A Lifetime and a Thousand Sorrows

I have lived only twenty-three years, but my soul feels ancient, weathered by sorrows that began before my first breath. They say children are born innocent, but I think some of us come already acquainted with grief, as if we spent those nine months in the womb learning the world's lamentations by heart.

My mother tells me I was born crying…not the healthy wail of newborns demanding oxygen, but something different ,more knowing. The midwife, an old woman whose wrinkling hands had delivered half the neighborhood, crossed herself and whispered that some babies come into the world already mourning what they will lose. I think she was right.

The first sorrow I remember was not my own. I was four, maybe five, sitting on my grandmother's lap while she peeled oranges with surgical precision, each spiral of peel falling unbroken into her cupped palm. The radio was playing in the background, Arabic voices speaking of numbers that meant nothing to me then…casualties, displaced persons, refugee camps. But I felt my grandmother's body tense beneath me, felt the way her breath caught between her ribs like a trapped bird.

"Teta," I asked, "why are you crying?"

She wiped her eyes with the back of her tumeric-stained hand and said, "Some tears, habibti, are older than the person who cries them."

I didn't understand then, but I do now. I carry tears that began falling in 1948, in 1967, in 1987, tears that have been passed down like heirloom jewelry, precious and painful in equal measure. My grandmother's sorrow became my mother's became mine, an inheritance more certain than eye color or the curve of our stubborn chins.

By the time I was eight, I had learned the linguistics of loss. Not from textbooks, but from the way my father's voice changed when he spoke of villages that existed only in his memory, of olive trees that had grown for centuries until they were uprooted in a single afternoon to make way for settlements with names that sounded like promises but felt like erasures.

I memorized the names of places I would never see: Haifa, where my great-aunt used to sell jasmine flowers in the old market before the exodus scattered our family like seeds in a windstorm. Jaffa, where my grandfather's brother once owned an orange grove so vast that the scent carried for miles on summer evenings. These places lived in our kitchen table conversations, in the deliberate way my elders pronounced each syllable, as if speaking them correctly could somehow bring them back.

The sorrows multiplied as I grew older, each year adding new layers to my understanding of what it meant to love a homeland from a distance. I wept for cousins I had never met when news came of another incursion, another "military operation," another round of collective punishment disguised as security measures. I learned to mourn strangers with the intimacy usually reserved for family, because in the arithmetic of displacement, every Palestinian death diminishes the whole.

But it wasn't only Palestinian sorrow that found its way into my chest. By twelve, I was collecting griefs from across the globe like other children collected stamps. The Rwandan genocide, learned not from history books but from a documentary I was too young to watch but old enough to absorb into my nightmares. The Bosnian women, violated and murdered while the world debated the definition of genocide. The Armenian grandmothers, still waiting for recognition that their parents' deaths mattered, that their suffering had a name.

I became fluent in the language of atrocity, could conjugate ethnic cleansing in past and present tense, could decline humanitarian crisis across multiple geographies and time periods. My teachers worried about my book choices. Why was a thirteen-year-old reading Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan? They suggested lighter reading, age-appropriate fiction, stories with happy endings.

But how do you explain to well-meaning adults that some children are born with an overdeveloped empathy gene, that some hearts are designed to be too large for their own good? How do you tell them that the happy endings felt like lies when you knew too much about how stories really ended for most people in most places?

High school brought new sorrows, more personal this time. The slow dissolution of my parents' marriage, conducted in whispered arguments behind bedroom doors that might as well have been megaphones for how clearly the sound traveled through our thin walls. I learned that love could die by degrees, suffocated by the burden of unspoken disappointments and dreams deferred too long.

My father began staying late at the office, claiming overtime but smelling of cigarettes and loneliness when he finally came home. My mother compensated by cooking elaborate meals that no one had appetite for, filling the silence with the percussion of chopping vegetables and the sizzle of oil in hot pans. I sat at the kitchen table doing homework while she cooked, both of us pretending that the cautious distance my parents maintained around each other was normal, that families were supposed to orbit each other like polite strangers.

The divorce papers came in on a Tuesday. I remember because I was studying for a history exam about the partition of India, and the irony was not lost on me. Another family divided, another map redrawn, another set of people learning to navigate new borders where none had existed before.

College brought intellectual sorrows, the kind that come from understanding too much about how the world works. Philosophy classes that taught me about the banality of evil, economics courses that explained why poverty was profitable, political science seminars that dissected the machinery of oppression with academic precision. I learned that injustice was not an accident but an industry, not a bug but a feature of systems designed to concentrate power in the hands of those already holding it.

I fell in love with a boy whose grandfather had fled the Holocaust, and together we created a small museum of inherited trauma, comparing notes on how genocide travels through generations, how survival can be its own form of suffering. We didn’t work out not because we stopped loving each other, but because the weight of our collective grief became too heavy for two twenty-year-olds to navigate together. Some relationships, we learned, are casualties of caring too much about a world that seems determined to break your heart daily.

The sorrows evolved as I entered my twenties, becoming more complex, more nuanced. The Syrian refugees I volunteered with at the local mosque, whose children drew pictures of homes they might never see again, whose mothers aged years in the span of months as they waited for news of family members left behind. The elderly Palestinian man who came to our interfaith dialogue sessions, who spoke of nakba with the precision of someone who had spent seventy years perfecting the art of explaining loss to people who had never lost a country.

I started having dreams where I was simultaneously eight years old and eighty, carrying both the innocence of childhood and the weariness of someone who had witnessed too many endings. In these dreams, I walked through landscapes that floated between my grandmother's village and refugee camps I had only seen in photographs, speaking to people in languages I had never learned but somehow understood.

My therapist, Dr. Martinez, a patient woman with kind eyes and an unlimited supply of tissues, helped me understand that I was experiencing what she called "empathic overwhelm". The psychological equivalent of trying to drink from a fire hose of global suffering. She taught me breathing exercises and boundary-setting techniques, suggested that I limit my news consumption and practice what she called "radical self-care."

But how do you practice self-care when self-care feels like abandonment? How do you protect your mental health without feeling like you're turning your back on people who don't have the luxury of looking away? These were questions Dr. Martinez couldn't answer, questions that resided in my chest like stone statues.

The pandemic brought new sorrows, but also a strange kind of validation. Suddenly, everyone understood what it felt like to grief for strangers, to mourn people they had never met, to feel helpless in the face of systemic failure. The whole world got a crash course in collective trauma, in the exhilarating exhaustion that comes from caring about numbers that rise relentlessly,death tolls, infection rates, unemployment statistics.

But for those of us who had been shouldering the world's grief long before COVID-19, the pandemic felt familiar. We already knew how to mourn in isolation, how to process loss without closure, how to love people we would never be able to save. We had been practicing for this particular kind of helplessness our entire lives.

Now, at twenty-three, I have learned to house my thousand sorrows like tasbih,prayer beads,each one distinct but part of a larger pattern, each one smooth from handling, worn by constant attention. I have discovered that sorrow, when held long enough, transforms into something else,not optimism exactly, but a fierce tenderness, a determination to witness what others would prefer to forget.

I still cry at news reports, still stay up too late reading about conflicts in countries I may never visit. But I have also learned that sorrow can be generative, that grief can grow gardens, that the heart broken open becomes spacious enough to hold both devastation and hope simultaneously.

My mother worries that I feel too much, love too widely, care too deeply about strangers who will never know my name. She fears I will exhaust myself on other people's pain, burn out before I have a chance to build a life of my own. But I think she misunderstands the nature of the gift I was given.

…or the burden, depending on how you look at it.

This capacity for sorrow is not separate from my capacity for joy. They are the same muscle, stretched by practice, strengthened by use. The heart that breaks for Gazan children also soars for Pakistani poets, weeps for Afghan women and celebrates Sudanese revolutionaries. Love and grief are not opposites but partners in the dance of being fully human in an inhumane world.

So yes, I have lived only twenty-three years and already accumulated a thousand sorrows. But I have also collected a thousand small miracles,the taste of my grandmother's herbal tea, still perfectly sweet after all these years; the sound of children laughing in three languages in the playground outside my apartment; the way morning light falls across my Mussolah like a daily promise that beauty persists despite everything.

This is what I have learned from a lifetime of loving too much: that sorrow is not the opposite of hope but its deepest expression, that to grieve is to acknowledge that what is lost mattered, that the heart's capacity for pain is matched only by its capacity for love. And in a world that often seems determined to numb us to others' suffering, perhaps the real radical act is simply to feel it all. To remain tender, to stay broken open, to let the sorrows flow through you like water through cupped hands.

A lifetime and a thousand sorrows, and somehow, impossibly, room for a thousand more.

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From the POV of a twenty three years old Palestinian refugee girl.