The cab
The cab pulled over. The driver turned around. My son was seven years old.
We were in London. A black cab, the kind you hail in the rain and sink into the back of, grateful. I gave the driver our destination and then turned to my boy and said something ordinary.
I used his name.
Faisal.
The driver told us to get out.
I thought I had misheard. I had not.
He said it again. He did not want us in his vehicle. Not with that name. Not with what that name meant to him.
My son was sitting beside me with his blond hair and his green eyes and his school bag on his lap. He had become someone else in the space of a single word.
We got out. We stood on the pavement in the rain.
He looked up at me and asked what had happened. I did have the words, but did not want to say them.
The words would require me to tell a seven-year-old that the world would sometimes look at him and see only the name.
A name, a pause, a world made smaller
I said something about the driver being in a hurry.
My son did not believe me. Children never do.
There would be rooms where his face would open doors and his name would close them. That he would spend his life navigating a gap most people did not even know existed. I knew this. I stood there on the pavement in the rain and said nothing true.
All four of my children have Muslim names. All four look European. Their father, Karim, is Lebanese and Palestinian. I am Dutch, raised across continents, white-skinned, blonde for most of my life.
When people see my children, they see what they expect to see.
When they hear the names, something shifts.
I have watched it happen hundreds of times. The micro-pause. The recalibration. The face that was open a moment ago, now working through something it did not anticipate.
A passport officer holding the document a beat too long. A school receptionist repeating the name slowly, as though checking for error. A dinner party where someone asks, with that particular lightness that is never actually light: where does the name come from?
My children learned young to read that pause.
They learned to pre-empt it. To offer the explanation before it was demanded. They became translators of their own identity before they had language for what they were translating.
This is something I understand. I have been doing it my whole life.
Karim
I married Karim in my twenties. Lebanese. Palestinian. Warm, brilliant, the father I would choose for my children all over again even knowing how it would end between us.
We divorced. The friendship survived. That is its own story and I will tell it when I am ready.
What matters here is what our marriage produced: four human beings who carry two worlds inside them. Who were raised speaking multiple languages, moving between countries, absorbing the prayers and the cheese fondue and the Christmas trees and the Ramadan fasts as though all of it belonged to them.
Because it did.
My mother wanted a neater package. She always had. A daughter who married well, produced children with appropriate names, lived in the right postcode, kept the edges tucked in.
I had never been that daughter.
She loved her grandchildren fiercely. She also never quite stopped wishing their names were easier for her bridge club to pronounce.
Texas
Before London, before Karim, before my children existed, there was Texas.
My father's work took us there when I was a girl. Texas in the early eighties. The heat and the flatness and the enormous sky and the rules that were written into the air itself.
Every Monday they made us stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I stood. I did not say the words.
The teacher looked at me with an expression I would come to know well. That look adults give a child who has done something wrong without understanding what.
I was not American. I was not going to pledge allegiance to a flag that was not mine. Every Monday for years they made me stand. Every Monday I stood.
They never knew what to do with a girl who complied with her body and refused with her mouth.
There was a Black family who moved onto our street. I remember the night. The men in white hoods. The burning cross on the lawn.
I was young enough that I did not fully understand what I was seeing, and old enough that my body understood completely. My stomach dropped. The air went thick. Something was happening that was about hate, and it was organised, and the adults around me were either participating or pretending it was not there.
I kissed a Black boy on the school bus not long after. I do not remember whether it was defiance or desire or both. I remember that it mattered to everyone except the two of us.
My body moved toward things that my environment told me to move away from. This has never changed. It is, in fact, the founding principle of everything I now teach.
The gift
In Texas there was a biology teacher who saw something in me.
He watched me with the animals in the lab, how I held them, how I spoke to them, how they responded. He told my parents: your daughter has a gift. She reads living things the way other people read books.
Nobody had said that to me before.
I was the girl who saw energy around her grandparents at four years old and lightened it with a drawing and a kiss. I was the girl whose body could read a room before her mind had entered it. But nobody had named it as a gift.
They had named it as odd, as sensitive, as too much.
That teacher in Texas is part of why I am doing what I am doing now. He was the first adult outside my family who looked at me and saw capacity, not a flaw. He did not tell me to calm down. He told me to pay attention to what I was already doing.
I think about him when I work with clients who have spent decades being told they are too sensitive, too intense, too feeling.
The sensitivity is the instrument. It was always the instrument.
It was never the capacity to feel that needed fixing. It was the world's discomfort with how much a body can know.
Adults now
My children are adults. Two of my sons live in Dubai. One daughter is in London. My other daughter lives in Beirut, with Karim, my ex-husband.
They move through the world with their father's names and their mother's face and a fluency in navigating contradiction that I sometimes envy and sometimes grieve.
Faisal is grown. He does not need me to explain cab drivers anymore.
He has his own catalogue of pauses and recalibrations. He has learned which rooms require his name to arrive before he does, and which rooms will never be comfortable with it no matter how it arrives.
What I gave my children is what I give my clients. Not a world without contradiction. A body that can hold it.
The lie of omission
There is a part I have to say next, because without it this essay is a lie of omission.
I am an immigrant. My fiance Alex is a Kiwi, also an immigrant. We have lived in countries that were not ours for most of our adult lives, and the countries have, by and large, made room for us.
Alex's ex-wife told us directly, with no apparent malice and no apparent self-awareness: but you two are not like them.
She did not need to define them. We both knew exactly who she meant.
Alex and I fly under the radar because we look like the country we landed in. Because our names do not require a recalibration. Because nobody asks us, with that particular lightness that is never light, where the name comes from.
The cab driver who turned around for Faisal would have driven Alex and me to the door without comment. He has driven a thousand of us. He always will.
The privilege of passing is not a defence. It is a responsibility.
If my body can stay in rooms where other bodies are expelled, the question is not whether I deserve the access. The question is what I do with it.
What I do with it is this. I stay. I name what I see. I refuse to pretend that the rooms I enter unhindered are the same rooms my children enter. I refuse to weaponise my own legibility into silence about everyone whose body the country has decided to read differently.
What the body already knew
The cab driver saw a name and made it mean one thing. My mother saw names and wished they meant something else. Texas saw a girl who kissed the wrong boy and did not stand for the right flag.
The world has always been making up its mind about me and about the people I love based on one signal, one name, one refusal to comply.
I have never been interested in compliance. I have been interested in presence. In what happens when a body stays. When it does not fold, does not explain itself, does not apologise for taking up space in a room that was not designed for it.
My son was seven, standing in the rain outside a black cab in London.
He looked up at me and asked what had happened. I lied to him because I was not yet ready to tell the truth. That the world would do this. That the name his father and I gave him with love and intention would, in some rooms, be the only thing people heard.
He knows now. He has always known.
The body learns before the parent explains. His body learned it that day on the pavement: the specific feeling of being expelled from a space you believed was yours.
I teach people to listen to what the body already knows. I teach them that the first signal is almost always right. I teach them that what was done to the body does not have to be the body's final word.
I was taught this by a four-year-old version of myself who saw energy. By a biology teacher in Texas who said pay attention to what you are already doing. By a boy whose name made a cab driver turn around. By a cross burning on a neighbour's lawn. By a body that moved toward what it was told to fear, every single time, and found that the thing on the other side was always more true than the warning.
I know what it is to be a parent with children in places that are dangerous and beloved. I have four children with Muslim names because I married the man I loved and gave them the names that carried his lineage. I have a life that does not fit into a single sentence because I stopped trying to make it fit.
The part you are afraid to say out loud: the name, the desire, the thing that does not match the package. I have probably already met it.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette