Unicorn Quotes

“As Umber taught me, the Quran is teeming with queer possibilities. Now I’m not saying that the Quran is a guidebook to a queer utopia, because, like many religious texts, it has its fair share of hegemonic rules and restrictions. But it is also an extraordinarily poetic work, with a diverse range of thoughts, many of which feel compatible with being queer. Prophet Muhammed once said, ‘Islam began as something strange and will return to being something strange, so give blessings to those who are strange.’ Amen Muhammed! If you replace the world Islam with ‘people’, the sentence could feasibly be the slogan for a queer sex-positive disco in Berlin.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“My mother was on the receiving end of so much of the anger I felt about my childhood. It didn’t ever occur to me that she and I might be ensnared within the same system of oppression. In fact, in Middle Eastern households, you’ll often find the mother as the mouthpiece of the patriarchy; while the father silently benefits from his male privilege, the women are left to enact the structures that the men profit from, perhaps even dictate.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“It’s devastating, really, how awful queer people can be to other queer people, when what they’re really trying to fight are the wider social structures attacking their queerness. We enact repeated cycles of rejection upon each other, obliterating ourselves like aimless Pac-Mans circling a doomed maze.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“With an almost mystical calm, as if she were a deity about to disappear right in front of me, Mama said, ‘You’ve remembered that wrong, habibi. A good deed is worth ten points. A sin is only worth one.’ She stepped into the taxi as though it were a private jet, and just before it drove away, she told me that she loved me. The”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Episode 1 – Anger: Ramy said that as soon as I got off the phone with Mama, she raged around the living room, furious that I would dare to attack her for being a bad parent. I wish I could have watched this impassioned performance, which included such hyperbolic claims as, ‘I am the best mother in the world’; ‘how dare Amrou accuse me of this when it is Amrou who made me unhappy all my life’; and, with utter seriousness and self-belief: ‘I am perfect’. This was the reaction I assumed she’d have. Whenever any critique came her way, her go-to response was that she was a person without flaws. As much as I admired the goddess complex, it automatically made everyone else at fault. She so vehemently believed that she was the ideal mother and person, that by proxy you were always in the wrong. Mama was good at gaslighting, but also an expert emotional manipulator; it didn’t take long for her eyes to water, and for her to spin out gut-wrenchingly guilt-tripping phrases like ‘I sacrificed my life for you’, and ‘I only ever wanted you to be happy’.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Normally it was hard for me ever to be angry at other people. Such a position would suggest that I had enough self-love to be enraged that someone else had potentially injured it, whereas I approached every scenario as someone unworthy of love, and just felt appreciative of anything that resembled it, even when it quite clearly wasn’t.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“I then asked him why he thought his character put on the make-up. After I asked this, he looked at the floor for such a long time that I started to think that he might have pooed in his pants and was trying to formulate an escape plan. But then he looked up at me and said, ‘Because he loves his mother and wants to be like her.’ I excused myself, locked myself in Mama’s closet, and cried all over her furs and embroidered textiles. All I could think was: None of this was my fault.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Even after years of being represented by wonderful, endlessly supportive agents, every time I get a phone call or an email from them, my immediate assumption is that I’ve done something that’s warranted me getting dropped. Every. Single. Time.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Watching the child gaze on his mother in fascination, putting on make-up out of love and curiosity, only then to be scolded, was completely illuminating for me. As I watched the little boy respond on the monitor, it became utterly clear – he was only a child. I was only a child when I was being made to feel that I was a problem. Watching this encounter from an objective distance, it was so obvious. In the lucky (and probably unlikely) event you have access to a willing cast of actors and a set like a scene from your childhood frozen in time, I would genuinely encourage any of you trying to work out your feelings around a difficult childhood to re-stage it with actors and watch it on playback. Otherwise, trying to see your memories is like trying to get a full view of a hand that’s planted on your face. Your perspective is all over the place.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“Amrou! What is that?! We cannot show our faces with that!’ It’s barely visible, Mother. And anyway, they already think we’re all damned because I practise anal and wear heels. Mama collapsed on the couch, breathing deeply. She was wearing a flowing black dress held together by a delicate metal circle frame around her neck. ‘This is the last thing I need today. Of all days, today you do this.’ Mother, Trump is president. A slightly patchy section on an otherwise spotless shirt won’t impair anyone’s life.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“My parents asked to meet me in a department store so they could purchase me a shirt that would disguise all my nonconformism. I loathe wearing plain suits and shirts – they feel like heterosexual prisons, the ties like death-penalty nooses. I often feel such an aversion to them that I can develop a rash around my neck. But I had learnt to just grin and bear it. So I agreed to wear the straitjacket, and dress up as the heterosexual son they all needed me to be.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“The more I discovered about quantum physics, the less I felt that I was a prophet from another world. This quantum model of the universe was one that entirely made sense to me, and it allowed me to believe that I must belong to the universe.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“The line between whether I genuinely believed in the Bible or whether I just pretended to is blurred in my mind; it was one of those lies we all convince ourselves to believe as truth, in an attempt to settle any internal confusion.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“The regulation of my sexuality was continually enacted through these coded silencing methods. When I was fifteen, Brokeback Mountain was released in cinemas, and I knew I had to do whatever was necessary to see it. Once the trailer was released, I used every opportunity I had on the Internet to watch it. I gorged myself on it, memorised its every little detail, with one deeply tender moment in the trailer that I would turn to whenever I needed comfort. After four years of separation, the men arrange to meet up, and when they’re reunited, they greet each other with a hug so tight it’s as though they’re fusing into each other. I was desperate to feel an embrace like this, one so driven by love and desire that it would cause me to melt into my partner; I often lay in bed replaying this embrace in my head, imagining that the hug was so tight that it caused both men’s skin to peel off, so that they were two fleshy bodies merging into one complete whole, free from gender, race, or identity. To this day, every now and then when I feel particularly connected during sex, I imagine that this faceless merge might ensue. My teenage years were deeply lonely, and this image provided much comfort for me – as if love could diffuse the boundaries between people, so that we were each of us not separated by our own lonely bodies.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“the forlorn little comma. It felt, and I’m not exaggerating, like a life-or-death situation. Doing perfectly at school was the only tangible thing I had in my control, and without it, my desires and transgressions would take over me like a rabid infection. I was plunged into a low so deep that by the end of the week, I went in the kitchen to look for a knife. I needed to punish myself for this cataclysmic failure. I rummaged around the kitchen drawer, searching for the sharpest knife I could find. My mournful week in bed had completely drained me of life, and I was searching desperately for a way to feel something. Of course, the burdened-with-paperwork angel on my left shoulder would not allow comfort or joy to be the solution, so sharp pain and punishment was the most natural thing for my brain to seek out.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“the forlorn little comma. It felt, and I’m not exaggerating, like a life-or-death situation. Doing perfectly at school was the only tangible thing I had in my control, and without it, my desires and transgressions would take over me like a rabid infection. I was plunged into a low so deep that by the end of the week, I went in the kitchen to look for a knife. I needed to punish myself for this cataclysmic failure. I rummaged around the kitchen drawer, searching for the sharpest knife I could find. My mournful week in bed had completely drained me of life, and I was searching desperately for a way to feel something.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“How could anything I do upset Mama? Are there things happening in my brain and body that might cause her to reject me? It felt like the purity of our bond was stained for ever. My mother was the light and love of my life, so the idea that there could be something other than love between us filled me with a terror that has endured till this day. In all honesty, I think it governs pretty much everything I do.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“I tried to nuzzle my way back into the nest, but as I lay my head on her lap, she brushed me off, and told me to go to my room. It was at this moment that I had the tragic realisation that the bond between us was not sacred. I became aware of my capacity to transgress; until this point, the idea of anything restricting our love was utterly alien. Something I said had revealed boundaries to what I believed was a boundless love. As I lay in my bed that evening – my twin brother Ramy sleeping soundly on the bed next to me – the weight of this overwhelmed me, and I wept so hard that I was eventually exhausted.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“I always feel empowered when I’m in drag and entertaining a crowd – it’s my sanctuary, a space where I invite the audience into my own reality, where I don’t need to adhere to the rules of anybody else’s. No matter how low I’m feeling, the transformative power of make-up and costume is galvanising; for most of my life I’ve felt like a failure by male standards, and drag allows me to convert my exterior into an image of defiant femininity.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“used my little finger to apply gold pigment to my emerald-painted lips. Denim, the drag troupe that I set up seven years earlier, had survived the gruelling Fringe Festival, and we were one show away from crossing our scratched heels over the finish line. A month of performances, often two a day, had taken its toll. My skin was at war with the industrial quantity of make-up it was being suffocated in (a two-hour procedure each time); I had obliterated my left kneecap because of a wannabe-rockstar ‘jump-and-slam-onto-the-ground’ move I felt impelled to perform each show;”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“As a queer person, I believe almost dogmatically in difference, in the idea that every single person is unique, with their own innate sense of self, and that it is this difference which brings all of us together as one.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“I was desperate to present as transgressive, but also to be entirely accepted within spaces that were anything but that.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between

“You might be questioning why I allowed Mason to treat me this way. I often do myself. But at the age of sixteen, and as someone who had not found true acceptance anywhere I turned, I was willing to accept any crumbs of acceptance that were thrown my way.”
― Amrou Al-Kadhi, Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between