UNTITLED #1

UNTITLED #1 © Mustafa Davis, 2026

I don’t know what I really look like. I can only see myself in fragments. I can glue some fragments together and convince myself they make a whole, but the pieces never quite line up. There is always something missing or distorted, some part that seems to belong to another version of me. No matter how expansive the fragment, someone else’s perception of me has always felt restrictive. Claustrophobic. Like clothes that never really fit. Perhaps this is why I wear really baggy clothing… to breathe better.

It is rumored that my father, the oldest of eleven siblings, was adopted. I once asked him if he ever wanted to investigate it, to find out whether it was actually true. He didn’t seem particularly interested. “What would it matter? I lived the life I lived.”

I’ve carried that answer with me ever since. Mostly because it ruined a perfectly good question. We like facts to settle things. My father seemed perfectly comfortable with the possibility that a fact could change while the life built around it remained exactly where he left it. He remembers what he remembers, loves whom he loves and carries what he carries.

Sometimes I wonder how much of a person is memory and how much is invention. I have vivid memories of things that I’m pretty sure never actually happened and vague memories of real things that changed me forever. I have memories whose facts I can question but whose consequences I cannot. Somewhere along the way, what happened, what I remember happening, and what those memories taught me about myself became difficult to separate.

Shhhh. Quiet down. Don’t make a noise.

I learned at five years old that making myself small was a useful way to survive. In the environment I grew up in, going unnoticed had advantages. Silence could make me disappear, and disappearing could keep me safe. The problem is that nobody tells a five-year-old that if you practice disappearing long enough, eventually you become invisible to yourself.

So I went looking for myself in other people. I searched their faces, their reactions, the things they said about me and the things they didn’t. Someone loved me, so I borrowed their version of me. Someone despised me, and I internalized that one too. Someone misunderstood me with tremendous confidence, and confidence has always had an unfair advantage over accuracy.

As I got older, I learned to hold on to larger fragments, shards of realities that may or may not have been. Maybe we spend our lives collecting evidence of ourselves this way: other people’s testimony, our own unreliable recollections, a look someone gave us thirty years ago, something our mother said, something our father didn’t say, the person our spouse believes us to be, the person our children need us to be, the person a stranger decides we are after three seconds. Some of those fragments are flattering. Some are grotesque. None of them are large enough.

For much of my life, the thought that nobody truly knew me haunted me. Then came the frightening realization that I didn’t know myself either. Stage 5: Reality. No known cure. It is frightening to consider that nobody really knows you. It is considerably worse to realize that you are included in “nobody.”

But eventually I began to notice something about all these people I had been using as mirrors: their mirrors were broken too. They have memories, wounds, expectations, love, fear, things their mothers said and things their fathers didn’t. The version of me they see has passed through all of that before it ever reaches me. Even someone who loves me deeply can misunderstand me. Someone who dislikes me may occasionally see something true. Someone can change their mind about me and leave me holding two completely different versions of myself, both attributed to the same person.

That realization made the room feel larger. I don’t need to decide that their fragments are false. They are real experiences of me. They simply cannot contain all of me. Neither can mine.

There is only One who knows me without assembling me from pieces. Allah knows what I remember correctly and what I don’t. He knows the intention beneath an action that may have looked entirely different from the outside. He knows the child that disappeared and the man trying to piece it back together, the person I imagine myself to be and every version of me that has ever existed in the mind of someone else. He doesn’t need those versions reconciled in order to know me.

There is tremendous comfort for me in that. This is a recent realization. I spent much of my life troubled by the thought that nobody would ever really know me, when perhaps I was asking people to do something they were never capable of doing in the first place. We see one another in fragments because we are fragments ourselves, looking through memories and experiences broken and reassembled so many times that we have forgotten where some of the pieces originally belonged.

I still don’t know what I really look like. I’m becoming more comfortable with the possibility that I never will. But I now know the mirror doesn’t need to be repaired for Allah to know who is standing in front of it.

Out Loud!

A few years ago I locked my cameras in a drawer and stopped telling stories.

What I didn’t understand at the time: when I stopped telling other people’s stories, my own story stopped too. I spent that stretch living inside other people’s passions, other people’s goals, telling myself I’d find my fulfillment in helping them find theirs. I didn’t.

No one asked me to put the cameras down. That was my choice. And I’m still learning why I made it.

This portrait of me on a Chicago street during the Great Depression is really a picture of the depression I was living in when I put my purpose down.

Recently I took the cameras out. Dusted them off. Started creating art and telling stories again.

The challenges haven’t gone away. They’re chapters now. Not the ending. Scenes in my own film instead of scenes I’m watching from the outside. Alhamdulillah I’m writing my own narrative again.

Consider this the first frame or first scene. There is more coming insha’Allah. I’ve picked it back up and I’m swinging for the fences… OUT LOUD this time! No fear. No compromise. No apologies