I used to believe that whittling down my passion for guiding others was the first step in truly affecting change around me. Within the counseling field, I had to discover where I fit professionally. There is community-based therapy, working with adults or minors, acute trauma counseling, stress disorders, couples therapy, and the list goes on. Beyond schooling, internships, continuing education, research, and niche certifications, finding my helping space required an honest and grounded understanding of my own internal landscape. Once I truly reflected, however, I realized that the question is not where I fit, but where would I be of the greatest service and what demographic needs my attention specifically. When I came to Depaul University for my master's I was armed with the knowledge that my life experience is my superpower, this is the same knowledge that I hope to inspire and enmesh into the communities I work with in the future. With the risk of boring anyone who knows and belongs in a helping field, I can explain the need to help as an interwoven combination of hope, love, privilege and curiosity. With that in mind, I know my experience growing up abroad and being raised in a Muslim household are absolutely indicative of where I should focus my professional energy. My professional goals encompass working with girls and women surrounding issues of equality and agency, and I know that community agencies are where I can make the biggest difference. Beyond that, I want to be a safe space within otherwise marginalized communities and carve out my own practice in Islamic and minority communities that provides more than counseling. The reason that I identified privilege as an integral part of the helping field is because I can see my path as being so much different than my peers growing up, and it is my responsibility to extend this privilege to communities that have less access to resources simply because they are “other” at a systematic level. When I think about my life growing up in a Muslim household I think of an anecdote my mother tells my sisters and me at every holiday, birthday, and family gathering. My mother was told she was going to have sons by my father, who once whispered to her a phrase I’ve always felt must have sounded so odd coming from his hushed and heavily accented voice, “We will have sons Habibi, only sons.” My mom likes to tease my dad, “Only sons, huh?” When I pleaded with her at nine years old to let me shave my legs for the first time, or when my little sister insisted she was in love with a boy in the fifth grade, my mother would just sigh and look at my father. “Only sons'' was a story, a comforting illusion that my very Saudi father spuriously invented when my mother became pregnant with my older sister in 1989. This was at the cusp of the first Gulf War– a war that would subsequently cause my mother to flee Jubail as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait spilled over the border into Saudi Arabia. Sons were suppositionally essential for my father, who grew up in a rigorously Muslim household in Riyadh to a powerful but absent father and a mother who shared her husband with four other wives. It was quite the family scandal when, at seventeen, my father ran away from home and six years later returned with a wife from small-town Spokane, Washington. The covert American wedding was a more tolerable pill to swallow than my mother’s ginger red hair and fair skin that burned at first acquaintance with the blazing Saudi sun. I often hear stories of the first time my mother was made to slaughter a goat with her new sisters-in-law, or how she secretly never wore underwear under her Abaya in the 108-degree weather. Her quiet rebellions notwithstanding, my mother was eager to convert to Islam, to return to Saudi after the war ended, and to indulge my father’s quixotic daydream of a male legacy. But five years and three daughters later she reminded my father of an important and almost forgotten stipulation of the fanciful blueprint he had conceived for their future. I can see her hand on his arm, I can hear her own earnest whisper, in his ear this time, “But if we have daughters, we leave.” A man to always keep his word, my father agreed that staying in Riyadh was an unrealistic way to give three little girls a full life, and not long after my younger sister was born we cried our goodbyes at the cramped women-only mosque down the street and left behind the oppressive Saudi heat for a new beginning in the far more progressive and rainy world of London, England. In the years that followed my parents whisked us across the globe as my dad was assigned to new projects in new places. We would spend a year acclimating, learning a new language or instrument or personality and then as impetuous as any expected surprise can be, my parents would sit us down, never before Salat al-maghrib prayer, and tell us it was time to move again. My sisters and I traded the limited and oppressive reality of growing into women in Saudi Arabia for a liberated and fast-paced lifestyle that couldn’t be further from that tiny women’s mosque, always too crowded compared to the large men’s temple next door. Making sense of always being the outsider on such an expeditious scale often felt beyond comprehension as I grew up and attempted to apply my experiences to an identity. To become a woman from a place of constant adaptation took form in obsession of women’s magazines, of small waists and long hair. It presented in skipping meals before school beach trips, and habitually cutting the skirt hems of my school uniforms three inches shorter. The new girl needs to be beautiful, skilled, kind but not simpering. As a younger woman I often oversimplified this phenomenon and wondered if the emancipation that came with my mother’s defiance, “If we have daughters, we leave,” was karmically linked to a new sort of imprisonment. The privilege of ripping my hijab off in the school bathroom traded for the counting of calories, daily prayers at the airless women’s mosque swapped for sucking in my stomach in the girl’s locker room. As I got older though, I was able to understand the patriarchy as a system of oppression that exists in all women’s lives, regardless of which place and time they exist in. I took this youthful revelation to college and majored in Gender, Women, and Sexuality studies, spent four years at the University of Washington’s violence prevention organization, and took it upon myself to educate my traditional father on feminism. My full circle perspective on equality and emancipation has led me to feverishly educate myself on things like how women and girls are disproportionately affected by the Syrian crisis and follow Saudi’s mediocre but inspiring evolution towards women’s autonomy, but most of all it has brought the mental health advocacy of marginalized communities to the forefront of my professional and personal life. Becoming overwhelmed working for a domestic violence organization after college convinced me that to truly be able to advocate for others meant learning more about trauma and the psychological markers it leaves behind. In 2018 I went back to school and took psychology courses while becoming a certified peer counselor in my state. Working in nonprofit mental health organizations illustrated the disproportionality of trauma and the stigma surrounding it being dependent on the socio-economic and racial factors of the individual, and demonstrated the steep imbalance of the availability of mental health services in the first place. I began to see oppression as something that comes hand in hand with being the other and exists beyond gender– it is wholly woven through the human experience. The intricate interplay of wider systematic inequalities is something I will always have to challenge myself to unravel in future practice. Working in mental health nonprofits also taught me that these types of organizations have the biggest direct impact on those in need, identifying the need however, that is the work that lies in front of me. I intend to become a licensed counselor and work in a community that needs more grassroots resources and start with one on one counseling and support groups, but I don’t plan on stopping there. I recognize that through my work I will have an incredible opportunity to identify common issues specific to a community, this is where curiosity comes in within a helping field such as counseling. Being able to pinpoint and understand issues that are shared throughout a culture or community will allow me to expand services, and bring in other helpers with unique skills of their own. Eventually, I would like to open a community nonprofit with counseling, classes, government aid workshops, childcare services, and other resources applicable to my community directly. There is much to do but I feel that I have the advantage of having worked in the nonprofit sphere before I chose to pursue my master's degree, as well as the opportunity to further my education and become a professional who can make change at the ground level.