Category: Featured Writers

FEATURED POST: Depression Is Not Beautiful

  

Written by marjramos– I get sucked under the waves of varying ferocity with no sense of direction. I don’t want help and I refuse to get better. Every waking day, it occurs to me that I don’t want to leave. My damaged body fights a long battle against my mind, both telling me different things. 

My friends and family see the problem, but I don’t. I look at the endless empty boxes of takeout, or I clean up after purging, or bandage bleeding wounds, but I see this as normal – I’ve never known anything else. It eludes from the change I desire to have; I’m doing fine on my own, ain’t I?

I hit a solid wall when I try to get a clear understanding of anything, so I stop trying. I am reminded daily of my flaws, reciting them to myself under my breath, hiding the words with half-hearted laughs. I’m nothing but a piece of crap and my life is a big joke. My skin is sliced open. Razor blades are bloody. There are band aids in the trash by the sink of the cold, lonely bathroom.

I must take a step back and inspect the damage. I sift through what remains of my life, never seeing the broken shards of the sanity I once had and not knowing I need to put them back together to form what it had been once before. Deep down, I know, there will always be lines to remind me of the fractures where I shakily repaired myself, so why bother?

I am forced to get some help and I am grateful for this. No longer do I hide away, make excuses, and cover my scars with long sleeves. I feel connected to the outside world for the first time in a very long time and it is an extremely liberating feeling.

I laugh, I cry, I make memories, and I finally enjoy life. I am no longer alone, hopeless, scared, or misunderstood. Every encounter is a small touch of warmth that never leaves, only burns brighter and brighter until I shine with a light I’ve never known. I want to cry, but out of happiness instead of sadness.

In a moment of clarity, I realize how alike I am to a flower. I grow in beauty, wither in sickness, and am carried by the seeds I left behind. This is my life. 

This post was originally featured on Thought Catalog 

 

FEATURED POST: Paris Is Not The Only Country We Should Be Mourning For

  
What happened in Paris makes me sick to my stomach. It is terrifying, disturbing, unsettling. It is inhumane treatment of others as well as inhuman, not in character for a rational, feeling, thinking, compassionate human beings. This is not normal and absolutely 100% deserves all of our attention. 

Paris deserves all of the news coverage, social media posts. Facebook profile pictures in the colors of the French flag, prayers and thoughts being sent out from all over the globe. I am not by any means trying to take away from the legitimacy of what happened and how everyone is affected by it. So many lost loved ones or experienced something that they never felt they would in the safety of the western world.

For many children, this will be their 9/11. It will go down in history as one of the most tragic terror attacks to hit a nation, especially a western nation. I do not write this to disagree with any of that. This tragedy breaks my heart as it does yours. But that is just the thing—what I said before, a western nation was hit and the world is ablaze with reactions. But what about Beirut, which suffered two suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood that killed over 40 and injured over 230 people. And what about Baghdad? Where over the past day there was a roadside bomb that killed and injured over 20 people and a suicide bombing at a Shiite funeral that killed at least 21 and injured 46.

Oh but these are against Muslims, you say—the same people that everyone lumps together with ISIS in the “safety” of our western bubble. Yet ISIS took responsibility for these attacks just as they did for Paris. Just as they did for the Russian passenger plane that went down, killing the over 200 passengers aboard. Muslims are not ISIS. Islam is not extremism. They are attacking “their own people,” who in no way resemble them, just as they are attacking us, the privileged, westerners who see their entire religion as the enemy.

And ISIS is the enemy. They lack human compassion, what they stand for is outright objectively wrong. Of course it is. So why do we not mourn in the same way for all whom they attack? And what about Israel? And yes, I know, this is where you dismiss me and say “She’s probably just another Jewish girl from a middle-class American family, living in Israel, of course she cares about Israel and this whole article is just to get us to take pity on their situation.”

Well, that’s not true. Yes I’m Jewish. Yes I live in Israel. Yes it sickens me and terrifies me every time there is a stabbing, a car ramming, or a Molotov cocktail that injures another of my fellow Israelis.

But it also sickens me when Israeli forces kill innocent Palestinians because their own ”government,” Hamas, has no compassion for human life and sees its people only as shields. I am not writing this so you take pity on either side in this conflict; they both deserve our sympathy and compassion, for the conflict is a beast that discriminates against no one. And I’m not writing this to make you feel bad about not sympathizing with every single tragedy throughout the world. There are too many to count.

What about Beirut, which suffered two suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood that killed over 40 and injured over 230 people. And what about Baghdad? Where over the past day there was a roadside bomb that killed and injured over 20 people and a suicide bombing at a Shiite funeral that killed at least 21 and injured 46.

I’m writing this because I am genuinely perplexed and am trying to make sense of it all.

But it makes no sense. This is senseless violence and hate. And in a way, our reactions are senseless too. So many of you have been to Paris, you know the culture, the sites, you posted pictures today from your trips to the Eifel tower saying how sad it is that this beautiful place is going through this.

But many of you do not know Israel. You do not know Beirut or Baghdad. You do not know Kenya, where a university was attacked in April and 147 were killed, but most of you probably did not even hear about it. I hadn’t heard about it until I sat down to write this.

You write what you know. You express what you feel. You react to what the media shows you. I can’t decide what makes me more angry- the overwhelming response and support to the Paris attacks not being shown to all these other tragedies, or the people who say to stop using it as an excuse to shine light on these other tragedies because if one does this they are taking away from this particular tragedy.

Read the rest of ‘Paris Is Not The Only City We Should Be Mourning For‘ by Jesse Perry on Thought Catalog. 

French Gangster Wife Turned Author: Elina Feriel

  
Elina Feriel is a 34-year-old author and former ‘gangster’s wife’, whose first book is causing a stir in France.

Feriel has appeared in the French press in recent days promoting her first book “Au bout de la violence” (After the Violence).

It’s a memoir of her years as the self-confessed wife of a drug dealer and career criminal in the violent and poverty-stricken northern district of Marseille, France’s second-largest city.

Over the course of just a few years, Feriel lost the three most important men in her life to violent crime.

Her husband, her older brother, and her new partner were all shot dead on the streets of Marseille in gangland killings.

Feriel is only just emerging in the French psyche now, but she’s already making an impression.

Her story – guns, drugs, bling, young love and the pain of repeated tragedy – is a fascinating one.

But it’s her personality as much as anything else which is making her a favourite on TV and radio talk shows.

Feriel is brutally honest and very passionate. She is critical of failures among her own people – the Arab community in Marseille – but scathing about the ignorance and hypocrisy of France’s Parisian establishment, which in her view claims to care about Marseille’s monumental problems, but actually does little to help.

She grew up in the northern district of Marseille, with an absent mother and an alcoholic father. “I was raised by the streets. I used to go around like a little boy,” she told France Info radio.

A distracted trouble-maker at school, Feriel married her husband Sabri when she was still in her late teens. She had fallen for his rough charm, and the two quickly started a family of three children.

He showered her with expensive gifts, the proceeds of his drug-dealing, but as Sabri rose through the ranks to become a top gangster in the city’s northern district, his paranoia and abusiveness increased.

Living in constant fear, Sabri began to beat Feriel, and their life spiralled out of control until he was finally shot down with a machine gun while riding his scooter.

Then, incredibly, Feriel’s older brother, who had been convicted of a bag-snatching, as well as her new partner Sam, who was “in with a bad crowd”, were both shot dead over the next few years.

Feriel says her book is not the start of a career in politics, but just to “get things off her chest.”

I’m not an activist or a spokeswoman…I just felt the need to write this to get things of my chest. It’s crucial. And if it helps to change things, all the better. 

she told Elle magazine.

After everything that has happened, Feriel has moved “far away” from Marseille’s northern district, and lives with her three children.

Feriel is sharp, witty, and very sassy. It’s clear there is some hurt, and even bitterness behind her words.

However, with the writing and publication of her memoirs, she gives the impression of someone who is prematurely wise and eager to share what she has learned (the hard way) about poverty, violence, and the allure of glamour.

After the death of my husband, some people would have preferred if I just stuffed myself full of Prozac and shut myself off in silent mourning. But I’m a bigmouth, and I do the opposite of what people expect from me. 

she told Elle magazine in a recent interview.

I try to pass down to my children an open-mindedness, and a trust that didn’t exist where I came from. But I also want them to toughen up, and to know that the world that’s out there waiting for them, it’s not all Care Bears.

Source | The Local (France)  

Original Publication Date: March, 2013