One of the greatest pains of my life is that of the split. T

Chapter 1

One of the greatest pains of my life is that of the split.

This condition is not unique to me. It is rooted in my Arabness, and is a thread of suffering shared by millions of others; yet each of us carries it as though it were ours alone.

In cultures governed by 'ayb, so much of our inner lives remain unspeakable. The trouble is: what is never spoken cannot be recognised in one another, and so we mistake the split for a private defect rather than a collective condition. Because everyone is obligated to perform, it becomes impossible to know which performances are willing and which are acts of survival. We assume we are the ones who have failed to belong because everyone around us appears to do so with ease. And so the split works quietly beneath the surface of our lives, often long before we have the language to explain what hurts us. The split is the coexistence of two selves: one performed for society, the other preserved from it.

How does culture produce a divided self?

The split is not a process that is taught, but learned through years of observation: watching which lives are celebrated, which are punished, and which disappear into silence. Gradually, two selves emerge or one learns to divide the self in two. The split does not emerge by accident. It is produced.

No one teaches you to divide yourself in two. There is no lesson, no conversation, no singular moment of awakening. Instead, it is absorbed gradually, through years of observation and correction. You learn which lives are admired and which are ridiculed, which desires are permissible and which must remain hidden, which futures are celebrated and which invite scrutiny. Long before you can articulate these rules, you have already begun to obey them.

The force that sustains this division is surveillance. Not surveillance in its institutional sense, but something quieter and, in many ways, more powerful: the constant awareness that you are being seen. Family, neighbours, relatives, acquaintances, the wider community-and, eventually, even yourself-become custodians of acceptable behaviour. Whether or not anyone is actually watching becomes almost irrelevant. The possibility that they might be is enough.

Within many Arab and SWANA communities, this surveillance is often reinforced by 'ayb: the social logic through which shame regulates behaviour. It determines not simply what we do, but what can be said, desired, confessed, or imagined. Every visible aspect of the self becomes open to judgement: the clothes we wear, the careers we pursue, the people we love, the beliefs we hold, the ambitions we admit to, even the tone with which we speak. Respectability becomes a performance, rehearsed so often that it begins to feel indistinguishable from the self.

The consequences of stepping outside these expectations are unevenly distributed. Women, in particular, often bear the greatest burden, their perceived transgressions carrying consequences that far exceed those imposed on men. Reputation is treated as both fragile and inherited; a single act, or even the suggestion of one, can echo far beyond the individual. Yet this system disciplines everyone. Each of us learns, in different ways, that belonging is conditional.

And so the split becomes a strategy of survival.

There is the public self. It is polished, disciplined, and endlessly attentive to reputation. It speaks the acceptable language, performs the acceptable values, and presents the version of ourselves most likely to move through the world without punishment. It is not necessarily false. It is simply the self shaped by surveillance. Alongside it survives the hidden self. It contains the desires, convictions, identities and ways of living that cannot safely exist in public because they exceed what society permits. This self is not evidence of deception but of adaptation. It survives beneath performance, emerging only in privacy or in the company of those who have earned our trust.

Many people are denied both. They spend entire lifetimes performing one self while quietly protecting another. To possess the privacy-or the people-that allow the hidden self to breathe is a rare privilege. To exist in one's entirety, then, becomes a privilege too.

We perform one self to secure safety, acceptance, and peace, while another waits beneath the surface, protected from the consequences of being fully seen. The tragedy is not simply that we perform, but that, after long enough, we forget where the performance ends and we begin.