Nowhere and Everywhere

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” - Rumi

My name is Omar Alani.

I was born in 1997 to a middle-class family in the suburbs of Baghdad, Iraq. The land between two rivers. The cradle of civilization. The place the world decided to break.

My father built things. Small contracts, local projects, honest work. My mother kept the books at a girls’ high school. We were comfortable. Normal, even. Or at least that’s how it felt to a child who didn’t know any different.

Before

Life in Iraq before 2003 was, through my young eyes, unremarkable in the best way.

I didn’t understand the sanctions that had gripped the country since 1991. Thirteen years of unfair collective punishment for a cardinal’s sin. I didn’t feel their weight the way the older members of my family did. Ask them about that period. They’ll paint you a different picture.

But I was a kid. I went to school. I played in streets that still had laughter in them. I learned.

My family believed in one thing above all else: education. Academic excellence wasn’t encouraged. It was expected. It was oxygen. So I grew up with literature in one hand and mathematics in the other. That discipline would shape everything that came after.

After

Then the war came.

Shock and awe, they called it. Liberation, they promised. What arrived was neither.

Nothing was normal anymore. I don’t think “normal” is something I’ve ever truly experienced. Ever.

The Iraq I knew as a child ceased to exist. What replaced it is something I still struggle to put into words. Some things resist language. Some wounds stay open.

By 2009, my family was forced to leave. The circumstances were what they were. Another family in the millions displaced. Another story swallowed by statistics. We took refuge in Jordan.

Amman

Jordan. Amman. That city still lives in my blood.

Truthfully, there’s no place on this planet I would call home. But if there were, it would be Amman. A city built on seven hills and filled with refugees. Palestinians. Iraqis. Syrians. All of us learning to rebuild something resembling a life from the rubble of the ones we left behind.

First love. First kiss. First cigarette. First beer. First heartbreak. First major success. First major failure.

I experienced most of my firsts in Jordan. The city raised me in ways Baghdad started and couldn’t finish. It taught me that home isn’t a place. It’s the people you find along the way. Or maybe it’s nowhere at all.

I finished high school there. The wait for refugee status to the United States stretched on for years. We waited. We lived. We grew. Time moves differently when you’re waiting for permission to exist somewhere else.

America

I entered the United States as an 18-year-old who had just finished high school. Chicago for a night. Then Phoenix. That’s where I’d spend the next seven years.

The American dream, they call it. What they don’t tell you is how much of it is just surviving. Just proving. Just waiting to be seen as something other than where you came from.

Going to school wasn’t an option. I needed to figure out too many other things first. So I worked. Different jobs. Different industries. Trying to find my footing in a country that welcomed refugees in press releases and made them prove their worth everywhere else.

For a few years, I went down the path of nightlife and partying. Lost years? Maybe. Finding myself? Also maybe. Sometimes you need to lose yourself completely before you can figure out who you actually are.

The Spark

Here’s something about me: I’ve always loved computers.

It started in 2001. My uncle visited from the UAE and bought my older brother a PC as a gift for his high school graduation. We watched him boot Windows 98 for the first time. The room was silent. Or maybe I just don’t remember anyone else talking because I was so focused on the monitor. That gray screen flickering to life. The startup sound. The desktop blooming into existence.

I was four years old. Completely transfixed. What is this thing? Is it a machine from a spaceship?

I remember watching him play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. The atmosphere. The voice acting. The weight of it. Red Alert 2 with its campy Cold War chaos. Age of Empires 2 and the thrill of building civilizations from nothing. Something about those games stuck with me and never let go.

In 7th grade, still in Iraq, I learned to read and write binary on paper. Ones and zeros scratched into notebooks while the world outside crumbled. By 8th grade, now in Jordan, I was learning Visual Basic. Behind the times? Maybe. But something had sparked years earlier, watching that Windows 98 machine breathe for the first time.

That curiosity never really left. It just got buried for a while.

The Return

At 24, six years after entering the USA, something sparked that old dream again.

Computers. That four-year-old wonder never really died. It just waited. Through war, through refuge, through years of wandering. It waited.

I enrolled in App Academy. Got my credentials. Started the climb.

Senior Software Engineer in three years. Senior DevOps by the fourth. The titles came faster than the sense that I belonged in the rooms they opened.

The trajectory looks impressive on paper. But here’s the truth: I’m still struggling to find myself. I still feel like an outsider to this entire world. Maybe I always will.

Belonging Nowhere and Everywhere

This is life for people like me.

We belong nowhere and everywhere. Diaspora children. War’s collateral. The ones who learned to code-switch between cultures before we learned to code at all.

When your origin keeps getting erased, you start asking a different kind of question. Not where you’re from. Who you become without it.

The world still reminds me I don’t belong. In boardrooms. In small talk. In the pause before someone asks where I’m really from. But I’ve stopped apologizing for taking up space.

These days I find myself reading Rumi and Mahmoud Darwish. Poets who understood displacement. Longing. The ache of not quite fitting anywhere.

“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere.” - Mahmoud Darwish

He understood.

I follow engineering philosophers too. Ken Thompson. Ray Kurzweil. Martin Fowler. I was lucky enough to work with someone who worked alongside Fowler at ThoughtWorks. He taught me a thing or two about the craft. About building things that last. About being brave. About being human. (Thank you, Nermin.)

I adore fantasy. I adore One Piece.

Maybe I gravitate toward those worlds because I never found my place in this one. Misfits building families out of strangers. Outcasts chasing dreams the world calls impossible. A boy in a straw hat who didn’t ask permission. He just sailed.

One Piece is the greatest story ever told. I see myself in it. I see my history in it. A story that cleverly reflects the struggles and pain of simple people while exposing the greed of those in power. The World Government. The Celestial Dragons. The way power protects itself while calling resistance terrorism. The way history gets rewritten by those who win.

One Piece and I were born the same year. 1997. We grew up together. While Luffy sailed from island to island, I moved from country to country. While he fought the World Government, I watched my own world governed by powers beyond my understanding. The same story unfolding in ink and in life. One Piece just gave it a name.

I said what I said.

Right Now

I’m currently reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. I’m building things with AI and Kubernetes and whatever else captures my curiosity. Writing code. Contributing to open source. Trying to figure out what comes next.

I live in Austin now. I have a family I love. I have work that challenges me.

And I’m still that four-year-old watching Windows 98 boot for the first time, wondering what else these machines could do. What else I could make them do.

Some dreams don’t die. They just wait.

If you made it this far, thank you. If any of this resonates. If you’re also figuring it out. If you belong nowhere and everywhere too.

You’re not alone. We never are.