Dubai, my birthplace, is a house with multiple rooms. You might think of Burj Khalifa, infinity pools hovering above the clouds, gold-flecked Dubai chocolate bars, sports cars around every corner, and the biggest malls in the world… But us Dubai kids know a softer, more humble version of the city, where stretches of desert sands carried us from one place to another. We think of Burj Al Arab, Modhesh decorations all over Hamarain Center, and Chips Oman with some flavored Canada Dry.

The Dubai most of us see online has been filtered, curated, and re-posted into a kind of illusory reality. Influencers made it look like a place where dreams turn to gold and gravity itself could be bought and sold. In doing so, they weren’t entirely lying, they were just showing you one room of a much more complex house.

I want to show you some other rooms in the house.

The loneliness of trying to make it in Dubai

These days, when dreamers decide to move to Dubai, they come with something to prove. There seems to be an unspoken tendency for people to perform success and fixate on perfectionism.

What most would rather not share online is that the hyper-fast pace and high cost of living may eventually rear their ugly heads. Many find themselves in debt, trying to keep up with their credit card statements while juggling the aches of hustle culture and the consequences of consumerism.

What’s more? When you’re far from home, surrounded by millions of people who are also far from home, there’s a peculiar kind of loneliness and isolation that settles in. Friendships and relationships form fast because people are equally untethered and unknowingly burnt out. And then, connections end up dissolving just as fast, because someone’s visa ends, they get a better offer, or the friendship loses its momentum simply because of proximity (in a city built on endless traffic and highways).

With that, commitment becomes a rarity, because the next best thing is always tempting — making it easy to fall for the seduction of “more” and “what if”.

Dubai: The melting pot of the Gulf

While so many people come and go — and loneliness becomes a teacher — something else happens on the other end of the spectrum. Dubai is, depending on how you count, home to people from over 200 nationalities.

Emiratis make up less than 15% of the population. Everyone else is from somewhere else, which means that in a strange and almost accidental way, Dubai has truly become one of the most diverse cities on Earth.

On the daily, you’ll share an elevator and a smile with an Indian nurse, a Nigerian banker, a Lebanese architect, and an Irish teacher, and none of it will feel remarkable because it’s completely ordinary.

Beyond the elevator ride, though, the melting pot brings us some of Dubai’s most authentic charm that sadly gets overshadowed by all the glam: Little Manila in Deira, Meena Bazaar, the numerous curry houses of Bur Dubai, Dragon Mart, the Ethiopian restaurants near Al Qusais, and so on…

When you put millions of people far from home in one place, loneliness just might drive them to do what humans have always done: they find each other, and communities blossom like flowers through cracks in the pavement.

Dubai, under the surface

What often goes unnoticed is that it is these very communities that helped make Dubai what it is today.

Yes, the city has the glossy rooms you see online — the ones filled with chandeliers, skyline views, and the promise that anything can happen if you hustle hard enough. But while there are rooms filled with ambition and privilege, others are filled with exhaustion, sacrifice, and labor that goes unnoticed. Rooms where people arrive with wide eyes and rooms where people quietly pack their bags to begin again somewhere else.

Dubai is not one story. It’s a house that millions of people from all over the world have briefly lived in. If you ever visit, you’ll probably see the glittering room first, but it’s only the one closest to the entrance.

There’s a lot more to explore inside, we’ve only just scratched the surface.

— Ghina Fahs

(All photo credit goes to respective owners, sourced from search engines, cover photo by Vogue Arabia)