There are times when I think being bipolar gives me the ability to see and want and write things that other people cannot and do not. One of those is writing. Creativity is something that co-presents with bipolarity. There are other times when being bipolar legitimately sucks and leads you to a point where you want to kill yourself. Very odd thing when your brain which, evolutionarily speaking, should want you to survive is telling you to die.

I'm looking at my window right now and it's a perfect blue sky. And if you ask people about Sept. 11, the one thing they'll tell you is how serenely, awesomely, perfectly blue the sky was. The juxtaposition of how the day began and what happened is jarring even now.

There are companies like Facebook that wield tremendous power over how Americans understand the world. Do they have a social responsibility now? That's the question we're only beginning to ask. Literature still has this power to do things that other forms of media don't have. The process of reading and writing and having arguments about ideas is valuable. I'm afraid it's something we're losing.

The one thing that's missing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and I don't imagine we'll see it any time soon, is that there's no memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of how the memory of 9/11 was used. Memory is a very interesting thing. We very selectively curate our story and then stop when it begins to tell other people's stories and forces us to accept some kind of culpability. One reason I write is that there's not enough Muslims writing, Pakistanis writing, not enough people of faith writing about the complexities of our experiences.

If you are an American Muslim, you live in a community that is really struggling to get its feet off the ground. We're a very young community, so to speak, institutionally and otherwise. The way in which we're portrayed it's like we're the empire from Star Wars and the truth is that we'd be lucky to be the Rebel Alliance.

Writing something down and processing it, sitting with a text and a story, editing and rewriting new drafts - that entire process helps clarify something for myself. Depending on the person, the act of trying to tell your story helps you understand yourself better, helps you come to terms with something that happened.

The Transportation Security Administration has probably converted more people to Islam than any religious order in the last 100 years. It doesn't matter how you choose to self-identify or even if your religiosity is private; when you get to the airport you know how you're going to be treated based on your name. Possibly also because of the colour of your skin and the colour of your passport.