We have always needed to divide time into before and after, as though life were a book we could neatly separate into chapters, each with its own beginning, middle, and end.

We seem to need these markers, these little fences between what was and what came to be… the human mind has difficulty accepting that life is one long, continuous thing, that even the most dramatic changes rarely happen in a single instant, and that the person we were yesterday is still in there, carrying the memories, the scars, and the decisions of all the people we have been.

I have my own calendar. Nobody will ever use it to date a historical document, and I doubt anyone will dedicate a monument to commemorate its milestones, but I can tell you exactly where some of the lines fall.

Before social media, and after

There was a time when the private business of being alive did not require an audience.

We were less reachable but more available. We could disappear for an afternoon, sit across from someone without a screen competing for our attention, and have an experience without wondering how it might look to people who weren’t there. A memory belonged to the people who lived it. It didn’t need a filter or the approval of several hundred acquaintances to become real.

Of course, the past has always benefited from good editing. I wouldn’t trade the ability to video-call my niece and nephew in Portugal, to play silly faces on Messenger and share the ordinary details of a day despite the 2 flights between us. But isn’t it sad to be able to reach someone thousands of miles away while failing to reach the best friend sitting across the table, whose eyes have been on her phone for the past twenty minutes? We have made the world smaller and our immediate lives lonelier.

We know what strangers had for breakfast, where they spent their holidays and what they think about everything under the sun. Yet we can sit beside people we love without knowing what weighs on them. We have become excellent spectators of lives we don’t share and rather distracted participants in our own.

And what a spectacle human nature makes of itself when given a public stage. The silly becomes celebrated, the mediocre acquires an audience, and the mean-spirited find a thousand people willing to cheer them on. A stranger makes a mistake, and the crowd gathers, eager to deliver its little dose of punishment. Outrage is practically a recreational activity. Everyone has a verdict before they’ve finished reading the story.

Vanity, envy, cruelty and the occasional act of kindness have all found a comfortable home here. We announce our happiness before enjoying it, and turn even our most private moments into public property. Some people seem less interested in having a good life than in making sure everyone knows they have one.

Social media didn’t invent the pettiness of human nature. It simply gave it much more room to embarrass itself.

I miss the before. The unphotographed evenings, the conversations that wandered for hours, the jokes that belonged to just three people, the pleasure of doing something lovely without having to prove it happened. I miss being somewhere without feeling the pull to tell everyone else about it.

The after has made it possible to see the face of someone we love across an ocean. That’s a beautiful thing. I just wish we hadn’t become so accustomed to looking at screens that we forgot to look at each other.

Before the Beirut blast, and after
August 4, 2020, did not just divide a day in two. It divided our lives as Lebanese into everything we hoped for before, and everything we would never dare to hope for again.

The explosion destroyed buildings, shattered windows, took lives, and left wounds that no calendar could contain. But there was also the destruction that unfolded over the months that followed… the slow, brutal realisation that even the hope of justice, accountability and a better future was slipping further out of reach.

What followed exposed not only the scale of our government’s negligence, but its chilling indifference to the lives it was entrusted to protect. We had survived the blast, only to be confronted with another kind of devastation: the cruelty of being abandoned by those responsible.

Beirut, the city that had held so much of my life, gradually became a ghost town in my own story. Clients moved their offices to nearby countries. The activities that shaped my days dwindled. My friends left the country, one by one, taking with them the joie de vivre, the spontaneous plans, the familiar faces, and the comforting assumption that someone would always be around to hang out with.

It divided the life I had built in Beirut into a before that I could remember in extraordinary detail and an after I had to figure out how to inhabit.

Eventually, I had to leave the city, too, and move up north, away from the streets that had held so many versions of me. I did not make a conscious decision to close a chapter. I found myself standing in a book whose pages had been torn out.

No farewell party for the woman I had been in Beirut, no ceremony to acknowledge the life that had ceased to exist. Just the strange business of waking up each morning and trying to make a life out of what was left, while missing the one that had once felt so entirely mine.

People often speak of rebuilding after a disaster, and I understand why. But nobody tells you how strange it is to rebuild a life when the people, places, and routines that made up its architecture are no longer there. You can replace a window. You can find another apartment. You can even start again in another city. What is harder to replace is the feeling of belonging to a place that once belonged to you.

Before self-awareness, and after
This one was less spectacular. No explosion, no dramatic headline, no date that marked the beginning of a new life. Just a slow, uncomfortable departure from the woman I had been. I had spent years making room for everyone else’s contradictions, finding explanations for disappointments, and mistaking emotional endurance for strength. I was good at understanding people, even when understanding them came at my own expense. I could make almost anything make sense, except what I was doing to myself.

The after version is harder to convince. She no longer needs every story to have a happy ending, every connection to be rescued, or every goodbye to come with a satisfactory explanation. She has lost some of her tolerance, some of her old attachments, the part of her that once believed everything could be fixed with enough love. But she has gained something she didn’t know she was missing: the ability to belong to herself.

Before AI, and after
I wish I could tell this story as a simple account of technological progress in which a new invention arrives, changes everything, and leaves us all marvelling at the possibilities.

I have always loved words. Writing was the thing I turned to when I had too much to feel, the thing that occupied my mind long before anyone paid me to put it to work.

I was fortunate enough to turn that passion into a profession, which meant I could spend my days doing something that never felt entirely like work. I could play with language, chase a thought until it revealed something unexpected, spend an unreasonable amount of time searching for the one word that made a sentence come alive. There was pleasure in the struggle, in the blank page, in the moment when a jumble of thoughts finally found its shape.

And then AI arrived, not as a distant technological development to be discussed over dinner, but as a force that began rearranging the very circumstances of my life. Work that had once required my experience, judgment, and years of learning could suddenly be assigned to a tool that produced something passable in seconds.

The economics of writing changed, the expectations changed, and the value attached to the skills I had spent much of my adult life developing became harder to defend. But the professional loss was only part of it. What I hadn't anticipated was how this new reality would begin to contaminate my relationship with writing itself.

Writing was my job, yes, but it was also my refuge, my hobby, my way of making sense of the world. Signing my first book was the moment a lifelong dream stepped out of my imagination and into my hands. Now I wonder if the words writers spend hours juggling with will matter in a world where words can be generated endlessly and instantly.

I know that AI can be useful. I know that technology has always changed the way people work, and I am not interested in pretending that the world will reverse course simply because I am unhappy with its direction. What hurts is that I did not just lose clients to a new technology. I began to lose the uncomplicated pleasure of doing the one thing that had always felt mine entirely.

I am mourning a relationship with language that existed long before it became a commercial service, before it became something that could be measured in turnaround times, budgets, efficiency, and output. It’s cruel to watch the world devalue the very thing you once loved enough to make your life’s work, and even crueller to feel yourself slowly losing the joy you once found in it.

I am still trying to understand what comes after this. I don’t know whether I will find my way back to writing in the same way. And no, thank you, I don’t want to be a prompt engineer. I don’t know whether I will have to find another place for the part of me that has always needed to tell stories. I only know that I miss the woman who could sit down with an idea and follow it wherever it led, without calculating what it might be worth, who might do it faster, or whether there was still room in the world for one more human being with something to say.

A series of sighs go in here…

The world changes, sometimes violently, sometimes so gradually that we barely notice until we look back and realise we no longer recognise the landscape. We lose cities, relationships, professions, habits, and versions of ourselves that we once assumed would be permanent.

We learn to live with the aftermath, even when we never agreed to the terms. And we keep using the same word for what comes next: after. As if it were simply the next thing in a sequence, as if we had crossed a line and could now carry on. But an after is everything but a new beginning, and it is not a clean break.

Sometimes it is a life we have to assemble from whatever remains. Sometimes it is the slow recognition that we cannot return to who we were, even if we wanted to. And most of the time, it is standing in the middle of a life that is still technically yours and wondering when, exactly, it stopped feeling like one you knew how to live.