Folded Away

, Janis Al-Himiyari

I was born in a country I do not name here, and raised in another. By the time I understood who I was, I already knew it was something I could not say out loud. Not at the dinner table, not at school, not in the language my family prayed in. I want to start with the thing that matters most, which is the fact that I am still here. There was a year when that was not certain. I was taken back to the country of my birth under a story that was not true. A short trip and small sum of money. A reason ordinary enough that I believed it, or wanted to. When I arrived, the door closed behind me in a way I felt before I understood. No phone, no passport, no way out that I could see. The people who were supposed to be family became the people who watched me sleep. What they wanted was simple. They wanted me to stop being myself. They called it treatment. They called it correction, a return to the “right path”. I sat through it for months. I learned to nod. I learned which face to wear in which room. I learned that the fastest way to be left alone was to perform the version of me they wanted, and to keep the real one folded so small that no one could find it. I want to be honest about something, for whoever is reading this in a room like the one I was in. There were nights I did not want to keep going. The pretending, the lies I told just to survive, the weight of being watched, of having every soft part of yourself treated as sickness, it does something to a person. I will not pretend it did not. But the wanting to stop was not the truth of me, that was the exhaustion talking. The truth of me was the part I had folded away, and that part wanted, more than anything, to live somewhere it could open again. Here is what I did not expect. In the middle of all of it, one person showed me mercy. At quiet risk to themselves. They did not rescue me with some grand gesture. They simply refused, in small ways, to treat me as broken. That was enough to keep a thread alive in me. If you are that person for someone right now, in a place where it costs you something, know that it matters more than you will ever be told. Getting out took longer to plan than it takes to tell. I will not describe how, because some of the people who helped me are still where I was, and their safety is not mine to spend. I will say only that it happened in stages, that fear almost paralyzed me along the way, and that there was a moment, hours into the leaving, when I let myself believe for the first time that I might make it. And boy did I make it. I am somewhere now where I can wear my own name. Where the earrings are mine, the clothes are mine, my body is slowly becoming mine. It is not some fairy tale. I carry what happened. Some days it sits on my chest. But I am building a life that is mine, quietly fierce and honest, and no one folds me away anymore. I am writing this for you, the ones still in the room, the ones performing the right face, the ones who have been told that the truest part of them is the sickest part. Hear it from someone who sat where you sit. They are wrong, you are not alone, and survival is not surrender. Staying alive long enough to get out is not weakness. It is the most stubborn, bravest thing a person can do. Hold the real you somewhere they cannot reach. Keep the thread alive. There are people you have not met yet who are already on your side and I am one of them.