The first feeling wasn’t anger. It was disappointment.
That quiet, sinking kind. The kind that settles in your chest when you realize the people shouting loudest about your story never even bothered to listen to it.

When the headlines started spinning, I remember sitting there thinking ... this isn’t critique, it’s theater. They weren’t reporting. They were performing.
And it hurt, because these were the voices the world trusts. The ones that talk about freedom, fairness, and truth… until the truth doesn’t fit the story they want to sell.

That’s what stung the most.
Not what they said.
Who was saying it.

It felt like being scolded by someone you once admired. Like watching a person you loved stand on a podium and tell everyone why you’re unworthy of the love they claimed to have for you. It’s a strange kind of heartbreak ... being abused by a voice that says it’s only trying to protect you.

But I learned something in that silence between outrage and clarity.
You can’t let borrowed anger rewrite your reality.

Because the truth ... the one I live, not the one they assume ... is simple.
We are not perfect. We never claimed to be.
But we are trying. Building. Laughing. Learning.
And those who come here, who see it with their own eyes, understand that.

The visiting comics, the ones who took the risk ... they get it now. You can see it in their eyes after the show. Relief. Surprise. Maybe even guilt that they’d believed the noise for so long. And privately, some of them admit it ... that the narrative they were fed doesn’t hold when you meet the people face to face.

I don’t feel vindicated. I feel… grateful.
Grateful that I still get to tell my story in my voice, in my city, on my stage.
Grateful that my difference ... the thing I once hid behind jokes ... is now what sets me apart.
I am not like any other comic in Saudi Arabia. None of us are. And that’s the point. Each of us is carving out space for voices the world hasn’t heard before.

So when they twist our progress into propaganda, when they weaponize compassion into condemnation, I remind myself ... real champions of humanity don’t cherry-pick who counts. They don’t sell stereotypes to pay the rent.

They show up. They see. They listen.
And only then do they speak.

Because at the end of the day, the ones yelling from the outside missed the story completely. They were too busy performing their outrage to notice that the people they’re supposedly defending are already standing, already speaking, already laughing.

That’s the real story.
The one they never showed up for.

And maybe that’s what hurts most ... and heals most too.
Because while they keep shouting at ghosts, we keep doing the thing they said we couldn’t.
We keep creating. We keep laughing.
We keep being human.