I Do not remember why I started writing. And I never considered myself a reporter although I worked exclusively for Annahar newspaper for 30 years before resigning in July 2023.
At 21, I was too afraid to pursue a career in acting. A lifelong dream. And at the time, my destiny. Or so I believed.
I was too afraid to try anything.
My father, prominent writer and Senior journalist for Annahar newspaper, Elias El Dairy, decided I will be a journalist.
And for 30 years, I wrote my heart out about all the subjects under the sun.
I never wrote in a traditional manner. I believe i daydreamed through University years where I learned how to be a journalist.
Everyone in the newspaper accepted that I was different. Not special. Or prodigiously talented. Just different. I could see people. I could write stories about them. I could discover them.
And so they allowed me to do my thing for 30 years.
Then one day, I decided to leave the only home I have ever known.
A young girl of 21 sat in the corner. Well, different corners in the newspaper, and wrote her heart out in so many different styles, she really should have been fired.
A younger girl of 51, decided to leave that corner on a glorious day when she felt particularly courageous. Not knowing where she was going. Not really caring. For if I have learned anything in life, it is what my father taught me:
"We must always know when to leave".
I spent a whole year and whole lotta money experimenting. Visiting luxurious hotels, splurging in expensive and trendy beauty products and cremes, indulging in all the different types of massages and facials, eating all genres of food that I had never thought of before. Walking the Streets of Beirut as though I needed to see it for the first time.
For as you might have guessed, daydreaming takes a lot of times the place of real living.
I was determined that I would make a living selling coffee. Selling a product or two from Turkey. buying property. Selling second hand books.
But I would never go back to writing again.
30 years are more than enough of a life sentence.
I decorated my new apartment. I cooked. Everywhere I went, people thought I was a really, really rich woman who could afford anything.
I was simply hungry for life.
Desperately searching For a way to fall in love with life again.
I lived with my father and mother for 51 Years before they left this earth one after the other earlier this year. They were my world, my companions, my friends, my children.
I had the courage to close the door in the face of a love story that was never really a love story.
Suddenly, I was no longer a reporter.
No longer a daughter.
No longer an occasional lover.
And I desperately searched for anything to validate my existence. To feel some sympathy for this life again.
And slowly, slowly, as grieving took its final shape, I remembered that I am a writer, A mother of 2 unbearably spoiled fur daughters, and many stray fur babies here and there, And that surprisingly, I was still a woman. Perhaps even more so now, than I was in my 20s and 30s and 40s.
Everything inspired me once again to write about it. To turn it into a story.
I was a lover of life. And frankly, I never once cared what society thought about me or the way I chose to live my days.
Nothing and no one was going to stop me from breathing again. No role predetermined by society.
I was my own person.
Finally, at 52.
My blog will be different. Not special. Just Different. Real.
For that is the only way I know how to do this thing called life.
There will be Art, Cooking, Luxury, Street life, Travels, Restaurants, Hotels, Short Stories, Satiric personal translations, Pictures, Exhibitions, Decor, design.
I could Have been anyone in this life.
Instead, I always chose to be me.
AR 
EN