Who Am I?

Before permanently moving to America in 2012, I lived in Damascus, Syria for the entirety of my life spending my summers in America and my winters in Syria. For that reason, I was able to get a Syrian traditional public school education without missing American cultural references. This duality of life made me more conscious of who I was becoming and how I was changing. I became culturally aware from a very young age and started noticing the differences between the two societies, one being more or less liberal, in America, and the conservative one in Syria. When I was in the fourth grade, I remember contemplating my mortality on a Good Friday as I watched my church have a viewing of the pains Jesus had to go through. I asked my Sunday school teacher about the inhumanity of what we were watching and the moral code that would allow a human being to be tortured and crucified in such a way. She dismissed my question and told me that Jesus was crucified to erase all of our sins. I followed up with another question clarifying that I haven’t done anything wrong but she smiled at me and told me to stop asking so much. I remember looking at her in awe wondering why she was avoiding my question and treating me like a child, forgetting that I was indeed a child. 

At home, my parents encouraged my curiosity and provided me with all the the resources that could justify my hunger for knowledge. My father and I used to watch a weekly Thursday night show in which the host would bring up controversial issues in society and discuss them. The topics went from underage marriage, pedophilia, God, to homophobia. During and after each episode, my father and I would talk about the episode and he would answer all the questions I had regardless of how obscure or stupid they were. This show was not intended for children and my parents were judged for allowing me to watch it, but if it weren’t for that show, I would not have been so conscious of all the societal changes and constructs imposed around me. I felt drawn to taboo topics because I couldn’t understand how a group of humans can deem something to be wrong and everyone else has to follow. This was especially dear and near to my heart as there were some things that were not socially accepted in Syria but were very okay in the US. For example, in Syria, I was not allowed to walk with only one guy because that meant I was dating him but in the US, all of my friends were guys. That contradiction made me question the reality from the rules and morals from a very young age and made me adapt to any situation in which I am put. 

One of the social rules that affected me the most was the understanding that only doctors, lawyers and engineers have real jobs, everyone else does not matter. As a curious bee, I was also interested in medicine and the inner workings of the human body so from age 6, and until February of 2019, I thought I wanted to become a doctor. In college, I took all the pre-med classes and was on the path I thought I was meant to be on. Little did I know, my father’s death in October of my Freshman year was going to have an impact on how my educational life was going to turn out. After my dad died, I was angry and confused. I did not understand why it would happen or how I was going to accept it. My grief was in the form of reading and journaling in hopes of finding some sort of an answer to this tragedy that hit my family. Spring semester of my Sophomore year, I took my very first philosophy class and realized that in philosophy, I can be curious without judgement, I can talk about death, life and everything in between. So I decided to major in philosophy and make the rest of my college career a hobby through which I can learn about all the issues that cripple or flourish a society. My affinity for taboo topics was met through classes like Philosophy of Sex and Love and my need for understanding the fundamentals of life was met through an epistemology course, Knowledge Truth and Power. I also discovered my passion for psychology through Philosophy of Psychology and decided to take multiple classes to understand the inner workings of the human psyche through the Psychology Department. 

I was not very aware of the fact that medicine was not as exciting to me as everything else I was studying. I dreaded learning organic chemistry, but everyone else was dreading it so I thought it was the norm. It took me 4 and half years of a liberal college/graduate education to realize that medicine was not for me. In my masters program, we talked about bioethics, implicit bias and topics that brought me an immense amount of joy because they were linked to my philosophy undergraduate degree but these classes created a facade over what medicine would be for me. I was not aware of this facade until working on my Masters Thesis, in which I was supposed to study a healthcare issue that affects the vulnerable societies in America and ways to fix the issue. When thinking of topics to talk about, I would come back to the issue of personal identity and how being in a vulnerable community affects that identity formation. I was not interested in a health outcome or a policy change. I wanted to see how the stigma associated with schizophrenia affects the personal identity formation of those with schizophrenia and if the stigmatization worsens their symptoms. 

The moment I finished my research for the thesis, from Jean-Paul Sartre, René Descartes to David Hume, I realized that I have always known my passion. It was just clouded by what was societally expected from me as a first generation immigrant American. That was when I became aware of the social strains that I thought I had escaped so I decided to truly escape them and changed my educational path from going to Medical School to pursuing a PhD in Philosophy. I want to further explore the process of personal identity. I want to see how the environment can morph us to be what it wants us to be, instead of who we want to be. I want to see if humans are truly free or is free will truly a facade? I want to spend my life fueling my curiosity because nothing makes me happier than understanding how and why humans tick.