Illustration by Tala Nassar/The Gazelle

When I was little, my mom used to gently tuck me into bed and stroke my hair off my cheek to see my blotchy face illuminated by the delicate rays of light emanating from the hall lamp. She would then help me drift off into a dreamless slumber by telling me a story.

The only story that I remember in vivid detail was one about a family of ducks. They were united by their physical appearance, with the exception of one baby duck, whose feathers were the color of coal. The duckling was alienated from the rest due to its uniqueness. The story was called The Ugly Black Duckling.

Even at such a young age, I was enraged by this. Rather than having the calming effect that my mother longed for, it made my blood boil. She wanted me to sleep and not wail or thrash around, like every other child at that age, but I couldn’t. The stories angered me because of their sheer unfairness. As if it wasn’t enough that the duckling was dissimilar, it was considered ugly too.

I always related to that ugly baby.

I felt out of place, odd, a black spirit in the midst of a white fog. Forever floating, forever lost in this sensation that I was destined for another place, another time and another life. For one thing, I was slightly blonde with marble-white skin; I almost looked like a ghost among my brunette, dark-skinned clan of friends with their exotic looks and rich colors. Me? I was bland, like an empty sheet of paper.

But the rift between me and the members of my society ran deeper than that. I wanted to be artistic, creative, delve into this imaginative world of fictional creation, whereas Egyptian society was breeding doctors or engineers, like my dad and my uncle. Even my family had caught that doctor/engineer disease, but I was free of the germs, no matter how many times my family and teachers tried to pass it on to me.

As I grew older, my desire to acclimatize to this environment intensified. It overshadowed my need for a change of scenery and my deep yearning to scour the world for the place where I belonged. I felt like a flower plucked from the ground, looking for its roots.

I wanted — I needed — a niche different from the one that I was born into. But I let this need slip away when I decided to try to fit in. This was prompted by my transfer to a different school. It ignited the fire that burns inside every pubescent child: the desire to blend in, to fit in and to make friends that understand you. But how would they understand me if I was so different?

With this realization, a communal way of life became my reality. It shaped who I was for years. A grain of sand in a wide desert, a bird in a massive flock. But deep inside, this worm kept wriggling, trying to fight its way through the soil of teenage years and society’s tendency to wipe away all traces of uniqueness. Who I truly was translated to what many would call different.

My attempts worked for a while, until all the recognizable attributes that made me unique slowly started to fade and were replaced by a dark emotion that affected me unlike anything else: depression. This depression followed the realization that no matter what I did or how I looked, I would never fit into this society. I felt alienated in this community of people who were all cut from the very same cloth, threaded in the same indistinguishable way, to match every other piece in the set. They failed to understand what art truly was. Art is the ability to create something so distinct that it grabs attention. How could I possibly acquire and retain that kind of attention while constantly being lost in the herd of identical twins?

When I watered down all these emotions, I realized that at the core of it was an epiphany, or rather, a quarter-life crisis: I was not Egyptian. And I would never become one. This sparked my will to study abroad. In high school I bloomed as the class nerd; it was one way of standing out. I got into a university where people hail from at least 100 countries, most of which I had no knowledge about. It was an eye-opener. I had finally located my hut, my place of rest, myself. I was different among people who were all different. How much more special could it get? I’d figured out who I was. l had no emotional ties to my country, simply bloodlines that ran through centuries.

During winter break, a nagging feeling kept me from fully enjoying my time with the people who had known me — or who I had pretended to be — for the last two decades.

There I was again, in a so-called foreign country, with so-called foreign people, while I felt foreign myself. How to escape? How to run? I found myself suppressing my newfound identity as I succumbed to the pressure of reverting back to my borrowed personality.

They don’t know who I am. And at this rate, they might never know it. I want to make myself believe that my family does not really know who I am and that I can be indifferent, but it feels like a dagger has plunged through my heart. The heart that holds the truth, the one that keeps telling me that I’ve had my share of the darkness and that it’s time for me to shine back home as much as I strive to elsewhere.

The same heart that keeps prompting me to try by saying that I can do it, that I can show them who I am.

Alas, coming from a professional fabricator, I know that this is a lie.