Soumaya
I am equally passionate about the arts (music, literature, film) and about science and technology. I love sharing what I am learning with the people around me.
The gap
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
Ira Glass, The Gap
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
Ira Glass, The Gap
And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you’ve got to know it is normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.”
Ira Glass, The Gap
Music that shaped me
Reading
- absolute favorite
- first "grown-up" book
- Italian literature
- history
- 20th-c British female authors
- mothers and daughters
- crossing social boundaries
- science
Movies & TV
A fascination with East and West Germany
A love of musicals
A pull toward personal and moral dilemmas
Quirky fast-talkers
Girlhood against the current
Snapshots
Side quests
My parents enrolled me in the conservatoire at age 7. For the next 11 years my after-school hours and weekends became consumed with Andalusian and Tunisian music, reading solfège, learning maqamat, singing mouwachahat and practicing the oud and the mawazins. I earned my teaching degree in 2006 after a grueling week of written and 1:1 oral exams and it was one of my happiest days. And if you're wondering what my favorite maqam is, it's Nahawand, which has a western equivalent (Do minor).
I got sucked into the TV show The Great Pottery Throw Down and the rest is history.
I've been practicing yoga since 2013 and kept hurting myself (the tragedy of flat feet) so I decided to use the first month of my non-compete to learn alignment properly. The teacher training program taught me that and more. We had meditation classes, anatomy classes and loads of yoga from acrobatic to hatha yoga, a fantastic experience.
I started buying and raising plants in 2018 and haven't looked back since, and I am now a proud mom of 10, surviving New York's harsh winters and cruel summers together.
Preparing for a future epic Kyrgyzstan trip.
