Resurrect the blog, that, I did.

Write more posts?… Now that’s where it did not go as planned.

Lebanon.

Five years ago, I left my home country, Lebanon, in search of more, better, further.

Five years later, I now call France my new home. But to be honest, I can’t stop myself from thinking that Lebanon is kind of still my home, too.

So many things have happened in the past few years, both on a personal and historical level. You can’t call yourself truly Lebanese if you haven’t been traumatized, in some way or another, by the events that took place on the 4th of August, 2020. This massive, programmed destruction of Beirut and its people shed light, yet again, on the incompetence and corruption ruling our beloved country. Lebanon is flawed, systemically, and has ruined the lives of all those who are still connected to it.

But despite it all, attached and connected we remain, true to our roots, our shared trauma history, and that… thing, undefinable yet special, that makes most people, both Lebanese citizens and foreign visitors, attached to this piece of land.

This love-hate relationship I have with Lebanon is the #1 reason I chose to emigrate in 2016… and that comes with its own set of worries.

Guilt.

In 2020, I dealt with guilt more than any other feeling in my entire life.

Guilt can eat you up and swallow you whole. Although you know you can’t do anything about it, you feel guilty for leaving, being away, not being able to hold hands or hug someone who desperately needs it. You even feel guilty for the moments you miss, for the “normal”, or even happy days you go through abroad while others struggle for some reason or another.

“Thank God you left, thank God both of you left”, is the one sentence I heard the most over the past year.

Thank God, indeed… but you, at the other end of the phone, are still there, struggling. My loved ones are still there, and helping from afar often falls short.

Plans.

2021 taught me that plans were meant to be changed.

I, who have always been eager to plan the earliest, was not exactly fond of the changes that the pandemic imposed upon me. I found myself writing out emails to cancel a wedding, vacations, meetings, plane tickets, reservations, catering, you name it (that’s probably where my writing energy went).

On the upside, it did not rain on the day of the civil ceremony, I got to discover a bit more of my new home, and I learned how to cook even more Lebanese food. Heck, we even built our own kitchen from scratch! How about that for some spontaneity…

VoIP.

This summer, I learned a lot about the Nobel prizes, quite a lot of people who’ve made incredible things (and then there is Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama*).

But, in my humble opinion, we are missing a collective peace prize (or equivalent) for the pioneers of internet technology in the past century. What I lost in shared time and unmade plans, I made up for in long, long VoIP calls (my husband is an angel for putting up with this). I would have gone crazy without this ease of contact that apps provided to talk to family and friends.

We could discuss for hours the downsides of human activity (or human beings in general), but this collective invention called the Internet is, again in my very humble opinion, humankind’s biggest achievement in history.

France.

These five years in France saw me check all the boxes. I’ve achieved everything I had on my list, and then some.

I love being able to work on data-driven projects with some of the biggest French companies; I love that in the span of four years, I was able to explore two very different fields that don’t even exist in Lebanon; I love that I’m able to work in two languages and speak three of them every day.

I also love the amount of culture I’m exposed to everyday by being in Europe, and Paris in particular. There are always new things for me to discover: world cuisines, choral works, contemporary and street art, different ways of life, easy access to cities and neighboring countries…

There are definitely quite a few downsides to living in a big city, but by coming here, by working my ass off, and thanks to the help of plenty, I am able to give myself choices. And this is priceless to me.

Now it’s time to make more dreams, to plan farther, beyond, bigger. What will the next five years bring to my life? Where will I be in five years’ time?

I just hope that the next post doesn’t take five years to write itself 😉

Toodles,

-J.

*: No, it is not my intention to start a political debate here 😅