I’ve Lived a Lot of Versions of Myself

Some of them never even met.

The Tokyo Version. The San Jose version. The L.A., Osaka, Jeddah, Work, and then there was the first variant... The Oregon version.
The one who looked people in the eye because a professor told him it was disrespectful not to. That moment cracked something in me. In Saudi, I’d been taught that lowering your gaze was polite… respectful. But in Oregon, eye contact wasn’t about defiance ... it was about being present. And once I understood that, I couldn’t stop. I started seeing emotion in people’s eyes. Vulnerability. Warmth. Humor. And, to my horror once, mild panic ... when I stared too long at a study partner and she thought I was broken.

That version of me became bold. Curious. The kind of person who hosted international night and DJ’d local hangouts. A Saudi kid turned social butterfly. I came alive.

But then I’d come home.
To Saudi Arabia. To the family. And that version had to… pause. Not die. Just... quiet down.

It wasn’t out of shame.
It was out of duty.

My parents had worked too hard to build a name worth respecting. I wasn’t about to dismantle that because I discovered eye contact and female friends. So I filtered. I rehearsed. I made sure every story was sanitized. Any reference to a woman became “a classmate.” Any joke with edge became silence.

And the strangest part? No one ever told me to do that.
They didn’t have to. You grow up learning the rules without anyone writing them down. Especially if you’re one of the good ones. You don’t rebel. You adapt. Because they still get judged by your choices.

My Arabic never fit cleanly.
English at home. Egyptian at school. Hijazi with my cousins. Najdi at work. My accent shifted like clay in a hot hand ... never quite drying. Never quite solid. I’d say a sentence and still worry if I sounded too foreign… or too fake.

But it’s not just the words that twist.
It’s the posture. The pitch. The entire performance.
Humor that makes people cry-laugh in LA? It confuses a room in Riyadh. Wit becomes risk if the wrong uncle’s listening. Suddenly, charm is a liability. And if you say the wrong thing ... like, say, mention your female friends ... you’re pulled aside and reminded: Not here, cousin.

I’ll never forget that moment.
Summer after sophomore year. I’d just flown back from college, still glowing from feeling truly seen. Hosting shows, making people laugh, finally owning who I was becoming. And there I was, in a side room at a family gathering, animated and full of stories.

Then two of my cousins walked out.
“You can’t talk like that here,” they said.

And just like that…
I remembered which version I had to be.

It’s funny.
People talk about finding themselves like it’s a treasure hunt.
But for me, it was more like juggling.
And I’ve dropped a few versions along the way.

Still... I kept going.
Switching tongues. Shifting gears. Stretching to fit every room.

But the cost of fluency... is exhaustion.
You bend so much, one day you wake up not sure which version of you is actually real.

Maybe all of them are.
Maybe none of them are.

But I’m still here…
and I speak them all.