than truth.

XI. A Final Thought

All of us are treating ourselves like finished adults when we are wounded children.

You would not raise a child on screens, poison, and constant consumption.

You would want them healthy, grounded, able to feel.

Feeling is life.

Numbness is death.

And this article is not meant to educate you.

It is meant to make you pause.

Think before you act.

Consume with intention or don’t consume at all.

If the tree is rotten, cut it.

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Thank you for reaching the end of my scrambled thoughts, A few people asked how they can help me and the new kitty i saved from the streets.

so I’m sharing this here: if you’d like to contribute since it's hard for me to fully cover his food, vet visits and basic care to him and on my own such as my medication or therapy journey I would be incredibly grateful for any financial support.

There is absolutely no pressure, sharing or kind messages mean just as much.

Anything received will go directly to our needs, and I’ll keep you updated.

Thank you for the love you’ve already shown <3

Buy Gazablanka a coffee

Does a flower die when it falls?

United in Grief.

If the tree is rotten, cut it.