Episode: 14 — "Live Your Life" · Full Episode #14
Date: 2020
Language: English (predominantly)
Heba Layas (هبة لياس) is a Libyan designer and architect. She spent her early childhood in Liberia before moving to Libya — a transition she described as a shock. At the time of recording she had practised architecture in Libya during the 2012–2015 window and was a mother navigating the intersection of creative ambition and the constraints placed on women in Libyan society.
Heba's earliest memories are paradise. Swimming with crocodiles. Riding bikes freely. Her father fishing near alligators. Liberia was freedom — physical, sensory, total. She was a child in a place where children could be children.
Then the family moved to Libya. The contrast was absolute. The openness of Liberia was replaced by walls — literal and social. Gender segregation, restricted movement, a world that told her what she could not do rather than what she could.
See: Childhood in Liberia
Heba described the violence of the Libyan school system — physical beatings as routine discipline. She did not accept it quietly. When a chemistry teacher crossed a line, she fought back. The detail was specific: she physically confronted the teacher. In a system designed to enforce obedience through pain, she chose defiance.
To survive in Libya, she developed a split identity: "Hiba 1" — the version of herself that conformed, wore the right things, said the right things, moved through public space without friction — and "Hiba 2," the person she actually was. The double life was not a metaphor. It was a daily operational strategy for a woman whose internal reality was incompatible with her external environment.
On a boat, she unpinned it, unwrapped it, and threw it into the sea. She described the moment as going blank — not euphoria, not relief, just emptiness. The act was final. It was not a protest or a statement directed at anyone. It was a private act of completion: the end of performing a belief she did not hold.
See: Throwing the Hijab into the Sea
In the brief window between revolution and the second civil war, Heba practised architecture in Libya. She described the energy and possibility of that period — and its collapse. The window closed. The work stopped. What she built in those years exists in a country that has since fractured.
She unpinned it, unwrapped it, and threw it into the sea. She went blank. (EP 14)