CAROLINA: How can you be so cheerful, and yourself at 200% ? Do you ever worry people judge you for how you show yourself ? I’ve never seen you stopped by this.
YASMINA: I don’t think I’m cheerful all the time at 200%, I really don’t think I am. I think the people who maybe see me more often and who I’m more intimate with know this very well. I’ve been through very, very dark periods where I was just very… dark, and embracing the darkness.
BUT, if I can give you a hint: I am very curious, and curiosity, for some reason, will always drag me out of it. I mean, not literally always, but maybe give it a little time. I recently got a membership at the American Library in Paris and I know FOR A FACT that when I’m feeling down, I’ll just go there, grab, like, six books at the same time, and go home with these books. And maybe I’m not even going to read them, but these books will have sparked something: the fact that I noticed them, that I noticed the titles. I try to go and grab new books every week. Maybe I should do: the books I grabbed this week?
I’m really curious. I want to know about stuff, I want to learn stuff, and I think I don’t escape darkness in this way, but I try to maybe not let myself be totally dragged down by it.
Yes, of course I worry about judgment. I think it’s insane to think that you don’t care about judgment and you don’t care about anything. I think I’m just very raw and honest, and I think I’m not trying to prove anything, not even to myself. I’m just trying to live life in a way that’s more or less respectful of myself and, of course, of others. Because respect and kindness are the values that my parents have taught me and that I’m trying to always carry with me.
It’s important to feel things. And to live things. I think I’m not afraid anymore. Of what people think of me.
Extra question
CAROLINA: Has your childhood been affected by frequent travelling and moving of your parents ?
YASMINA: Enormously.
But I think it affected me in ways that I only really understood much later, because as a child I don’t remember moving around as something difficult. I actually remember it as incredibly exciting.
I spent part of my childhood in Abu Dhabi and, when I think about it now, I almost remember it as being on holiday all the time. Which is ridiculous because obviously I went to school and my parents worked and we had a normal life, but there was something magical about it. Everyone came from somewhere different, there were different languages and religions and ways of living, and I think I learnt very early that there isn’t really one “normal” way of living a life.
Maybe that’s also why home is such a complicated concept for me.
When I think about homeland, I can’t think about one place. I think about Beirut, my mum’s city and the city where I was born, and Rome, my dad’s city and where I spent most of my life. But then there’s Abu Dhabi, and now Paris, which is probably where I feel the most at home.
So I think growing up moving around made me much less geographically rooted. I don’t feel like I completely belong to one place, but I don’t necessarily think that’s sad. I once described myself as fragmented, but in a beautiful way.
And weirdly, I think moving so much also made people more important to me than places.
I’m a very relational person. When I think about a city, I usually end up thinking about who I loved there, who I met there, what happened to me there.
And then there’s leaving.
I realised recently, answering another question, that one of the most formative experiences connected to my homeland was actually leaving it. Leaving Rome allowed me to become versions of myself in Paris, Madrid or Brussels that I don’t think I would have allowed myself to become there.
Maybe watching my parents build lives in different places taught me very early that you can leave somewhere and build another life.
That home can move.
And I think that has affected almost everything about the way I see the world now.
