How I think when I am not writing for journals

There is a sentence I keep returning to in my own thinking about why I do this work: behind every research question is a human experience, behind every statistic is a story. It sounds simple. It is not. Most of what shapes a life — a diagnosis, a clinic visit, a private grief shared at 2 a.m. on a blog nobody official will ever read — happens in language too small, too informal, or too easily dismissed to count as “data” in the conventional sense. My research exists because I believe that smallness is where the meaning is.

Over the past several years, that conviction has produced seven interconnected papers, all of which grew out of a single doctoral project: a close study of ten English-language blogs written by Muslim women navigating infertility, totalling 411 posts written between 2009 and 2017 by women in the UK, the US, Kuwait, the UAE, South Africa, and Malaysia. But the papers themselves are not really the story here. They are evidence of something underneath them — a single movement of thought that runs from how we look, to who we become, to what it all might mean for how we live alongside one another.

That movement runs through six stages: attention, identity, meaning, connection, translation, practice. What follows is that movement, with the papers offered as evidence along the way.

Attention

Everything begins with paying careful attention — to people, to language, to experience, and to the meanings that often lie just beyond the immediately visible. Long before TikTok and Instagram normalised public vulnerability, the women in this study were doing something quietly radical: writing detailed, often anonymous accounts of trying to conceive, woven through with religious reflection, clinical detail, grief, humour, and hope. To study these blogs is to commit to a particular discipline: not skimming for themes, but staying with the half-finished sentence, the joke that deflects pain, the pronoun that includes or excludes a reader, the metaphor reached for without thinking. This is where the methodological backbone of the whole project — small stories and positioning theory — comes from. It insists that fleeting, ordinary storytelling is not a lesser form of evidence. It is often where the truest evidence lives.

This same discipline of attention is what eventually led me to study a metaphor-led approach to how bloggers describe their own bodies — as machines, battlegrounds, containers, rebellious agents, journeys — each figure of speech a small window onto how someone is managing an unbearable situation in real time.

Identity

Attention, sustained long enough, reveals that identity is not something a person has and then expresses. It is something built, under pressure, sentence by sentence. The first major finding in this body of work is that when a woman's body fails to do what culture, faith, and family expect of it, she does not simply describe her infertility — she actively legitimises herself against an unspoken accusation of deficiency, drawing on religious vocabulary, medical authority, and moral reasoning to reclaim standing in her own community.

That same construction work continues even when the story does not end as hoped. Some of the most important writing in this corpus comes from women who chose to stop treatment, pursue adoption, or live without the resolution the genre often promises — and who had to build, in language, a version of dignity and completeness that the culture around them did not hand them ready-made. Identity, in other words, is not revealed by hardship. It is authored through it.

Meaning

Once identity is understood as something constructed, the next question is: against what backdrop? What unspoken rules is a person writing toward, or against? This is where the work turns structural — examining the deeper normative architecture, including the assumption that heterosexual marriage exists, by default, to produce children, that makes infertility feel like a crisis of selfhood in the first place, rather than simply a medical circumstance. Meaning-making, here, is shown to be relational: a woman does not invent her sense of self from nothing. She negotiates it against master narratives that were already waiting for her — about gender, faith, biology, and worth — and the negotiation itself is where meaning is forged.

Connection

No one builds identity, or makes meaning, entirely alone. The next movement in this work turns from the self to the we: how strangers, writing publicly and often pseudonymously, build genuine solidarity through shared, ordinary storytelling. A shared vocabulary, inside jokes, recognisable rituals of disclosure and response — these are the quiet architecture of belonging online, and they show that affiliation is not a backdrop to identity work. It is itself a form of identity work, built collectively rather than individually.

This is also where time enters the picture. Identity is not static even within community — it shifts across the full arc of a journey, from diagnosis through treatment to whatever resolution eventually comes. Capturing that required developing a staged way of tracking how the same person repositions herself across years, not just within a single post. Connection, it turns out, has a timeline of its own.

Translation

Methods do not arrive ready-made for every context, and using them honestly requires translating them deliberately. Small stories research was originally developed for spoken conversation. Blogs are not conversation — they are asynchronous, public, addressed to an imagined rather than present audience. A significant piece of this work has therefore been methodological: building and defending an approach specifically adapted to the medium people are actually writing in, so that the analytic tools used throughout are not borrowed uncritically, but earned through careful translation.

This same instinct toward translation is what carried the project beyond its original corpus entirely. The newest paper turns the lens on myself: an autoethnographic account of what happens when a patient, navigating illness and recovery, turns to an AI system for the kind of reassurance once sought only from doctors, family, or faith communities. It asks what is gained, and what is lost, when the listener on the other end has no body, no faith, no shared history — only language. It is the same human need for recognition, translated into a genuinely new register: not a different question, but the oldest question, asked of a new kind of interlocutor.

Practice

None of this is meant to stay inside a journal. Attention, identity, meaning, and connection only matter, in the end, if they translate into practice — into how clinicians communicate with patients navigating infertility; into how technologists and ethicists think about what AI-mediated care actually does to a person's sense of being heard; into how communities, religious and secular, support members whose lives do not follow the expected script. Knowledge, to be worth producing, has to be able to leave the page and do something in the world — in a clinical guideline, a conversation, a teaching resource, a moment of recognition for someone who thought their experience was too small to matter.

Where This Leaves Us

Ultimately, this body of work has never been only about infertility, or blogs, or health communication. It has been about learning to pay closer attention — to the ways people make sense of themselves when life no longer follows the expected script. I increasingly believe that this discipline of attention has relevance far beyond any single research topic. It is equally necessary in education, healthcare, policy, and everyday human relationships. If these papers have a common aspiration, it is not simply to contribute knowledge, but to encourage a way of seeing in which no person's experience is considered too ordinary, too fleeting, or too small to matter.

There is a sentence that appears, in one form or another, in nearly every one of these journals, and it took me a long time to notice how strange it is. The doctor said. Three words, offered without preamble, as though what follows requires no further warrant. The doctor said it would take time. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me. The doctor said, at last, the word that changed everything. In a body of writing otherwise so alert to nuance, so unwilling to take anything at face value, this one formula passes without interrogation, again and again, like a coin nobody stops to examine because everyone has agreed in advance what it is worth.

I want to spend this essay examining the coin. Not to devalue it — these women needed their doctors, trusted many of them, were grateful to some of them in ways that moved me to read. But underneath the trust, and sometimes tangled up inside it, there is a harder question running through every page: who, finally, gets to say what a body means, what a result means, what a life means? The clinic has an answer. The mosque, or the aunties who speak in its name, have another. And somewhere beneath both, quietly, insistently, a third answer is being worked out by the woman herself, in the middle of the night, in words nobody asked her to write.

This is an essay about authority — the kind stamped with a letterhead, and the kind that has no letterhead at all and has to be built from nothing, sentence by sentence, by a person nobody appointed to the job.

Consider the shape of the sentence the doctor said a little longer. It is a citation. It borrows its force from an institution — years of training, a diploma, a coat, a room designed to make you feel the asymmetry the moment you sit down in it. When she writes it, she is not merely reporting information. She is invoking a kind of authority that Western medicine has spent centuries building: the authority of the diagnosis, which does not describe a body so much as rule on it, the way a court rules. Infertile. Unexplained. Diminished ovarian reserve. Each phrase closes a door that was, a moment before, still open, and it closes it with a confidence the woman herself is rarely permitted to have about her own body.

I noticed, reading enough of these accounts, that the clinic's authority is at its most absolute in a single small object: the test result. A number on a printout. Two letters — BFN, the shorthand this whole community built for itself, big fat negative — that arrive with no bedside manner at all, no manner of any kind, just a fact appearing on a screen at whatever hour the lab happens to process it. Nothing in the whole archive carries more unearned finality than those two letters. They do not explain. They do not soften. They simply declare, and the declaring is the whole of their power.

And yet — this is the turn I did not expect, going in — the women rarely let the declaration stand as the last word. Not because they reject the medicine. Almost none of them do. They keep the appointments, take the drugs, track the follicles, trust the doctor about the drugs even when they privately doubt him about almost everything else he says. What they resist, instead, is letting the clinical fact be the same thing as the meaning of the fact. One writes, after a result that could not have been more final in the clinic's own terms, a single line invoking her own scripture — that with hardship comes ease — set directly beneath the laboratory language, as if placing one text physically on top of the other were itself an act of authority. The beta number stands. What it is allowed to mean does not belong to the lab.

This is, I have come to think, one of the most important and least visible moves in the whole archive: the separation of the fact from its interpretation, and the quiet insistence that the second thing belongs to her and not to the institution that produced the first.

If the clinic's authority arrives stamped and certain, the mosque's — or more precisely, the aunties', the well-meaning callers-on-the-phone, the entire diffuse apparatus of people who speak, or claim to speak, in religion's name — arrives disguised as comfort. It's God's will. Everything happens for a reason. There must be some wisdom in this that you cannot yet see. I want to be careful here, because this is not interested in setting faith against reason, and these women, almost without exception, were not interested in that either. What several of them were interested in — what one, in particular, wrote about with a clarity that stopped me the first time I read it — was the difference between God and the people who had appointed themselves God's spokespeople.

She had grown tired, this one, of a certain sentence arriving from relatives and acquaintances every time she tried to describe what she was living through. She began, in one entry, simply listing the sentence's variants — the way a linguist might, though she was not doing linguistics, she was doing something closer to justice. And then she did something I did not expect from a woman who by every outward measure remained a believer: she refused the sentence. Not faith. The sentence. She wrote, in effect, that if this — her suffering, offered back to her as evidence of a benevolent design — was what people meant by God's will, then she rejected their God, and would keep her own.

I want to sit with how much interpretive nerve that took. She was not abandoning her religion in that line. She was doing something more difficult: drawing a line between the institution of religious explanation — the aunties, the borrowed phrases, the social economy in which piety is performed by explaining away someone else's pain — and her own relationship with the God she still, in the very same entry, addressed directly, sincerely, as hers. The authority she rejected was not divine. It was human authority wearing divine language as a disguise, and she was one of the very few voices in this whole archive who said so plainly, in words rather than only in the shape of her resistance.

This is moral intuition doing exactly the work I think it is built to do: naming, before any argument can catch up to it, that a form of words which sounds pious is in fact doing harm, and that the harm matters more than the piety's surface. She did not need a theologian to tell her this. She needed only to notice what the sentence did to her — how it dismissed the size of what she was carrying — and to trust that noticing over the comfort of going along with it.

The third authority is the hardest to see, because it does not announce itself with a letterhead or a scripture. It builds itself, unglamorously, out of hours spent reading. One woman describes, with a kind of rueful humour that does not fully hide how serious the claim underneath it is, that she has come to know more about her own condition than several of the doctors she has consulted — that she might, she says, half-joking, have been better off training as a physician herself than becoming one more patient handed a diagnosis with no explanation attached. I do not think the humour is incidental. It is doing the work of making an otherwise startling claim sayable: I know things the institution assumed only it could know.

This is not a rejection of medicine, any more than the earlier example was a rejection of faith. It is something more exact and, I think, more instructive: an insistence that expertise is not the exclusive property of the credentialed room. She reads the studies. She learns the vocabulary — the whole compressed, tender dialect this community built for itself, half armour and half mercy — not to perform sophistication but because nobody in the fifteen minutes she is allotted has time to teach it to her, and she has decided her own understanding of her own body is not optional. Epistemic independence, in this archive, rarely looks like defiance. It looks like homework. It looks like a woman becoming fluent, out of necessity, in a language that was supposed to remain the property of people who wear white coats.

And what she does with that fluency is not, in the end, replace the doctor. It is something more modest and more radical at once: she keeps him, and keeps herself too. She holds both authorities in her hands at the same time — his and her own — without collapsing into either one entirely. She defers to his hands during the procedure and reserves, for herself, the right to ask why, to doubt the explanation she is given, to go looking when the explanation does not satisfy her. This double posture — patient and scholar, believer and dissenter, recipient and reader — is, I think, the closest this archive comes to a working definition of independence. Not standing outside every authority. Standing inside several of them at once, and refusing to let any single one make the final ruling on her own life alone.

I keep returning to a question my own training raised in me long before I met these women on the page, which is what gives any authority the right to be believed. The honest scholarly answer is disappointing in its plainness: nothing, finally, except the ongoing consent of the people who submit to it. Institutions borrow their force from centuries of accumulated trust — in medicine's case, largely earned; in the case of the aunties' theology, largely assumed. But trust that is never examined curdles, eventually, into something closer to obedience, and obedience is not the same thing as belief.

What moved me most, across hundreds of these small, private acts of interpretation, was watching ordinary women — with no letters after their names, writing in the dark, certain nobody official would ever read them — do this examining anyway. Keeping the doctor's fact and refusing his monopoly on its meaning. Keeping their God and refusing the borrowed voices that spoke falsely in God's name. Keeping their own reading and refusing to let it replace, rather than simply supplement, the reading of the person trained to help them. None of them, so far as I can tell, set out to make an argument about epistemic authority. They were simply trying to survive an experience that several institutions at once had opinions about, and in trying to survive it honestly, they arrived, independently and without training, at something that took philosophy considerably longer to work out formally: that authority is not a single seat. It is a set of claims, each partial, each owed a hearing, and none of them owed the last word simply because it spoke first, or spoke loudest, or spoke from a room with better furniture.

The last word, in every account I have read closely enough to trust, belonged in the end to the woman herself — not because she was right about everything, and not always because she was even confident, but because she was the only party to the whole arrangement who was going to have to go on living inside the answer. That is close to the only rule of authority I am willing to state plainly here: whoever has to live longest inside a meaning has the strongest claim on making it.

I have a friend whose name arrived late — a beautiful name, given only after two months of hesitation and deliberation. Somehow that delay became a pattern. Many of the beautiful things in her life have also arrived a little later than expected.

Yara's only flaw, if she admits to one at all, is that the word no appears too rarely in her vocabulary. She carries a stubbornness that comes not from pride but from a childlike spirit that delights in challenge, and she moves through her days searching for love in everything. Her uncle has a word for it: ashuqa — someone unusually quick to fall.

Easy and impossible at once, she shares in a kind of reckless passion for adventure that, luckily for us both, is kept just short of ruin by a mind that stays half-sensible — refusing ever to settle for a lacking man, but never refusing to break the hearts of those who were promised something and let down, and so earned their own undoing.

One foggy day, in a city that seemed to carry his name, we kicked through drifts of autumn leaves lying in wait for other lives, and Yara told me what she needed: love, success, and a homeland.

Home, for Yara, does not mean what the dictionary says, or what the anthems sing at national celebrations. It is not land. It is not a birthplace. It is not the seat of a tribe.

Home, for my friend, is measured by the size of one's familiarity with it. The more familiarity grows, the larger home becomes inside her.

Friends. Places. Voices. Old pain. Small battles. Bread eaten in the back seat of her car beside the sea. Ceramic cups that still seem to hold the scent of whoever last drank from them. A child's drawings, kept carefully in a box.

She makes a home wherever she lands, but it is never instant. Its details are drawn daily, out of devotion, until every empty space has been filled with memory — until it grows loud, and warm, and full of an intimacy strong enough to hold off the ache of harder experiences.

Love, too, has its own classification in her private system. It is a mythic, overtaking love, one that seizes every corner of you and leaves none of it unfilled. Ever-burning, never cooling. Rebellious, untamed. Bare, unconcealed. A love in open revolt, not at peace — and yet, in the same breath, a love that is certain, lasting, safe. Nothing shakes it. Nothing, however large, slows its current. It is the love of fifty, dressed in the clothes of twenty. It is a love that has made Yara unlucky in love.

Success, meanwhile, is her daily bread — what she lives on to stay happy. For Yara, a day with no success in it is a day that cannot be counted.

She speaks with a child's spontaneity and a philosopher's maturity, never embarrassed to share a thought however sharp or strange it sounds. She looks for herself in talk her listener never tires of. She has enough eloquence to paint whole pictures for whoever she is speaking to — and still she reaches, often, for a pen: to draw, to write.

Perhaps my friend believes these channels of expression will eventually lead her to someone who understands her — not noticing that understanding needs more than a clear enough medium. It needs, too, a listener capable of breaking the code.

She tells me about her relationships, how hard it is for anyone to reach the deeper parts of her — a reach she has granted, so far, only to her sister, to the many Fatemas in her life, and to Maryam. Perhaps that understanding is reserved for the Aries among her friends, as though the sky had handed out souls, and their likenesses, according to the turning of the stars, and made that turning a condition for closeness.

To Yara, I say this:

What is delayed is still moving, even if it has not yet arrived. Time only knows how to pass; it does not know how to stall. The beautiful thing you are waiting for will come to you. And home is a set of lines in your own painting, beginning as a blank page, filled in by your own hand.

Draw what you like, Yara. The pen is yours. The voice is yours. Draw. And sing. And dance. And you will find the ones who dance with you.

النص العربي الأصلي — Original Arabic Text

Reflexive Notes

Context

I wrote this at the very beginning of my doctoral thesis development, at a point when I could feel the shape of what I wanted to study without yet being able to name it. I did not sit down to write about identity, belonging, or narrative — I sat down to write about a friend. Looking back, I can see that the questions which would later take years, a supervisor, and a formal methodology to articulate were already moving through this essay, in a language I had not yet learned to call theoretical.

Home as a lived experience

The essay's central claim — that home is not geography or nationality but accumulated familiarity — anticipates almost exactly the argument I would spend the next several years learning to make with proper evidence and citation. Objects, places, routines, and relationships become repositories of memory here long before I had a vocabulary of positioning or small stories to describe how that happens.

Narrative as observation

Even here, before any formal training, the instinct that runs through my later work is already at play: using one person's story as a way of thinking about larger human questions. Yara is not only a friend being described. She is a lens through which love, success, friendship, and home become visible.

Ordinary objects as cultural memory

Bread eaten in a parked car. Ceramic cups holding the memory of a scent. A child's drawings kept in a box. None of these details are incidental. They are early evidence of a fascination that would later shape my approach to narrative analysis and ethnographic attention — the conviction that ordinary objects carry emotional and cultural weight far beyond their size.

Looking back

At the time, I thought I was simply writing about a friend I loved. I did not yet have my research questions, and I would not have known how to state them if asked. Reading this essay now, I recognise it as the earliest form of a line of thinking I would spend a doctorate learning to formalise: that identity, belonging, and memory are built in language, in the smallest and most ordinary of details, long before anyone calls that building a method.

“La'ib” moves between English and Arabic without settling in either, tracing a return — in memory rather than in fact — to a childhood home: a lemon tree and a pomegranate tree, the call to prayer, a mother tending her garden, a father waited for. A second movement descends into older textures of family and neighbourhood — the local ma'tam and mosque, a grandfather's walking stick, a grandmother's unworn wedding dress and her fierce, private vow — before closing on inheritance: what the heart goes on carrying for as long as memory lasts.

The code-switching is the point rather than an obstacle to translate around. Home, for a second-generation Bahraini in Britain, is lived in both languages at once, and the poem declines to choose between them.

Reflexive Notes

I did not write “La'ib” to illustrate anything. I wrote it during six weeks of workshops with other British-Bahrainis, trying to get down what dual belonging actually feels like rather than what it means. What my academic work spends pages arguing, this poem simply does: identity under conditions of migration and transition isn't stated, it's performed, moment to moment, often mid-sentence. The code-switching here isn't a device I chose to make a point. It's simply how the memory arrived.

Method and material

There's a small irony I've come to appreciate: the small-stories and positioning frameworks I use to analyse how other people construct identity in language were, for a few weeks in early 2021, methods I might as well have turned on myself. I doubt I could have written the poem and the theory in the same sitting. But they were clearly drawing on the same instinct.

Note

“La'ib” was written during the Between Two Islands workshops (10 January–21 February 2021), a project bringing together British-Bahraini poets, and appears in the anthology of the same name (ed. Ali Al-Jamri, No Disclaimers, 2021). It was also discussed, alongside work by other poets in the anthology, in a Middle East Eye feature on the collection.