Social work

My name is Omer Maydan. I served as a platoon commander and as an officer in the regular army, and fought in Sajaiyah during Operation Protective Edge. Several years later, I developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder, which led me on a long journey of coping, treatment, addiction, searching - and most importantly, determination to recover. For five years, I went through a deep process of dismantling and rebuilding.

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There are moments in life when one stops asking just how to survive, and starts asking how to live. This site was born out of that question. Out of a search for truth, meaning, soul, spirit - and what exists beneath all the noise.

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Today I understand that trauma, no matter how difficult, can also open a door in a person. Not out of a romanticization of pain, but out of the understanding that sometimes it is precisely the places that have broken within us that force us to truly meet ourselves. For me, creation has become a place where one can give form to extreme experiences, to questions that had no place, and to moments that cannot always be explained in ordinary words.

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For more than a decade, my texts sat in a drawer. I wrote mostly philosophy, thoughts on the human soul, spirit, identity, truth, love, and meaning. Writing was a way for me to understand myself, to heal myself, and to try to touch the essence that lies beneath life itself. Today, I no longer write just for myself. I write for you.

My first book, Illuminating Fragments, describes in a raw and exposed way the world of trauma alongside the healing process. The second book is a book of poetry, dealing with love, man, and the essence of human connection. In both there is an attempt to create a shared journey - not from the position of a preacher or teacher, but like a friend who introduces you to his world, in the hope that you will take something from it for your own world as well.

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My gallery, which is shown in museums and exhibition spaces across the country, was also born from that inner place. Through photography and visual art, I deal with ideas of truth and falsehood, trauma, identity, humanity, and what is the role of man in this world. For me, visual representation and the written word are two different languages trying to touch the same point.

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Alongside my work, I take an active part in the struggle to change the way society views mental health, recovery and quality of life. I believe that people should not be reduced to their definitions, diagnoses or moments of failure. There is much more to a person than that, and sometimes it is precisely from the struggle that the possibility of a deeper, more sensitive and more authentic life is born.

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Today I also deliver the lecture "Illuminous Things," which deals with the truth behind trauma, the path to recovery, living alongside it, and human development thanks to it. Over the years, my life has changed constantly, but the content has remained the same. The difference is that today I choose to publish it.

I find deep value in creation, because it allows me to bring all of myself to light - in the most bare form I know.