It took me about thirty years to connect two thoughts I’d been thinking my entire life. In my defense, I was busy trying to change the world instead of understanding it. Rookie mistake.

The first thought is about identity. The second is about the bubbles we are all living in. For most of my life, they felt like separate problems — one personal, one about everyone else. Naturally, it turns out they are the same problem, which is the kind of realization that would feel profound if it didn’t arrive so late. But hey, that kind of realization, even in your mid-40s would keep humbling you. Oh, the stupidity of my youth.

I was born in Saudi Arabia to an Iraqi family, which, as origin stories go, is less a beginning and more an immediate complication. From the very first day of school, I was too Iraqi for Saudi and too Saudi for Iraq — impressively, both sides have kept this alive to this very day. In Saudi Arabia, I was called an infidel Shia. In Iraq, I was mocked for being Saudi Sunni. At an age when I didn’t yet understand the concept of God — not that I fully do now, by the way — I was somehow always losing arguments. Even the ones where I replied to them in my head.

We played together regardless. Spent full days roaming the streets, doing whatever it is children do when left unsupervised in the 80s. And still, the jokes came. Funny to them, clearly. I was the punchline that kept showing up for the game anyway. Little did any of us know that those walls they were casually building around me would eventually make me stronger and build my tolerance higher. I thank them for it now. Only after seeing the results, of course.

By the time I was twelve, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and suddenly the Iraqi part of me became an international wanted criminal. A reasonable moment, then, for a child to sit down and seriously ask himself: how evil am I, exactly? Not a question most twelve-year-olds are working through, but it seems I loved drama at a young age — which made me the filmmaker I am today. With no other Iraqis at school to consult, I did what any reasonable person would do — I tried to become something else entirely.

I tried to befriend different groups. Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Saudis of course. I ended up among a group of Sudanese friends, which, if you’re keeping track, is my third nationality in twelve years without leaving the city. I was the only Iraqi, and they welcomed me anyway with a warmth I had genuinely never encountered. They made me want to be Sudanese. Then, slowly, they made me become Sudanese — the music, the slang, the way of moving through the world, and even a strong Black identity, even though I wasn’t Black — but I wanted to be so much. It was the first time I felt like I had extensions of myself. People who understood me, and through whom I began to understand myself. It was, I would later realize, also a bubble — but a sweet, warm, and much-needed one, at the right time and place. Or perhaps it just made me hungry for more.

Identity, I learned, is not fixed. It shifts depending on who is in the room, what they need you to be, and how badly you need to belong. It is layered, contextual, and apparently available in a surprising number of configurations.

Moving to Germany confirmed this. I became Arab among North Africans, Middle Eastern with Syrians and Palestinians, Asian in food taste, Muslim at certain parties, liberal at others, basketball player, engineer, artist — and, briefly, German, when visiting friends back in Saudi Arabia and explaining with great authority how “we in Germany” approach things. The labels kept changing depending on where I stood and who was doing the labeling. I was many things to many people — a useful quality, I’m told, mostly by myself, whenever I managed to dodge tourist scammers by acting local.

Four years in Southeast Asia added yet another layer — this time inward, into older knowledge, spiritual frameworks, questions about what sits beneath nationality and religion, and all the other costumes people wear. And still, beneath all of it, I kept feeling drawn to something I couldn’t name. The more I moved, the more I noticed that everyone else seemed to have found it — or at least was acting like it. Nationality, race, religion, politics, lifestyle, football club, dietary preference — all of it serving the same basic function: I belong here. This is mine. I am not alone.

I wanted that. I still want it, honestly. I just never quite got it. To this day, I feel like a stranger wherever I live, and I’ve made my peace with the fact that I will probably keep moving toward a home that keeps moving too.

Which brings me to the bubble side of the story.

Wherever I moved, I arrived into one. Safe for those already inside, yes — comfortable, familiar, self-confirming for them. But also sealed — for them only. People content with the edges of their own city, their own internet feed, their own conclusions, their own social media algorithm quietly curating the world into something that always, somehow, agrees with them. In the same household, two people can live in entirely different realities, each one convinced the other has simply not yet seen the obvious truth — while they both share a bigger bubble, convinced it’s everyone else who is wrong.

And it is everywhere, in every flavor, with equal conviction and absolutely no irony.

The Trump supporter who receives any criticism of the man as a direct personal attack on their ancestry, even if the criticism is as obvious as: wiping out an entire Persian civilization is wrong. The feminist who has, through great intellectual effort, located the patriarchy inside a conversation about gym toilets. The Black Lives Matter activist who has not left their apartment in three years but is nonetheless completely certain they understand the streets, even from countries where they have never actually met a Black person, but asian workers with no rights and no online movement to support them. The yoga influencer who has cured themselves of everything except the need to sexualize themselves in every post. Each one holding the full picture, seeing the complete truth, baffled that you can’t see what is so obviously right in front of you.

Then there’s Dubai — a city that has somehow convinced an entire generation of expats that they have become citizens of something. The moment the region shows any sign of geopolitical tension, the Emiratis go quiet. Meanwhile, the people on two-year renewable visas who moved for the tax-free salary and the Friday brunch start posting the most hardcore nationalist content imaginable — defending the UAE with the energy of someone whose great-grandparents are buried there.

And then — my personal favorite — there is the Saudi girl who has been tracking her online shopping order for eleven days. A conflict involving multiple nations. Ships rerouted. Hormuz blockage. People are displaced, dying, and history is moving. But the pink two-piece set was supposed to arrive on Tuesday, and it is now Saturday. OMG

Food nationalism, while we’re here, deserves a moment. No one simply enjoys their cuisine anymore — they fight for it, as though the territorial pride of the nation depends entirely on whether you acknowledge that their couscous is the original one. Every country invented hummus. Every country invented the dumpling. Every country has the best coffee, the best spices, and the warmest hospitality. Suggest that another culture may have existed nearby and possibly influenced the recipe, and you will be looked at like someone who has dishonored their dignity — eyes ready to kill.

I’ve noticed that over the years, I discuss less and less. Not because I lost interest, but because I stopped gaining anything from it. These are rarely discussions at all. They are performances — everyone already knowing their lines, waiting for their cue, repeating something someone else said or posted without ever having processed it. Yes, the show can be entertaining, and I used to laugh at it. But I’ve stopped buying tickets. It’s too repetitive and damaging in the long run. 

The question I kept returning to — for years, genuinely — was: how can people be so blind? And then, more honestly, am I blind too?

What I came to understand is that no one is completely blind. They are selectively blind — sharp in some areas, carefully unseeing in others. And this isn’t a quality of the uninformed. It lives just as comfortably in the well-traveled, the well-read, the credentialed. People who can hold a sophisticated conversation about geopolitics right up until the geopolitics touches something they’ve decided not to examine — or fear to, because they already sense the answer. Then the shutters come down, and suddenly they are very busy, and their faces become red. 

These are not strangers. They are close friends. Family. People I have sat with for years. And each time the shutters come down, the wall between us gets a little higher — not a dramatic wall, just a quiet one. The loneliness that follows has nothing to do with how many people are in the room. Ironically, these walls are different from the ones built by my childhood bullies. And funny enough, these walls are also the ones that made me stronger, and finally led me to the conclusion of today.

I have, on occasion, met people who are genuinely awake. Who faces the uncomfortable thing instead of looking around it. Who question what they believe and mean it. They are rare enough that meeting one feels like a big event. I keep a mental list. It is short, but the names on it matter. And I salute you. I see you, and you are more home to me than home itself.

Belonging. That’s what all of it is. The nationalism, the outrage, the food arguments, the order tracking, the brunch expats waving flags — all of it is belonging. People finding the thing that says “you are one of us” and holding on with both hands, because the alternative is to float aimlessly, and floating is uncomfortable, and most people would rather be wrong together than uncertain alone.

I understand it. I spent my whole life trying to get it.

But the strange gift — and it did take a while to see it as a gift — is that I never quite could. The distance that came from never fully landing anywhere turned out to be the same distance that lets you see. Not better, or necessarily correct. Just wider. Without being fully inside any one bubble, I could observe more, react less, and occasionally notice things that the people inside were too comfortable to look at.

The loneliness that comes from not belonging, I now think, was never really loneliness. It was the price of a particular kind of freedom. Not the loud kind — not the flag and the anthem and the chest-beating look at how great we are. The quieter kind. The freedom to look at something clearly without first checking whether your group approves of what you’re seeing. The freedom from the herd, from the performance, from the exhausting maintenance of an identity that other people gave you. 

And perhaps the most underrated freedom of all: from other people’s judgment. When you never fully belong to any group, no group fully owns your reputation. You are not carefully wording things so that your tribe still accepts you. You are not protecting an image. You are not managing the optics of an honest thought. When honesty is sexy.

Not belonging freed me from the mental prison of bubbles. Not being fully understood is the price I’ve decided I’m willing to pay.

For now, at least. Ask me again after the next move. I may find the best Hummus by then. And it will definitely be mine.