1. Education

This year I finally graduated university, at long, long last and then went on to gain entry to the post-graduate Masters’ course. (Yay – still ecstatic over that!) I discovered a whole new passion for my subject area and it’s been a huge motivator.

I’m now truly fluent in Arabic reading and writing and I can understand my lectures and actually take my own notes (instead of borrowing someone else's) now – none of which was true when I started university four years ago.

Now that I have finally caught up linguistically, I am able to achieve the kind of marks that I used to get when I was studying in Englis and am now on an equal footing with my peers, academically speaking. It is a truly wonderful and liberating feeling to know that I’m not going to suck at everything because of my language problem.

However, I believe that a person’s education is not measured merely by academic success (we’ve all met academic geniuses who turn out to be total idiots). I’ve also got back to reading and writing, as well as watching more documentaries and less crappy reality TV (although I still watch a lot of that too). Generally, I’ve been pushing my mind in new, informal ways: reading poetry, and classics, watching interesting things on Youtube, trying to seek out and be open to different ways, opinions, information, etc.