Dina Solitah

Activist, Care taker, Change Agent, Designer, Environmentalist, Event planner, Explorer, Finance professional, Inventor, Life mentor, Muslim, Photographer, Producer, Project manager, Single, Student, Technologist, Web guru, World traveler, Writer/Editor

I am a dream chaser, communicative and loving person.I gained the webdeveloping, multitasking, self-learning skills after a long journey full of ups and downs. I seek to be a web-developer in the future.

I want to help people learn how to overcome hardships, how to grow into a better person, and how to heal from past trauma. I want people to feel like they’re seen, I want them to know that they matter and that they have a place in this world and that every single person is capable of greatness. I want to offer a platform that shows how strong humanity is, a platform that celebrates our differences, that nourishes the idea that there’s no such a thing as the end, that every ending is a door way to a new beginning. As I’ve mentioned earlier, defeating the look-see is the theme of this event, and my goal is to show that people who have been tormented by their pasts and who have suffered at the hands of grief can come back stronger than before. People make mistakes, and that’s part of the human experience. I hope that through this event, my community will become more tolerant, forgiving and aware. Another thing is that I want to help those who have experienced grief. I have gone through it myself, and I know how haunting it is, so I want this event to inform those who attend it so that they themselves could also help other people who have gone through tough times.

Picture this, you’re thinking about your past, perhaps certain aspects of it, memories of trauma or pain or things and people that you lost , and you start feeling a weird suffocating sensation in your chest, as if someone is trying to smother you. That is grief. Now grief is something that lingers and haunts people, and if they succumb to it, it could destroy them, leaving only a hollow husk behind. This is the idea of the look-see web series. A monster, named look-see, that represents grief hunts people who can’t let go of their traumatic pasts and who can’t move on. It attacks by taking only a piece of the grief stricken people it hunts, because that’s what grief does. It might not kill you, but it takes a part of you. The part that makes you yourself, that keeps you alive. This on its own could be a death sentence. The only way to escape from this monster is by letting go of your past and of that grief. To move on and to build yourself and overcome hardships and rise again no matter how much you fall, to defeat that grief, to live while knowing that all things pass whether good or bad, to defeat the look-see, that is the theme of this ted-x event.

Personally, I have been faced with many instances in life where I completely lost hope, instances where I decided to accept what the world threw upon me and instances where I believed that our lives are predetermined and that no matter what, you cannot escape fate. When I was young, I had a dream of becoming something more, and I almost believed that I could change the world. As I grew older, I started to think of myself as less, to doubt my own self and my capabilities. Last year, I attended the TEDX Maadi event, and seeing people talk about how they overcame hardships through their lives and made the best of bad situations gave me hope. Hope that maybe life isn’t predetermined, that maybe fate is made by our own hands and driven by our own choices, that I and anyone can change the world if they just find the courage within themselves to do so. That event inspired me, and made me want to transfer this power, and courage, and this feeling of being in control over your own life to as many people as I could. I was also encouraged by my own desire to see the world change for the better. I hope that through this event, I could help people get over their pasts, realize their true potential, and aid in making this world more civilized, tolerant and accepting.

Reading and writing are both a dear thing to me. I find literature in general quite interesting and I’ve been dabbling in writing poetry and stories for a few years now. Personally, I think words and sentences hold power, yet we are the one who give them this power. We are the ones who allow them to affect us so much, and I would love for my writings to one day in end up in a place with people who need them and who allow these writings to affect them positively. I believe literature is not a definite or constricted form of art in its interpretation, I don’t think there exists a form of art that is definite in its interpretation. Words do hold power and meaning, but this meaning differs from one person to another, and I love knowing what each person thinks of a specific piece of writing, I feel different perspectives on a certain piece add so much depth to it and make it seem more real and three dimensional.