The photographs I kept are not photographs of medicine. They are photographs of a period when I was trying not to lose myself.
There came a point when my room became full of medication.
I kept looking at it and wondering how my life had reached this point.
There were so many boxes and packets around me that sometimes it felt like I could open a pharmacy with what was in my room.
But those medicines were not the thing I remembered most.
What I remember most is the person I was during that period.
I was trying to understand myself.
I was trying to understand what had happened to me.
I was trying to understand why the journey that was supposed to lead me to safety had left me so damaged.
These photographs show only medicine.
They cannot show the fear behind them.
They cannot show the nights I could not sleep.
They cannot show the weight I had lost.
They cannot show the person I was becoming.
They cannot show what it felt like to have your freedom restricted while you were already struggling to understand your own mind.
They cannot show what it meant to wake up and realise that your life had become something you never planned.
But when I look at those photographs, I remember.
I remember the hospital.
I remember the people I met there.
I remember walking through those corridors.
I remember having my phone taken away.
I remember being watched.
I remember the questions.
I remember the medicines.
And most of all, I remember wanting my life back.
I did not want to spend the rest of my life being defined by what had happened to me.
I did not want to become only a diagnosis.
I did not want people to see me only as a traumatised refugee.
I wanted to laugh again.
I wanted to eat normally again.
I wanted to sleep without being afraid of my own dreams.
I wanted to work.
I wanted to have friends.
I wanted to wake up in the morning and feel that I was actually living.
So I began searching for ways to find myself again.
It was not immediate.
It was not easy.
There was no single morning when I woke up and suddenly became the person I used to be.
It was a slow process.
One day at a time.
One decision at a time.
I had to learn that surviving something and recovering from it are not the same thing.
I had survived the desert.
I had survived Libya.
I had survived the Mediterranean.
But surviving those places did not mean that everything inside me was healed when I reached Germany.
The journey had continued inside me.
That is something I wish more people understood about refugees.
People often see the moment we arrive.
They see us stepping off a train.
They see us entering an accommodation centre.
They see an asylum application.
They see a number on a document.
But they do not always see what came with us.
Some of us arrive carrying memories that we do not know how to explain.
Some arrive carrying grief.
Some arrive carrying fear.
Some arrive carrying nightmares.
And some, like me, do not even know that they are traumatised until their own body begins telling the story.
I thought reaching Europe meant I had finally escaped.
I later understood that escaping a place does not always mean escaping what happened there.
Sometimes the hardest border is not the border between countries.
It is the border between the person you were and the person trauma is trying to turn you into.
I had already lost too much.
I was not prepared to lose myself as well.
So I fought to come back.
Not to become exactly the person I was before.
That person had been changed by everything I had survived.
I fought to become someone who could live with the memories without allowing them to control the rest of my life.