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I Was Bullied for Being Arab. Nine Inch Nails Threw Me a Lifeline.

As a teenage girl paralyzed with fear, one of the darkest albums of the 1990s, “The Downward Spiral,” gave me the guts to rebel against my tormentors.

Credit...Farah Al Qasimi for The New York Times

During my first week of school in Kentucky, in 5th grade, at the very beginning of the first Gulf War, a boy drew a picture and hung it on the classroom wall. On one side was an illustration of me; on the other, the rest of my classmates and teacher. Above my head, in marker, the words “Saddam Salam.” The teacher came in, examined it, peeled it off and never said a thing. I’ve since joked that I was the “literal poster child for bullying,” but it’s not so funny.

In that town, a tight-knit community in the Bible Belt, my Arabness and my Muslim background were glaring targets. I was terrorized ruthlessly, by those looking to elevate their station or find the butt of a joke, including the occasional teacher. For stretches over the next few years, throughout middle school, I would sit in a classroom during lunch or in the front office during recess, for my safety.

Hometown pride is everything in a town like that, and it was made exceedingly clear that this was not my hometown. Which, of course, it wasn’t.

I spent my first four years in Beirut, Lebanon, during one of the worst eras of its civil war. The pandemonium of bombs detonating was the soundtrack of my formative years. (Memories that surged back to the surface with the blast in Beirut last month.) My parents, with little choice but to chase down a better life, moved with their three daughters to the United States, landing in Colorado and Missouri for a few years before Kentucky.

Like so many immigrant children, I didn’t belong — here, there or anywhere. And I was cornered between two cultures by an unspoken guiding principle: Don’t stand out, but don’t fit in. And so I was a ghost, spending most of my time alone deep in my hobbies, including watching absurd amounts of TV. My parents, coping with their new reality and skeptical of American childhood rituals like sleepovers, were largely hands-off as long as I stayed at home.

Then in 1994, days before my 14th birthday, the Nine Inch Nails video for “Closer” premiered on MTV: A macabre fever dream crawling with insects and gritty with cobwebs. There was a wired heart thumping, a pig head spinning, a monkey on a cross and the skull of a bull. And a singer, Trent Reznor, sometimes blindfolded, levitating or writhing as a panel of similarly suited businessmen cast a judgmental eye. It was a far cry from the uninspired videos peddled to adolescent girls, a battery of spinning, polished Jordans and Joeys that had long left me confused and a little repulsed.

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Trent Reznor in the Nine Inch Nails video for “Closer.”

On my birthday (which I share with Reznor, I’d later learn), I went to the mall and slid cash across the counter for “The Downward Spiral,” the album with “Closer,” which had been released a couple months prior. At home, I slipped the CD in my Discman, hid the case under my mattress and listened to it on headphones until my ears were trashed.

The music — a kind of mechanical cacophony I’d never heard before — landed in my life with no context, a meteor from the sky. But instead of it creating a crater in my life, it slipped perfectly into the one already there.

On the surface, a bleak concept album about a man spiraling toward suicide, packed with explicitly sexual and violent lyrics — even if it’s regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time — might seem like an unlikely, even dangerous, salve for a sad girl paralyzed with anxiety. But instead, it threw me a line. Its themes of religious alienation, loss, loneliness, fear, anger and maybe most important, NIN’s signature theme, control — which I was desperate for — resonated deeply. To break free, I had to see my pain reflected and swim across that dark pool. That grinding, banging, cranking scream of industrial sounds transformed my shame to rage.

“There are others,” I realized. My people: outcasts, nerds, misfits, loners. And with that, my rebellion was underway. I began slowly shape-shifting from a ghost to a flesh-and-blood human. My choices, even the risky ones, were, for the first time in my life, mine.

We’re taught that risk-taking, thrill-seeking and fearlessness are the domain of boys and men. And that girls are flowers — precious, vulnerable and evanescent, to be protected from perceived forces of destruction. To me at 14, dark industrial music that flouted boundaries was the embodiment of courage and the antithesis of fear. Maybe that was part of the point: This music, and the identity that went along with it, was not intended for me (or so I thought), which only made me want it more. I guess I’m more of a weed, resilient and determined to progress, like so many girls and women.

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A scene from the video, a macabre fever dream.Credit...no credit

“The Downward Spiral” gave me the nerve to fight for what’s mine, and with my newfound armor, I began high school transformed, inside and out, to the point that some of my classmates didn’t recognize me. I inscribed the letters “nin” on my backpack in Wite-Out — an audacious signal in that conservative community, where such music was considered devilish. The bullying stopped almost on a dime, and I felt what was once unthinkable: cool.

By going public with my fandom — in the time just before the internet allowed us to find our tribes with relative ease — the other others came into view. I wasn’t so alone after all. I became aware that tucked into corners all around me, in that very school and town, were creative kids similarly struggling. These newfound connections opened up new worlds of sounds, messages and musicians that would further mold me: Fiona Apple, Rage Against the Machine, Garbage, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Nirvana, Ani DiFranco and my favorite of all, Tori Amos. These artists would provide the score as I carved an atypical path through my 20s. The decade culminated in me coming out as gay.

Today, when I stream “The Downward Spiral,” every palpitation-inducing thwack, growl and whisper is branded in my memory. And I’m reminded that for those like me, the status quo is a mirage, elusive no matter how hard we chase it. By existing as an Arab in America and a gay person, I am inherently an outsider. But outside, as it turns out, is good. And recently, as we all navigate this new era of transformation and bid farewell to a norm that was unwelcoming to many, maybe it’s great.

Us rebels, well-suited to adapt, get to continue imagining reality on our terms and, like a weed that will flourish anywhere, take our opportunities and claim space in any way we want.

Maya Salam is a senior staff editor on the Culture desk at The New York Times. She's a pop culture buff and television junkie. Previously, she was a gender reporter and a breaking news reporter at The Times. More about Maya Salam

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Nine Inch Nails & Me. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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