If it matters, let me whisper a secret in your ears: I have always felt that I was in the wrong place and the wrong time. I am forever out of time and out of place.

Many treat friendships and other human connections as if they are things they can store in a closet where they can come back one day and find them unaltered. Alas, human connections do not survive with this mentality.

[M]any people say things like ‘investing in a love relationship’ as if they are talking about investing in stock market or in financial projects. That is a customer not a human or a citizen language. This type of language is filled with clues about how we have internalized ourselves as customers.

A long time ago, I learned to only share my war stories (I have many) with people with whom I feel a genuine and deep human connection. These stories are at once precious and painful – they need to be earned. They must be deserved by those who hear them.

As we were leaving the camp, I wondered whether refugee and IDP camps are a sign of compassion towards displaced people, or are they signs of how far humans have gone in causing harm to each other?

Hearing about any single human life lost anywhere in the world should never ever become old news.

A refugee is someone who was forcefully taken out of their time and place. They were then placed in another time and another place that insist on dehumanizing them. It is a tragedy. The ultimate paradox and irony of this tragedy is that, in many cases, those who caused their displacement and those who hate them in their newfound ‘homes’ in exile are the same people! In this way, they leave no place for a refugee to feel at home or even alive.

Let’s hope 2018 will be a better year.' I don’t know why this statement sounds to me as one full of defeat and hopelessness. It is a statement that many people repeat one year after another, even though they know deep inside that it is a fake form of optimism we console ourselves with, like a scared child singing in a dark alley to keep himself distracted from darkness.

Why are we so afraid of confronting ourselves? Why do we always use the loud noises of the outside world to mute what our inner voice is trying to tell us?