Dr. Sarah Marusek

How is it possible to go from taking drugs with rock stars in London and New York to sipping tea with Ayatollahs and Sheikhs in Tehran and Beirut?

Wow, this is hard to explain. So, I need to go further back.

When I was a child, I spent all of my energy trying to get better. This meant competitive gymnastics, baseball, soccer, field hockey, basketball and finally track and field. I really only had time to read in the car, to and from gymnastics practice, which was located far away.

My monster made me take all of my activities way too seriously.

My body has had to live on muscle memory my whole life, so I needed to work as hard as possible to keep up the ability to move. And I really fucking love moving, because it is the only way to ignore the monster.

Unfortunately, as I began to grow into a teenager, the competitive aspect of sports started making the monster stronger and stronger, and thus I soon lost interest in performing badly in everything except gymnastics, because that was the only sport that ever really liberated me from the monster. In the early days, it was almost as if the monster did not even exist.

Flying through the air and landing is that special.

But the monster did exist. So, when it made it too difficult to continue with gymnastics, I did springboard diving at university. However, that soon started going badly too and I gave everything up when I moved to London to study.

Of course, I was absolutely heartbroken over my body. I went from flying and wowing people to being unable to perform at all. I had even started smoking the year before, as a ‘fuck you’ to my own body. Before that, I barely touched drugs although drinking has always made the monster confused.

When I arrived in London, I decided to try living the life of Dorian Gray, the eponymous character of Oscar’s Wilde’s novel of depravity and decadence. I was so desperate to feel good in myself, and surprise!

Drugs can make you feel pretty amazing.

For those of you who have not read the novel, you should as The Picture of Dorian Gray is pretty fucking brilliant. I read it as a teenager and liked it so much that I wrote an essay about it for high school, which the monster then deleted. My monster hates technology! It did the same thing to my undergraduate dissertation, right when I was just shy of completing it…

Anyway, in the novel, Dorian Gray is a beautiful young man so in love with himself that he wishes his portrait will never age. In a Gothic twist, Dorian remains young and beautiful while living a life of hedonistic sin, meanwhile his portrait ages, sickens and disfigures after his every foul deed.

Of course, this novel especially appealed to me because by high school I was already becoming the monster inside of me.

So, in London, I became quite the character, in search of my Dorian Gray.

Right away, I started going out alone. And oh my, not only venturing out alone to gigs, but also to nightclubs. I did not know anybody and after all I just wanted to have fun! But that is exactly how I eventually made friends. Most of my friends were really well connected, so I became everybody’s ‘plus one’. This included invitations to afterparties, and that is when the drug taking started in earnest. VIP tickets at festivals were particularly messy.

I never took drugs as much as other people thought, I was just always wanting to be taking them. Why? In the moment, they made my nervous system more accessible than it had ever been before. That was exciting.

Of course, the aftermath of the drugs started taking a huge physical, emotional and psychological toll. As Dorian, I was even unhappier.

I was definitely becoming the monster inside of me, completely out of control. However, I am going to save these details for my memoir.

Shortly after leaving London for New York, I stopped taking illegal drugs when I learned about how they arrive on the streets.

I also started exercising again, even running marathons, but quitting smoking was too tricky so I still try to make do with only one or two a night.

But the monster had now been unleashed and by my twenties I had never hated myself more. I started watching BBC News late at night and would just sob uncontrollably over the sadness. I knew that something had to change.

Being in New York after 11 September 2001 was dreadful, as the Islamophobia just permeated everybody and everything. I had my own boutique public relations company, working mostly with music, film and fashion photographers, plus the odd Hollywood actor, but I also started taking on clients working in photojournalism.

None of the books about Muslim suffering garnered any publicity!

Not about the US-led war in Iraq, nor about the Russian war in Chechnya.

When my own respected client started spouting Islamophobia, I decided to pursue a masters in international affairs with a focus on Islamic activism. And not long afterwards, a PhD in social science.

Why?

I fell in love with postcolonial revolutionary religious movements. I had never been a believer, but Islamic activism really inspired me.

I think it was because the monster was beginning to turn me into a victim, and I needed to learn how to become a warrior again, this time not through movement but by engaging with new and different ideas.

The only way I can describe beginning my higher education is like having the carpet yanked beneath my feet. I started to question everything I had ever known and I do not think I have stopped questioning anything since.

Back then, as now, the US and Iran were sworn enemies. So that was the country that I yearned to learn about, and coincidentally I also fell madly in love with Iranian culture. Back when Netflix was only a DVD provider, they had an astonishing collection of Iranian films. I watched all of them while waiting for my visa to be approved, which took months.

And then it happened. I went to Iran, got in trouble and so chose Lebanon, another absolutely brilliant culture. But that’s another blog.

Honestly? I also think I just needed to do something entirely crazy and self consuming to stop me from focussing on the monster at that stage.

In any case, now you at least kind of know…