Cycling past an empty dirt football pitch in Tripoli, Motasim Dhawi returned to baseline (EP 25).
Dhawi was in the middle of his recovery from the breakdown described in The Panic Attack. He was cycling as part of the daily exercise he had adopted as one element of his protocol. On the ride, he passed an empty dirt football pitch — the kind used by children in Tripoli neighbourhoods as informal playing space.
The sight sent him directly back to his own childhood: skipping school to play football on Sharia Al-Sareem with the other neighbourhood boys. There had been no plan to think about it. The memory arrived uninvited, attached to the image of the pitch.
A song on his Spotify became the reset ritual he attached to the moment. He played it on the spot. He cried first, then smiled. He describes the sequence — childhood memory, music, tears, smile — as the first time since the shutdown that his nervous system had done something other than brace.
He began treating the song as a ritual: whenever he felt himself pulled back toward the old state, he would play it, and the body would remember the pitch.
The story is small and almost trivial in description. It is included because Dhawi treats it as the specific turning point in his recovery — the moment recovery stopped being a list of disciplines (see The Panic Attack) and started being an experience. It is the case for childhood anchors as adult reset tools: the thing that returns you to yourself is often something you stopped paying attention to at twelve.
For Libyans living inside the constant low-grade alertness of the country's political crisis, Dhawi's instinct — to find a memory, a place, and a song, and to play them on repeat — is a low-cost protocol that does not require permission from anyone.
See: PTSD and Collective Trauma