The Morning I Stopped Recognising Myself
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It was a quiet morning in the autumn of 2014, and I was standing at the end of my second marriage.

The sun was warm. I remember that clearly, because it felt wrong, the way warmth sometimes does when something cold is happening inside you. My mind was racing through the same question on a loop, the kind of question that sounds simple and is anything but: what went wrong?

On paper, nothing was wrong. I had a career that had grown steadily over many years. I had accomplishments that others pointed to with respect. I had built, by every external measure, a life that looked like success. And somewhere inside all of that, without my noticing exactly when it had happened, I had lost my passion entirely. Not in a dramatic moment. Not in a single identifiable event. Just gradually, quietly, the way a fire goes out when nobody is tending it.

That emptiness was the most disorienting thing I had ever felt. Not grief, not anger, not the clean pain of failure. Just a hollow, puzzling absence where something vital was supposed to be.

Is this it?

That question had been sitting inside me for longer than I had been willing to admit. It had been there, I think, long before that autumn morning. But the morning made it impossible to keep walking past.

I did not have an answer. What I had, for the first time, was the honesty to stop pretending I did.

For years I had done everything that was expected of a person who wanted to be considered serious and successful. I climbed. I achieved. I followed the rules and learned from every failure and kept moving forward with the kind of momentum that looks, from the outside, like confidence. But the more I achieved, the more I felt I was living someone else's version of my life rather than my own. The distance between what I was doing and what I actually felt was growing, and I had been filling that distance with activity rather than examination.

I remember one evening that autumn, returning home after an exhausting day and standing in front of the mirror for longer than I usually would. The face looking back was familiar and completely strange at the same time. I knew the titles. I knew the responsibilities. But the person behind them, what he loved, what gave him joy, what he was actually for, I could not answer those questions. And for the first time in my life, I admitted that to myself without immediately trying to move past it.

That admission was the beginning of everything that followed.

A close friend, sometime later, asked me a question that I have never forgotten. He asked what I would do if I were not afraid. I sat with that for a long time, because my first instinct was to say that I was not afraid of anything significant. But the more honestly I looked at it, the more I understood that the fear was not of failure. I had failed before and recovered. The fear was of looking inward. Of finding something there that I did not know how to hold. Of discovering that the life I had built, however impressive from the outside, had been constructed around values that were not entirely mine.

By the end of 2015, that same friend guided me toward a path I would not have found alone. I will not pretend the first steps were comfortable. They were not. I had spent so many years focused on doing, achieving, contributing to others, that I had genuinely forgotten how to simply be with myself. The inward journey felt awkward and slow and occasionally frightening in the specific way that honesty is frightening when you have been avoiding it for a long time.

I began with a notebook. It sounds small, and it was small. But I started writing down the thoughts I had been carrying without examining them, the dreams I had quietly abandoned, the fears I had learned to work around rather than face, the questions I had kept at a comfortable distance. Over time, the pages filled. And as they filled, something began to clarify. Not all at once. Not in any dramatic revelation. But slowly and unmistakably, a thread began to emerge from the tangle.

One question kept returning above all others: what actually brings me joy?

I sat with that question for weeks before an honest answer came. And when it did, it was both surprising and, in retrospect, entirely obvious. Joy, for me, had always lived in the moment when someone I was working with or speaking with began to see their own potential more clearly. Not when I solved their problem. Not when I gave them the answer. But when I could see, in their face or in their words, that something had shifted, that they were beginning to understand something about themselves that they had not understood before. That was where my energy had always been most alive. I had simply stopped paying attention to it.

That realisation felt, in the most literal sense, like a light coming on.

I kept going. I read. I reflected. I sat with my own thoughts instead of running from them, which is harder than it sounds and more important than almost anything I have ever done. I began to see patterns in the choices I had made over the years, habits that had been driven by fear rather than genuine conviction, opportunities I had taken because they were expected rather than because they were mine. And alongside all of that, I began to feel, gradually and then with increasing certainty, like myself again.

I learned to say no. That was perhaps the most significant practical change of that entire period, and the most demanding one. No to opportunities that were impressive but misaligned. No to projects that asked me to be a version of myself I had already outgrown. Every no felt costly at first. Over time, each one felt like reclaiming something.

I picked up a pen in a different sense too. I began writing articles in Arabic for news portals, sharing what I was learning and thinking about leadership, purpose, and the inner life that underpins all of it. The experience of putting ideas into words for other people to read was unlike anything I had felt in my professional life before. It was not performance. It was contribution. It was using something I had that could genuinely serve someone else's journey, and that distinction mattered enormously to me.

In January 2019, I held my first book in my hands.

I want to say that again, because the weight of it still means something to me. After years of doubt and searching and the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a life from the inside out, there was a physical object in my hands that represented everything I had learned and everything I had become in the years since that autumn morning. It was written in Arabic. It was about leadership and management, translated into language that anyone could access regardless of their title or their background. It was not written for recognition. It was written because I believed it could help people. That belief, I had come to understand, was my compass.

Then the pandemic arrived, and the world went quiet in a way none of us had anticipated.

I wrote my second book during those months. I say that not as a point of pride but as a simple statement of what the practice of self-awareness had made possible: even in the most uncertain and disorienting period most of us had ever lived through, I had something to return to. A purpose that did not depend on external conditions. A voice that kept showing up on the page even when everything outside was unsteady. That second book was about leadership in precisely that kind of darkness, about the responsibility to keep a clear and human perspective when the world is frightened and looking for direction. It was, in many ways, the most honest thing I had written.

Since 2017, I had also been writing in English, reaching a broader conversation, connecting with people across different cultures and backgrounds who were asking the same essential questions about purpose, growth, and what it means to lead with genuine integrity. Those conversations have taught me as much as anything I have written.

And now there is this: the third book, published in English in August 2025, the culmination of a journey that began with a question in front of a mirror and led, through more detours and more discoveries than I could have anticipated, to that moment of holding it in my hands. And already, by the start of 2026, the next journey has begun. The fourth book is taking shape, because that is what this kind of life does. It does not arrive at a destination and stop. It keeps asking what comes next.

I share all of this not because my story is exceptional. I share it because I do not believe it is. I believe the questions I sat with in 2014 are questions that most people carry, often for years, without finding the space or the permission to take them seriously. The hollow feeling beneath achievement. The distance between the life being lived and the life that feels true. The voice that asks, quietly and persistently, whether this is really it.

That voice is not a problem to be managed. It is the most important thing inside you.

Self-awareness, I have come to understand, is not a destination. It is a daily practice, the ongoing discipline of listening to yourself honestly, aligning your choices with what you actually value, and being willing to be changed by what you find. It does not make life easier in the conventional sense. But it makes it real in a way that nothing else does.

I did not find my purpose by achieving more. I found it by finally stopping long enough to ask what I was actually for.

You already know what you are for. The question is whether you are willing to stop long enough to hear it.