Middle school

When I was a teenager, I wrote dozens of horror fiction short stories heavily influenced by Stephen King and HP Lovecraft. I realized that my writing style swayed to and fro between the two authors based on whose stories I’d be reading on any given day.

My teenage years were generally unpleasant. My best escape at the time was flexing my writing muscles by quietly typing away into my computer while blasting out black metal.

Yes, I was an angsty teenager.

I then started a poetry forum online, which I shut down three months later because I realized that I enjoyed drafting short stories in private much more than sharing poetry with others. Dozens of short stories [that ended abruptly when the writing itch suddenly disappeared] later, I felt confident in my creativity so long as nobody read my bizarre short stories, always worried of how I’d be perceived.

University

In 2009, I wanted to study English Literature, but ended up studying water and environmental engineering against my will (for reasons that are completely irrelevant to this post).

To make matters worse, the false assumption that I could “re-invent” myself socially by going to a university where nobody knew me crumbled the moment I walked into a class full of my high school colleagues.

Alright, so now I was in university studying something I detest with people who - while pleasant - operated in a completely different time zone than me.

I needed a plan.

I still wanted to write, and with too much free time and too little money, I decided to get paid to write. Knowing that I don’t want to share my horror fiction stories with others [let alone get paid for writing them], I walked up to a publishing agency in Jordan called Al Faridah Publishing. In 2011, I started freelancing with one of their magazines called On Campus Magazine (OCMag), a magazine that targeted university students in Jordan.

At the time, I was reading a lot of content by Vice, which I found interesting but irrelevant to my culture. I wondered why we didn’t have anything like that in Jordan. I felt that I wanted to take the risk and start writing about taboo topics myself. I asked the people running the show in OCMag permission to write about the budding gay scene in Jordan, and - surprisingly - they said OK! Below is a little excerpt of that article:

Naturally, I got some backlash, but that didn’t stop me from covering more offbeat topics.

Shortly afterwards, I was freelancing at 50 Jordanian Dinars (70 USD) an article for Venture Magazine (a business intelligence magazine where I covered topics ranging from drug busts to toll road announcements), VIVMag (a now-defunct woman’s lifestyle magazine), and Trendesign (a magazine that covered "the best in architecture, art, design and décor", where I wrote things like this “gem”).

Soon enough, I suggested that the Al Faridah folks let me write a larger portion of OCMag, and they promptly promoted me to me the editor in chief of OCMag. My weekends were spent drafting most of the magazine’s content, and proofreading in a draconian manner articles submitted by other freelance university students. Looking back, I should have known that the target audience were university students, and therefore should have been less of an asshole about what my other colleagues wrote.

Fast-forward a year: I was 19, and I had a foreign exchange semester in Germany. Surely I was going to find my muse and become a great writer, right?

RIGHT?

Nope. I was terrified by the crippling fear of being outed as a plagiarist because my short stories had remote resemblances to things written by authors I looked up to, so I decided to quit writing fiction altogether - worried that I would be shunned by a world [that hadn’t even read any of my stories!].

To my pleasant surprise a few weeks later, further reading of Stephen King’s stories showed clear parallels to HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I found that it is okay to be influenced by authors you look up to, and that what I was doing was really a trial and error, relying on the literary styles of others as crutches until I can find my own voice.

Unfortunately, that was also the last time I wrote a horror fiction short story. I lost my inspiration and haven’t gotten it back since.

While finishing up an engineering internship in Berlin, my boss - who could clearly tell that engineering depressed me - told me that I should drop that and do what I really love. It was around that time in 2012 that I found out about blockchain and bitcoin. I wanted to see how I could use bitcoin, so I bought my first five coins from bitcoin.de for 9 euros a pop, as shown below:

Not too bad! We won’t talk today about what I spent them on, but let’s just say I became obsessed with with decentralized ecosystems shortly afterwards.

Fueled by my hatred towards civil engineering, and the expectations of Arab parents on “what are you going to do next”, I decided to spend my last year of university scooting by academically and focusing on a little project I called “Humanity Can Wait”. In the same spirit of the article I wrote on the gay community in Jordan, this website was meant to be an outlet for offbeat subcultures in Jordan that very few knew about. I wanted to practice gonzo journalism, and at its peak, Humanity Can Wait had 20+ writers, a couple of photographers, and a graphic/web designer. Article topics ranged from “Where did all the devil worshipers go?” to “How to navigate the dating scene as an expat in Amman”.

Naturally, as with all of my other projects mentioned so far, work on Humanity Can Wait fizzled out, and I took a break from writing.

The Corporate World

It’s was now 2014. I hated engineering so much that I skipped my own graduation and flew to Qatar for a job interview in (surprise!) Civil Engineering.

I knew I hated it, but I also felt a deep regret at being unable to write creative things, and worried that I’d never find joy or make money by writing, so I freelanced to scratch the creative itch again while I meandered along in my 9-to-5 job as an Engineer. It was around that time that I began writing for Bitcoin Magazine and CoinTelegraph.

Feeling that my articles at the time were average at best, I decided to stop writing about cryptocurrency altogether.

Here I began writing for the sake of writing, covering topics from construction projects (for Qatar Construction News - now out of business) to Toilet Paper Manufacturing (yes, I am serious).

After quitting engineering altogether, I stumbled upon insurance and worked as a loss adjuster for three years. For those not familiar with the profession, a loss adjuster investigates insurance claims arising out of losses such as fires, floods, burglaries and accidental damage. My job was to assess and determine the amount of damage or loss covered by a building/construction company/high net worth individual/etc.’s insurance policy.

If you thought construction was manual labor, you haven’t really seen what the back office of an insurance company looks like.

During my time as a loss adjuster, I’d visit a site where a loss occurred (typically a fire), take photographs, draft and edit a templated report, and send it over to an insurer. I must’ve written hundreds of these reports, but remember very few of them. The job was mind-numbing. Often, I’d go to conferences where insurance ‘experts’ wrote about how they need to stop using legacy systems and “digitize” their manual processes.

All I could think about at the time was that the entire concept of insurance back then was a ‘legacy system’. You didn’t need to change the insides of insurance to keep up with the times, you needed to burn it down and rebuild insurance from scratch.

As a loss adjuster, I managed to work on some ridiculous cases, and even flew to the Caribbean [specifically to a small island called Tortola in the British Virgin Islands] briefly, where I lived on a boat while writing insurance reports on the damages caused by Hurricane Irma.

I was fascinated by Tortola. It’s the only Island I know of with Google reviews! One of the residents there told me that it had a population of 20,000, while being home to more than 400,000 offshore companies due to tax reasons. Most of the locals I met there always wore shorts and flipflops, but worked in the treasury of ??? bank, or legally represented a ??? holding company abroad.

My home while I was in Tortola

During my corporate time, I still wrote a bit about why the Arab world urgently needed cryptrocurrency, but I felt that I was only writing half-heartedly. I thought that I had already lost my fascination with blockchain, but then…

The Startup

In a sudden move I quit working as an insurance loss adjuster with barely any plan on what I should do next. I just knew I didn’t want to write reports about fires and hurricanes for the rest of my life.

I loved blockchain, and I did not hate insurance. So I decided that the two should marry, and I decided to create Addenda with my brother. Our goal was to digitize car insurance claim reconciliation between insurance companies (sounds super sexy, right?).

As the “Addenda bros”, we raised some funding, and at our peak, we transacted a few thousand claims between insurers and reconciled more than 30,000,000 AED (~8,000,000 USD). We had 9 clients in the UAE, a proof of concept in Bahrain with 6 insurance companies, and 6 more companies in the pipeline in Kuwait.

Things were going great, right?

Well, yeah. We were still servicing the “legacy systems” that I always wanted to eradicate.

Nobody I knew who worked in insurance grew up wanting to work in insurance.

Nobody I knew looked forward to renewing their insurance policy, either.

Why?

Insurance by definition is ugly, and—

—WAIT, WAIT, WAIT!
Q: God damn it! The title of your post is literally “Why I write”. You’ve talked about everything other than WHY you write.
A: Alright, fine, fine, fine. I’ll talk about my startup later. Sheesh, relax…

Why I write

When I wrote my first horror fiction short story, it was out of curiosity. I wanted to test out my fantasy “world building” capabilities. Writing to me was an escape from a world I (still) cannot understand. At the time, I was scared of what people would think of me if they saw my stories.

The truth is that there’s nothing very special about them. The set and setting of nearly every story I wrote involved mundane people suddenly experiencing a shift in reality. The horror I found fascinating to me was not zombies, ghosts, or monsters, but mental illness.

I was terrified of the concept that you can become a prisoner to your own mind, whether it was resulting from genetic disorders or drug induced psychoses. To me, losing control of your mind probably still is the scariest thing I can think of. Especially because - unlike stories of demons and evil spirits - there are millions of documented cases of people going insane and not coming back.

So, I used to write these stories as a safe way to explore “what’s the worst that could happen”? I didn’t share them with others because I was worried about how I’d be perceived (either as a fraud because of plagiarism, or as a weirdo because of the content).

This post today is probably the first I write in 8+ years that is not written to be published “somewhere” on a random niche topic in a magazine. Rather, I wrote it purely for my own joy. The joy and itch to write is one that I have not felt in so long, and I am glad it is back, regardless of how long it may last this time around.

The challenge I have today, though, is no longer “what would people think about what I write”, but rather “why share what I write?”

I think my problems boil down to this:

• If I write for myself as an outlet, then why publish it?
• If I write for others to view it, then is it out of arrogance? Do I need to stroke my ego by showing others that I have something important to share? Will anybody even learn anything from what I write?
• What if what I write has already been written before?

I’m sorry for the anticlimactic ending: the truth is I don’t know why I write, but I know that I can finally enjoy writing again, and that’s good enough for now.