The Root of Our Growth

I guide myself through life knowing that reciprocity sits at the heart of building intentional community. Protecting our peace matters, but so does noticing when that peace becomes a bubble — a space so safe it quietly keeps us from growing. When we let ourselves stretch outward, we meet parts of ourselves we didn’t know were waiting to be seen. A slow unfolding that I’ve witnessed within myself and in my connections that lovingly challenges the fears and anxieties we’ve all held onto.

As I’ve been healing and processing my experiences, I’ve realized how essential it is to bring everything I’ve learned in somatic therapy and within my internal work into the real world. Integration only happens through relationships — with ourselves, others, and in community. It shows up when we support the people we care about and allow them to support us. Not from obligation, but from alignment. From the belief that who we are now and who we’re becoming are both deserving of care.

Find the people who cheer you on even when you’re not in the room. That’s where reciprocity lives — and it’s the kind of knowing you can root yourself in.

Where the Roots Formed: Early Lessons in Reciprocity

My relationship with reciprocity didn’t begin in adulthood, it started in my early years. Growing up as a Palestinian American girl in Los Altos, a neighborhood that lacked warmth, I often wondered why people weren’t as expressive or openly loving as my own family. We were loud, communicative, and always apart of in one another’s lives.

My grandparents used to tell my sisters and I that our last name, Totah, meant “generosity.” I remember running around as a kid with that lesson in the back of my head, “remember we’re generous by nature.” Later we learned it actually means “Mulberry Tree,” which feels just as symbolic. A mulberry tree feeds its community, offers shade, spreads sweetness — it gives what it can, when it can. That understanding of giving was planted in us early, and it stuck.

Because of that upbringing, I became someone people felt comfortable opening up to, even as a kid. Adults shared the good, the bad, and the things they didn’t feel comfortable telling anyone else. Maybe they sensed I never shied away from vulnerability. I’ve always been the confidante, the person trusted with truths others needed to release, even if I wasn’t meant to keep them forever.

My auntie once told me I needed to learn to shield myself from absorbing too much of other people’s emotions — to understand what belonged to me and what didn’t. She herself is a confidante and extended this lesson to me. That was the first time I realized how deeply I felt energy that wasn’t my own to carry. And somewhere within that sensitivity, I learned that one of the most genuine forms of reciprocity is emotional reciprocity — the exchange of care, honesty, presence, and shared truth.

College: The First Confrontation With Competition

By the time I entered college at 17, I still didn’t know what I wanted to pursue. Marketing felt like the natural choice — communication and entrepreneurship had always come easily to me and was something passed down to me through my family. But I wasn’t prepared for the reality of the business department at San Jose State. It often felt like a boys’ club, and the few women in the room treated one another as “competition.” Nothing about that aligned with how I had been raised.

I didn’t grow up believing success required comparison. I believed progress came from collaboration, shared values, supporting each other rather than shrinking each other.

That belief became the foundation of the community I wanted to build on campus. I was tired of environments fueled by insecurity and individualism. I wanted spaces that reflected the values my family instilled in me — generosity, that top notch Palestinian hospitality, honesty, and care.

But college wasn’t always kind. There were moments that made me hide parts of myself for protection. When you’re raised on reciprocity, you learn quickly that not everyone recognizes generosity. Some take advantage of it. Others simply don’t know what to do with it because they’ve never encountered it.

Still, I never stopped offering affirmation or empathy. Even when I became a leader and president of a club on campus (Her Campus at SJSU), I led with these same values. These instincts weren’t learned, they were inherited — from every entrepreneur and community leader in my family, and there are many!

Post-Grad Limbo, Self-Discovery, and Returning to Art

After graduating in 2024, I entered a quiet season — the kind where you loaf around your house and nest while you grapple with your past before deciding what your future will look like. I didn’t have a plan, but I had a pull. A pull back toward the Studio Art degree I switched into my fourth year of college paired with the minors I accidentally worked towards — Marketing & Gender Studies. I started taking workshops, exploring new mediums, and letting myself grow as an artist without expectations, pressure, or any specific outcome in mind.

At the same time, I was unraveling one of the biggest misconceptions I held about healing. I used to believe healing meant becoming fully self-sufficient — that strength meant being able to do all the things others need help with. Now I know healing often means the opposite: learning to let people back in. Learning to receive. Learning to soften. Parts of myself I was pulled away from after encountering many people in college who hurt me emotionally and pushed me to build a wall.

Women, especially BIPOC folk, are taught to over-give, to put our needs to the side, to see receiving as weakness. I’m working to unlearn that. And yet, the act of giving, when you have abundance, is somatic. It shifts something in the body. It reminds us we’re part of something bigger. That’s where individualistic mindsets begin to soften, and we start thinking in terms of we instead of me.

Somewhere in that shift, I found myself craving ways to support intergenerational growth — to create intentional communities and opportunities that strengthen us now and plant seeds for the generations to come. Spaces where reciprocity, care, and shared wisdom could actually take root.

Why Flow & Grow Podcast Emerged From This Season

In the middle of all these experiences — understanding my cultural roots and values, college years, post-grad unraveling, somatic healing, and everyone in my life nudging me to start a podcast — Flow & Grow began forming in my mind. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew from years of building communities, learning how reciprocity shapes us, and how honesty and openness connect people far beyond shared interests.

I’ve always moved easily between generations — listening to older folks, holding space for my peers, becoming the person people feel comfortable confiding in. Flow & Grow is a home for all of that. A community project and space where stories help us grow inward and outward — encouraging us to contribute to our communities, prioritize our healing, and gently disrupt generational patterns that were never ours to carry forward.

It’s an opportunity to bridge generations, experiences, fears, and expand. To create conversations that guide us back to ourselves and back to one another.

Reciprocity isn’t the theme of Flow & Grow — it’s the soil it was planted in. Pull up a chair; we’re all here to listen and learn.

If this piece resonated, I welcome you to subscribe and share it with someone who believes in this project. That’s how our ecosystem grows. Through small, meaningful acts of reciprocity.

I’ll leave you with a question: What’s one moment in your life when someone offered you unexpected reciprocity — and how did it shape you?

xx Camy