Until next time.

Hiatus is too delusive a word, goodbye too bitter.

This newsletter began over seven years ago with a herculean mission: to use storytelling as a tool to strip mental illness stigma among migrant communities and make care more accessible for populations oft-overlooked and underfunded. For years, I hoped the resources and stories I shared might inch us closer to a more de-stigmatized, gentler existence, one where we might address and heal our intergenerational traumas and self-inflicted judgements, a world in which we might finally eclipse survival mode to find joy in the underrated simplicities of life—within and without the help of the flawed institutions in place.

Some of you have been here from the very start. Many have actively, generously, lovingly supported and sustained this work. A thank-you simply isn’t enough. But while I adore this newsletter and feel strongly about the overwhelming benefits of mental health care or about closing the gaps afflicting our communities, I frankly do not feel emotionally or professionally equipped at this time—nor do I believe it’s adequate—to continue writing about self-preservation during genocide. I feel like a fraud, barely hanging on. Beyond that, I am simply being called elsewhere.

I’m posting here for the first time since May 6, 2024, days after a few good-hearted strangers and I decided to start a small, traveling liberation library to support and help grow the Palestinian liberation movement here in my home of Atlanta, Georgia, a little library community that has consumed my life entirely since its inception, and one that’s saved me a hundred times over. It was around then, too, that I left my MFA program over its silence and cowardice, a decision that still stings like grief. It was then, too, that the company I’d worked for my entire adult life abruptly cut me off with no goodbye, a decision I’d later learn through acquaintances was due in large part to my organizing efforts and unabashed protest against the apartheid regime. Since May, I’ve also lost my grandfather—the soul of my soul—and then, days later, my first dog. My grandmother no longer knows my name, and I am confronted with the fragility of family and time when I touch her tissue-paper-thin skin. I do not know how to console my father, my mother, my brother, even my dog, who I can tell in those almond honey eyes is still reeling from the loss of her big brother, and I’m reminded of that scene: her paw on my sobbing father’s shoulder as she witnessed a needle lend our cancer-ridden pup his final, drowsy goodbye.

I say all this because while there has been so much personal and global pain in these last 12+ months and I am far from what I’d consider to be “okay,” I have never in my life felt so cared for, so abundantly surrounded by my community of human- and animal-shaped glimmers. That's a word my good friend Janay found despite her own grief, a reminder to notice those tiny little twinkles, like when you emerge from a melancholy nap and you squint to find the sun squinting right back through your blinds at golden hour, and then maybe, for a second, the thought of cooking a meal, of bathing, of loving, of living—maybe it no longer feels utterly impossible after all. If it weren’t for my glimmers, I wouldn’t be here, the library wouldn’t be here, and I wouldn’t wake up on the first day of 2025 ready to keep fighting.

So if there’s anything I want to leave you with, it’s this: Mental health care, however it might look for you, is important, yes. But I believe the only sustainable, ethical, profound answer to our collective despair is community. I beg you to find and nurture yours.

You can find me out there in the world, continuing the work of collective liberation, however that might look a day, a week, a year, 10 years from now. I’ll be building, growing, laughing among, weeping among, fighting among my own community of conscience and curiosity through inevitable growing pains and mishaps. If ever you feel lost in your search for yours, I’m happy to give you a nudge or offer an ear.

In the coming year, I hope also to rekindle my relationship with words. This might actually be the first time I’ve sat down to write in months; hence the lengthy rambling. I want to write my way through this grief, both the personal and the collective, and to record the glimmers feeding me, keeping me in this fight. If you’re inclined to follow along, any tidbits will be posted on my personal newsletter.

For now, I think it’s time for a nod goodbye. It’s more like an I’ll-see-ya-later, but with a hint of guilt and a flicker of delusion. Maybe one day. When we’re all free.

Until next time,
Fiza