Identity and belonging

Episode 18, with Dr Tala Abdallah. Talking to AI about your mental health can be appealing. It seems cheaper and faster, it is there at 2am, and it can feel like talking to a friend without worrying about being a burden or being judged.

Episode 16, with Joelle Choueiry. There are moments that divide life into a before and an after. For Joelle Choueiry, 4 August was one of them. After living through the Beirut explosion she left Lebanon and began again in France, rebuilding her life, her career and her sense of stability from the ground up.

Episode 15, with Nadine Mhanna. Most people place the harp in Greece or Europe. Its story runs back thousands of years, with some of the earliest depictions found in ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

Episode 14, with Dr. Jase Moussa-Inaty. Silent trauma doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like disrupted sleep, an upset stomach, pulling away from people, or slowly letting yourself go. The body speaks before we do.

Episode 9, with Nina. Nina left investment banking at the point where most people would have stayed. Three children, a career at its peak, and a schedule that had quietly answered every question about who she was for over a decade. This conversation is about the pause she took, and about what she found in it. We talk about the specific disappearance that happens when ambition and motherhood are both running at full volume, how the outline of a person blurs when every hour is allocated, and how easy it is to mistake momentum for direction. Nina is precise about the discomfort of stopping: the loss of identity that comes with the loss of a title, the guilt in both directions, and the strangeness of having time to ask what she actually wanted. What she describes on the other side of that pause is not a reinvention. It is a recovery, a return to a version of herself that had been running alongside her life without being consulted.

Episode 8, with Jihane Boustany Khoury. Some conversations do not need a frame. Jihane talks about living through what she would never have chosen, and about the unremarkable daily mechanics of continuing anyway. This episode is about resilience stripped of its motivational packaging: not a triumphant arc, but the decision to get up, again, on a day that offers no particular reason to. We talk about perseverance as practice rather than personality, about what hope looks like when it stops being a feeling and becomes something closer to discipline, and about the people and small rituals that make forward motion possible. Jihane is careful not to tidy her own story or pretend the hard parts resolved neatly. What emerges instead is a portrait of strength that most people would recognise from their own lives, quieter, more stubborn, and less photogenic than the version we are usually sold. It is a conversation about carrying something heavy without letting it decide who you are.

Episode 7, with Mike Harb. Mike calls it a painkiller society, and the phrase lands because it describes something most people recognise before they can name it. We reach for the thing that dulls the signal, the scroll, the drink, the extra work, the noise, and we do it so habitually that we stop noticing there was a signal at all. This conversation is about exhaustion as a default setting rather than an emergency, and about the survival mindset that hides comfortably inside ambition. We talk about the difference between coping and choosing: how numbing buys you the day but spends the year, and how distraction has become the most socially acceptable form of avoidance available. Mike is not offering a detox plan. What he describes is slower and harder, staying with discomfort long enough to learn what it is pointing at. The conversation keeps returning to the same uncomfortable question: if you removed everything you use to take the edge off, what would you actually have to feel?

Episode 3, with Rym. Banking rewards composure. Rym describes a working life built on structure and precision, where being unshakeable is not a personality trait so much as a professional requirement. This conversation follows what happens underneath that requirement, how control begins as a skill, becomes a habit, and eventually turns into a survival strategy that is hard to switch off. We talk about carrying responsibility for other people's stability during genuinely unstable years, and about what it does to a person when the environment stops being predictable but the expectation of composure does not. Rym is candid about the distance between professional success and how she experiences herself, and about the quiet cost of never being the one who needs reassurance. The conversation opens into a harder question: if control is what kept you safe, what does it mean to loosen it? Not as a wellness gesture, but as an actual risk. This is an episode about competence as armour, and about what armour weighs when you have been wearing it for years.

Episode 2, with Lara. Lara's days are built on accuracy. Doses, interactions, records, the small unforgiving details that cannot be approximated. But the counter she stands behind is also a place where people arrive frightened, embarrassed, grieving, or simply tired, and she meets all of it inside a transaction that is supposed to take two minutes. This conversation is about what it means to care professionally: to be trusted with something intimate, repeatedly, by strangers, while keeping enough distance to stay accurate. We talk about the rhythm of repetitive work and how routine can be both a refuge and a flattening force. We talk about the emotional residue of a day spent absorbing other people's fear, and the way that residue follows you home into a personal life already squeezed by long hours. Lara describes the negotiation clearly, between being present enough to be human and detached enough to be safe, and about how few workplaces acknowledge that this negotiation is happening at all.

Episode 1, with Carla. Carla's work looks orderly from the outside. Deployments, timelines, handovers, a calendar that stretches across several time zones, the kind of role that reads as competence on a résumé. What this conversation sits with is the gap between that surface and what it costs to maintain it. Being the person other people rely on for stability means absorbing uncertainty rather than passing it on, and doing that quietly, for years, changes something. We talk about how identity gets rearranged when your working life is spread across borders: which parts of yourself you bring to which room, which parts stay unspoken, and what happens to the version of you that nobody at work has met. Carla is honest about the loneliness inside dependability, and about how difficult it is to admit uncertainty when your whole function is to remove it for others. This is not a conversation about burnout as a dramatic collapse. It is about the slower thing, the steady, unremarkable weight of holding a structure upright while quietly wondering who is holding you.