Day 96 - How are you? On Palestine

96 Days - I started writing this on Day 60 something, then Day 72? Day 87 - but today is the day. This isn't easy for me to share, but my mother reminded me to "always stand on the right side, even if you are alone ."I am fearful of the impact of this on my career, my safety, and my family's safety, but it has been 96 days, and Palestinian people, my people, have been going through the worst of humanity for a few decades, so I can no longer in good conscience stay silent.?

How are you? What have you been up to? I dread having to answer this question at work calls. What do you want me to say that I got to learn the name of another martyred child, another friend, a mother, a grandmother, a grandfather? Names of people I will never get to know but have to learn to give them a little bit of dignity - to not make them a statistic of this genocide.?

Reem - whose grandfather Khalid put her hair in space buns after she was killed because that was her favorite hairstyle. He referred to her as "the soul of my soul." Her brother Tariq looked so much like my son.

Faris - who wanted biscuits, and when his father came back with a pack, he found Faris and his wife in kafans (Muslim burial clothing).?

Layan - who was in just a diaper, laying on the floor of the hospital with no anesthesia. With a cut on his forehead so deep that it flapped over his left eye. Medics with no equipment and failing infrastructure had to drain the puss using their fingers. All the while, I am praying for him to live, only to find out that he died 7 hours later.?

A child went into the rubble of his home destroyed in an airstrike to collect pieces of his family members and wrapped them in a rug.

A mother refusing to wash her blood-filled hands from her child being killed because that is the only way she can sleep close to her child at night.

A father carrying a plastic bag - full of body parts of his child to the tent where they prepare bodies for burials, frantically looking for help

Seeing babies who should be NICU evacuated to one big pen that was covered with aluminum foil - and then two weeks later looking at footage of their decaying bodies found at Al Nasr hospital.

Growing up visibly Muslim (with a hijab) and brown post 9/11 in NYC was a very challenging time. I thought the world would have become a kinder, gentler place with all that we all have gone through collectively in the past few years alone. But no, I was wrong.

I had my classmates, who would call me Osama Bin Laden's sister, pull my hijab - so much that I would go home with blood on my neck from the safety pin digging into my skin. Mike, who sat in front of the classroom, in the seat next to mine for two years - looked me in the face and loudly declared that "we should bomb all Muslims and all Pakistanis," and Ms. Felci laughed it off. Telling my horrified mother that Mike didn't mean it; he was just funny and had a wild sense of humor.?

These same classmates followed my friends and me on the MTA bus, lighting a cigarette and trying to burn my arm with everyone around us watching and not saying anything, not jumping in to help. I had to get off the bus at a stop in a neighborhood I didn't know and had to find my way home(before everyone had cellphones) with my parents frightened, not knowing where I was for a few hours. These classmates didn't get any disciplinary action - I was always the one having to move classrooms.?

See, I was naive to think that with access to so much information, the world becoming "globalized" has shifted people's thinking, but no, these classmates just grew up to run the world.

What world are we trying to create with our "new, innovative, disruptive" thinking? How can we work on ESG, Sustainability, and human-centered design projects without accounting for everything happening around us? As a designer, my teaching and my belief has always been to design for the folks at the margins of society - because that allows us to create products/services/experiences that are accessible, inclusive, and sustainable.?

So when you ask me how I am, what did I do this weekend? I don't know what to say because I am stuck in a permanent code-switch mode. Fearful of losing my career and the physical and mental harm of being so public of my support for a liberated Palestine. But as someone who suffers from mental health issues - I refuse to feel this fear in my body anymore - it is making us all sicker.?

#freepalestine?