After the fall of regimes that for decades had cracked down on anyone who dared speak out against them, citizens of countries such as Tunisia, Libya and Egypt found themselves suddenly free to speak their minds. But especially for the youth who had grown up without a memory of a time before Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Moammar Gadhafi or Hosni Mubarak, it turned out not to be easy to figure out what to say.

“We had no right to think, to talk, to do what you wanted,” 23-year-old Tunisian Asma Hriz told Al-Monitor. “Even when talking in your home, your mom would say; ‘hush, they will hear us.’ And if you talked to close friends, there was the fear that he or she would talk to the regime and your whole family would be in danger.”

But now, Hriz explained, Tunisians are talking about politics, the economic situation and religion everywhere. But as the freedom to express oneself is a new thing, it also causes frustration about what to actually say and how.

Ahmed Shalghoum, 25, from Libya added, “Now we have absolute freedom, but I can’t say that’s a good thing, because it is like giving sight to a blind person. This guy has never seen the world before, he can’t understand what he’s seeing, but he is trying to cope. Some of the things he is seeing after being blind for 42 years are bad, and some say it is better to keep on being blind because they are used to it, while others see there is hope for the better.”