Lost Backpack, Found Love

What happens when you lose everything you thought you needed to feel safe, and discover who you truly are instead?

Lost Backpack, Found Love is a deeply moving memoir of identity, healing, and resilience. It begins with a simple but life-altering moment: arriving in Paris and losing a backpack within hours of landing. Inside it were documents, money, memories, and the illusion of control. What followed was not panic alone, but transformation.

From war-torn Lebanon to Canada, from coming out as a queer Arab man to navigating faith, family rupture, illness, immigration, and love, Moe Akel invites readers into an intimate journey of survival and self-reclamation. With vulnerability, wisdom, and warmth, he explores grief, trauma, chosen family, spirituality, HIV stigma, forgiveness, and the body's memory of pain while offering hope, tools for healing, and moments of unexpected joy.

This book is more than a memoir. It is a companion for anyone who has ever felt different, displaced, silenced, or forced to shrink themselves to survive. Through lived experience and life-coaching insight, Moe reminds us that healing is not about fixing what's broken, it's about remembering who we were before the world taught us to hide.

Lost Backpack, Found Love is for:

• LGBTQIA+ readers and allies
• Immigrants
• Anyone healing from trauma, heartbreak, or identity loss
• Readers seeking courage, self-acceptance, and meaning

At its heart, this is a story about love, romantic, familial, chosen, and self-love, and the quiet magic that unfolds when we stop running from ourselves.

This isn't just Moe's story.

It's an invitation to begin yours.