Dealing with the Devil, Dancing with Death

I was born into contradiction. Nazareth first — an Arab Christian family in a place where Arabs are a minority, squeezed inside a state that pretends at democracy. Then Bethlehem — checkpoints, soldiers, the occupation pressing down on daily life. By the age of seven, I had already crossed borders too many times, already learned that life is lived on both sides of a wall.

My childhood was war. Helicopters shaking the walls, neighbours’ homes blown apart, men in the street with slingshots facing tanks. Nights in basements, hiding under stairs, or in a church with nuns. Rockets overhead, my mother driving fearlessly through bullets so we could escape. Death was close enough that it stopped frightening me. I joked through it. It became the air.

Later came the Gulf, a different planet. Oil wealth, endless houses, luxury cars. I drank young, smoked weed daily by sixteen, numbed myself with women, parties, anything that made me forget what I’d seen. It was easier not to think. But the past always waits. You can only suppress despair for so long before it erupts.

In high school, it hit me. Too much consciousness, as Dostoevsky would say, and I got sick with it. I looked at my life, the unfairness of it, the absurd lottery of being born with one passport instead of another, and I couldn’t stomach it. I wanted to be someone else, to live without weight, to slip into the bubble of extravagance around me. But I couldn’t. My self-love, my ambition, my envy, they collapsed into despair.

Then came Amsterdam. A trip with classmates, a train ride that spun into hallucination or revelation, maybe both. Faces red-eyed, voices whispering, the devil herself leaning in. She told me she could give me everything: fame, money, women, escape. She told me I didn’t need my family. She laughed at me, tempted me, promised me a surreal life if I just said yes.

And for a moment, I considered it. I wanted to take it. But then I felt the debt. My parents, the sacrifices they made, the fear in their eyes when they left Palestine, the pride they carried even in exile. I couldn’t trade them for illusions. The Other, as the philosophers call it, held me back. I refused.

That refusal dropped me into limbo. The world froze. The train stopped. I thought I was dead. And strangely, death brought relief. When I accepted it, the weight slipped off. The trees moved again. The train carried on. Life resumed.

Looking back, I know it was my own consciousness playing tricks, or forcing truths I hadn’t wanted to face. The devil wasn’t real, but the struggle was. Self-love against duty, despair against meaning, freedom against death. I chose family. I chose not to sell myself to emptiness. Was that authenticity, as Heidegger might say? Maybe. Maybe not. But it felt real enough.

And yet, after death brushed me, I couldn’t shake the question Socrates once asked: what does it mean to live a life worth living? He claimed love isn’t just lust or companionship, it’s reproduction, it’s creation, it’s leaving something behind. For some, children. For others, wisdom, virtue, beauty. In other words: the eternal beauty, immortality.

That idea haunts me. Because if life is this absurd, if everything fades, what matters except what we leave behind? My parents gave me their courage, their sacrifices. What will I give? A company? A film? Words that flicker in someone else’s mind for a moment before disappearing? Or a child who carries pieces of me forward?

Sometimes I believe Socrates was right, that the only way to outlast death is to birth something beyond yourself, whether in flesh or in thought. Other times, it feels like another delusion, another story we tell ourselves to make circling the fish bowl bearable.

The lesson I took, if there was one, is that death shadows every choice. Once you’ve stared at it, nothing else looks the same. Love, success, freedom, they all wobble under its weight. And yet, somehow, you keep moving.

But don’t mistake this for redemption. I’m not writing to say I found clarity or peace. I still circle the same questions. I still doubt the value of love, of accomplishment. I still think most of our meaning is a collective delusion. The absurdity remains.

All I can do is keep living with it: eating, working, fucking, writing, laughing when I can. Knowing that the devil is always there, offering me a way out, and death is always there, reminding me that there’s no way out at all.