Haniyeh’s Reviews > Becoming > Status Update

Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.

I have become, by certain measures, a person of power, and yet there are moments still when I feel insecure or unheard.

Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.

So many of us go through life with stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn’t live up to some established ideal. That if your skin is dark or our hips are wide, if we don’t experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from another country, then we don’t belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently.

My body, the literal space I occupied in the world.

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.

You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind.

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.