How does it feel when it is still?
How does it feel when it moves gently?
How does it feel when it crashes against the shore?
How does it feel when it is rained upon?
How does it feel when the sun sets behind it?
And how does it feel when it rises again?

I spent the first few years of my childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, then moved back home to Jeddah. Now, I live in New York. Today, I’m in San Juan. A body of water embraces each of these cities, and by extension, embraces their people.

Because of the constant proximity I’ve had to various waters, whether it be an ocean, a sea, a river, or a bay, I’ve always wondered why they are grouped by the term “body” and if our relationship is indeed bodily.

Do these bodies feel as connected to me as I do to them?
Do they feel as grounded in my presence as I do in theirs?
Or is the relationship paradoxical, leaving these bodies distressed by companionship?

How do they feel when they are observed?
How do they feel when they carry a ship?
How do they feel when their inhabitants are harvested?
How do they feel when they drown a person?

I’ve made peace with the fact that I will never find answers to these questions, because the ocean can’t speak to me the way that I speak to it. Or perhaps it is my own shortcoming, and I cannot understand the ocean the way it understands me. Or perhaps, neither one of us can understand the other. Nonetheless, I extract a subtle comfort in its companionship that makes me feel understood.

Maybe I am understood by the water.
Maybe I am understood by the water.

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I can go on and on about why I love rewatching the show and what it’s taught me, but today I picked up on something very specific that I hadn’t before. I kept noticing the subtle foreshadowing of events that manifested from the characters’ conversations. Many of the subtle remarks they made would later become life-altering events in the show. Now, in this case, it might only be the result of meticulously intentional scriptwriting, but we see this happen in real life as well. We talk about something and then suddenly find ourselves living it.

Growing up, my mom would always warn me, “Be careful what you wish for”. She would say this anytime I’d make a self-deprecating joke or anything along those lines. I always thought to myself that it was just a joke or that it wasn’t that serious. For a long time, I didn’t understand it, but the more I grew up, the more I did.

The first step to making something happen is creating space for it to exist within your mind. Once something has made its way into your consciousness, it’s more than halfway into existence. When you speak it, you affirm it, a secondary reinforcement. What this implies is more than just picking your words; it’s picking your thoughts. While many might be skeptical about the power of their own minds, I am all the more sure about the power of mine.

In his book, ‘You Are the Placebo’, Dr. Joe Dispenza outlines that the root of changing your state of being is changing your thoughts.

Your thoughts ripple down to your choices,
which affect your actions and behaviors,
which create your experiences,
which reinforce or alter your state of being.

The same thoughts reinforce the same state of being. New thoughts create a new state of being.

When our thoughts are deeply rooted in such a way that they manifest in our conversations, they are well on their way to manifesting in our realities as well. So, as careful as we are about the things we say, we need to be all the more careful about the things we think.

It’s much safer to think that the outcomes of our lives are random. It’s much safer to think that we are not responsible for the way we are wired. It’s much safer to neglect responsibility for the things we should be taking accountability for. We all know that we are in the driver’s seat of our own lives, but to think that we are also the manufacturers, mechanics, and engineers of our own being is the truth we’d all like to safely reject.

Realizing that you have so much power over your life can be paralyzing. You start to feel like you might be sabotaging your own reality or that you’re not qualified enough to take charge to such an extent. It starts to feel like you’re walking on eggshells inside your own mind. You start to crave a sense of reassurance that everything will work out, the same sense of reassurance you get while watching a TV show and knowing what’s gonna happen next.

We can replicate this feeling when it comes to our own lives if only we believe that everything is going to work out the way it’s supposed to. If only we believe that nothing meant for us will lose its way. If only we believe that we don’t have to know how things will end up to know that they’ll work out in the end. If only we believe that we are capable of guiding ourselves to where we need to go.

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Quiet in the sense that there isn’t a pre-iftar uproar in the kitchen.
Quiet in the sense that there isn’t a clatter of utensils against the plates at Iftar time.
Quiet in the sense that there aren’t any siblings fighting over the last piece of cheese sambusa.
Quiet in the sense that there aren’t any Ramadan TV shows playing in the background.
Quiet in the sense that there aren’t any adan callings on the street.

Ramadan back home moves with a rhythm.

A rhythm born of cultural noise overtakes the religious importance of the month.
Instead of Ramadan being the opportunity it is to better oneself, it becomes a contest of cultural extravagance.

Who can host the most extravagant gathering?
Who can wear the most extravagant thobe?
Who can put up the most extravagant decorations?
Who can cook the most extravagant dish?

Culture has propelled forward the idea that Ramadan is about indulgence, about doing the most, wearing the most, eating the most. In reality, this month is meant to strip us bare of all the things we deem important, helping us to redefine our priorities, in this world and the next, in Dunya and in Akhira.

Social Media as a Catalyst

The importance of keeping up appearances has increased dramatically with the rise of social media and the increased popularity of social media influencers. Both the need to document and consume Ramadan-related content serve as a catalyst to these ideas of extravagance, fueling the ego instead of taming it. Extravagance behind closed doors is one thing, but extravagance as a public boasting contest is something else.

When your stage expands beyond just your social circle, the expectation to uphold a certain image exists with more social pressure. Suddenly, we begin to keep up with these unrealistic social expectations, and they continue to overshadow the true priorities of this month.

The Commercialization of Distraction

The buzz of distractions is bred into our commercial consumption during the month. It’s important to understand the business interests that arise as a result of this. The Ramadan TV show and advertising industries are two of the main beneficiaries of the cultural significance of this month.

1. The Ramadan TV Show Industry

The industry is approximated to have a market value of $10B, with its peak relevance spanning over the month of Ramadan. This means that how these shows perform during the month is a primary determinant of their success. Thus, the key stakeholders behind these shows focus on driving viewership as high as possible during the month.

In terms of consumer behavior, people wait for Ramadan from year to year to see what new TV shows are going to air. To meet this expectation, increasingly controversial content is set forth with the intention of grabbing and keeping the attention of viewers throughout the month. A distraction by design. Ultimately, the industry thrives on this season, and specifically on its existence through a cultural premise rather than a religious one.

On a personal level, this might sound harmless when you think about sitting down to watch one TV show, an episode a day, for the entire month. But there are dozens of TV shows produced simultaneously, distilled to distract. According to MBC Group, viewership increases by 80% during Ramadan compared to typical viewing hours. This results in hours of your day being wasted trying to keep up, valuable hours, might I add.

While media giants prioritize their profits at the cost of your religious prosperity, keep in mind that when Ramadan ends, those TV shows are still there, available to watch on demand, but you can’t rewind the Barakah of the month like you can rewind the episodes of a TV series. Their success is contingent on your falling victim to their ploy of distraction, and your prosperity is contingent on actively combating it.

2. Ramadan Advertising

Beyond the TV show industry, Ramadan becomes a universal advertising opportunity. From large conglomerates to small family-owned companies, Ramadan is an experience that companies can utilize as a tool to relate to the consumer. Clothing and retail, consumer-produced goods, home appliances, and telecommunications are only a few sectors. They all employ nostalgia and a sense of unity to create an emotional bond with the viewer, compelling consumers to purchase their product. Thereby turning a month about restrained consumption into a commercial fiasco.

The Pursuit of Fasting

Beyond the economics of the month, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding around the pursuit itself. Fasting is meant to be an act of detachment from worldly comforts. While we fast for half the day, the second half is spent in pure indulgence, stemming from the idea that we have to make up for our underconsumption during the day by overconsuming during the night.

On the flip side, the month also becomes an opportunity for many to prioritize getting in shape. Instead of outlining a set of goals that enhance their relationship with Allah, people find this month to be a golden opportunity to develop and execute strategies towards aesthetic goals. Intentional shifts in routine can drive these benefits, but they should never become the primary objective.

Aside from the spectrum of wellness and indulgence, some of our fasts are completely discounted by the way we try to outsmart the system. Every year, with the start of Ramadan, comes a unanimous social decision to “flip your sleep”. This is a term we use to describe the act of sleeping after sunrise and waking up any time between noon and just before sunset. This system aids the pursuit of maximizing eating hours and minimizing fasting hours, completely missing the objective of Ramadan.

This used to be easier when Ramadan coincided with summer vacation and younger generations didn’t have school or university obligations. But in recent years, as Ramadan moves backwards against the Gregorian calendar, the inability to pursue this schedule has become an increasing frustration for kids and young adults. Having to go on with regular schedules is deemed a worldly inconvenience, despite governmental adjustments to school and working hours.

Ramadan Abroad ~ رمضان في الغربة

One of the most humbling realizations of spending Ramadan abroad is that there are little to no accommodations made to your day-to-day life. If at all, those accommodations would be made by the individual, not by any official institution or society as a whole. If you choose to flip your schedule, it’s an independent and often isolating flip. Restaurants don’t stay open late as they do back home. Stores don’t stay open late as they do back home. Your day doesn’t start later and end earlier as it does back home.

Ramadan exists quietly in your internal spirit rather than loudly in the external atmosphere. But what you miss about being back home is the exact opposite of what you gain by being abroad.

When you experience the Ramadan that is quiet, you begin to distinguish between Ramadan as an element of culture and Ramadan as a pillar of Islam. The key issue here is not in the cultural expression, but in making it the sole premise of this month. People want the Ramadan spirit without participating in what makes the essence of its spirituality. It’s important to recognize that both larger business interests and our collective social behaviors drive us towards this cultural extremity. But Islam was never a religion of extremism. The Prophet Mohammad ﷺ shares a famous wisdom that is called into question here. He says: “خير الأمور أوسطها”, which translates to “In all things, moderation is best.”

What this tells us is that we shouldn’t expel all participation in cultural festivities related to the month, but that we should participate in them with moderation.

Moderation and extravagance cannot coexist.
Moderation and indulgence cannot coexist.
Moderation and extreme flips cannot coexist.

Let this be a reminder for all of us to revise our Ramadan regimes and make sure we are, in fact, participating in moderation. Let it be a reminder as to why this month holds the Islamic significance that it does. Let it be a reminder that we possess agency over how we choose to spend this month, despite commercial efforts to manipulate these choices. Ramadan was a religious responsibility before it was ever a cultural celebration, so let’s honor that.

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You must sit down in a specific seat in the cafe, which is typically occupied. Once you find your way to that seat, you are poured a cup of coffee. But here’s the catch: you have to complete your journey to the past and back before the coffee gets cold. Typically, when you think about time travel, you think of it as a grand quest, an adventure. Not something you sit down with for coffee.

But more than just this time constraint, you cannot change anything about your past. You can only go back and live it again. When I first read this condition, I thought to myself, but then what’s the point?

Now, I sit at the edge of my bed, staring at the calendar on my laptop, sobbing uncontrollably, trying to decide when is a good day to leave New York, for good.

Now, I know what the point is.

I stare at the calendar, but all I can think about is this cafe and how much I wish it existed in my reality. How much I wish I could come back to these days. How much I wish that the finite were infinite.

At this moment in time, I would do anything to have the opportunity to sit in that seat and relive any moment I spent in New York that didn’t feel finite. My days here are numbered, and that feeling echoes quietly in the repetitiveness of my days. I repeat them like rituals, soberingly aware of their expiry date. It’s funny because instead of actually choosing a date, I’m sitting here, procrastinating the inevitable.

There were days when the end didn’t feel so near. There were days when I was closer to the beginning than I was to the end. There were days when I couldn’t even picture a life after New York.

Those days are long gone.

The days I live now buzz with a quiet anxiety. An anxiety that pulsates through my body, urging me to be present, to savor what I have for as long as I have it. And yet, it’s that anxiety itself that renders those moments tasteless rather than savored.

Instead of savoring the present moment, I sit here and wish for that seat and a cup of coffee because I know that the ability to meet New York for a quick cup of coffee would give me all the comfort I need to be able to leave it.

In the face of this desire, I am deeply aware of the privilege that it is to have a chapter in my life that is so difficult to turn the page on. So if I can’t sit down for a cup of coffee with my days in New York, I’ll sit down for a cup of coffee with my privilege, because that’s something I will always carry.

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Carrie Bradshaw was far from perfect. In fact, she was very very very flawed. But those flaws are what make her embody someone who is closer to a real person than a fictional character. People dislike Carrie because she reminds them of their own flaws; their own mistake-ridden existence that they would like to cast behind them when they click on the TV at night. Our discomfort with Carrie’s mistakes is nothing but a mirror of our discomfort with our own mistakes.

I share the frustration that comes with watching Carrie make the same mistake over and over again. I share the resentment towards Mr. Big for taking so long to choose her when she chose him time and time again. I share the confusion at her inability to recognize that she deserves better. But this frustration, resentment, and confusion exists to remind us that there are undeniable consequences to the decisions we make in our life.

Aside from the consequential nature of decision-making, Carrie is a real and raw representation of what it means to know that you deserve better and still be unable to demand that of the world. So many of us were able to see how much Carrie could offer and that’s why we resented her so much for wasting it with someone that clearly didn’t deserve it.

But more than that, Carrie craved the familiarity of being hurt in the same way as opposed to being vulnerable to the possibility of getting hurt in a way she couldn’t anticipate. Carrie was smart and she was able to predict how Big would treat her, no matter how much she hoped he would treat her differently. She had decided that was a safer bet than being vulnerable to a type of pain she didn’t know. As much as that makes us uncomfortable, it was a trade-off that she was willing to make and a trade-off that reminded us of all the pain that was once comfortable that we’ve now cast away.

That was the thing about Carrie, she was never afraid to exist in the truest form of what she felt. She was never afraid of feeling the things she had no right to feel. She was never afraid of being true to the version of herself that she needed to express in that moment and that made a lot of people deeply uncomfortable.

In the face of this ability, Carrie was called a bad friend, disloyal, and ungrateful. The way I see it is that she was flawed, like all of us were, but she was just less intentional about concealing those flaws and more intentional about being authentic to them. When she waltzed into Charlotte’s park avenue apartment, declaring her offense that Charlotte didn’t offer her financial support when she needed it, Carrie was most authentic to what she had felt in that moment. Whether or not that was a fair expectation to have has nothing to do with the quality of her friendship with Charlotte. If anything, her ability to so comfortably express herself is the real testament to their friendship.

More than anything Carrie Bradshaw existed to teach us all a thing or two about reflection. Carrie was never afraid to ask the tough questions and sit with the discomfort of not having the answers. Carrie was also not afraid to sit with the discomfort of being herself and knowing that not everyone will like her. Ultimately, she lived a life that was abundantly flawed with plenty of mistakes. You may feel that she wasted her life, but if she did then Carrie Bradshaw wasted her life so you don’t have to.

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But the flip side of this conversation embodies the resistance that often comes with such attempts:

Arguments that forgiveness is not owed to those who hurt us.
Arguments that justice is needed for forgiveness.
Arguments that forgiveness is not as simple as a single choice.

All are valid arguments, especially when each case carries its own emotional baggage. But the validity of these arguments doesn’t negate the necessity of forgiveness for purification.

Forgiveness is not owed to those who hurt us

A lot of us think we don’t owe forgiveness to the people who hurt us. But the key misconception here is thinking that forgiveness is something for the wrongdoer. Forgiveness is for you.

In most cases, the people who wronged you are going on with their lives, carefree. The day you spend actively rejecting forgiveness and the day you decide to embrace it are all the same to them.

In an exchange between one and another, forgiveness is an offering one makes to themselves.

An offering of peace.
An offering of acceptance.
An offering of purification.

So yes, you don’t owe forgiveness to the people who hurt you, you owe it to yourself.

Forgiveness is not owed to those who hurt us

Justice is needed for forgiveness

A lot of us are waiting for justice before we can to forgive. But the thing about justice and forgiveness is that they are both means of neutralizing conflict. You either seek justice or you forgive. But you don’t seek justice to forgive. You neutralize the conflict once. You choose one.

Now the thing about seeking justice is that it often requires ideal conditions. We don’t just want justice in an objectively fair manner, we want justice to manifest in a way that restores our dignity, heals our wounds, and rebuilds what’s been broken. But such an effect can only come of forgiveness, not justice.

A part of you might feel unconvinced, like you’d rather choose justice over forgiveness. But the thing about the injustices you leave behind in the world is that they are never forgotten. They are put down in the record of records and justice is restored when it matters the most: on the Day of Judgement. Allah makes a divine promise to seek justice on your behalf, and what better justice can you ask for than that of Allah.

“وَعِزَّتِي وجَلَالِي لَأَنْصُرَنَّكِ وَلَوْ بَعْدَ حِينٍ”
(I swear by my glory and honour, I will answer you even if after some time.)

So do yourself justice and forgive the people who deserve your forgiveness the least. Justice is a divine promise, but forgiveness is a humile responsibility.

Justice is needed for forgiveness

Forgiveness is not as simple as a single choice

A lot of us are convinced of the necessity of forgiveness, but are unable to fathom the simplification of the request.

Forgiveness feels heavy.
Forgiveness feels complex.
Forgiveness feels difficult.

But a lot of this stems from the way justice and forgiveness are intertwined within our minds.

In our heads, we imagine a courtroom.
Opposing sides.
Arguments.
Prosecution and defense.
But this is a scene of justice not forgiveness.

Welcoming the idea of cleansing your soul requires you to reimagine forgiveness as a concept. Reconfigure its meanings and open yourself up first to the idea that it might be a choice and not a process, before willing yourself to make that choice.

Forgiveness is not as simple as a single choice

Ultimately, the people we choose to forgive are not owed our forgiveness, justice is not restored when we forgive them, and they probably don’t deserve our forgiveness either. But we choose to forgive them nonetheless because we deserve to participate in the pursuit of purification and we owe it to ourselves too.

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In observing my crying patterns, I found that I had phases where I would be crying about anything and everything and other phases when I would absolutely never cry. Because I’d always only end up at either extreme, there was always a sense of judgement, shame, and guilt around every time I’d cry. I’d be comparing myself to others and wondering where I fall on a spectrum of averages. I’d compare myself to other phases in my life to see if I’m crying too much or not enough.

Slowly crying existed on a spectrum of frequency and appropriateness rather than emotional expression and release. This is where the list came in. It provided an emotional reset, an outlet for me to redefine my relationship with my tears and create a safe space for them to exist. Perhaps I started the list less aware that this would be the outcome, but nonetheless craving the outlet just as much.

Statistics and Baselines - When Comparison is the Culprit

According to my quick Google search, women cry between 30-72 times a year (2-6 times a month). In 2025, I cried 47 times, averaging at approximately 4 times a month. In comparison to these statistics, it appears that I fall within the “acceptable” range. But does this comparison offer any real value?

In reality, I know nothing about where these numbers came from and how they compare to my numbers. I don’t know who these individuals are, how resilient they are, what caused them to cry, what situations they’re more vulnerable to, nor what relationship they have with crying. All of these factors undeniably play a role in whether or not a person cries under a certain set of circumstances. Which brings me to perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned about crying: comparison is the thief of letting go.

I’m well aware that the original saying is “comparison is the thief of joy”, but comparison robs us of far more than just joy. It robs us of anything we subject it to. In the case of crying, when we start to compare ourselves to others, we deny ourselves the release we need to overcome the challenges we face.

The Tales Behind My Tears

To dive deeper into the analysis of this list, I broke it down into 5 categories:

1. Physical pain: any physical pain that caused me to cry.

2. People: any interaction with another person that caused me to cry, whether on the spot or at a later time.

3. Circumstances: any externally imposed circumstances, beyond my control, that made me cry.

4. Stress: any time I cried as the result of an overload of work related stress.

5. Content: any content I consumed that touched me emotionally enough to make me cry.

For the 47 times I cried, the distribution is as follows:

Circumstances was in the lead by more than double its successor. This comes as no surprise. Crying is a natural reaction to loss of control. When we can’t control our circumstances, we control our responses. Crying is one response that when given the opportunity to, provides a mechanism for release and reset. It’s the way the body regains control.

Taking second place is people. Again, this didn’t come as too much of a surprise. Our relationships absolutely have an influence on our emotional responses. Who we surround ourselves with, how they interact within conflict, and what they leave behind for you to sit with all contribute to whether or not you have a reaction like crying. This is why it’s so important to remind ourselves that the way we show up in our relationships has the power to influence the other person’s emotional state. We are all responsible for our own actions and the reactions they instigate so we should treat our relationships with more kindness and care and less transactional intent.

That being said, it’s equally important to realize that the way we react to the actions of other people is also well within our control. We react proportionate to how much we care about said person or how much we value what they have to say. When we strip this value, the substance of their offense loses its capacity to influence you so deeply.

We are responsible for the way we show up in relationships but we are also responsible for the value we attach to our relationships as well.

Building the Release Muscle

When I first started the list, it was noticeably more difficult for me to let myself cry than it was towards the end of it. That’s not to say that the progress was linear, there were definitely setbacks along the way, but the progress was nonetheless noticeable.

Every time I would sense a wave of strong emotions coming on, my reflex was to suppress them.

“Now is not a good time.”
“If I start now, I don’t know when I’ll stop.”
“I don’t have time for this.”

These are only a few of the sentences that would run through my head in this situation. It’s funny that they all seem to be related to time. Something about letting yourself take the time to have an emotional release seems unworthy in comparison to the abundance of tasks we might have on our list for the day. But just like anything else we deem important, we have to actively make our emotional well being a priority for it to become one.

The reflex was suppression but the muscle I was trying to build was release. When the reflex is the exact opposite of the mechanism you’re trying to build, it becomes all the more difficult to build it. But this is when the power shifts to intention rather than repetition. It’s not about how many times you let yourself cry, but how much you resisted it before you cried.

The resistance can come in a lot of different shapes. Whether it be the physical resistance of trying to hold back the tears or mental resistance that takes the shape of self-shame disguised as strength. In the end, they’re all tactics to try and keep in the tears.

Moments Before the Tears

The way we resist our tears tells us a lot about our internal dialogue. The way we talk to ourselves when we are most vulnerable and the arguments we use to convince ourselves not to cry are key indicators of the relationship we have with ourselves and our emotions. Most often, there is a lot of judgement and shame in the dialogue that precedes our tears.

“You shouldn’t be crying.”
“You’re stronger than this.”
“It’s not worth your tears.”

We think we’re trying to help ourselves but in reality we’re only making things more difficult by standing in the way of our nervous system. The nervous system is the primary mechanism in our bodies designed to protect us and crying is a complex nervous system response that ultimately serves to protect you and keep you safe.

The Science Behind Tears and the Nervous System

Now you might ask how sitting down and letting a few droplets of water stream down your face would protect you. There are several biological mechanisms that come into play when it comes to tears.

Firstly, crying triggers the parasympathetic nervous system which helps release tension and lower stress through the release of endorphins and oxytocin. Secondly, the chemical composition of emotional tears is distinct from other tears. Specifically, they feature a higher concentration of protein-based hormones and toxins. They act as a waste product. Thus, releasing them helps to release stress related chemicals.

This reveals that tears not only trigger the release of soothing chemicals, but they also get rid of stress inducing chemicals, providing a 2-in-1 regulating mechanism.

What happens when you store and don’t release?

Although I’ve made the point that comparison is unhealthy, I make this comparison for the sake of this argument only.

Comparing this year to previous years when I’d cried far less, the main difference is that each time I cried, there seemed to be a very obvious reason as to why I was crying, and it was almost always only that one reason. In other years, crying felt more unclear. There were many times where tears would stream down my face and I had no idea why I’d reached that point. This was not only confusing but it was also deeply frustrating.

When we suppress our emotions, bottle them up, there comes a point where the bottle gets full to the brim and can take no more. This is when a forced release happens. Often this release is triggered by extremely minor inconveniences which cause us to perceive ourselves as weak or less resilient. In reality, we’ve just been carrying far more than our bodies can handle and it decided to take things into its own hands.

The Role of the List

A lot of these takeaways might seem like they are completely independent of the list. But for me this list provided two things:

1. It provided the layer of awareness I was missing to really approach this problem with intention.

2. It provided a safe space where my tears could land.

Because I had this list, it made me think more about why I’m crying, how I’m responding, and how much I’m resisting. It also provided a designated space for all of these tears to go to after they’ve been released. Somewhere that felt safe, secure, and always close by.

Range - Live Life in Seasons

It’s important to note that some seasons in your life you will be crying far more than others. Within the span of this year, there was a month where I cried 10 times and a month where I cried once. The ultimate message here is to let your body respond in the way that it sees fit. Don’t fight the natural response of the nervous system, regulate it. Like a dear friend of my mine likes to say, live life in the seasons it comes in.

The message here is in no way to take every opportunity you get to sit and cry. That will not be productive neither literally nor emotionally. But the idea is to let yourself have that release if you know it’s what you need.

While this passage seems to be all about crying, it’s more so about emotional release. Crying just happens to be the way I like to do so. Other people have other ways of releasing their emotions but still choose to suppress them. So suppression remains an issue regardless of the mechanism of release.

So regardless of your chosen mechanism, strive to find the balance that helps you to regulate, release, and rise above the challenges that try to bring you down.

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But is that really where love comes from? Is that the organ to which we ought to be in awe of?

The heart?

The heart is the main organ responsible for pumping blood throughout the body, sustaining life. So one would think to task it with the responsibility of creating, accruing, and carrying love would be above that which it would be able to handle. Sustaining life and sustaining love can be no easy feat.

In reality, it’s true. The vessel tasked with creating love is not the heart, it’s the mind. Love in its literal sense is all but mere chemicals emitted by the brain’s reward system.

Yet, in the ever existing fight between the heart and the mind, we still attribute love to the heart and logic to the mind, when they are both products of the mind.

What’s indeed undeniable is the connection between the heart and the mind. Yes, the brain is the ultimate source from which the love chemical, oxytocin, comes from, but once it’s released into our system, it lands in our hearts. When we experience love, we can feel our hearts warm, expand, embrace. The biological manifestations of love are often felt in the heart and that is perhaps why we attribute the emotion to it. Or perhaps because love often feels deeply existential, and what is there more essential to existence than the heart?

Aside from the very literal sense of love, what’s even more astonishing is the shape that love can take. The same system exists and is deeply embedded within our bodies but the way we love is uniquely different.

The way we love, who we love, how we love, all create a matrix of possibilities.

Love that’s conditional or love that’s unconditional.
Love that’s rigid or love that’s malleable.
Love that’s selfish or love that’s selfless.

The unconditional, the malleable, the selfless, they exist in parallel. Their parallelism lies precisely in their ability to transcend circumstances, systems, architectures, to exist and persist nonetheless.

Today the love we are taught to value is the love that’s loud, visible, exclaimed. The love we can prove to ourselves and others. The love that’s easy to capture, easy to showcase. The love that performs but doesn’t last. It seems today many of us wait for the circumstances, systems, architectures to align perfectly such that the love we carry can exist easily within, among, and between them.

Long gone is the love that is able to exist so firmly that it can mold itself around anything that might stand in its way. A love that’s unwavering. Carried and everlasting. A love that’s too strong to speak. A love that’s quiet but reliable. The way you know you can always return to silence after the noise. Because the only thing louder than the love we exclaim is the love we carry in silence.

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I’ve come to realize that a lot of this tension is generated by a battle of wants, most often when those wants are conflicting. My parents want me to visit family. My sister wants me to spend quality time with her. My cousin wants me to go to the beach with her. My youngest sister wants me to stay longer. My brother wants me not to leave altogether.

But amidst all those battling wants, I often wonder about what I want. What do I want? And in the face of that question I’m often stuck in a paralyzing state because there isn’t enough space for me to piece together what that might be.

Where we’re going, who we’re seeing, and what we’re doing begins to be imposed on me instead of discussed with me. And I start to feel my sense of agency, that I worked so hard to earn, suddenly evaporate into thin air.

Amidst all this frustration is an underlying feeling of guilt that shows up in the form of self-questioning. Am I wrong for resisting this? Am I wrong for wanting less collective movement and more autonomy? Am I wrong for ending up in the crossfires of an autonomous society and a collective one?

I think one of the challenges least spoken of, that comes with studying abroad, is the element of reverse culture shock that has to do with autonomy.

We’re raised in a society that is foundationally collective, oriented towards “we” instead of “I”. Then we are propelled into a society that is foundationally autonomous, oriented towards the “I” instead of “we”. That initial culture shock is visceral because it ingrains a sense of agency in you that begins to feel like a survival instinct. Then once we return to the collective societies we call home, this survival instinct remains and we’re left with an internal battle that feels existential. A battle to extract the “I” from the “we”.

So in the face of these conflicting wants, what I want is to feel safe in being the subject of someone else’s decisions, to live without resistance as a survival instinct, and to embody adaptability enough that I can exist in both places without forcing the mechanisms of one on the other.

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In the same way, when humans are faced with obstacles in their lives, some sort of protective mechanism comes into place to protect the self from the impact that may come through. But these mechanisms can also reinforce the trauma rather than prevent it.

The challenges we face can be broadly put into two categories:

1. Circumstantial obstacles: obstacles that are externally imposed on us by circumstances we can’t control.

2. Internal turmoils: obstacles that stem from internal conflicts and tensions that seem to be within our control.

It feels as though it’s more difficult to create a separation between ourselves and internal turmoils than circumstantial obstacles. As Um Kalthoum says, “أهرب من قلبي أروح على فين؟” (Where do I run to escape from my heart?). But what we feel is within our control and what’s actually within our control are two different things.

A theory that helps to distinguish the things we can control from the things we can’t control was set forth by Stephen Covey in his book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. The theory distinguishes 3 levels of control:

1. Circle of control: encompassing things you have direct power over, like your choices, actions, and responses.

2. Circle of influence: encompassing things where you can take action, even if you don’t control the ultimate outcome.

3. Circle of concern: encompassing everything you care about but have little or no control over.

In dealing with circumstantial obstacles, we recognize that they are outside of our circle of control, but nonetheless, we have a strong desire to control them. Through that desire for control, we absorb these obstacles into our personalities. We extract from them labels that we use to identify ourselves. Suddenly, circumstances that had a clear separation from who we are become completely internalized. They become part of our identity and the way we perceive ourselves.

In dealing with internal turmoils, we feel as though they are within our circle of control. We feel as though we have a complete ability to deal with the demons inside our heads but somehow are not able to. This friction between our perceived ability to tame the dragons and inability to follow through creates a deep frustration with the self. The issue here is the failure to recognize that these internal conflicts often stem from something external. We identify too deeply with our perceived ability to control these conflicts and this restricts us from looking beyond the self to find where these tensions may be coming from. The battles, narratives, and internal dialogues, that show up during these conflicts are not original. They are not composed by you. They are often internalized projections of others but we can’t seem to pinpoint how, where, or when this internalization happened.

What this highlights is that when we deal with both circumstantial obstacles and internal turmoils, we internalize what should stay external.

It’s easy for us to identify with the things we go through, especially during tough times. It starts to feel like we are what we go through but in reality our identity and the obstacles we face are quite distinct. We have complete control over whether or not our identities blend into those obstacles and become one. While that seems to happen organically, the alternative is taking an objective view of the obstacles we face, looking at them as something to overcome rather than absorb. It’s in that overcoming where our becoming lies, not in the scars drawn by adding hardships to your roster of traumatic events. It’s the journey and not the obstacle.

It has occurred to me how much we crave control. When we are faced with obstacles that suddenly shock us into a state of awareness of how much we are in fact not in control, it seems that absorbing these obstacles into our personality is the easiest way of taking back the reins. But in this pursuit of control, we think we gained control over our circumstances but in that lose complete control over our identities. It’s ironic that in chasing control over the things outside of our circle of influence we neglect the things that are completely within our circle of control.

Our reactions, attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, all make up the essence of who we are and yet we completely neglect the intention in those pursuits. Instead, we direct our energy towards absorbing the impact, instead of letting it pass through.

It’s important to understand what are the things within our control and to let go of the things we know are not. Don’t absorb the impact, let it pass through. The growth isn’t in the scars you keep, it’s in the wounds that heal.

So let them heal.

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Some people show more of themselves than others, making it easier to see and therefore love them. Other people are more guarded, often making the incremental step of investigation necessary to loving them. But the reasons why some people are more revealing of themselves and others are more guarded vary.

Some people are guarded because they are afraid of the vulnerability of someone else knowing them. They prefer to hold on to themselves and never leave themselves in the hands of another. They know precisely who they are, what to hide, and how to hide it. It’s an intentional dance of distance and disguise.

Other people hide themselves with less intention. They don’t hide because they’re afraid to be seen but they hide because they can’t see themselves. If anything, they wish more than anything to be seen by the world but their own blindness to themselves stands in the way.

This reveals an essential prerequisite to being seen by others: seeing yourself.

If you don’t know yourself, if you and you are strangers, if you can’t see yourself in the way you hope for others to see you, you will not be seen. Perhaps one of the most over used, over preached, over sold ideas around self love is that you have to love yourself first before anyone else can love you, but unfortunately it’s true.

You absolutely set the standard for the love you demand from the world, so set it high. Give yourself something to see, give the world something to see, love yourself, and the world will love you.

This passage might hold a frustrating message for some, because what does it mean to be yourself, know yourself, let alone love yourself. But deep down each one of us knows exactly who they want to be. We have an internal image of who we aspire to become but very often there is a gap between who we are now and who we are in that image.

Living with this gap is a state of existential cognitive dissonance, where the larger the gap between who we are and who we want to be, the more internal psychological tension there is. This tension can build into resentment and even hateful feelings toward the self. But this tension only multiplies when it is not acted upon. Recognizing this gap and striving to fill it is the biggest act of self love you can participate in. Every step that takes you closer to the version you aspire to be helps you to be more yourself, know more yourself, and love more yourself.

This is not to say that you have to change who you are to be worthy of love. It’s to say that growth and evolution are a natural course taken by the self, and making that growth intentional allows you to embark on a journey alongside yourself that helps you to learn about who you are, who you want to be, and how to love any and every version you face along the way.

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If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know, you will never become anything, and that is your reward.

This quote particularly resonated with me because it came at a time of deep uncertainty. Within this uncertainty, I felt both the confusion of being at a crossroads and the privilege of having multiple roads to choose from. But when I read this quote, I found myself leaning into the latter perspective, with full recognition of how difficult it is to lean that way.

It seems at this stage in our lives, people fall into one of two categories:
1. People who know exactly what they want to be and how to become that.
2. People who have no idea what they want to be nor how to figure it out.

The first path is glorified while the latter is catastrophized but each has its own misconceptions that lead to these attitudes.

People who know exactly what they want to be are praised for their perseverance and discipline. While these virtues are truly admirable, they fail to recognize that taking this path sometimes causes its voyager to go into a state of tunnel vision, fixating on a single outcome and rejecting any alternate routes that may show up along the way. This type of fixation requires one to make many sacrifices to remain on the same path. These sacrifices are sometimes necessary but at other times are a forceful attempt to walk a path that is not meant for you. Perhaps this is the element that Wilde refers to as punishment.

On the other hand, people who have no idea what they want to be are punished by both themselves and the people around them. They fall into a state of uncertainty that becomes a perpetually shameful existence. Add to that the external pressures of people constantly berating them to be more proactive about what they might pursue. But in reality the combination of internal and external pressures causes them to implode into a state of decision paralysis. Like a swimmer that starts flailing in the water, driving themselves into a perceived state of drowning, instead of relaxing their body long enough so they can float again.

What each of these people are lacking is perspective.

People who know exactly what they want to be are lacking the perspective needed to widen their point of view, to widen the window of opportunities they’re willing to accept for themselves. They’re lacking the adaptability needed to respond to the varying obstacles life may throw at them. The delays, the failures, the changes of heart. Things never work out the way we think they do and for the person with a fixed path forward, this truth is often one that’s hard to swallow.

On the other hand, people who have no idea what they want to do are too preoccupied in an internal spiral of shame and confusion to recognize the opportunity that lies within their circumstances. This uncertainty can be an opportunity to look inwards at what they value instead of outwards for a fixed path to follow. It’s a privilege to not be certain about a single path because it means there are multiple paths worth pursuing. Embracing this abundance and coupling it with adaptability is precisely the reward Wilde is referring to.

In reality, it’s much easier to say you’ve always known what you wanted to do and pursue that, but there’s all the more respect to not knowing what you want to do but going out in the world, figuring it out, and exploring the options in front of you, and even the ones that are not. The latter means you’ve struggled, explored, failed, got back up again, until you found the path for you. The added value here lies in the way each person knows themselves because the person who fought to find their calling knows far more about themselves than the one who’s known their calling all along.

No path is better than the other but each path has something to learn from the other. The real art is in finding a balance, in pursuing a direction with discipline but balancing it with adaptability and exploration. Some roads are frictious for you to reroute, some roads are less traveled for you to trail-blaze, and some roads are traveled far too often but best left untraveled. In the end, trying to shape your path against what’s been written for you will always result in an arduous journey.

(وَعَسَى أَن تَكْرَهُوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّكُمْ وَعَسَى أَن تُحِبُّوا شَيْئًا وَهُوَ شَرٌّ لَّكُمْ وَاللهُ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنْتُمْ لاَ تَعْلَمُونَ)

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I’ve always been a firm believer that the music we listen to absolutely has an influence on our subconscious mindsets, attitudes, and the outcomes we manifest in ourselves. Not because the music itself has the power to have this effect, but because the way we absorb that music does.

Observing the flip side of this song made me realize my own pattern in listening to music, that I know many other people share as well:

• In songs about heartbreak or tragedies, we tend to envision ourselves as the victims in the story.

• But when it comes to music that represents power and ego, we tend to envision ourselves as the victors in the story.

This highlights a stark inconsistency in our perception of ourselves. The subconscious is faced with an identity crisis because we shift our self-perception according to the medium we are absorbing. When we are inconsistent about the narrative we write for ourselves, this results in a manifestation of whatever we consume the most. Frequency dilutes intention.

Music and other modes of art are mediums through which we explore ourselves. Our preferences, our perceptions, our personalities. These are the threads that come together to sew the fabric of who we are. They are the words that come together to write the narrative of our being. So when the role we play, our character, shifts in the face of shifting mediums, our sense of self becomes wavering, unstable, uncertain.

It’s true that in life you will play many different roles in people’s stories. You will be the villain in some, the hero in some, and a side character in others. But you can’t shape shift in your own story. Your role and character must be unwavering in your own narrative. The way you consume media should be dictated by your own sense of self not by the characters written in those stories. Our innate response to music is to try and find something to relate to in the lyrics, but in that pursuit, we begin to identify with stories that are not ours and turn ourselves into characters that we are not.

But we don’t only do this with music, we do it with TV shows, movies, and even people. In a desperate pursuit to find belonging, we morph ourselves into people we are not just to feel embraced by the likeness. But the truth is, the embrace of ungenuine likeness is a cold embrace, discounted by the lack of sincerity in its exchange. However, the embrace of genuine likeness is a warm embrace, marked up by the sincerity in its exchange. And you can’t find genuine likeness if you are not your genuine self.

So remember who are in your own story and find yourself in the world. Don’t morph yourself into someone that you are not, just to belong to someone else’s story.

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The new year’s season is often one that’s filled with reflection, planning, and aspiration. Reflection on all the ways one could have done better in the current year. Planning how to improve in the next year. Aspiring to do more, achieve more, have more, in the next year. But what this season lacks, amidst all this proactive reflection, is more gratitude.

We fail to recognize all the things the current year has given us, but only recognize what we want from the next. We fail to recognize how far we’ve come, but only recognize how much farther there is to go. We fail to recognize the person in the mirror, but only recognize what the next version should look like.

The theme of recognizing all the things we wish were different about this year is a strong one. One that comes through even in lighthearted contexts. In the race to create relatable content, it seems that we think tragedy is more relatable than gratitude. As I scroll through Instagram during this time of year, I see memes about how tough the past year has been, how brutal, and the amount of shares and likes these posts get really concerns me. Not because I’m ignorant to the hardships that people go through, but because I’m weary about how much they identify with those hardships.

These end of year reflections come to remind us what parts of the year we most identify with, and more often than not, we deeply identify with our hardships because they have to have amounted to something, no? No! Learning from hardship and extracting wisdom from it is absolutely important, but making hardship a part of your identity will only make you hold on to pain that doesn’t belong with you. The things we carry around manifest in our mindsets, goals, and reflections so it’s important to let go of that baggage.

I used to be one of those people who look back at every year and say “Thank God it’s over”, but I quickly realized that if that’s how I feel about every year, when will the years I’m grateful for come? I found the answer this year, not because this was an easy year for me, far from it, but because this was the year I chose that I have more to be grateful for than to regret.

So as I scrolled through my camera roll, I watched my year back with rose tinted glasses, perhaps because it’s easier to see the good in what has passed, but also because I actively chose to see the good in those moments and show gratitude for what they offered me.

الحمدلله على عام أتى ورحل ونحن غارقون في نعمك يا الله

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The answer is quite nuanced and situational. But ultimately it comes down to active choice.

Some people we can’t explain our love for them. It feels almost immediate, natural, innate. We connect to them first and find the reasons why later. These people, loving them feels like the most natural reaction to meeting them, like there was no other option anyway.

Some people we can explain precisely why we love them. All our favorite things about them and all the things we connect to the most. This type is the opposite of the previous one, where your love for the person accumulates as you get to know them.

Some people we can’t remember ever not loving them. Our love for these people feels almost like a birth right. Perhaps you question it the least or you question it the most, both because most often you can’t find an answer for why you have all this love and why you’ve had it for so long.

Some people we can’t remember how we ever loved them. This one strikes me the most. When, how, and why do we stop loving people that we love? And is that really what happens? Loss of love? I don’t think we ever really lose the love we hold, but that same love either stops being enough, morphs into another shape, or is left behind, held by a previous version of ourselves.

One of my favorite Egyptian drama series, Khalli Balak Min Zizi, follows the life of a young woman in her 20s and her struggle with ADHD, particularly its effects on her marriage. At their breaking point, Zizi and her husband, Hisham, have the following exchange:

Zizi: When did you stop loving me?

Hisham: Everything happened gradually.

Zizi: Did you fall out of love with me gradually?

Hisham: No… My love for you stopped being enough to carry your burden.

This dialogue is a perfect representation of the insufficiency of love. More often than not, we don’t lose the love we have for the people in our lives, but some external pressure suddenly outweighs our love for them, causing temporary or permanent distance. This scene embodied a wisdom that is repeated often but still ignored: love is never enough. But if you think about it really, is any single virtue ever enough to uphold an entire relationship? Probably not. So why would love be the exception?

Shifting Narratives

The underlying shift that happens here is in the narrative we have around this person and our love for them. When external pressures tip the scale left such that love can no longer compensate, we often still hold the same amount of love, but have to justify why it no longer feels enough. And so the narrative begins to shift. We rationalize, we explain, we try to make sense of the imbalance.

Narratives are important but they are also dangerous because they are solely crafted by us. These narratives can be close to or as far from the truth as possible. More often than not, we craft these narratives to justify these imbalances and sometimes we end up not only manufacturing a narrative but also manufacturing the imbalance itself through distorted perceptions.

But what does this imply about how we stop loving the people we love? It implies that it’s a choice that we make. At some point when an imbalance is perceived, whether it actually occurs or not, we start making small choices that accumulate into a larger choice of not loving anymore.

We choose not to tolerate what we previously tolerated. We choose not to give what we’ve previously given. We choose not to persist when we’ve previously persevered.

When we choose to continue loving, we create space within ourselves for the exchange of that love. But when we choose not to, we lose the space within ourselves that enables this exchange. That’s why distancing yourself often feels like a bodily rejection, because you physically can’t find it within yourself to accept the exchange.

Mutilated Love

Sometimes our reactions to certain changes are more extreme than just a shift in narrative that results in a decision not to go on. It can also result in flipping the sign of that love. It turns from positive to negative. From love to hate. We hold the same emotions, the same magnitude, but the underlying sentiment of it is completely flipped. Even in this case, we hold on to that love, but it looks so different that we no longer recognize it as love. Mutilated, morphed, mangled.

Distance

Sometimes we keep holding on to the love. But as time passes it seems that love has diluted, shrunk in magnitude. In reality, we’re still holding on to the same love but in hindsight it shrinks behind us in the distance. We leave it behind in the safe keeps of our previous self.

So maybe we never lose the love. But a series of conscious or subconscious decisions determine whether or not that love continues to grow, changes shape, or gets left behind in the distance. So ultimately it comes down to a choice, far from simple, but nevertheless, a choice.

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I’m a firm believer in crying things out. I think I have quite a healthy relationship with crying. In fact, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been compiling a list of every cry I’ve had and what I cried about each time. I told myself it was for data collection purposes, because there’s a sense of agency in having information about the things that trigger such a vulnerable reaction from myself.

To give you more context on what the list looks like, it’s separated by month, counting how many times I cried each month and why I cried each time. For the month of December, there was nothing listed there because until today, I hadn’t cried once this month. Since this is the first year that I compile this list, I have no reference as to what a typical December looks like in terms of cry count, but I did know that subconsciously I felt proud that I’d gone that long without crying. I know that completely negates my crying it out philosophy, but what this reveals is that often, even when we believe in something, deep down, our subconscious continues to hold contrarian beliefs that instill a sense of shame, guilt, and criticism on the self.

Today, the most difficult part of everything wasn’t what made me want to cry nor the crying itself, but the span of time I spent trying to suppress my emotions. People always say not to bottle up your emotions because what’s bottled up comes back to the surface eventually. That was one of the reasons I pursued the cry list in the first place. To encourage myself to deal with things as they come not when I can’t bear to hold them in anymore. But oftentimes when we’re faced with that initial sense that there might be a stream of tears making their way out of your eyes, it seems almost instinctual to try to resist that. Maybe because we associate giving in to crying as a sign of weakness, both to ourselves and others. Maybe because we’d rather not feel the pain as deeply as crying would make us feel it. Maybe because we don’t know when we’d stop crying if we let ourselves start.

But what you have to gain from letting your emotions pass through as they come is that they pass through once. Meanwhile, when they’re bottled up, the bottle that holds them is never strong enough to keep them in for as long as we hope it would. The bottle cracks and the emotions leak. Slowly, subtly, subconsciously. And they create an internal emotional mess that’s much harder to clean up than wiping a few tears off your face is.

So cry.
Resist your conscious and subconscious urges to swallow the tears.
Release the pain that you hold on to out of muscle memory.

Cry, if you know that’s what you need.

Most often we know exactly what we need to do to release those emotions but we hold on to the pain because that’s what we’ve been programmed to do.

Cry if it’s your party.
Cry if it’s not your party.
Because releasing the pain your tears carry
is far more rewarding than holding it in will ever be.

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When I saw the scene play out in front of me again now, I recalled my irritation, but didn’t embody it. I didn’t share the same point of view as that version of me who watched the show 6 months ago. I was completely unfazed by it. That made me realize how often I feel this way, unfazed by things that used to enrage me, agreed with things I used to viscerally disagree with, joyed by things that used to be completely mundane.

Watching this scene over again was a profound reminder that oftentimes we hold on to mindsets, points of view, ways of living, because we choose to hold on to them, even if they don’t serve us anymore. And that moment where we realize that they don’t serve us anymore, is the precise moment where we should set the intention of letting them go. The process of cellular turnover lasts an average of 30-40 days, meaning we shed our skin every 30-40 days. Physically we change skin, so it’s important that mentally we do the same. Although we might not feel neither that physical or mental turnover, it happens nonetheless and we only see it manifest when we observe a shift in reaction like I just did.

I’m the type of person that enjoys rewatching shows, not only because I find comfort in familiarity, but because I enjoy seeing how my perspectives and reactions to the events in the show are different in the face of a change of person. One particular show I happen to rewatch often is Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a notoriously long show with extremely dramatic events. And every time I rewatch it I find myself taking a different stance on an issue where I’d previously thought my stance was unwavering.

One might call this indecisiveness or uncertainty but the way I see it is development. To think that one person might have the same point of view for their entire life is terrifying to me because it means that there is no space for those points of view to evolve. That’s the danger of being so dead set on your own opinions and always thinking you’re right, you deprive yourself of the opportunity to expand your perspective and step into a new version of yourself, a better version.

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Realizing this comes in twofold: coming back to an environment and coming back to the self.

Pause Theory captures the meeting between two versions of ourselves. Winter Break Maryam meets Summer Maryam during winter break and Summer Maryam meets Winter Break Maryam During the summer. Each time I arrive to meet the version of myself I left in Jeddah last, and each time they are different people.

Beyond ourselves, we come back to an environment that, in my experience, has been consistently, persistently, perpetually, the same. And in the face of the changing self, a constant environment will either feel stabilizing or feel like a place you’ve outgrown. I go back and forth between the two.

Pause Theory is born in the mismatch between the speed at which we grow in an alternate environment and the speed at which we grow at home. When we realize this, it’s easy to resent the environment in which we grow slower. But the growth speed mismatch is not the only mismatch that comes with Pause Theory. Pause Theory is fueled by mismatches. Primarily, it makes it easy for us to see the value in the environments we’ve pursued all while we take them for granted. And see the bad in the environments we’ve left behind all while we hold them dearly.

This reveals that often there’s a timing mismatch between having something and realizing its value.

Sometimes we realize the value of something well before we have it, so we anticipate its arrival with gratitude. Sometimes we realize the value of something as it arrives, so we meet it with gratitude. Sometimes we don’t realize the value of something until after we lose it, so we continue to carry it with us to make up for the gratitude we didn’t have before.

When there’s a timing mismatch between having something and knowing its value, there’s often also a timing mismatch between having something and being grateful for it as well. Sometimes the value recognition mismatch is unavoidable but the way to avoid the gratitude mismatch is by meeting everything we have with gratitude. This way, even if you fail to recognize the value of something, you don’t fail to meet it with gratitude.

But is it really as simple as that?

Oftentimes our gratitude is proportional to the value we give something and so without recognizing its value, we fail to meet it with the gratitude we think it deserves. The notion of deserved value implies that some things deserve more gratitude than others. But is this notion right? Are some things more worthy of gratitude than others? Or is everything with which we’ve been blessed worthy of equal gratitude?

In Islam, we are taught to be grateful for everything. This is reflected in our response to every “How are you?” with an “Alhamdulliah”. We are conditioned to be grateful for pain and for joy, for sickness and for health, for wealth and for loss. This makes me think that measuring value and measuring gratitude should not be tied to one another. Because the value we attach to things is an intrinsic reflection, it’s subjective. But gratitude is oriented upwards, to a greater power, which means it should be held to a higher standard than the limited value we are able to measure. So not only should we not meet the things we have with the gratitude we think they deserve, we should meet them with more, because no matter how much gratitude we give, it will never be enough.

الحمد لله على النصيب والقدر والمكتوب
الحمد لله وقت الفرج ووقت الانكسار
الحمد لله في الشده والرخاء
الحمدالله على المنع والعطاء
الحمد لله بلا سبب ولا طلب
الحمدلله على ما مضى وما تبقى وما هوآتٍ
الحمد لله دائماً وأبداً

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I’ve seen this ignorance in my own mother and in many other mothers. Time and time again they choose to safely and securely place the oxygen mask on their kids first.

They blow three times and wipe on their kids, first,
Before wiping themselves with the protection of Tahseen.
They place a plate of food in front of their kids, first,
Before filling a plate for themselves.
They tuck their kids into bed, first,
Before turning their attention to themselves.

But not only is this their primary choice, often it is their only one. They not only put the mask on their kids first, but they very often forget to put the mask on themselves afterwards. The latter parts of these sentences, separated by the “first”, very often don’t exist. Their own sustenance is not secondary to their kids’, it’s completely disqualified in the face of the latter.

This stems from the belief that the sustenance of their kids is self-sustaining. Fulfilling that role and knowing they’ve participated in the sustenance of their kids is enough for them to sustain themselves. That may be true, in the short run, but it’s definitely not sustainable.

In an ongoing debate I have with my own mother, urging her to choose herself, care for herself, like she does for us, she tells me that I’m going to understand one day when I become a mother. It’s tough to argue with that response. It’s tough to argue with what you don’t know. But what I do know is that right now, I’m only a daughter. My role has yet to become as dual as mother/daughter. In fact, when you’re a mother, you are no longer a daughter, you are only a mothered mother.

And while I’m still a daughter,
I wish for my mother to put on her oxygen mask first,
To sustain her own life before sustaining ours.

I wish for my mother to know that in doing so,
She is not making a selfish choice nor a neglectful one.

I wish for her to know that in her pursuit of her own sustenance,
She pursues ours as well.
And in her pursuit of our sustenance,
She neglects her own.

Making the only situation
Where anyone is neglected,
The one where she
Primarily,
Predominantly,
Ultimately,
Chooses only us.

I’ve had this conversation one too many times, so I know that the response will take the form of something along the lines of: “Knowing that you are safe, masked, is all I need to survive.” I don’t question the sincerity of this statement, I never have. But I do question its truth. Not because its teller is less convinced of it, but precisely because the teller is entirely all too convinced. But the belief that you can survive off of something is not enough to make it true. Believing your own sacrifice will sustain your survival doesn’t mean that it will.

So I wish that one day my mother will choose to put on her oxygen mask first, but until then, I will try my best to put it on for her, or at the very least, put on my own so she has one less mask to fasten.

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Perhaps too soon.
Perhaps anticipating what has not come yet.
Perhaps grieving in anticipation.

Second to last.
Something about there being a second to last of anything seems to emphasize the finality of the last.
Like saying “Uno” in the second to last round,
Then putting down your final card.

This letter is my “Uno”,
Before I put down my final card.

Dear New York,

Thank you for everything you took from me before everything you gave me.
Thank you for being the city where I lost myself before I could find her.
Thank you for being the city that, more than anything else, was my teacher.

Your reputation for being the city of possibility precedes itself. Your reputation for producing tough and gritty individuals as well. I think in my first few years here I leaned into that. Speed, strength, survival. But once I had that down, I learned that strength without softness is just destruction. I learned that in a yoga class. It was a lesson shared by the instructor at the end of the class. Strength without the balance of softness to meet it, is just destruction. And that’s when I realized that in my pursuit of surviving the city, I had pursued my own destruction, and sugarcoated it in labels of strength.

After you taught me strength, you taught me softness. After you taught me speed, you taught me to be slow. You taught me that there is all the more power in knowing you have the ability to do something, but being selective in how and when you expend that ability.

You taught me to shine. You taught me not to dim my light in the face of people who valued darkness. You taught me that there’s enough space for everyone to shine without the accumulation of light becoming blinding.

You broke me, shattered me, but in that, you revealed to me pieces of myself that I never knew were there. Maybe that’s what I’m going to miss the most, how much I learn about myself in your presence, in your company, in your embrace. And perhaps that’s what I fear missing out on most when I do finally leave, all that you might have to teach me had I stayed.

So my second to last request to you is to teach me everything I need to learn to make departing for the last time easier. Perhaps a selfish request, but I request it anyway.

Your student,
Maryam

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