Issue 9: A return "home"

"So, where are you from?"

Dearest reader,

“Where are you from” has, for as long as I can remember, been a difficult question for me to answer. My response usually depends on a wide range of contextual information (e.g. who’s asking, where I’m being asked, the degree to which I’m willing, in that particular moment, to be vulnerable, etc). It also typically involves the synthesis of a wide variety of unconscious cues I’m taking in from people and the environment around me. And, upon being asked, this process of collecting and synthesizing such cues tends to amplify intensely.

You may understandably be wondering, “What’s wrong with you? It’s a simple question.” And you’re right. It is simple. And yet I continue to struggle with establishing and committing to a clear, uncomplicated response.

And so, in today’s letter, I take a moment to ponder this question with you.

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was May of 1994. Uptown, from what I recall my parents telling me. My dad was not working and spent his days (and nights, I presume) at home taking care of me while my mom was in the process of completing a medical residency in Minneapolis at—if my memory serves me right—Fairview Health. Upon completion of her residency, my mom persuaded my dad to get a job as a geophysicist at Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, which is where my family moved in 1996. My grandfather was facing some health challenges at the time, and my mom wanted to be close to him and the rest of her family in Khobar. I was two years old. Soon after we arrived in Saudi, my sister was born.

Ages two through eighteen were spent in Dhahran. This was the period I associate most with the word “stability” as I reflect back on my life thus far. Both my parents worked at Saudi Aramco (Mom a family physician, Dad a geophysicist), we lived on a company compound, my siblings and I attended the local (“company”) schools, we spent a lot of time with my mom’s extended family (I cherished time spent with my cousins more than anything), and we lived in the same house for the entirety of our time on the “camp”. My brother was born and joined our family in 2007, and from seventh grade through the end of high school, I have memories of the five of us—a complete family—living together, traveling together, and sharing rituals under the same roof.

Something I feel compelled to share is that the house we lived in, this house where I and my siblings established many of our first friendships and formative memories, where we first began to individuate—was never “ours”. The house was company property, on a company-owned residential compound, and living in the house was entirely contingent upon our parents’ (well, mainly our father’s) employment at the company. If anything were to happen to that employment—if he retired, left voluntarily, or e.g. indicated any sign of solidarity with the 2011 pro-democracy protests occurring in neighboring Bahrain—we’d be, most likely, forced to leave the country and would be in pursuit of “home” elsewhere. Where, exactly, we’d search, I think remained an open question. My father didn’t seem to have any desire to return to his hometown of Lewiston, New York, and, despite the fact that we were her family, my mother was inherently limited in her ability to provide us with a secure home in Saudi due to restrictions mainly relating to the fact that she was not born a man.

And so, we lived in Aramco.

Impermanence, from where I sat, seemed to be built into the structures of Aramco by design. The company seemed to want you there for a long time but explicitly not too long. To establish roots, yes, but to ensure they were shallow roots—nothing too deep. You can exist, yes, but it better damn well be on the terms of the company.

The company provided education for the kids of employees from kindergarten through ninth grade¹. I attended these schools throughout this entire range, and it was in these schools where I experienced many formative moments of my life. I remember developing my first crush (fifth grade), making my first best friend (RIP), experiencing my first kiss (seventh grade, astaghfirullah), trying hashish for the first time (also seventh grade, astaghfirullah), drinking moonshine (siddiqui or “sid” as the ajanib/foreigners called it, eighth grade, major astaghfirullah) and taking a songwriting class in eighth grade that, in many ways, was my entry point into the worlds of digital music production and writing—crafts that would establish themselves as the bedrock of my means of expression in this world for over a decade to come.

Where today’s letter was written. Captured on iPhone (while sweating).

Ironically, the cafe from which I now sit to compile and share these fragmented memories and reflections with you is in Minneapolis. Uptown, just over a mile away from the house my parents lived in when I was born. It’s May of 2023. I’m 28 and will turn 29 within a couple weeks. I moved out of the studio apartment I was renting in New York last weekend, marking the end of a 32-month chapter in the city, which followed eight years in Boston prior to that, inclusive of my time in college and time spent at my first engineering job after college.

The main reason I decided to return to Minneapolis is that I could, frankly, no longer afford to maintain the lifestyle I developed in New York. Living in New York was incredibly fun when I had a steady flow of income coming in each month, but as soon as that paused, the inconvenient voice of reality made it very clear that, unless I made a significant change, the runway ahead of me would dry up quite rapidly.

And so I chose to simplify. I’m lucky to have access to a house in Minneapolis that serves as a kind of “safe haven” for myself and my siblings, should we ever need it (alhamdulillah), and it’s from this house where I’ll be living and continuing to work on music (and other miscellaneous things, such as reading and re-reading copious amounts of Nassim Taleb) for the weeks to come, if not longer. Today marks the third full day since I left New York, and I’m encouraged to share that the main thing I’ve felt over these past few days is a generalized “slowing down” and “calm” that I’m ready to embrace for a bit.

Until next week.

Love,
Reef

1. Unless you were a family with a male Saudi patriarch. This fits into a larger/longer story; Aramco maintained many discriminatory practices, explicit and implicit, while I lived there. The color of your passport played a highly disproportionate role in how you could expect to be treated—inclusive of whether you could even expect to maintain access to said passport or not.