Journal
Reflections & Cultural Commentary
Honest conversations with the self and with the world. My journal entries document the evolving narratives of communities, the intersection of tradition and modernity, and the quiet revolutions unfolding in everyday life.
The Language We Lost, and the One We Are Rebuilding
There was a time in my childhood when Amharic script filled every corner of our home - on grocery lists tucked into books, on letters folded into envelopes, on the borders of old photographs where my grandfather wrote dates in a hand that has since stilled. Language is memory made audible; every word we lose is a small extinction.
But I have watched a generation reclaim its tongue. Young people in the diaspora, born to English sentences, are studying their mother tongues in weekend classes, on apps, in the kitchen with their grandmothers. They are not trying to be "authentic" - that word has always been a cage. They are simply trying to say I love you in the way it was first said to them. This is not nostalgia. It is reclamation. And it is underway, word by word.
Writing in the Age of Disruption
The tools of my craft have changed more in the last decade than in the century before. I have watched editorial rooms shrink and feeds grow endless, watched attention fragment into milliseconds. And still, the reader wants the same thing we have always wanted: to feel understood, to be spoken to in a voice that does not perform, to encounter words that arrived with intent.
What remains, when the platforms shift and the algorithms recalibrate, is the discipline of paying attention. The writer's first loyalty is not to the format but to the truth of the moment being observed. Everything else - reach, metrics, virality - is weather. The story is the soil. Tend the soil, and it will hold, no matter the storm.
The Women Who Taught Me How to Read the World
My earliest lessons were not in classrooms. They happened at dawn, over a brazier of roasting coffee, while my aunts spoke in the long shorthand of women who have known each other since childhood. Their conversations were novels I could not yet decode - marriages negotiated in silences, grief carried in the rhythm of grinding beans, joy erupted in a shared laugh that startled the chickens.
They did not call themselves writers, but they were master storytellers. They knew that a woman's life is not a single narrative but a chorus of interrupted tales - begun in the kitchen, continued at the market, finished only when the last witness decides to remember. Every essay I write about community carries their speech patterns, their way of holding a story like a warm loaf, tearing pieces off for everyone at the table.
On Keeping a Journal in a World That Wants Everything Public
To journal is to refuse the pressure of performance. It is the only form of writing that expects nothing - no audience, no approval, no clever conclusion. The blank page asks nothing of you except honesty, and even honesty, it forgives.
In a culture that equates visibility with existence, the private page becomes an act of quiet rebellion. It says: not everything needs to be shared to be real. Not every thought requires a response. Some words are planted in the dark so they can grow roots before they ever see the sun. My journal is my root-room. When the season is right, I dig up the ones worth replanting in the world.
© Selam. All Rights Reserved. | Creative Writer & Content Strategist