Sydney Morning Herald
Sydney Morning Herald

Trauma Testaments and Creative Vertigo

It was a couple of years after September 11. But the Australian media had its Muslim spokespeople, and I had no desire to be a mouthpiece in this excruciating moment. So in my debut mainstream piece, I didn’t write about being Muslim in an increasingly Islamophobic world. I wrote of my struggles to transform the high of graduating with a challenging degree into a meaningful career, one where the pile of rejection letters grew so thick I went from paper clip to bulldog.