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Questions
A running list of questions I return to often. I don't have satisfying answers yet.
To the diaspora — wake up.
The Interior Life
- How do we come to terms with our pasts?
- What makes certain people able to overcome the insurmountable?
- Can resilience be taught, or is it only ever earned?
- How much of who we are is chosen, and how much was decided before we had a say?
- What does it cost a person to keep reinventing themselves across cultures, languages, and borders?
Memory and Displacement
- What do we lose when we can no longer return to the place that made us?
- What does it mean to remember a country you left as a child?
- Why do some societies reckon honestly with their past while others build myths over mass graves?
- Can archives be a form of resistance?
Power
- Why do systems built with good intentions so often become cruel?
- What makes institutions humane rather than dehumanizing?
- How does power quietly shape what people believe is normal or inevitable?
Community
- What do we owe to each other as humans?
- What do we owe to the people we left behind?
- How can we show up for our communities on the micro scale?
- What do Somalis and diaspora communities broadly owe each other?
Story and Creativity
- How does grit come into writing? Is it the same grit that gets you through everything else?
- How do writers build expansive worlds that others fully buy into? (Thinking of the great sci-fi space operas.)
- How does writing nourish us? What is it actually doing when it works?
- Who gets to tell the stories of places the world has decided to forget?
- How do we write good work without falling into diaspora writing slop?
- How do we reimagine the homeland without desecrating it?
A Life Well Lived
- How do you recognize the work you're meant to do?
- What kind of ambition leads somewhere meaningful rather than somewhere empty?
- How do you stay soft in a world that keeps asking you to harden?
- What does it mean to show up for yourself when no one taught you how?
My Lifelong Questions
How can we pursue a life well-lived when we're still dealing with our own ghosts?
What is a life well-lived exactly? For me right now it's surviving school and surviving myself. It's getting to wake up and choosing to continue.
How can one survive the everyday to build the story of one's life?
I survive by writing little things daily and collapsing onto myself. I write to live. I write to survive.
Why are missions and lifelong goals so central to certain people's ability to survive?
I don't know what mine is yet. But it's slowly taking shape: writing, people, community.
Let's Talk
If you want to chat about anything, please do connect. I love learning about other people.
Last updated: January 2026