Today I Turn 38, and I'm Still Excited About Everything at Once

 Today I turn thirty-eight.

The phrase that has followed me since childhood arrives with the morning light, unbidden as always: “You sometimes get excited about everything at once.” It was never said to wound, but it wounded anyway, the way only the truth can. I was six, maybe seven, the first time I heard it, breathless from explaining my newest plan: a fish farm in the courtyard, a library in the stairwell, a school for the stray cats. The adults smiled, exchanged glances, and delivered their verdict. I didn’t know then that this would become the central indictment of my life.

Now, on this birthday, I am a father of five. An Egyptian who left Egypt, then returned, then left again. A former banker who writes code in a rented apartment in Canada while dreaming of soil - Egyptian soil, first. And that phrase - you get excited about everything at once - has become less an accusation and more a prophecy. I am writing this because for years I have let others narrate my life, and I am tired. Today, on the day I turn thirty-eight, I am taking the pen. This is my article. I will do the talking.

To understand the immigrant, you must first understand the geography of his restlessness. Cairo taught me ambition. Dubai taught me transaction. Egypt upon my return taught me disillusionment. And Canada - Canada is teaching me something I still don’t have a word for. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I graduated in 2009, a young man with a commerce degree and the permanent sensation that something enormous was waiting for me just beyond the horizon. Egypt in those years was already teaching its children a particular kind of arithmetic: how to divide hope by opportunity and arrive at departure. So I departed. Dubai rose out of the desert like a dare, and I accepted. Accounting. Procurement. Sometimes foreman, sometimes project manager. The construction and home decor sector cared little for job titles; it cared about results. I learned to speak the language of concrete and spreadsheets, of deadlines and delivery.

But the Gulf has a way of reminding you that you are a guest. No matter how many years you give, the soil never recognizes your roots. You can build villas for other families while your own children grow in photographs. You can manage million-dirham projects while your sense of belonging depreciates like an asset no one wants to carry on their books.

So in 2013, I went home. Or what I thought was home.

The Return: Banking on Stability

Egypt received me with the complicated embrace reserved for prodigal sons who weren’t actually prodigal, just exhausted. I entered banking - a proper career, the kind mothers boast about. By 2014, I was inside the machinery of one of Egypt’s financial institutions, and I climbed. The title sounded impressive: CLCU Outbound Manager. I managed teams, targets, the delicate alchemy of convincing customers to stay when they’d already decided to leave.

For seven years, I was good at it. But competence is not the same as conviction. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from excelling at something you never chose. The bank gave me structure, salary, status. It also gave me, by 2020, a forced resignation. The details of that departure belong to the closed rooms of corporate Egypt, but I will say this: sometimes institutions ask you to choose between your integrity and your income, and whichever you choose, you lose something.

The pandemic arrived like an answer to a question I hadn’t asked. While the world locked down, I was already in a different kind of lockdown - the suffocation of a life that had become unrecognizable. I spent the next four years moving through companies, through roles, through the motions. I was present but not accounted for. A ghost in my own career.

And through all of this - the Dubai years, the banking years, the pandemic drift - I was building something else. A family. Then another. Then another. Five children. Three mothers. None of those relationships survived. I am not here to litigate those endings. What I will say is this: there is no failure quite like the failure of love, and no silence quite like the silence of a father who doesn’t know how to explain to his children why he couldn’t stay.

The Crossing: Canada, 2024

I arrived in Canada in 2024 at the age of thirty-six, not as a refugee or a fleeing victim - I arrived as a man who had simply run out of versions of himself to try in the places he’d already been. Canada represented not hope, exactly, but the absence of exhaustion. A place where no one knew my titles, my failures, my three marriages, my five children. A place where I could be unknown long enough to discover what I actually wanted.

The first months were disorienting. You don’t realize how much of your identity is stored in other people’s recognition until you walk into a room where no one knows your name, your language, your context. Egyptian immigrants have been making this crossing for decades - some fleeing political unrest, others chasing economic opportunity, many carrying both burdens at once. I met some of them in settlement programs, in language exchanges, in the quiet solidarity of men who recognize in each other’s eyes the particular exhaustion of starting over at an age when others are consolidating.

And then I did something that, to anyone who knows me, was entirely predictable: I enrolled in coding classes. A thirty-six-year-old former banker, sitting in a classroom learning Python and JavaScript alongside twenty-somethings. Canada’s tech sector, I discovered, has an almost insatiable hunger for programmers - software engineers and developers are among the most sought-after immigrants in the country. But that wasn’t why I chose it. I chose it because code is the opposite of everything I had been doing. Code doesn’t care about your past. Code doesn’t ask about your failed marriages. Code either works or it doesn’t. There is a profound mercy in that kind of clarity.

The Dream That Won’t Quiet: A Farm in Egypt

And then there’s the farm.

You may have noticed by now that I cannot seem to want one thing at a time. You get excited about everything at once. Yes. I am learning to code, yes. But what I actually want - what I have wanted since I was a boy sketching fish ponds in Cairo dust - is land. Soil. A farm. Something that grows. And I want it to grow first in Egypt.

Canada has its agricultural pathways, and I am learning about them. But my farm dream is not limited to this cold northern soil. The land I have always imagined tilling is the land that raised me. Egypt is where I first learned the smell of wet earth after the Nile flood, where I watched fellaheen work fields with a patience I have never possessed but always admired. That is where the farm belongs - at least the first one. The one that will prove to myself that the boy who sketched fish ponds in the courtyard was not a fool, but a prophet.

It still makes no sense on paper. A man with no agricultural background, no farming family, no experience with Egyptian land reclamation or drip irrigation or the ministry permits that turn a dream into a deed. A man who has spent his entire professional life indoors, under fluorescent lights, staring at screens and spreadsheets. What business does he have dreaming of soil back home while he sits in a Canadian classroom learning JavaScript?

But that is precisely the point. I have spent twenty years building things for other people - villas in Dubai, portfolios in Egypt, code for Canadian companies. I want to build something that grows. Something alive. Something that doesn’t care about my resume or my relationship history. And I want to build it where it all started. A farm doesn’t ask for references, and Egyptian earth does not forget its sons.

The plan is taking shape slowly, from a distance. I research land prices in the Delta and the desert reclamation projects. I study what crops make sense for a man who will not be there every day - not yet. I speak to friends back home who still believe in me despite everything. Canada is teaching me skills that may one day fund this dream. But Egypt is where the dream lives. Egypt is where the soil waits.

The Reckoning: What It Means to Be Excited About Everything

Let me return to the accusation - because I am beginning to understand that it was never an accusation at all. It was a diagnosis.

You get excited about everything at once.

What the adults were really saying was: You want too much. You will be disappointed. Protect yourself. They were trying to teach me the art of limitation. But limitation was never going to be my story.

Yes, I have wanted everything at once. A career and a calling. A family and freedom. Stability and reinvention. Egypt and Dubai and Canada. Banking and coding and farming - starting in Egypt, reaching wherever it needs to. I have been a husband three times and a father five times and I have failed at the first while succeeding at the second in ways I am only beginning to comprehend. I have been wealthy and I have been broken. I have managed teams and I have sat alone in rented rooms wondering if any of it meant anything.

And today, on my thirty-eighth birthday, I am a student again. A father of five who speaks in code snippets and dreams in crop rotations on the banks of the Nile. A man who has left behind three countries and three marriages and one career and is still, impossibly, excited about everything at once.

Maybe the adults were right. Maybe this is a pathology. Maybe I am constitutionally incapable of choosing one life and living it quietly.

But I have begun to suspect something else. I have begun to suspect that the people who change anything - who cross borders, learn new languages, build new families, plant seeds in unfamiliar soil or return to plant them in the soil they came from - are precisely the ones who cannot stop wanting. The ones who get excited about everything at once. The ones who refuse to be just one thing, in just one place, for just one lifetime.

Coda: The Article I Am Writing, on My Birthday

I told you at the beginning: this is my article. I will do the talking.

For decades, I let others define me: the scattered child, the ambitious immigrant, the absent father, the failed husband, the ex-banker, the perpetual beginner. Each label true in its way, and each incomplete. What none of those labels captured was the thing underneath - the relentless, exhausting, perhaps pathological conviction that there is more. More to learn. More to build. More to love, despite the evidence of my own history.

I don’t know what comes next. The code may lead to a job in Canada. The farm may start in Egypt and grow from there - maybe one day it will reach across oceans, maybe not. My children - scattered across households and countries - may or may not understand their father’s restlessness. I am not writing a victory narrative on my birthday. I am writing a survival narrative. A human narrative.

What I know is this: I am thirty-eight years old today, and I am in Canada, and I am learning to code, and I want to start a farm - first in Egypt, where the dream was born. And I am excited about everything at once. And if that is a flaw, then it is the flaw that brought me across an ocean. It is the flaw that will not let me settle. It is the flaw that, God willing, will one day put seeds in Egyptian ground and a harvest on the table and a story in my children’s mouths that is not about absence, but about audacity.

You sometimes get excited about everything at once.

Yes. Yes, I do.

And today, on the day I turn thirty-eight, I am finally beginning to believe that this is not my curse. It is my inheritance.