this is an excerpt from my book

I wrote this today, for the book I'm working on, and I thought I'd share it here. 

There’s an ad on the side of my Facebook Newsfeed this morning: it says “Be Brave. Write.” Am I being brave? Or am I just running away from the life I don’t want to live? I always hoped my life would be special. As a kid I dreamt of being a very famous actress, the first Lebanese actress to ever win an Oscar. Two Oscars, I would tell my friends. That was my life’s ambition. But it turns out I wasn’t brave enough to try that. I tell myself it’s because my mother died and I was distraught and didn’t want to leave my brother and sister, but maybe that’s just an excuse. I’m not sure what I would do if I had to live through that again. I had these piles of acting-school brochures in my bedroom, because at the time you still ordered brochures to check out colleges. Seems like a lifetime ago. A lifetime when my mom was alive and I was just a teenager with my whole life ahead of me and my dreams still very much alive. Now I’m scared. Terrified actually. I only have enough money to last me a week. Maybe ten days, if I’m very careful. This weekend I’m meeting two different families for prospective babysitting jobs. That’s what I’m looking forward to now, babysitting. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids, but I’m 28-years-old. I have a Masters degree from an Ivy League school. That I got on a Fulbright scholarship. And I choose to leave my job, my country and my family to come write a book about my life. Is that brave? It doesn’t feel brave. I look around me and see all these people who have it figured it out. They have their own apartments, beautifully decorated, like real grownups. It makes me feel so much older. In Lebanon, people live at home with their parents until they get married, so it’s nothing unusual there, but out here I feel like a complete loser. I don’t have any of it figured out. I have absolutely no income and I still haven’t figure out what makes me happy.  Maybe I should go hide out in a mountain in Lebanon, plant fruits and vegetables and write stories from my imagination. Maybe I’m not cut out for that “special” life after all. Maybe I don’t have what it takes to make it. And maybe I can still change that. I can decide to be brave, starting now.

My mother was brave. That much, I’m sure of. So many things about her I question, I wonder if she was actually different than I remember her to be. But I am sure she was the bravest person I know. Sometimes, I wonder about how she chose to fight. She decided not to go through chemo, because it was making her too sick and it wasn’t worth the time we’d be buying. When the doctors found out she had a tumor in her brain, they gave her two weeks to live. But my dad fought like hell. He flew her to Belgium to get her operated on and reduce the tumor and suddenly she had a whole year. But the tumor wasn’t only in her brain. It was a metastasis from cancer in her lungs. And it was bad.

When they flew to Belgium, they told us they were going on vacation. She always wanted to protect us, my mother, not wanting for us to worry at all. I remember how I found out it was all wrong: A woman called at home, asking me about my mother. She asked me how the surgery went. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I started shaking, and hung up the phone. It’s like I knew something about this Belgium trip that happened so quickly right after my mom spent a week in the hospital was a little weird. But I guess I didn’t want to see it. When my mother dropped me off at school that day before she traveled, I barely kissed her goodbye. I thought it was cool we would have the house all to ourselves. And I think about it now and I’m shaking. I didn’t know she was going to have a brain operation that could’ve left her completely paralyzed, lose her memory, or killed her.  I didn’t know. She knew and she didn’t show it for a second. That’s how brave she was.