In her poem “A Litany for Survival,”1 Audre Lorde proclaims we were never meant to survive. This “we” is ambiguous. She speaks of “those who live at the shoreline, standing upon the constant edges of decision, crucial and alone,” those who “love in doorways coming and going, in the hours between dawns, looking inward and outward,” and those who “were imprinted by fear,” But we know she herself is included; Black, lesbian, survivor, and warrior. She speaks of those who exist on the margins, in a liminal space. Such marginal existence compels us to pose questions: Will their troubled existence give space for their dreams to be fulfilled? For their love to be seen? To heal?This liminal space and these margins hold knowledge and wisdom and carry potential and capability, not only for survival but also for recovery and healing. These margins are embodied by the racialized, displaced, queer, trans, neurodivergent, and disabled. Being on the margin shaped my journey with healing, being a queer body from the (neo)colonized global south, forced into exile in the white Western world. This duality between marginality and the aptitude for healing has always intrigued me, and their relationship is what I investigate in this text.I knew I was different as a child, but I didn't comprehend how. It wasn't until my prepubescent age that the bullying started. I was too feminine for the other boys at school. They called me names, shoved me around, and sexually harassed me. During recess, I escaped the schoolyard, full of boys running after each other. The quiet, mostly empty school library was my refuge. When I think of this now, I see the library as a margin. The schoolyard was a space where power was on display. My retort was an attempt to arm myself with another, hidden form of power. I sought shelter in knowledge and imagination. This anecdote elucidates my journey with healing; marginality shapes our choices, our paths, and the lives we lead.The pressure was also felt at home. As a queer child, I wanted to impress my parents and get a prestigious job, which for them meant becoming a doctor. For a while, I was persuaded. I was a fan of American medical dramas and felt that medicine would be my contribution to healing others. However, that path didn't sit well with me. The roadmap for becoming a doctor in Egypt was too long. I wanted to move out of my small hometown and live freely. I opted for a pharmacy degree, to grant myself quicker independence, all the while fantasizing about finding cures for impenetrable diseases. I moved to Cairo once I got my degree. My first job was my visa to stay. But I hated working in the pharma business. It had nothing to do with healing. I decided to exit that path despite the lucrative prospects. I wanted to do something I believe in. I started working with NGOs on projects at the intersections of sexuality, gender, and health.Cairo, with its stark inequalities, politicized me. In 2011, I joined millions who took to the streets to demand bread, freedom, and social justice. United in our call to end the dictatorship, our personal motives were different, and it was clear that the queer feminist block of the revolution was at the margin. Our fight wasn't only against the authoritarian regime but also against the revolutionary comrades who thought the time wasn't right for our agenda.My journey with healing took a turn when I began working as a psychosocial counselor at one of the few organizations that assisted refugees in Cairo. I hesitated if I was right for the job. The task seemed huge. My friend, who worked as a psychologist there, talked me into it. She insisted that if community members seek counseling and comfort with me, then I am “a natural.” After extensive training, I was doing basic counseling with survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. I accompanied people to hospitals, UN offices, and police stations, as well as through their journeys with trauma. The years I spent in that job were some of the richest times and the most challenging of my life. Contrary to common belief, social workers, therapists, and others in the helping professions learn immensely from their clients. Through the lens of trauma, we see the horrors that people inflict on each other, the suffering and pain, but also witness the power of the human commitment to rebuild oneself and the power of belief in something larger than individual survival.In an intimate conversation with a colleague back then, we opened up about our history of surviving sexual violence. Our personal histories pulled us towards this kind of work, she suggested. This observation resonates with Carl Jung's notion of the wounded healer archetype, which he derives from the Greek myth of Asclepius. Reflecting on interrelationality in psychoanalytic dynamics, Jung says that “it is [the analyst's] own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal.”2 I now understand that because I am wounded that I was able to offer a hand to others who harbor wounds. My marginality paved the road for a journey of surviving and healing. It also prepared me for what was about to come.In 2014 I became a refugee. I fled Egypt to Germany amid a crackdown on civil society groups, political opposition, and the queer community. I was an enemy of the state in all of the aforementioned checkboxes . Exile is a violent, disorienting experience. You will never understand it until it happens to you. My journey for recovery acquired new urgency.Moving from the “third world” to a wealthy Global North country, I thought resources would be rampant. I was never able to access mental health services in Egypt, in large part because I could not financially afford them, and because of the difficulty to find queer-friendly therapists. In Egypt therapy was a luxury. I never thought I would face similar barriers in Germany. As an asylum seeker in Berlin, health insurance only covered so-called painful and chronic conditions. Mental health was excluded. A few organizations provided mental health services for refugees. Yet I was not eligible as I neither survived torture nor war. I wasn't the right kind of traumatized.One of the therapists at an NGO invited me to her private practice because my case, according to her, was interesting. She was a German woman in her forties. In the beginning, she inquired about which barriers I expected in the therapy. “You are white,” I bluntly answered. At that point, I had already had my share of bad experiences with social workers in Germany. I became wary and suspicious. “I am not free of racism,” she answered; an acknowledgment that I found reassuring. She suggested we remain open for discussion whenever something made me uncomfortable. I was optimistic, but with time, I dreaded the moments when I had to explain why something was racist. I worried those conversations would spoil our relationship. I felt I should be grateful that she picked me. It all became burdensome. I stopped seeing her.I would come to understand the problem as structural and pervasive. My ex-therapist relayed to me that the overwhelming majority of therapists in Germany would not address racism in the therapy dynamic, that their training was not made for that, and that it took external education and self-improvement to be sensitized in this regard. A therapist's qualification is very expensive, which creates an overwhelmingly white mental health system, especially in a country where higher education and class strongly run along racial lines. When I started working as a psychosocial worker in Berlin, I had better insight into these systems. My struggles were far from singular. Queers of color encounter horrific situations navigating a system shaped by whiteness and heteronormativity. Refugees faced extra barriers due to legal, location, and language barriers. The system was not made for us. Especially those who cross borders, as Audre Lorde professed.Jennifer Mullan, a psychologist and advocate for decolonizing mental health says, “When we look at the legacy of so many fields, mental health specifically, we see long histories of white male theorists, violence against non-white male bodies, and the erasure of other kinds of wisdoms that might threaten the power of white men.”3 Institutions of psychiatry and social work have roots in hierarchies of power and social control of the other; the poor, the sick, the disabled, and the neurodivergent. The problem was not merely finding the right therapist. Rather, the overpathologizing, overmedicalization, and setting up of people to a standard of functionality and productivity based on a white Western understanding of healing.With time, I realized it wasn't helpful to dwell on the specificity of my exile. We often believe that our suffering is special and unique, which stands in the way of healing. There are endless exiles. Uprootedness permeates our modern life. Processes of capitalism, industrialization, and colonization created alienated lives, removed from our roots, from ancestral wisdoms, from nature, and from each other. The intellectual and academic Edward Said wrote, “Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.”4 Exile is a state that allows us to reexamine who we are, to understand our culture, language, and histories in new ways, and to no longer take them for granted. In my Berlin exile, I was able to reconnect with forms of wisdom held within but were always sidelined, ignored, and ridiculed. Exile helped me return to myself.One of the best things about exile is the friendships it creates. Other exiles and refugees I met in Berlin made life there tolerable, possible. It was a cold November night in Berlin when I headed to my Mexican friend's place for a celebration of Día de los Muertos. She asked me to bring food and drinks, along with photos of deceased loved ones. Because all those who attended were queer, we queered up the tradition. Extending our rituals to honor the deceased beyond biological ancestry. Photos of queer siblings were placed on the shrine. We didn't only talk about the dead, but about traumas, losses, and intergenerational curses—crying, laughing, eating, and drinking together. That night had me thinking about the grief rituals I experienced in Egypt. Rituals of washing the body of the dead, visiting the graveyards while bringing food to give to the poor, and the different days on which the dead are remembered and talked about. I was fascinated by how our cultures dealt with grief, and how our queerness helped us revise and reclaim these rituals.Egyptian culture felt more in tune with death rituals. At the same time, we are also prone to humor. Humor and jokes are embedded in culture and daily interactions. Egyptian comedy is well-known in the media industry across Arabic-speaking countries. We laugh at others as well as at ourselves, we laugh at the good and bad. I began to think about what this means for survival and healing. In Berlin, my therapist frowned on humor. Whenever I laughed while sharing my struggles, she questioned and modulated my tone. Several therapists argue that humor is a defense mechanism that hinders processing emotions. I could understand that argument because at a point in my life I repressed humor as a response to traumatic life events.The key to humor is where it comes from, by that I mean who gets to use humor to express their narrative. When marginalized voices reclaim humor, we overcome shame, connect with others, and find healing. I later understood why frowning upon humor from therapists didn't sit well with me. It was too cognitive an approach. Humor can dilute negative emotions. There is power in being able to laugh at our oppressors, at our darkest experiences. I began to develop an approach to healing that can be summarized by an embrace of grief and humor, an ongoing intertwinement of sadness with rebellious joy.Living in exile made me realize I had to take healing into my own hands. That healing was my responsibility. It's safe to say that not very long ago, there was more stigma and shame around mental health. This is changing. Psychology and neuroscience resources are massively proliferating. A growing body of knowledge on trauma and healing is made available online. I started to connect with my age-old pleasure, escaping into the world of knowledge. Through reading books, and listening to lectures and podcasts on mental health, I learned about myself more than I could anywhere else. My therapy experiences provided techniques but didn't teach me about my thought patterns, how I see the world, how trauma shaped me, and how to build self-acceptance. I experimented with a range of self-therapy techniques, inner child healing, ego work, and shadow work. I realized how disconnected I was from my body, so I explored the realm of embodied practices.Healing should not become a solitary endeavor. It must remain collective. The healing revolution of the past years entails alarming tendencies—commodification and superficialization among them. What concerns me, however, is the inward turn toward the self which reifies an ideal of healing that is selfish and antisocial. “You need to seek therapy” is commonplace advice for people struggling with their mental health. Indeed, therapy and medication save lives and help people navigate their paths through healing. However, I worry that this expectation to go to therapy, especially for marginalized bodies, for whom these systems were not made, could further isolate them. The challenge lies in how to collectivize our healing and take it out of the confines of therapy rooms and bubbly bathtubs.Psychiatric research5 points out that patients’ progress during psychotherapy can be broken down into two main elements: insight of the person into their own psyche, i.e., psychoeducation and being accompanied through their healing journey, in the sense of being witnessed, related to, and reassured. We need a loving community to witness each other as we heal. We need to democratize healing, perhaps we need healing circles, a way of breaking the hierarchy. It might be useful to remind ourselves that witch hunts were not solely motivated by the anxieties around female sexuality, but also by their coming together, and practicing healing wisdoms beyond the modalities sanctioned by the state and the church at the time.Healing can be elusive and tricky. I don't think we can talk about healing in absolute terms. It perhaps describes moving from one condition to another where there is more harmony, more understanding, and more acceptance. For me, healing cannot be separated from resistance against injustice. Seeking a better, just world has always been the grail for those kept at the margins. We need to shake the systems of injustice and marginalization. We need a new theory of healing; a theory from the margins, where the magic happens.