Helina Blogs: Living in Duality

A person cannot physically be in two places at once, but their mind and soul certainly can be. 

When I landed in America as a teenager, I had no doubt that I was a Kurdish refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan. Being young, America quickly made its way into my mind, body, and soul—and I’m glad that it did. But after that, the duality set in. 

There are so many aspects of the U.S. that I love, as there are so many things about Kurdistan that I not only love, but feel have created me. This dual identity can be a gift, but it can also make one feel like they’re never home. After more than twenty-five years of living in the U.S., I’m no longer entirely at home in Kurdistan, and I still never feel entirely at home in America. It can be a challenge to be caught between two worlds, split in half, looking at America through Kurdish eyes and at Kurdistan through American ones. Perhaps this duality was to be expected. But what I didn’t expect when I came to America was the constant “othering” I faced. How could I feel truly American when so many people reminded me that I wasn’t? 

When I arrived in the U.S., we lived in the American South. As a teenager in Atlanta, I found myself constantly addressing misconceptions about Kurdistan and the Middle East. “Does every Kurdish woman have to cover her hair with a hijab (nearly always mispronounced as ‘heejab’)?” “Can women drive in Kurdistan?” “Wait, you can actually date in the Middle East?” “Hold on, women can go out without men? You don’t need a man to accompany you everywhere?” “Where on the map is Kurdistan?” “How come you speak English so well?” And there were many questions about fasting during Ramadan: “Wow, you do not eat anything for thirty days? I would never be able to do that!” “Are you trying to lose weight?” “You can eat something; we won’t tell anyone.” 

All these comments can be grouped the same way. People were implying, “You are different, and being that different is not good.” Today, I am still addressing misconceptions, trying to show that differences make America beautiful. But it’s an uphill battle and part of the reason I’m still searching for a true sense of belonging. 

A term that encompasses what I felt when I arrived in the U.S. is the French word, dépaysement. It refers to the disorientation we feel in a foreign country or culture. I felt it then and I still experience it now when I travel the world. It is important to understand that individuals who were forced to migrate from their homeland to a country where culture, language, and people are foreign, often feel out of place and are easily triggered. Everything they are trying to absorb in a new country and culture is too unfamiliar for their body to comprehend. 

To me, the idea of home was always where my heart was and my heart had always nostalgically belonged to my childhood memories, to Kurdistan. Yet, as I grew up in America, I suspected that time had made those days rosier than they really were. While growing up in Kurdistan, I felt out of place because you can’t call a place home when your safety is in constant danger, when your cultural identity is denied, and when you are not even allowed to listen to music in your mother tongue. When I came to the U.S., I was suddenly able to imagine all the possibilities of what a home—in the larger philosophical sense—could be. Yet, in America I felt a different kind of cultural exclusion. My language was allowed, but it would never be something in the public sphere. I would be one of the only people displaying my Kurdishness, not surrounded by it. 

I gradually realized that what made a place home was being able to soak in your culture in the presence of others. It was not a solo performance, but a communal play. To solve this dilemma, I filled the void by living a nomadic life in which I wasn’t forced to choose. And whether it was genuine or me merely convincing myself, I enjoyed the constant packing and unpacking while moving from one city to the next, my two suitcases full of clothes and books. For years, my definition of home was about the next destination. Not permanence. 

I have always derived a sense of belonging from books. When I read, I’m accompanied by the author, and with every turn of the page, I feel that I’m with someone, even when I am alone in the physical sense. When I was alone in childhood, I was terrified by my own thoughts and books helped me escape that internal pain, serving as an escape and allowing me to experience adventures in magical places. My head in a book, I felt that we lived in a better world, one beyond that of my Kurdish childhood and the America I reside in. 

For years, home for me was transient; it was always about leaving. After I graduated from pharmacy school and had time to really listen to my soul, I knew my calling was to work with the underserved, displaced refugees in Northern Iraq. I returned to Iraqi Kurdistan and served on the front lines for three years to help hundreds of displaced refugee girls who were suffering from trauma due to war and the ethnic cleansing of minorities. I cared deeply about the community and was sure that returning to Iraq was the only way I could reconnect with my roots and address the unfinished business from my childhood. At the time, I was not aware that I was one of these girls that I was working with, that my own internal struggles with my past were still so present. As I tried to focus on my mission, to help the people who needed me, flashbacks and nightmares of the early years of my life—filled with war, emigration, and immigrant struggles—had become unbearable, not only at night, but as I tried to be the change in the room. I attempted to shut it all out, to focus only on work, but my past was continually beating out the present. 

I was committed to helping women find their voices, while haunted by the voices of my childhood. Growing up between two worlds, my life became about doing whatever it took to fit into both cultures. And the more I tried to fit in, the more I was disconnecting from my authentic self. There came a point where my soul could not take it anymore. I was having a reckoning with my past in the place I considered home. My three years on the front lines in Northern Iraq did help me reconnect to the community, and to the person I was—the good and the very difficult aspects of it. It served as a spiritual awakening that prompted me to really look at my deep wounds from childhood. And for that, I’m thankful. 

It took time, but I realized that I was providing trauma-informed care to refugees in Iraq not just because I wanted to help, but to actively escape my wounds from childhood trauma. After seeing hundreds of patients and hearing their heart-wrenching stories, I would sit outside my office in the refugee camp to rest with a group of teenage girls. It made me happy that they all enjoyed hanging out with the Kurdish-American doctor who looked like them. As I listened to their stories of discrimination, abuse, war, and trauma, I was able to admit to myself that most of their stories were mirror images of my own upbringing. I supported them, I did everything I should have done as a medical professional, and as a woman there to help them, but my inner child would not stop screaming. “What about me?” it demanded. Every day, it wanted answers. But during my time in Iraq, I was not ready to find them. I was in denial for I thought those little girls were more deserving of healing than my own inner child. 

They were in the moment, I was supposedly past it. I was a healthcare provider, sure that I did not need help from anyone. I had the proper training and resources, I could do the work on my own. But I was very wrong.