Luma Mufleh: How You Become a Refugee

It's hard in the U.S. to imagine life as a refugee. Allow me to do it for you.

Ukrainian refugees fleeing war in their homeland for Poland.

By Luma Mufleh 

Well-intentioned people often ask me to tell them about the refugee experience. For many reasons, this is an impossible request. Every refugee experience is different. Shaida, a brave Afghan mother I write about in my book Learning America, endured years of direct physical threats and danger. While my asylum process after fleeing Jordan for the U.S. unfolded mostly in law offices, I suffered from severe anxiety, mood swings, and nightmares so real that I would wake up screaming. Shaida and I share similar scars, but our stories are very different.

Although we often pass around the old cliché about walking in someone else’s shoes, we usually can’t. Our imagination will always be limited by our own assumptions, politics, and cultural blindspots, not to mention our built-in instinct to avoid things that upset us. Sure, we might be able to sit through a news segment about the latest spate of bombings or watch a docu…