Zizi, my grandmother, says: “God curse the countries that cannot carry their own people, my dear.”

And I think: a country cannot carry its children when it cannot even carry itself.

Many moments pushed me to think about leaving Lebanon. But I never truly felt that the decision was real. When I returned to Beirut in 2024 after the ceasefire agreement, I cried for four hours at the airport while hugging my close friend Sally. Afterwards, I felt as though I had been born again. I looked into the eyes of the people around me and saw terror living inside them. The 2024 war was not the beginning of Lebanese suffering, but the moment their already overflowing cups finally spilled over. Nothing had been left unshed into them.

I remember how relieved I felt in 2023 when my visa to the Netherlands was rejected while I was trying to leave Lebanon. I was satisfied merely with the attempt, convincing myself that I was doing everything I could to emigrate, without ever truly wanting to go.

A French friend I met in Brussels in October 2025 reminds me that I told her then about my decision to stay in Lebanon for at least eight more years. I had begun studying psychology and was planning to become a clinical psychotherapist, a path that requires six to eight years of study and training. That was my way of choosing to stay, especially after the 2024 war, when I felt that I did not want to leave this country behind.  

But what do we do when our country rejects us?

At dawn on Monday, March 2, I woke up, like many residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs, to violent Israeli bombardment. I did not yet know that, just hours earlier, Hezbollah had launched “six rockets” at Israel, opening the gates of hell upon us once again.

The windows of the house shook violently. I felt the pressure of the blast pushing through the room, followed by the sound of heavy gunfire that felt like the end of the world. The screams of neighbors filled the street. Someone pounded hard on our door, urging us to evacuate the building, while I threw myself onto the floor, trying to shield my body from both the successive Israeli strikes and the stray bullets alike. In a country like Lebanon, where there are no emergency plans and no warning sirens, we are warned of war by gunfire.

I crawled across the floor trying to reach my phone on the other side of the room, then ran toward the emergency bag my aunt had insisted on preparing two weeks earlier. I opened it to pack some clothes, but another missile struck a nearby street. I collapsed onto the bag. For the first time in my life, I truly felt that I was going to die. I had never imagined that I might die so young, without even choosing the last thing I wanted to do before being killed.

I closed the bag as it was, without adding any clothes. I wrapped my arms around my body and said: “I’m sorry… this is how you’re going to die.” Then I cried.

We survived by a miracle, like so many others during that mad dawn. As we were leaving my grandmother’s house, I saw scenes “that could turn your hair white.” People were running through the streets in their pajamas. Cars and motorcycles sped recklessly through the chaos. I saw two men struck by a motorcycle that kept going without a second glance, indifferent to the fear it left behind.

Near the Municipal Stadium, large groups of people had gathered around fires they had lit, hoping to warm themselves against the freezing cold of that dawn that aged all of us at once.

Then began the journey of forced displacement: first to Jounieh, then to Achrafieh, and then to Dekwaneh.

I stayed in Dekwaneh for a month, before the sectarianism of some residents in the building began to close in on me. They signed a petition and called military intelligence, and I was eventually asked to leave my friend’s apartment, a place I had been visiting regularly ever since he moved there. 

This came after Israel killed a member of the Lebanese Forces, claiming that the intended target had been a Hezbollah operative. The Israeli war, the indiscriminate targeting of Hezbollah’s social environment even in places of displacement, and the presence of party and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials in civilian areas, all layered onto a long legacy of communal distrust dating back to the Lebanese Civil War, created a volatile and deeply complex reality. It reinforced suspicion and fear that every “Shiite” was automatically a Hezbollah member, including me, despite my three earrings, my opposition to the party’s policies, and to the so-called “support war” that dragged us into catastrophe.

It was as though the old myth of the mosque embracing the church no longer held any meaning, and each side had quietly returned to its trench.

I could not process what I had heard. In that moment, I felt as though the entire country had closed in on me. There was nowhere left that could hold me. Not the southern suburbs, which never truly felt like me, even though I had been forced to live there in my grandmother’s home after losing my job. Not Achrafieh, where I had lived while I was working. Nor Dekwaneh, where I had fled to escape the Israeli bombardment falling upon us.

Where do we go when our own country no longer has room for us?

I packed my belongings and went to Istanbul, the city my Lebanese passport allows me to escape to whenever things fall apart. I cried the entire way as we boarded the plane. I felt as though my homeland was spitting me out into a vast, cold, and frightening exile. It was as if I had forgotten everything I once knew, as if I were trapped inside a giant labyrinth, endless and terrifying. 

In Istanbul, I did not know how to begin. It is a massive city, one I usually love, yet deeply fear. I feel as though it could swallow me whole the moment I allow myself to grieve or stop running for even an instant. I search for familiar faces, familiar voices, for some small thing that might reconnect me to who I was before I was uprooted.

They say that Istanbul is a city of transit. And I, like so many others, remain trapped within that passage. We live between two places: one we left behind but that never truly left us, and another we are trying to reach without knowing whether it will ever receive us.

There is something unbearably painful in realizing that your own country cannot contain you, that you are forced to search for a home in other countries you already know will never truly embrace you.

To find yourself walking down a road you spent so long trying to avoid, after paying for that resistance with pieces of yourself. To have your spirit slowly drained by your own homeland.

It pains me to surrender to leaving. And it pains me, too, to think of the self I almost lost in Lebanon, the self I am still trying to protect, however little of it remains.

What happens to us after we are stripped away from our homelands? Other countries do not receive us easily, so we spend our time trying to adapt, trying to build a fragile sense of belonging that never fully resembles us. We search for small homelands within larger ones:

people who resemble us in experience, in loss, in exile. We gather around one another and build substitute families.

Our souls split into two halves: one remains there, where we left it behind, while the other struggles to begin again without knowing how.

I think of all those who were forcibly torn away from their homelands. Does exile ever end? Do we ever find substitute homelands? As Fairuz sings: “And here I am, inhabiting emptiness, displaced from my people twice, living in absence twice…”

Can emptiness itself become a homeland?