I have spent most of the year feeling bad about feeling bad. It’s been a difficult year, primarily because I am entering an industry that seems to be disintegrating in exactly the amount of time it takes me to finish what feels like the 100th cover letter begging for a job (while I have not written 100 cover letters, I have applied for about that many jobs).

It does not feel good to know that the prospect of me doing work that I actually will enjoy is so small. It feels even worse knowing that my woes of unemployment pale in comparison to the suffering of people around the world that I have the option to just scroll through and/or ignore every day.

But it also has been a great year! My family and I did a ton of traveling: New Delhi and Aligarh in India, London (briefly), New York City, Niagara Falls, Rochester (upstate NY), San Diego, Los Angeles (my hometown!), Reading (Pennsylvania), and Boston. We had a fun-filled summer full of family reunions and celebrating my graduation too.

As of May 2024, I am officially a Wellesley alum with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a minor in Cinema and Media Studies. I worked very hard for four years for this degree, and am proud of all that I achieved as a student.

My four years at Wellesley were eventful indeed, beginning in the height of the pandemic in September 2020, and ending as many of our universities and colleges became centers of attention amidst widespread protests against the genocide in Gaza.

On our part at Wellesley, we walked the stage with the flag of Palestine, wearing keffiyehs, or with decorated caps. It wasn’t much, but it mattered on a campus that often felt like a vacuum, where all of us were watching and never saying anything.

I once did a presentation in class, where I spoke about the limitations of VR-produced empathy. I presented on a video shared on Twitter that said “If X had existed during the time of the Holocaust, it could have saved millions of people.” The video struck me as incredibly ironic coming from an account that was engaged in genocide denialism today.

It was the first time anyone had really spoken at length about Palestine in that class. It was April 2024. When I did, it felt like a pressure had popped and released, and suddenly, everyone had something to say. It was a cathartic conversation, and I had many of those person-to-person over the last year. Graduation was the biggest stage we could do it at, and it felt freeing.

Our president gave an incredibly hypocritical speech about reaching out to the other side and learning to listen to people you disagree with. All we, who had been at the receiving end of her cold shoulders and withering disagreement, could do was laugh. She was also interrupted several times with “Free Palestine!” which was conveniently cut out of the recording available online.

I also completed my tenure as co-Editor in Chief of the college newspaper. I poured many (unpaid!) hours and energy into my work as editor, and I am proud of what I achieved.

My aim as EIC was always to publish new stories on places and communities on campus that were egregiously overlooked in the past. I had many lofty goals, and we made a modest dent in them. By far, my proudest achievement was helping in establishing our editorial boards’ public solidarity with Palestine and our subsequent coverage of organizing for Palestine on campus.

In September 2022, we put out an editorial in support of Palestinian liberation. Several of us were doxxed for it too, and as the only Muslim in that group, I got called a Nazi, terrorist, anti-Semite and more.

It was not a pleasant month.

We were not protected by the “adults” in the administration that were supposed to protect us, so I and the other editors-in-chief got a quick crash course in crisis communications. The administration publicly distanced themselves from us, but many, many students and alums showed up for us, something which I will always be grateful for.

In the months after, I struggled to write, to get words out that I thought mattered. Where I used to enjoy sharing my words and discussing my takes with other people, I would instead talk myself out of writing anything “controversial” in anticipation of what could come after. Ultimately, the doxxing was just online, thankfully, but as a 20-year-old whose life was very online, it was an incredibly disturbing experience.

This paranoia could just be the symptom of an increasingly online-oriented writing landscape or just very bad imposter syndrome, but it felt like I was choking on my own words because I was so afraid. Every word thereafter was cautiously written and turned over in my head several times to see if it could incite controversy.

This sounds like an unnecessarily exhausting exercise, and it was! And I moved on from it, which is why I am writing about it in such detail now, two years later. I ultimately moved on from the fear that people were paying outsized attention to my words. If they were not engaging with it in good faith, then that is not a me problem.

Doesn’t this all sound familiar?

A year later, what happened to me and my fellow editors happened to students all around the country and the world. We never had it as bad as the students at Columbia, Harvard, MIT or NYU, since we did not have trucks going around with our faces and names plastered on them. But seeing how they were treated by people in their own community and beyond was the most intense sense of déja vu I’ve ever had.

I wish I could have done more for all of them, especially for the Palestinian student journalists who were reporting on the arrests of their fellow community members and also the genocide of their families and people in Palestine. I cannot imagine the pain they went through then and now, and their strength towers far above mine and the rest of us. I really wish it didn’t have to.

In October 2023, we as a newspaper at the Wellesley News were much better equipped to report on what was happening and much less afraid. You can only really get doxxed once, so what else did we have to lose?

We also reported on labor organizing on campus, affirmative action and its end, COVID-19 and its impact on student communities, and more. Our reporting on Palestine was probably the biggest difference we could have made. I am proud to have been a part of it. It was the deadliest year for Palestinian journalists ever, and while they were risking everything to show us what was happening on the ground, we could risk a couple comments online.

Ok, moving on to the rest of the year after graduating!

I celebrated my graduation with many of my closest friends and family from all around the world. It was by far the most stressful event planning we have done, but it turned out quite well. I also set up a scavenger hunt through my favorite books for our guests.

Our visit to India was my first chance to go after five years. After starting college and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was extremely difficult to make the time to go safely, but I finally was able to in May, exactly one week after my graduation. My mom and I went together, and even got a brief layover in London where we hitched a ride on a double decker bus and drove around seeing all of London’s sights. But only from the outside, since we only had about six hours in London.

We spent our ten days in India just with family, and staying in the first home we lived in when we first moved to India. This home was built by my paternal great-grandfather, and is the home my father grew up in. The house is full of memories, old ones and new ones now that my maternal grandmother and eldest aunt are living there. I saw my youngest cousin in-person for the first time, and he and his brother exhausted everyone in the household with their boundless energy and tendency to come to blows every other second. They are very cute though.

We also went through all the photos and books that survived the termites that plagued the house. There was such a large collection of memories held in those albums and books, so I spent a lot of time asking my mother and my relatives who was who, and where each photo was taken. A lot of photos were of my parents’ wedding, and I pieced together a detailed description of all the events from various perspectives.

We catalogued and digitized the photos, so that all of our family across the world would have access to the memories encased in them. It is a great privilege to have access to archives like these, and none of us take it for granted.

It is an odd contradiction to hold in my head: personally, this year has been quite fulfilling – traveling, working on my personal projects, getting to live at home with my family – but also it has just been terrible if I take a look outside.

I scroll through any social media platform these days, and all I see is terrible images of broken bodies and homes in Gaza, or posts and replies begging for donations to help those in Gaza survive. I am only able to repost and donate a meager amount, and I do what I can for every one, but it is just so profoundly depressing to see just how desperate they have to be to ask for donations and shares from everyone, anyone they can reach. It is just such a heartbreaking scenario in which the only means of saving your family, your children, your own life, or finding a way out of your destroyed home is this.

But feeling despair is a privilege in itself.

So I keep going, sharing, reposting, writing, doing whatever I can, because that is as much and also the least I can do. I swing between moments of extremely clear direction and motivation and others where I am simply overwhelmed by the state of the world. It’s very disorienting, especially since this state of the world has not actually impacted my actual day-to-day life that much. I live a very privileged life, sitting in a home my parents pay for, and never wanting for food, water or entertainment.

I’ve been churning out pitches, job applications, and doomscrolling on LinkedIn (truly the lowest of lows), and some of that has been successful! I covered a variety of shows and films, writing reviews, explainers, and some interesting news pieces too for outlets like Nerdist, Tell-Tale TV, and The Polis Project. And there seems to be new freelancing projects in the next year too, so hopefully that pans out!

The process has been arduous and disappointing, to say the least. The state of affairs in journalism is exactly that these days. My hope for a viable career in journalism also dwindles with the sheer amount of propaganda and genocide denial that is being pushed out by outlets that are supposed to be the bastions of journalistic values (ahem, the new york crimes).

Since I was home for all of the summer and fall (and now the winter), I was able to say goodbye to my sisters on their first days of school, go to their fall plays (they are both dedicated theater kids) and December concerts. I saw the hills change color into red, orange, and yellow over the months of September and October from my bedroom window, and took an unlimited number of sunset pictures (hence the featured image for this post).

I have been mostly homebound, due to my chronic lack of a driver’s license, but being a proud homebody, I don’t mind much. That means I get to pop into my father’s study when he’s working and chitchat, or knock on my mom’s door to her room to remind her to have lunch (and beg for ideas because making my lunch is literally the bane of my existence).

In a year filled with loss around the world, where it seems my career is doomed from the start (jk I’ll be fine), I have learned to enjoy the small moments a lot more; to savor each of them and to focus on being present. I have started drawing again, enjoying each meticulous pencil and brush stroke, doing my puzzles, and really paying attention and enjoying listening to music.

Everything is simultaneously terrible and getting worse, so I hope you also have moments this year and the next to savor and remember.

I came across a TikTok recently that was full of quiet, beautiful moments in Gaza: the wind blowing from the shore, a delicious meal spread out on a pristine table, a drive in the rain through quiet streets. No incessant drones, no explosions, no rubble, no blood, no bodies or their parts, no crying children, no grieving families.

I watched the video two or three times, filled with an ache for Gaza’s people I couldn’t quite describe. May we never forget what Gaza, Sudan, and the Congo were like, and what they someday will be, insha’allah.

May this next year bring joy and hope, a free Palestine, and freedom and prosperity for all people.

If you made it this far, thank you! And if you want to read about what I watched, read, and listened to this year, stay tuned for Part 2 of this post. See you next year!!