Salaam everyone. Subhanallah we are already in January 2024. Subhanallah subhanallah subhanallah. Thank you Allah for getting me here, thank you Allah for giving me the friends I have made in these past few years that have inspired me to make a life for myself that I get to choose. Thank you Allah for a home, safety, unlike some people right now (🍉) 😔, thank you for food, family that sticks by you, love, unconditional love, my eyes, these fingers to type, sooo many blessings I physically cannot count them all. But alhamdulillah, and thank you nonetheless.

You know I was reading my little side-bio on my home page today and thinking about how far I have come from that younger self now. Perhaps, the biggest change being- the satisfaction of knowing where I am heading/want to go in life. Pursuing a Clinical Psychology degree- there’s fear of course, but there’s also excitement that I have no idea where this will take me. What places will I go? Who will I meet? What will I experience? What will be hard, what will be easy. Reflecting on it now, I realize much of my inability to choose, and much of my “lostness” feeling, stemmed from my fear of disappointing my parents. I was afraid to pursue a career that they disapproved of, and as such, I tried to force myself through a door that was just not meant for me- at least not anytime soon if at all. I think older siblings can be pretty hard on themselves when it comes to feeling like they made their parents proud. Especially when your life’s destiny does not match up with that goal that your parents have in mind.

My path to career (and quite frankly life), is not so standard, and I love it that way. It allows me to be open to the parts of my life that I have yet to discover. Open to people, places, things, and ideas. While inshallah, I pray that my principles always stay the same, my ability to access more of the world is so bright! And allahu akbar am I so happy! Happy to go to work every morning. Happy when I come home from work. Content with where I am going. Satisfied even if my parents, grandparents, aunties, etc. have a million different opinions on my life and the way I should be living it. Lol I sound like a young teenager right now, but I think that is because I spent most of my teen years not challenging anything. I did not fight for anything, I did not even try to do things. I just focused on being the best child i could for my parents.

As a 26 year old, now I can appreciate the importance of being good to your parents, while also being content living a life that is not exactly as they had planned. And by that I do not mean going out to bars and staying out late into the night making bad decisions, with questionable friends. I simply mean pursuing a career outside of medicine. Pursuing a life in which I am not a workaholic but rather make time for the little things- like scheduling out time every month to visit family, caring for a plant, designing and decorating my home. Things my family never really did because we were hyper-focused on getting good grades, getting a good job, and of course staying within the path of Islam. The latter is still very important to me, but the former 2 goals are goals I realized can be toxic. If you are a workaholic that prides themselves on all the work you accomplish every day, it can sometimes affect your mentality. And then you meet people who judge women for not working (for example) as if they have nothing else to offer to the world. They treat this stereotype of a woman as being useless, and just “taking,” while that is not always the case. There is so much more to making a world and a life other than working. There’s all the back ends of things. And I realized as an adult that learning to make time for the other things (other than just making money) is a large part of what “living your life” means.

How exciting it is to be on this side of the pasture now. I do work full time but I always take a day off to ensure I can take care of other priorities in my life. I try to schedule vacations to see important people and to me those are the monumental parts of my life. Anyways, pursuing my current path has helped me in more ways than one and I am eternally grateful to Allah swt for getting me this far.

Another interesting reflection of getting to this age, is acknowledging how even the strongest emotions can eventually become fleeting and then disappear. I fell in love with a man that I loved for 8 years. And then after the 8 years its not like it just ended. Our relationship may have ended but this person was still somehow apart of my psyche and it felt like my whole life sometimes. I would interact with their friends, family,etc. Eventually they married and every sad emotion that had been drummed up from years before came back in full force. Love is a tricky thing. But the craziest part of the whole story was my ability to move on. Eventually, all those feelings died down and I look at my old self thinking “how could I think that those feelings would last forever?” Like I really thought it had to be this person and that was the end. But Allah swt teaches you to trust Him in crazy ways sometimes. And now when I look at people, or relationships, or even my feelings, I am always acknowledging fleetingness of it all. Which is why important relationships in your life must be tended to, nurtured, and worked on- or else they will also become only a distant memory. 

I think I will stop here. But hang in there everyone. This was a long-winded way of saying “This too shall pass.” Even the awful. numb. almost emptyfull feeling you have right now WILL pass. And it will make way for some beautiful, amazing moments in life that you NEED to stick around for. Even if you give up hope on yourself, don’t give up hope on Allah and His capabilities to help you.

With love,

Sakeenah