Hi friends,
It’s been a while since I’ve written here.
Life happens, and before you know it, all of the things you promised to hold yourself accountable for slip out of your fingers. For many of us, the last few months have been mired with collective grief and anger as we witness a full-scale genocide take place against the Palestinian people of Gaza. Many of us, those of us with a moral conscience at least, have felt disillusioned, lost, and demoralized with everyday life because of the great weight of this outrage. Outrage at the world’s complicity in the annihilation of an entire nation as we know it.
We live at such a unique point in history because the highly digitized world we are navigating allows us to witness and consume bits and pieces of the pain, agony, and destruction that the Palestinian people are facing in real time. What makes that even scarier to me is that, as a global community we are equipped with this knowledge…..yet many remain utterly silent, unwilling to act, and docile. Moving through life as if everything is normal feels like a travesty. Things are not normal. They will never be normal. Trying to stomach the last few months has been difficult, but I come into the new year with a renewed sense of hope and vigor for resistance to the status quo that is trying to convince us that Arab and Muslim lives don’t matter.
That Palestinian lives do not matter.
2023 was indeed an incredibly challenging year for me — like I have been saying here for a while, transition is never easy. It may sound cliche since everyone says this but I was genuinely in a very dark place where my self-worth, values, and identity were constantly challenged. It is hard to maintain a steady grip on your sense of self when you are going through so many changes at once. It was hard to stay true to myself when I was so far away from home (or at least the only place I’ve known to be home…). I constantly find myself taking a break to stop and look back at something I’ve done and wonder “did I really mean what I just said/did? Does this actually align with what I believe? .” The image of myself is sometimes unclear. I am still growing, still failing, but still getting up and continuing to fight for myself everyday. I feel like as an eldest daughter (yes I am dragging it) from an immigrant family, every day of my life is abundant with hurdles to jump over. There is always something to learn, to grow from….. mainly because the environment I am navigating is entirely new to me and those around me. What support do I have in reality? Not much. The first-gen Black, Muslim, female experience is a rare and unique one. It is overwhelming to have to pave your own path in every way imaginable. Strong girls need breaks too. I wish this was easier for everyone to understand yet consideration and thoughtfulness are two values that I think are absent in a lot of interpersonal relationships. Little kindnesses and gestures are what made my days bearable in 2023.
In 2023, I began to recognize some of my subconscious behavior patterns that were almost entirely guided by my need to survive as well. So much of being an eldest daughter is about survival and hyper-awareness. My nervous system has always been in crisis mode. I don’t know what it means to “relax”, and I definitely didn’t know how to stop trying to control everything. That’s because all my life I had learned that as I long as I am in control, the probability for disappointment was always lower. What I want now more than ever in the new year, is to release some of that inherent desire to control and to give back autonomy to those around me + and to also absolve myself of that burden. It is a radical act to let people be there for you. That has been so hard for me to accept, especially in the last year. I struggled to surrender to the abundant sources of love and support in my life — but gosh, submission feels so good! Like yesss, I trust you to take care of me, to be there for me, there is no reason for me to think otherwise. That type of contentment is liberating and I am definitely leaning more into that energy with friends and family in the new year.
2023 also feels like a fuzzy blur, filled with good and bad, love and sorrow. Even though it is only one year I feel like I’ve aged decades, and earned that much in wisdom but also stress lol. The body has been keeping score indeed. I feel like we all are always grappling with the profound desire to change ourselves for the better…. to break out of destructive habits, behaviors, and triggers. With wellness becoming so commercialized it is hard not to feel pressured to constantly make robust progress and upgrade yourself at an absurdly fast pace. 2023 has taught me to stop running so fast, to slow down and take in every moment.
I’ve been thinking more of what brings me joy…. that pure, innocent, and childlike type of joy. Like what has provided me with constant fulfillment no matter the time period of my life? What makes my heart sing? It is when I am out of touch with those things that I feel the most lost. Plus, I am more aware now that my unhealthy persistence to control everything was actually blocking pathways to fulfillment and joy for me. The more I let go of control, the more contentment I have been experiencing. That also means letting go of the expectations society has on me about what I should or shouldn’t be doing, right? A lot of that has to do with divesting from what the pop culture industrial complex is telling the average 20-something year old what they should be eating, wearing, watching, etc. I want nothing to do with what is “in” anymore. I am tired of chasing that unrealistic standard because bearing that burden costs too much (literally) and robs you of important feelings like gratitude, contentment, and genuine human fallibility.
I spent the last few hours of the year slightly sadder than usual because I was missing family and felt so far from them and unwell physically (caught the flu when in Karachi) but I couldn’t help but feel a little grateful despite alllll the things that were making me feel miserable at the time. When the clock ticked towards midnight I remember clearly I was stuck in the NYE traffic of Karachi lol, but outside the car window I was gazing upon the hundreds (probably thousands) of people on motorcycles, who often were in violation of safety guidelines (probably because lack of proper transportation options). I felt sort of lucky….. I was in an air-conditioned car… and I was safe? I didn’t have to worry about falling off a motorbike and knew I would be in comfort in no time. I couldn’t help but notice there were almost no women in the streets either. I felt so deeply lucky (and little sad) that I lived in a walkable city where I felt safe enough to go anywhere without being harassed. These were the little privileges most women could never indulge in. So many women around the world aren’t even able to celebrate something like New Years because social inequalities are inherently built into so the cities, homes, roads, urban landscapes and in some societies — female expression is treated like a crime. I guess I felt like things could be worse right? But here I was, surviving and thriving all at the same time. It is all about the “choti choti khushiyan” as you would say in Urdu, which translates into “little joys” lol.
The following morning I began to think more about what I wanted to take with me into the new year. What has been working for me and what hasn’t, and so, I came up with a list. Here it goes:
2023 was entirely occupied with a really debilitating form of anxiety I began to develop. I had never been anxious before, though I have become an increasingly more anxious person since leaving home — which is natural when you are going through a huge transition. I read somewhere on the internet a quote that said “Stop borrowing grief from the future” and it struck me that so much of my anxiousness could be boiled down to all of the anticipatory grief I was placing on myself. So, in the new year, I want to stop borrowing grief from the future!!!!
Finding my ikigai. Ikigai is a Japanese philosophy that I recently came across through the new Blue Zones docuseries by Dan Buettner from his episode looking into the lifestyles of communities living in Okinawa, Japan. Essentially, your ikigai is your sense of purpose in the world. It is the thing that you cultivate in a habitual pattern which is driven by pure passion, for the rest of your life. Buettner calls it the thing that “makes your life worth living”. Is it painting? gardening? Social work? Baking? It could be anything. What is your ikigai?
Living in my truth as a Black Muslim woman, full stop. This was the year I was also challenged on so many levels because as my life began to rapidly change, I noticed the ways that people expect Black women to withstand cruelty and unfairness. People are always trying to sell us short and convince us we are less deserving of grace, dignity, and respect. It left me feeling delirious to witness the ways people will gaslight Black women into believing we are not entitled to softness+care, and then turn around and infantilize and protect nonblack women. Are we not deserving of care and consideration too? I reject the notion that we aren’t and am promising myself to protect my authenticity in every facet of life. Conformity and respectability are exhausting. Especially when the intersectionalities of antiblackness, misogyny, and Islamaphobia are all at play.
Less vigilance, and more moving through this world unruffled. A fancy way of saying I want to be unbothered lol.
Being more proactive about preventive medicine and lifestyle decisions. The body does keeps score, and if there is anything 2023 taught me it is that my body is overworked and not as immune as I imagined.
One thing I’ve also learned is that being good to others is good for you. It is the ultimate truth and only reality. You reap what you sow and choosing the enlightened path will always pay off in the future.
Intentional solitude. I enjoy my time spent alone so much. Solitude is so empowering because it helps you stay grounded in your self-narrative and also process all of your emotions without the influence, chatter, and unnecessary disruptions/projections from external voices.
Nourishing my intellectual wellness. I want to spend a lot more of my time creating rather than consuming. My partner is really good about maintaining a healthy level of intellectual nourishment since he is an avid reader who has made serious effort to take regain autonomy over his attention span and to divest from the internet’s toxic algorithm industry which has resulted in total brain rot for an entire generation. I am still in my brain rot phase ….. but to see someone be able to bounce back from that gives me hope that another reality is possible. I remember reading somewhere that said that the internet used to be a place we would go to, but now the real world is where we go to escape from the internet. We are essentially living in the internet nowadays, and I find that scary.
Life is short, therefore I know we don’t have enough time on this Earth to not live as our true selves. To not forgive, to not fall in love, to not tell others how we truly feel, to not hold grudges, to not give your loved ones the love and care they deserve. Life is just too short and we must always cherish the small and mundane moments in this tiny tiny existence of ours.
I want to end my list with the 5 top regrets of the dying (from Bronnie Ware’s book) which are:
1. "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."
2. "I wish I hadn't worked so hard."
3. "I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."
4. "I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."
5. "I wish that I had let myself be happier."
I hope you all have a year filled with deep and genuine gratitude, righteousness, radical self-acceptance, and healing <333