u/-170cm

A chapter from my biography book that I would like to share.

She gave me an iPhone as a gift. He bought it for her.

I stepped off that plane from military academy at twenty-one thinking the hard part was behind me. Commissioned officer. Salary. A posture that a year of elite military drilling had permanently carved into my spine. I had been shot at the Black Mountains. I had survived a tank rollover in Yemen. I had been bitten by a snake I genuinely, voluntarily jumped on in a Red Zone. Whatever was waiting for me back in home couldn’t possibly be harder than any of that.

I was catastrophically wrong.

She had been there through all of Sandhurst. Not physically digitally. A Twitter account, a voice, a presence that existed entirely in the gaps between training days when I needed something to hold onto. The kind of connection that feels perfect precisely because there’s no friction in it. No reality to bump against. She was exactly what I needed her to be, because I was filling in every blank myself.

Then I came home and she was real.

Before I’d even properly landed back in my own life, the push started. Marriage. Timelines. Families meeting families. Boxes being checked with the efficiency of someone who had been planning this while I was still in the field. I kept moving because the momentum wouldn’t let me stop and somewhere in the middle of all those meetings and formalities, two things flagged in my gut immediately and my pride overruled just as fast.

She was four years older than me. And she was significantly taller.

I know exactly how that sounds. But I was a man who had just spent a year being the smallest person in every room at one of the most demanding military academies in the world, fighting for every inch of respect I had. Standing next to her, I felt something I had no interest in feeling again. Small. Quietly, persistently small.

My gut said slow down.

I didn’t listen.

We got engaged. I negotiated a one-year window before the wedding told myself it was to build a proper house, get things in order, do it right. The truth? I needed to breathe. I needed to stand still long enough to actually hear myself think.

I never got that quiet.

She had no job. She had expensive taste. Gifts appeared generous, brand-name, the kind that people give when money isn’t something they’re worried about. A new iPhone showed up one day. I thanked her. I moved on. I was raised not to ask those questions.

I was an idiot.

The afternoon everything unraveled was completely ordinary. We were in my kitchen. Cooking something. Talking about nothing. Her phone was on the counter and a WhatsApp notification lit up the screen contact name: Moh’d and the message was four words I will not forget for the rest of my life.

Call me soon, babe.

Two red hearts.

I looked at it for maybe two seconds. Then I looked away. Then I kept chopping whatever I was chopping, and I did not say a single word, and my head went completely, utterly silent.

Not angry. Not panicked. Just — gone. Like a room after a power cut. Everything still there. The light completely out.

I faked an urgent call. Asked her to unlock her phone so I could write down a number. In the half-second she handed it over, I saw enough. I copied the conversation to my own account. Deleted the evidence. Handed the phone back with a steady hand and a face I was controlling with everything I had.

She noticed me zoning out. Tilted her head. Asked if I was okay.

I said I was fine.

I chose a public place to have the conversation. Deliberately. Because I knew what I was capable of and I wasn’t entirely confident I could stay measured somewhere private.

I put it all on the table. Calmly. Completely.

Her face said everything before her mouth did. I gave her space to speak, to explain, to offer anything that might shift the weight of what was sitting between us. And she did speak. What she said didn’t make it better. It made it worse in a different direction.

She was lonely. She was boxed in by the walls our religion draws around women and the men they’re permitted to know. She had found something online that felt like love, because everything real had been closed off to her.

I understood the loneliness. I genuinely did.

What I could not get past — what I still can’t fully reconcile — was the calculation beneath it. Because it wasn’t just an emotional affair.

The iPhone she had given me as a gift.

He had bought it for her. She had passed it along to me.

I drove home that night and I didn’t feel angry. I felt something worse than angry. I felt stupid. The specific, corrosive stupidity of realising you missed something that was never that well hidden. I went over every moment in my head and I found the signs — sitting there quietly the whole time, waiting to be noticed.

I had not noticed.

She showed up at my door the next morning. Banging. Crying. On her knees.

Nobody in my family knew any of this yet. Just us. I pulled her inside, closed the door, and looked at her — and something shifted that I didn’t expect. Not softness. The complete opposite of softness.

“This is not acceptable. You do not show up like this. You do not involve anyone in what is between us until we reach a conclusion together. Act like an adult. Compose yourself. And do not cross that line again.”

That was all I said. I meant every word. I have not regretted a single one.

I went on a short work trip. When I came back, I had made my decision. I prepared the documents. I went to court.

She had beaten me there.

Two days. That was all it took. She had hired a lawyer, filed for divorce, named herself the victim, and was demanding ten thousand dollars in compensation for emotional distress and defamation of character.

I was twenty-one. No lawyer. No guidance. No one who had warned me this was something I needed to prepare for. I stood in that courtroom surrounded by legal professionals on every side and I could not speak — one wrong word would have buried me. I requested the judge review my documents instead. Then I stood in the quiet of that room and waited.

My father arrived. My brother arrived. They had heard. They came anyway.

Two hours later, the court reached its decision.

I was granted the divorce. She received nothing. Her status changed from single to divorced.

I drove home a different person than the one who had walked through those doors that morning. Not stronger yet. Not wiser yet. Just different. Something had been removed, and the space where it had been was still raw and open, and I didn’t know yet what was going to fill it.

I was twenty-one. And I am genuinely grateful it happened at twenty-one and not thirty-five. Grateful there were no children, no mortgage, no life so interlocked with another person’s that getting out becomes its own kind of wreckage.

I lived my mistakes in the right season.

I wouldn’t trade a day of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I might be in the wrong community, but I read a couple of posts that gave me a small push to post a piece that i wrote as a biography of a book I have decided to write when I was 17.

years ago my English teacher once assigned us a three-day personal journal as a class project.

I handed in an absolute disaster. Spelling errors throughout, grammar that had clearly never met a rulebook, and zero filter just my actual life, written down exactly as I was living it. No performance, no polish. The kind of writing that makes English teachers question their career choices.

I got a low grade. Naturally.

But apparently also the best content in the class.

I'm still not sure what to do with that information.

What I do know is that something stuck after that assignment. Not the grade. Not the embarrassment. The idea. It sat in my head for weeks — this quiet thought that I should keep going. Keep writing, stack the journals, and leave them sealed until graduation. Then open them all at once and have a proper laugh at whoever I used to be.

So that's what I did.

Graduation came. I read the oldest entry first and worked my way forward. What I didn't expect was how unsettling it would be not in a bad way, but in the way that stops you mid-page. You could watch the thinking change. The mood shifting from one entry to the next, pulling the writing with it. The same person, completely unrecognizable across time.

I couldn't stop.

I kept writing. And I made myself one rule that I haven't broken since: no going back. No correcting the old spelling. No smoothing out the grammar. No reframing the past into something more presentable than it actually was. Whatever I wrote, I wrote. It stays exactly as it is. The truth doesn't get a second draft.

I'm in my mid-thirties now.

This thing has been building for over twenty years. I am in absolutely no rush to finish it because finishing it would mean something I don't want to think about yet. I still go back and read it every now and then. Not to edit. Just to remember. Sometimes to cringe. Occasionally to smile at a version of myself I'd completely forgotten existed.

Recently, I let AI fix the English in some of it not to polish it, but because even I couldn't decode what I was trying to say at seventeen. It helped. The voice is still mine. The chaos is still intact.

But here's the part that changed why I write it at all.

At some point it stopped being just for me. I started thinking about my children who don't exist yet in the pages I'm still writing, but do now in real life. And I thought: when I'm gone, or old, or just faded in the way people fade I want them to be able to open this and know exactly who their father was before he became their father. The full version. Not the edited one.

That's the book. No outline. No deadline. No map.

Just a man writing his life while he's still inside it bad grammar, twenty years of accumulated honesty, and apparently one encouraging English teacher who had no idea what she was starting.

My English teacher once assigned us a three-day personal journal as a class project.

I handed in an absolute disaster. Spelling errors throughout, grammar that had clearly never met a rulebook, and zero filter just my actual life, written down exactly as I was living it. No performance, no polish. The kind of writing that makes English teachers question their career choices.

I got a low grade. Naturally.

But apparently also the best content in the class.

I'm still not sure what to do with that information.

What I do know is that something stuck after that assignment. Not the grade. Not the embarrassment. The idea. It sat in my head for weeks — this quiet thought that I should keep going. Keep writing, stack the journals, and leave them sealed until graduation. Then open them all at once and have a proper laugh at whoever I used to be.

So that's what I did.

Graduation came. I read the oldest entry first and worked my way forward. What I didn't expect was how unsettling it would be not in a bad way, but in the way that stops you mid-page. You could watch the thinking change. The mood shifting from one entry to the next, pulling the writing with it. The same person, completely unrecognizable across time.

I couldn't stop.

I kept writing. And I made myself one rule that I haven't broken since: no going back. No correcting the old spelling. No smoothing out the grammar. No reframing the past into something more presentable than it actually was. Whatever I wrote, I wrote. It stays exactly as it is. The truth doesn't get a second draft.

I'm in my mid-thirties now.

This thing has been building for over twenty years. I am in absolutely no rush to finish it because finishing it would mean something I don't want to think about yet. I still go back and read it every now and then. Not to edit. Just to remember. Sometimes to cringe. Occasionally to smile at a version of myself I'd completely forgotten existed.

Recently, I let AI fix the English in some of it not to polish it, but because even I couldn't decode what I was trying to say at seventeen and english is my second language so lets say It helped. The voice is still mine. The chaos is still intact.

But here's the part that changed why I write it at all.

At some point it stopped being just for me. I started thinking about my children who don't exist yet in the pages I'm still writing, but do now in real life. And I thought: when I'm gone, or old, or just faded in the way people fade I want them to be able to open this and know exactly who their father was before he became their father. The full version. Not the edited one.

That's the book. No outline. No deadline. No map.

To the Version of Me That Made It.

We made it.

I'm a 90s kid. Which means if you share that timeline, you already know the blueprint we were handed. Obedience was the baseline. Showing weakness wasn't an option. You didn't talk about your feelings, you buried them. Mental health was something nobody had a word for, let alone a conversation about. You listened to adults, asked no questions, and whatever you were carrying inside, you carried alone.

Was that what built our resilience? Or is it what left a lot of us quietly damaged without ever knowing it?

Here's the thing though, I don't carry resentment toward that generation. They parented from the only playbook they had, which was the one passed down to them. The problem was never cruelty. It was the absence of knowledge and access to better. I can acknowledge the damage without holding a grudge. Most of them, at least.

What I can't do is pass that same playbook to my son.

But then I look at the alternative being served up today and I'm equally unconvinced. The pendulum has swung so hard in the opposite direction that we've somehow landed in a place where giving a toddler unrestricted screen time gets rebranded as preparing them for the future. Social media has appointed itself the authority on child-rearing, and its verdict is that your kid must be praised for everything, protected from anything uncomfortable, and handed a microphone before they've learned how to hold a conversation. And the most painful part? We sit there scrolling and judging, while doing the exact same thing.

You see the results everywhere. Children who fall apart the second things don't go their way. Young people who find ordinary human interaction genuinely overwhelming. Parents who have confused love with the inability to draw a single boundary.

That's not progress. It's just dysfunction wearing a different outfit.

So what's the actual answer for those of us who refuse both extremes? I'm not raising my child on silence and suppression. But I'm also not outsourcing his upbringing to trending parenting philosophies that change every six months.

The version I'm chasing looks something like this: a person who can feel things deeply without crumbling under them. Who carries himself with confidence but never at someone else's expense. Who can navigate the digital world without disappearing into it. Someone grounded, in who he is, where he comes from, and what he believes while still being equipped for a future that looks nothing like anything we could have imagined growing up.

That's a difficult thing to build. It requires more consistency and self-awareness than any of us were probably taught.

So I'm genuinely asking, those of you who recently became parents, which direction are you moving? Back toward the way you were brought up? Forward into whatever the internet is currently recommending? Or are you somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, improvising as you go?

Because I suspect most of us are quietly standing in the same spot. Far enough from our own childhoods to see the cracks clearly. Skeptical enough of the current narrative to not swallow it whole. And honest enough to admit that despite all that awareness, we're still largely figuring this out as we go.

I'm a 90s kid. Which means if you share that timeline, you already know the blueprint we were handed. Obedience was the baseline. Showing weakness wasn't an option. You didn't talk about your feelings, you buried them. Mental health was something nobody had a word for, let alone a conversation about. You listened to adults, asked no questions, and whatever you were carrying inside, you carried alone.

Was that what built our resilience? Or is it what left a lot of us quietly damaged without ever knowing it?

Here's the thing though, I don't carry resentment toward that generation. They parented from the only playbook they had, which was the one passed down to them. The problem was never cruelty. It was the absence of knowledge and access to better. I can acknowledge the damage without holding a grudge. Most of them, at least.

What I can't do is pass that same playbook to my son.

But then I look at the alternative being served up today and I'm equally unconvinced. The pendulum has swung so hard in the opposite direction that we've somehow landed in a place where giving a toddler unrestricted screen time gets rebranded as preparing them for the future. Social media has appointed itself the authority on child-rearing, and its verdict is that your kid must be praised for everything, protected from anything uncomfortable, and handed a microphone before they've learned how to hold a conversation. And the most painful part? We sit there scrolling and judging, while doing the exact same thing.

You see the results everywhere. Children who fall apart the second things don't go their way. Young people who find ordinary human interaction genuinely overwhelming. Parents who have confused love with the inability to draw a single boundary.

That's not progress. It's just dysfunction wearing a different outfit.

So what's the actual answer for those of us who refuse both extremes? I'm not raising my child on silence and suppression. But I'm also not outsourcing his upbringing to trending parenting philosophies that change every six months.

The version I'm chasing looks something like this: a person who can feel things deeply without crumbling under them. Who carries himself with confidence but never at someone else's expense. Who can navigate the digital world without disappearing into it. Someone grounded, in who he is, where he comes from, and what he believes — while still being equipped for a future that looks nothing like anything we could have imagined growing up.

That's a difficult thing to build. It requires more consistency and self-awareness than any of us were probably taught.

So I'm genuinely asking, those of you who recently became parents, which direction are you moving? Back toward the way you were brought up? Forward into whatever the internet is currently recommending? Or are you somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, improvising as you go?

Because I suspect most of us are quietly standing in the same spot. Far enough from our own childhoods to see the cracks clearly. Skeptical enough of the current narrative to not swallow it whole. And honest enough to admit that despite all that awareness, we're still largely figuring this out as we go.

This might be a long post but bear with me especially new parents, I became a father recently, and I haven't slept properly since, though I'm told that's just the beginning.

But somewhere between the 3am feeds and the fog of new parenthood, I keep thinking about one thing: how on earth do I raise this kid?

I grew up in the 90s. If you did too, you know exactly what that looked like!!

A parenting style built on authority, toughness, and a general belief that children were supposed to be seen and not heard. "Emotions" weren't discussed. Mental health wasn't a conversation. You respected your elders without question, took what you were given, and figured the rest out on your own.

Thats what made us tough? or somehow broken from the inside too.. I'm not saying it was wrong, because our parents did what they knew and how they were raised. The issue wasn't bad intentions, it was a lack of info, awareness, and tools that simply didn't exist at the time. I genuinely don't blame babyboomers or our parents for that. "not the majority"

But I also know I don't want to repeat it.

At the same time, I look at what society is pushing today and I'm not fully buying that either. We've swung so far in the other direction that raising a child now sometimes looks like handing them an iPad at age two and calling it "digital literacy." Every scroll on social media tells you your child needs to be validated for everything, shielded from every discomfort, and given a platform before they can even read. I see kids who can't sit with boredom for five minutes, god we're becoming just as them but even though teenagers who struggle with basic social interaction, and parents who are so afraid of saying "no" that they've stopped saying anything at all. whats that all about?

That's not balance. That's overcorrection with good branding, thats my point of view.

So where does that leave those of us who are genuinely trying to think this through? I don't wanna raise my child the way I was raised. But I also refuse to hand him over to whatever algorithm decides what a "healthy childhood" looks like this week.

What I'm actually after is the middle, and I'm not sure how to find it.

emotionally aware is key without being fragile. Confident without being entitled. Connected to technology without being consumed by it. Rooted in his identity, his faith, and his family, while still being prepared for a world that looks nothing like the one we grew up in.

its a tough job to commit doing if you don't have the patient or strength for it! I'm curious about other new parents, and especially here in Bahrain. When you held your kid for the first time, what did you decide? Are you following the parenting you experienced growing up? Are you going with what society and social media are pushing? Or are you trying to build something in between and if so, how?

Because I think a lot of us are standing in the same place silently, old enough to see the gaps in how we were raised, aware enough to see the traps in what's being sold to us now, and just new enough at this whole thing to still be genuinely lost.