I grew up on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway, in a neighbourhood situated between the city and the huge forests to the north. I remember a childhood of exploration, adventure, nature and great deals of alone time. The world was a place to run into in wonder – or crash into. One of the greatest legacies of that fearlessness was serious and permanent burns and psychological trauma from climbing on the kitchen drawers and pouring boiling coffee onto myself while my language was still single syllables. The scars would define my sense of self and worth until well into adult life.

My father was a professor at university and greatly dedicated to his professional work. I remember him as partly absent and partly a great source of stories and wisdom. He’d travelled far and wide and lived life until settling down to start a family late in life. My mother, much younger than him, lived with disappointing experiences of men, and with a lion’s heart of a mother for her two sons. She instilled great belief in my abilities, a strong sense of fairness, and an autonomy that is one of my greatest gifts in this life. Learning about emotions and witnessing mature ways of dealing with them, was not present and something I needed to take responsibility for in myself much later in life.

Primary school was first a playground where I would lead and dominate, and then an alien world of complicated relating, groupings, and increasingly standing apart as something indefinably different. Secondary school saw my intellect soar, and this would become my main compensating mechanism for what I later understood to be social insecurity and a belief that I was ugly. I would wield my intellect to find superiority – in order to be able to live with the inferiority. It was the birth of insufferable arrogance and belittling behaviour. And here was also the start of more than a decade of great emotional distress in the longing for romantic connection and intimacy.

What would truly hone me and define my personality, was living with a step father from the age of 12 who was deeply traumatized from his own childhood and prone to violence that only stopped short of direct physical abuse. At home I learned to bully and to be bullied, and I lived with having my boundaries crossed and disrespected while my young adult was being formed. It forced me into myself, into my own will and strength, and instilled a belief that relationally speaking, no one can be truly relied upon or trusted.

At the same time I was on a trajectory of building skills and learning to play the game of society and “become” someone in it. In high school I spent a year in Ecuador living in a fairly poor family and learning to live richly with few means. It showed me a life radically different to my own, and I thrived in it. Throughout my university years, I would alternate between theoretical studies in politics and social sciences and spending time abroad. Many years were spent in different countries in the Middle East learning Arabic and being exposed to yet more perspectives and differing ways of living.

I learned to blend in, to play the part, to immerse myself and truly enjoy what was totally not my life. There was even this moment – sitting on a bunk bed in a police barracks in southern Yemen with my cheek full of qat – where the offer to marry the supposedly beautiful daughter of the police chief and settle down in that scenic village in lush mountains, made a certain kind of sense. But my path was one of movement; To places most people won’t go, to experiences most people would be afraid of, and seeking my own understanding where others obviously only held prejudice and misunderstanding. I was beginning to perceive the world as a place of lots of incongruous truths that only made sense in context, not as anything superior or real.

I wrote my MA thesis on religious identity in Syria and how it is shaped by narratives and social constructs of “us” and “them.” I felt the division in that society, and I felt the human conflict that would erupt into civil war some years later. Becoming an expert was a great idea in my mind, and what followed was working as a Middle East expert in the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, and peaking in a temporary position as a diplomat at the embassy in Damascus.