Photo Courtesy of Heba Shiban

It doesn’t make sense that Heba Shiban and I are friends.

I’m quiet and shy; she’s loud and outgoing. I’m a dog person; she’s a cat person. I’m from Tennessee; she’s from Syria. I’m Christian; she’s atheist. I love rules; she loves to break them.

But freshman year of college, we shared a wall, a tea kit, and a love of bad rom-coms, so we ended up close friends. She was willing to befriend somebody who is totally different than her in almost every way. And that, too, is part of what makes her so unique.

Heba defies just about every expectation people have of her. When people see her brown skin and Syria necklace amid a crowd of white students, she has been asked everything from “Are you a refugee?” to “Are you straight off the boat?” to “Are you Muslim?”

That last question left her family particularly worried two years ago, when the Muslim Ban was announced. That day, she walked into her living room and was issued a series of warnings from her father.

“My dad said, ‘From now on, you tell people you’re a Christian. And you tell no one you’re a Muslim,” she remembered. “And I was like, ‘Baba, what the f***? I’m not even a Muslim in the first place. Why would I tell people I’m a Muslim?”

As a child raised in a non-religious household, this warning from her father was particularly worrying to Heba. Though she was born in Latakia, a port city in Syria with a population of about 340,200, she has lived in Arizona for most of her life.

When she was two, her parents moved her and her older sister to Qatar. A few years after that, her father received a work visa to the US, and they all moved to Arizona. She and her family all became US citizens shortly after they moved here, and they haven’t looked back.

This summer was the first time Heba had visited Syria and her family in 14 years. In Heba’s eyes, she is just like a white American.

“Girl, you know how white I am,” Heba said, letting out a snort as she laughed.

It’s true. The stereotypical white girl is obsessed with Starbucks, owns at least one pair of ugly but comfortable shoes, and gets emotional when she’s had one too many glasses of wine. Heba used to work at Starbucks for years, owns a pair of hot pink Crocs, and starts tearfully telling bystanders that she loves them when she’s had one too many drinks.

That “whiteness” is one of the things Heba hates most about herself.

“I hate that I feel so disconnected from my culture,” she said. “To be a Syrian, you need to know suffering. You need to have suffered. You need to acknowledge the pain that Syrians have. And I feel like I haven’t done that yet. I haven’t gone through s***.”

That’s one of the reasons she went back to Syria last summer: to see her people and her country torn apart by war. The Syrian War initially began as a series of protests in March 2011 against President Bashar al-Assad’s corrupt regime, but it quickly escalated into civil war. In 2016, the United Nations estimated that 400,000 people had been killed, but experts suspect the number has increased since then.

At 18, Heba wanted to meet her relatives again and let them know that her family had done okay. Although immigrants going back to their home countries is perfectly normal, Heba took extra precautions, given the anti-immigrant tone of the Trump administration. Before leaving, she contacted a lawyer to ask for advice on getting safely through customs, and she later paid $100 for Global Entry so the American customs agents wouldn’t make any assumptions based on her Syrian roots.

When Heba visited Syria, her extended family there only saw an American, assuming that she would be high-maintenance and wouldn’t cope well in an environment where basic necessities are often lacking. After all, the electricity cuts out for portions of the day; the water doesn’t always work; and Heba had to go to the emergency room after she got food poisoning from unrefrigerated egg and dairy. But Heba loved the country and knew she would be returning to America at the end of the summer. What was a couple months without A/C?

“I would tell people, ‘I want to live in Syria. I love this land. I feel connected to it,’” she said. “And they’d be like, ‘No, no you don’t. You don’t want to live here. This is terrible.’ So I was always in a position where I didn’t know what to do. I know I’m so privileged, but I feel like I don’t even deserve — I just felt guilty. It’s survivor’s guilt in a minor way because I [would] look at my cousins and just cry at night. Like, why not them? It’s not fair.”

About halfway through her trip, Heba and her uncle got into a car accident. It was just a fender-bender, but Heba hit her head on the car roof, cutting her head open. She returned to the emergency room for a second time, but this time, a young doctor told her that he was going to have to cut her hair and put in stitches.

“I was like, ‘Is there any other way?’ Because I was not about to have a f***ing boy shave my head!” she said. “But at the same time, I’m a sucker for a cool story. And I was still extremely giddy and happy because this extremely attractive f***ing plastic surgeon [was] stitching my head up.”

Heba admitted that her Arabic was a little rusty, but it was good enough to get her a date with the doctor outside of the emergency room. At the end of the summer, they made plans to meet up in Germany in a few months. He told her that he was planning to cross the Turkish border and go to Germany, because he was already fluent in the language; Heba was already planning to study abroad there in the fall. But when he tried to cross the border, he was shot at by guards. He survived, but she never saw him again.

On her birthday a few months later, she went skinny-dipping in Greece, a destination for refugees trying to escape by sea, and was struck again by how differently her life turned out. She feels guilty for living in the US, which she feels has contributed to the Syrian conditions with its meddling.

“Every single time I met someone in Syria, [they’d ask,] ‘What’s better? Syria or America?’” Heba said. “Like what the f*** do you want me to say to that? What’s better, a developed country or a war-torn country? So I would say, ‘Syria is much more beautiful.’ And I would tell people that I’m not the average American, so don’t look at me and think this is what America looks like, please.”

Now that Heba is back in the US, she’s reminded of this regularly. Heba’s not one to be quiet about anything, and it isn’t always taken well on our campus, resulting in unkind rumors and whispered warnings about the “crazy” girl. She is very sexual, and she’s not afraid to talk about it, even on an Instagram account that she uses as her diary. If I ever think she’s given me TMI, she reminds me that her talking about the most intimate details of her life is the equivalent of anybody else talking about a routine trip to the grocery store.

She dresses to show off her body, and she works as an intern for an organization where a regular day includes counting condoms and handing out “Yes Means Yes” stickers. She’s decided to grow out her eyebrows into a unibrow inspired by Frida Kahlo, a Mexican artist famous for the unibrow illustrated in her self-portraits. If she finds something funny, she can’t stop snorting, which usually elicits some glares from the people around her, but doesn’t bother in the least. I’ve always considered her to be one of the most confident people I know.

But Heba says that her confident behavior and insecurity are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes she hates her body, and sometimes she hates herself.

She doesn’t look at pictures of herself in high school anymore. She used to straighten her hair every day in high school instead of letting it fall naturally into waves because she “hated” her natural hair. She always describes herself as “fat” then, and she has since gotten a breast reduction. Today, she doesn’t even recognize herself in those photos as the same person.

She gets worried about people disliking her, so she needs extra reassurance from her friends: “Were they acting differently than normal? Do you think they’re mad at me?” I assure her that they don’t hate her, and she apologizes before asking one more time.

This is one of the reasons why our friendship works so well. I have my own fair share of insecurities, but I’m not as good as Heba at hiding it. In public, I get embarrassed easily and say “I’m sorry” way too often, but Heba is unapologetic for who she is and never gets embarrassed. But in private, if Heba needs reassurance, I love to give words of affirmation.

She is bold and adventurous and 100-percent unique in spite of her insecurity. She is her own person, and she’s proud of it.

“I would say I’m pretty f***ing unique. You don’t meet a lot of weirdos like me,” she said, laughing. “I am crazy, and I embrace it! I can’t represent my people by being quiet. I need to be loud.”