The jealous girl. The needy girl. The girl who is completely obsessed with her boyfriend, wants all of his attention and cannot stand the thought of another woman having him. Men joke about wanting a woman who is crazy about them, who gets possessive, who misses them after five minutes and who cares almost irrationally about everything they do.

There is a line in Crazy Girls that captures the contradiction perfectly: “said he likes crazy girls, but he hates when I get crazy.”

Because there seems to be a point where the very intensity that initially attracts someone becomes the thing they complain about.

He loves that she always wants to see him until she wants to see him too much. He loves that she gets jealous because it proves she cares until her jealousy requires reassurance. He loves that she notices everything about him until she notices that his behaviour has changed. He loves being needed until being needed comes with responsibility.

The contradiction makes more sense when you consider that wanting an obsessive girlfriend and wanting a girlfriend who is obsessed with you are not necessarily the same thing.

When someone says they want a girl who is obsessed with them, what they are imagining is usually how her obsession will make them feel.

Desired. Important. Irreplaceable.

There is something incredibly validating about knowing someone cares enough about you to be affected by the possibility of losing you. Even jealousy can feel flattering in the right context because of what sits underneath it. If another woman shows interest in you and your girlfriend reacts, part of that reaction communicates that your relationship matters enough to her that a potential threat to it produces an emotional response.

Being wanted feels good. Being wanted intensely can feel even better.

The “crazy girl” fantasy takes that feeling to its extreme. There is never any uncertainty about whether she cares. You never have to wonder whether she misses you, whether she finds you attractive or whether she could take you or leave you. Her entire character is built around the fact that she very obviously cannot take you or leave you.

And in a dating culture that seems increasingly obsessed with detachment, that kind of certainty is appealing.

We are constantly encouraged to care without appearing to care too much. Don’t reply too quickly. Don’t double text. Don’t admit you miss someone first. Don’t seem too available. Don’t ask for reassurance because you might look insecure. Don’t show too much interest because then the other person knows they “have you.”

There is almost a strange power attached to being the person who needs the relationship less.

The obsessive girl destroys that ambiguity completely. She isn’t playing it cool. She isn’t pretending she could not care less. She loves loudly, and something is appealing about being on the receiving end of that kind of certainty.

But there is a problem with wanting someone who loves intensely.

Intensity rarely exists selectively.

You cannot always have the person who experiences affection at a ten and expect every other emotion connected to that affection to remain at a two.

Someone who becomes deeply attached may also experience the possibility of disconnection more strongly. Someone who places enormous value on closeness may notice distance more quickly. Someone who thinks about you constantly is probably going to notice subtle changes in your behaviour. Someone who loves reassurance may occasionally need more of it. Someone who values the relationship intensely may experience jealousy when they perceive something as threatening it.

You cannot ask someone to love hard and then be completely shocked that sometimes they feel hard too.

That doesn’t mean intense love inevitably creates unhealthy behaviour. There is a huge difference between feeling jealous and controlling someone, between wanting reassurance and demanding constant access to another person, between being deeply attached and making someone responsible for your entire emotional stability.

But emotions do not exist in neat little boxes.

The traits we find attractive often have another side to them.

The incredibly independent person might struggle to ask for help. The endlessly easygoing person might avoid difficult conversations. The person who is deeply sensitive to your emotions might also be deeply sensitive to changes in them. The person who gives themselves completely to relationships may have more to lose when that relationship feels uncertain.

We like to separate people into desirable and undesirable traits as though we can order a personality à la carte.

I’ll take the loyalty, passion, emotional intensity and complete devotion. Hold the jealousy, sensitivity and need for reassurance.

But people don’t really work that way.

Sometimes the qualities that make someone wonderful to be loved by are connected to the qualities that make loving them require effort.

The woman who remembers the tiny detail you mentioned six months ago is probably paying very close attention to you. That attentiveness might also mean she notices when your communication changes. The woman who wants to spend every possible second with you might make you feel incredibly desired, but she may also struggle when you suddenly become distant. The woman who loves you without reservation may occasionally need reassurance that the feeling is mutual.

You don’t have to tolerate unhealthy behaviour because somebody “loves hard.” Love does not excuse control, manipulation, invasions of privacy or disrespecting boundaries. There is a point where jealousy stops being an emotion someone is responsible for managing and becomes behaviour another person is being forced to endure.

But there is also a difference between unhealthy behaviour and emotional inconvenience.

And I think that distinction gets lost in the romanticisation of the crazy girl.

Because sometimes the problem isn’t that someone wants a passionate girlfriend. It is that they want passion exclusively when they benefit from it.

Jealousy can be attractive when it makes someone feel desirable. It becomes annoying when the jealous person needs reassurance.

Neediness can be cute when it means someone constantly wants your attention. It becomes frustrating when you are expected to actually give them attention.

Emotional sensitivity can be beautiful when someone understands you without you having to explain yourself. It becomes inconvenient when that same sensitivity means they notice when you withdraw.

Being loved intensely feels wonderful when you are receiving the affection. It becomes heavier when you realise that loving someone intensely also gives your behaviour emotional weight.

That is where the fantasy and reality begin to separate.

The fantasy of obsession is entirely centred around being wanted. The reality of intimacy requires you to want someone back in a way they can actually feel.

And perhaps that is why people are so drawn to obsessive characters in fiction. Fiction gives us intensity without responsibility.

A fictional woman can be jealous in exactly the right amount. She can be possessive enough to make the male character feel wanted without asking him to spend an hour reassuring her about something he considers insignificant. She can be needy when it is cute and conveniently emotionally regulated when the plot requires it.

Real people are less carefully written.

Their emotions don’t disappear when they become inconvenient to the person receiving them.

And women do the exact same thing with men.

There is an entire romantic archetype built around the possessive man who “doesn’t play about her.” The man who becomes visibly jealous when another man looks at her, pulls her closer, puts his hand around her waist and makes it very clear that she is his. In fiction, the behaviour is attractive because we understand what it is supposed to communicate: I want you so much that the idea of someone else having you bothers me.

But again, we are selecting the flattering part.

A genuinely possessive person does not necessarily stop being possessive when it stops being sexy. The same emotional system that produces I don’t like that guy looking at you can produce why is he messaging you? The same jealousy that feels like desire can become exhausting if the person experiencing it cannot manage it.

The fantasy works because we get to decide where the intensity ends.

Real relationships don’t give us that control.

Maybe that is why the phrase “I want someone obsessed with me” is so revealing. What most people actually seem to want isn’t obsession. They want security through intensity.

They want undeniable evidence that they matter.

They want someone who notices when they are gone. Someone who misses them. Someone who chooses them openly. Someone who would be genuinely hurt to lose them. Someone whose love is obvious enough that they never have to question where they stand.

And none of those things are unreasonable things to want.

But obsession is not the only way to get them.

Someone can trust you completely and still be devastated to lose you. Someone can give you independence and still miss you when you’re gone. Someone can feel secure in your relationship and still want you intensely. Love doesn’t have to constantly prove itself through fear.

At the same time, if what you genuinely want is someone emotionally intense, then you have to understand what you’re asking for.

You cannot romanticise how deeply someone attaches and then shame them for being attached. You cannot love how sensitive someone is to you and then become irritated when they are sensitive to your behaviour. You cannot ask for someone who loves loudly and expect every difficult emotion they experience to somehow arrive quietly.

Of course they still have a responsibility to manage those emotions. Loving someone hard does not give anyone permission to hurt them hard.

But loving an emotionally intense person sometimes means meeting intensity with reassurance rather than immediately labelling it “too much.”

Maybe that is the real contradiction behind the crazy girl fantasy.

People don’t necessarily want crazy.

They want devotion. They want certainty. They want passion. They want the ego boost of knowing someone is completely taken by them.

They want all the beautiful things that can come from someone loving hard without always understanding that loving hard can have a vulnerable side too.

Because the girl who loves hard might occasionally worry hard. She might miss hard. She might get jealous hard. She might need reassurance hard. She might feel distance before you even realise you have created it.

That doesn’t make every reaction acceptable. But it does make her human. So maybe the question isn’t why men say they like crazy girls and then hate when those girls get crazy.

Maybe the question is whether they ever wanted the crazy girl in the first place, or whether they simply wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by one.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

The moments we wish we could freeze will eventually become memories. The people sitting beside us will not always be there in the same way. Homes change, friendships change, families change, and we change with them. One day, the version of yourself you are right now will exist only in photographs and memories, and things that currently feel painfully ordinary may become the things you would give anything to experience once more. “This too shall pass” comforts us because nothing is permanent, but it breaks our hearts for exactly the same reason.

Maybe that is why impermanence is something we need to remember, not so that we become afraid of happiness or spend beautiful moments anticipating their end, but so that we actually notice them while they are ours. There is a difference between knowing something will end and allowing that knowledge to ruin it. The former can make us more present. It can teach us to hold our lives with gratitude rather than assumption, to recognise that ordinary moments are often only ordinary because we have not lost them yet.

One of the cruellest things about hardship is how permanent it feels while you are living through it. It is so easy to become trapped inside your own head, feeding an endless loop of thoughts until they begin to sound less like thoughts and more like facts. Your brain tells you that nothing will change, that you will always feel this way, that there is no light at the end of the tunnel because you cannot currently see it.

But not being able to see the light does not mean it is not there. Sometimes the light is another person. Sometimes it is a passion that gives you a reason to keep moving. Sometimes it is Allah (SWT). Sometimes it is the smallest, quietest part of yourself that refuses to give up even when everything else in you is exhausted. And sometimes the light is simply time doing what time has always done: moving forward, carrying you with it even when you feel as though you have been standing still.

There are things I once thought I would never get over that I now have to consciously remember. There are situations that once consumed every corner of my mind that eventually became stories I could tell without feeling their weight in my chest. That does not mean they were insignificant or that the pain was exaggerated. Something does not need to last forever to have hurt deeply. It simply means that the way we feel in a moment is not a prophecy about the rest of our lives.

Sadness does not mean you will always be sad. Fear is not proof that something terrible is coming. Feeling lost does not mean you will never find your way again. Sometimes we mistake our inability to imagine a way forward for evidence that there is no way forward at all. We forget how small our perspective really is. We see the page we are standing on and convince ourselves we know how the story ends.

But Allah knows the pages we have not reached yet.

The Qur’an reminds us, “Indeed, with hardship comes ease” (94:6). I have always found something particularly beautiful in the word “with,” and I have written a lot about it. We often think of ease as something waiting for us once hardship finally leaves, as though life neatly separates itself into seasons of suffering and seasons of happiness. But sometimes ease exists within hardship itself. A person who makes you laugh on a day you thought you could not. A prayer that settles something inside you. A moment of peace in the middle of grief. A reminder that your heart, even while hurting, is still capable of feeling love, gratitude and hope.

We are capable of carrying contradictory things. We can grieve and still laugh. We can be afraid and still have tawakkul. We can feel exhausted and still be grateful. We can be hurting and still have hope. One feeling does not invalidate the other.

Recently, I presented at a conference about hope as a daily practice. The timing felt almost ironic. It was the week of my grandfather’s death, and the last thing I wanted to do was stand in front of a room full of people and talk about hope. I felt like a fake, almost as though my sadness had somehow disqualified me from speaking about it. How could I tell people that hope was something we could practise when I was standing there grieving?

But that experience forced me to recognise something I think I had misunderstood: sadness and hope were never opposites.

My grief did not mean I had lost faith. My sadness did not mean I had stopped believing things would become easier. I still had hope in Allah (SWT). I still had hope in myself. I still believed that I would heal, that life would continue to contain beautiful things, and that what felt unbearably heavy in that moment would not always feel quite so heavy.

I think sometimes we imagine hope as an emotion, something bright and warm that we either possess or we do not. But hope is often much quieter than that. Sometimes it does not feel hopeful at all. Sometimes hope is making plans for next week when this week has been terrible. Sometimes it is getting out of bed, going to work, submitting the assignment, replying to the message or praying salah when your heart feels heavy. Sometimes it is making du’a after disappointment. Sometimes it is allowing yourself to laugh during a painful season without feeling guilty for experiencing joy.

Hope does not ask us to pretend that everything is okay. It does not require us to turn suffering into a lesson before we have even had time to feel it. There are things in life that hurt, and faith does not require us to lie about that hurt. Hope simply refuses to let pain become the final word. It is the quiet decision to believe that there are still pages of your life you have not read yet. Sometimes hope is simply living as though tomorrow is worth arriving at.

Everything in this life is given to us by Allah (SWT), and everything can be taken from us in the blink of an eye. The people we love, our health, our homes, opportunities, friendships, abilities and time are all blessings we have been entrusted with rather than things we were ever promised permanently. Islam does not hide the temporary nature of dunya from us. If anything, it repeatedly asks us to remember it.

At first, that can sound frightening. We naturally want to hold tightly to the things we love. We want guarantees. We want the people we love to remain exactly where they are, happiness to stay once we finally find it and life to follow the plans we carefully create for ourselves. But there is also something freeing in remembering that we were never promised permanence here.

If hardship is temporary, then I do not have to believe it when it tells me my life will always feel this way. If happiness is temporary, then I should stop treating it as something I can appreciate later.

So much of life is spent waiting for life to begin. We wait until we graduate, until we get the job, until we have more money, until we look different, until we meet someone, until we travel somewhere, until we become some imagined future version of ourselves who finally has everything figured out. Then we reach the thing we spent years waiting for and almost immediately find another horizon to chase.

Meanwhile, our actual life is quietly happening in the background. It is happening in kitchens and car rides and phone calls. In sitting around a table with people you love. In laughing until your stomach hurts over something you will barely remember a year from now. In hearing someone’s voice from another room. In the drive home with your favourite song playing. In praying after a long day. In the cup of tea you drink without thinking twice about it. In conversations that run later than you planned. In ordinary mornings you assume you will have thousands more of.

Most beautiful moments do not announce themselves as beautiful while they are happening. Sometimes you only realise you were living inside a memory once it has already become one.

Maybe “this too shall pass” should not only be something we whisper to ourselves when we are crying. Maybe we should remember it while we are laughing too. Not to make ourselves sad, but to remind ourselves to stay.

Our relationship with Allah can easily become tied to the extremes of our lives. In hardship, we suddenly understand how little control we have and turn towards Him desperately. We make more du’a, pray with greater urgency and ask Allah to change what we cannot change ourselves. When life is beautiful, gratitude may come more easily. But faith was never supposed to belong only to our highest highs and lowest lows. Allah is there in the ordinary middle too.

There is something beautiful about remembering Allah when you are not asking Him to rescue you from anything. To pray when there is no crisis. To make du’a when your heart is content. To say Alhamdulillah for something you have had for so long that you almost stopped recognising it as a blessing. To love Allah not only for what you desperately want Him to give you, but for what He has already placed quietly throughout your life.

Allah tells us, “Remember Me; I will remember you” (Qur’an 2:152). There is something almost overwhelming about that promise. We spend so much of our lives wanting to be remembered by people, wanting to leave impressions, wanting our existence to mean something to someone. Yet the Creator of everything tells us to remember Him, and He will remember us.

Perhaps consistently remembering Allah is what allows us to live peacefully alongside impermanence. When hardship comes, we know where to turn. When goodness comes, we know Who to thank. When something leaves us, we remember Who it belonged to before it ever belonged to us. And when the future frightens us because we cannot see what comes next, we remember that Allah already can.

I do not think accepting impermanence means becoming detached from the world. I do not think we should love people less because we know we may lose them or enjoy happiness less because we know it will eventually change. If anything, knowing something is temporary should make us love it more intentionally.

Hold the people you love close, but understand that ultimately they belong to Allah. Say what you mean while you have the chance. Make the phone call. Take the photograph. Sit at the table a little longer. Tell your friends you love them. Celebrate the small things instead of waiting for something enormous to give you permission to be happy. Stop postponing gratitude for a future version of your life when there is so much of your current one that you once prayed for.

And when life becomes difficult, offer your pain that same understanding of impermanence. Do not build a permanent home inside a temporary feeling. You have already survived days you once thought you would never get through. You have watched circumstances change that you once believed were immovable. You have become versions of yourself that younger versions of you could not have imagined.

There will be more difficult days. There will also be more beautiful ones.

Islam never promises us a dunya without pain. This world was never designed to satisfy us completely. But Allah repeatedly reminds us that hardship is accompanied by ease, that He is near, and that what we see in front of us is not the entirety of what He has written.

Perhaps that is the real beauty hidden inside the sadness of “this too shall pass.” It teaches us not to hold our pain so tightly that we mistake it for permanence, and not to hold our blessings so casually that we forget they are temporary.

When life is beautiful, say Alhamdulillah and be there for it. Notice it. Let yourself love it without immediately searching for the next thing. When life hurts, turn towards Allah and remember all the things you once thought would break you but did not. Remember all the nights that eventually became mornings.

And when you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, keep walking anyway. You do not need to see the entire road to trust that there is more ahead of you. Hope does not always arrive as certainty. Sometimes it is simply enough faith to take another step into a future you cannot yet see.

This too shall pass. The sadness and the joy. The heartbreak and the healing. The seasons we beg to escape and the ones we wish we could stay inside forever. Perhaps the point is not to be afraid of that truth, but to allow it to teach us how to live: to hold the good with gratitude, the difficult with hope, and through all of it, to hold onto Allah.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

And yet, knowing all of that does not make grief easy.

I recently lost my grandfather. I have written about him before, particularly in When Memory Fades, Love Remains, because for a long time his dementia made me think deeply about what remains of a person when memory begins to disappear.

My grandparents are the light of my life. And I deliberately say "are," not "were," because even though my Boba Jan is no longer physically here, he is still and always will be the light of my life.

Growing up, I spent almost every weekend sleeping at my grandparents’ house. I spoke to them on the phone every day. Their home was not somewhere I occasionally visited. It was part of the architecture of my childhood. So many of my memories begin there.

In fact, my earliest memory is of my grandfather.

A bird had flown into a window and fallen to the ground; I would have been around 3-5 years old. One thing you should know about my Boba Jan is that he loved birds. Birds and flowers. He brought the little bird inside, placed it gently on a chair, gave it food and water, and showed me how to care for it.

It seems like such a small memory now, but I think there is a reason it stayed with me. It captured something fundamental about him: gentleness.

His gentle nature was something I did not always see modelled by Afghan men of his generation. He was soft in ways that stayed with me. He cared for small things. He loved animals, he loved flowers, he loved going on walks, and he deeply loved his family. Without realising it, I think some of my earliest understandings of compassion came from watching him.

Maybe that is one of the strange things about losing someone. You start finding them in parts of yourself you never realised came from them.

Grief is an odd thing.

I know, inshaAllah, that we will meet again. I know that he has returned to the One who created him. I know that Allah (SWT) is more merciful to him than I could ever be. There is enormous comfort in being able to say Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un: surely we belong to Allah, and to Him we return.

Something is grounding about those words. They remind me that my grandfather was never truly mine to keep. Neither are my parents, my siblings, my friends, or anyone else I love. We are entrusted to one another for however long Allah wills.

But faith does not make me miss him less. It does not stop my heart from hurting, and it does not mean I do not cry.

I think sometimes we misunderstand sabr because we imagine patience in grief as emotional stillness, as though strong faith should make death hurt less or accepting Allah’s decree means suppressing the very human response of wishing someone were still here. But grief and faith are not opposites.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself cried when his son Ibrahim died. His grief did not contradict his trust in Allah, and his tears were not evidence of weak iman. There is something incredibly comforting to me about that. Islam does not ask us to become emotionally numb in the face of death. It teaches us how to grieve without losing our relationship with Allah.

And my grief did not actually begin when my grandfather died. That is the complicated thing about Alzheimer’s.

I have spent about the last five years grieving different versions of him. First, I grieved the version who had the energy to be present with us. Then I grieved the version who remembered the details of our lives. Then I grieved the version who knew who I was. And finally, I had to grieve him.

Psychology sometimes calls this anticipatory grief, the grief that begins before physical death when someone is living with a terminal or progressive condition. Dementia makes this particularly complicated because the losses happen gradually. The person is still physically in front of you, but parts of the relationship are continuously changing. There is no single goodbye. There are hundreds of tiny ones.

You would think that grieving all of those versions beforehand would somehow prepare you for the final loss. That after years of watching dementia take pieces of someone you love, death would simply feel like the final stage of a process you had already begun.

It doesn’t.

Nothing about watching someone disappear slowly prepares you for the first time you realise you cannot visit them anymore.

I have never really had a close relationship with the grandparents on the other side of my family. So, growing up, my Bobo and Boba felt like all I had in that sense, and they were more than enough. They shaped me enormously. They are pieces of me, and for that I am grateful.

I see my grandfather in my dad and my uncles. I see pieces of him in my siblings, my cousins and myself. Sometimes it is something obvious. Other times it is a mannerism, a phrase, a way someone reacts to something, or a story that suddenly reminds us where we came from. His memory may have been gone when he left us, but my memory of him is not.

His gentleness will stay with me, as will his love of birds and flowers. Even his ability to shrug things off and essentially say, it is what it is, leave it, will stay with me. Death ends a life in this dunya, but it does not erase the ways a person has shaped other people.

Lately, psychology has helped me put language around that.

I am currently working my way through psychologist William Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning. I like this framework because it does not treat grief as a neat sequence of stages that you complete one after another. Grief does not work like that. You can understand something intellectually one day and struggle with it emotionally the next. You can laugh in the morning and cry that night. You can feel peaceful for a week and then something completely ordinary can bring everything back.

Worden instead describes mourning as involving four tasks: accepting the reality of the loss, processing the pain of grief, adjusting to a world without the person, and finding an enduring connection with them while continuing to live. They are not boxes that I expect myself to tick off. I can move between them, struggle with several at once, or revisit one I thought I had already worked through.

What I find particularly interesting is how naturally some of these psychological ideas sit alongside the Islamic understanding of death.

Task One: Accept the Reality of the loss

This one is strange because part of me accepted his death before it happened. I sat with him in hospital towards the end. I was there at the nursing home watching his breathing change. I watched his body become weaker, and I knew what was happening. There was no sudden phone call that shattered an otherwise normal day. Death had been approaching us slowly enough that we had time to recognise it.

But knowing someone is dying and understanding that they are dead are psychologically very different things.

Our brains build expectations around the people we love. When someone has occupied a place in your life for as long as you can remember, your mind continues expecting them to exist there. For years, there was somewhere I could go and find my grandfather. Then suddenly there wasn’t.

I think that is why acceptance is more complicated than simply being able to say, he died. You can accept a fact intellectually before your emotional world catches up with it. Islam gives me language for this acceptance that feels deeper than simply telling myself that death happened: Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un. We belong to Allah, and to Him we return.

There is surrender in that sentence, but not meaninglessness. Islam does not ask me to pretend I did not want more time with him. Of course I did. I would take another day, another conversation, another moment in a heartbeat. Acceptance is not saying, I am happy this happened. For me, it is being able to say, Allah, I know that what You have decreed has occurred, even while my heart hurts because of it.

Almost two weeks later, I think I have accepted the reality of his death. But sometimes I still have to remind my brain of what my heart already knows.

Task Two: Process the Pain of Grief

Boy, have I done this one. I have cried and cried and then cried some more. Sometimes I know exactly why I am crying, and other times grief seems to arrive before I have even figured out what triggered it. A memory, a photograph, driving somewhere familiar, hearing something I wish I could tell him. There are obvious reminders, but there are also ordinary moments where his absence suddenly becomes noticeable again.

I am grateful that I am not scared of feeling it. I think there can be a temptation, especially when faith is involved, to rush towards meaning because meaning is sometimes more comfortable than sitting with pain. We want to immediately say, Alhamdulillah, he has returned to Allah, and I do say that. I believe it completely. But I am learning that Alhamdulillah does not cancel out I miss you. Sabr does not mean refusing to cry, and tawakkul does not require pretending something does not hurt.

There is something psychologically important about allowing grief to actually be grief. Pain does not always need to be reframed the moment we experience it. Sometimes sadness is an entirely appropriate response to having lost someone you loved. Sometimes crying is not a problem requiring a solution. Grief can involve sadness, longing, anger, guilt, numbness, exhaustion and moments where you feel completely normal before suddenly remembering what has happened. Processing it means allowing those emotions to exist rather than deciding that some of them are incompatible with being patient or faithful.

There is also something I have started thinking about as righteous grief, or perhaps righteous pain. Not because suffering itself is inherently virtuous, but because some pain exists because something good existed first. My grief hurts because I loved him, because I was attached to him, because Allah gave me a relationship that mattered deeply enough for its absence to be felt. In that sense, I don’t think every painful feeling needs to be treated as something I should immediately overcome. Some pain is simply evidence that the heart loved well.

Islamically, that distinction feels important. The Prophet ﷺ grieved and cried, yet his grief existed alongside complete trust in Allah. Pain itself was never the contradiction to sabr; what matters is what we do with that pain. I can let grief pull me towards despair, or I can allow it to soften me, deepen my dua and remind me of how temporary and precious our relationships in this dunya really are. Perhaps righteous grief is grief that is allowed to hurt while still being held within faith. It does not deny Allah’s decree, but neither does it deny the love that makes accepting that decree painful.

Islam gives me somewhere to place those emotions. I can cry while making dua for him. I can miss him while reciting Qur’an. I can feel the ache of his absence and still say Alhamdulillah. I can wish more than anything that he were still here while simultaneously trusting that Allah’s wisdom extends beyond what I can understand right now. Those beliefs do not have to compete with my grief.

Perhaps that is one of the things I am learning about sabr. I used to think of patience as enduring something without being shaken by it, but grief has made me understand it differently. Maybe sabr is not the absence of pain at all. Maybe it is allowing yourself to feel the full weight of something and continuing to turn towards Allah from within it.

Task Three: Adjust to a World Without the Deceased

This is probably the task I am still sitting in the most. It is strange because I see him everywhere, not literally, but in all the places and routines that still expect him to exist. I used to visit him around once or twice a week. His nursing home became part of the geography of my life, and I drive past it almost every day. My brain knows he is no longer there, but my habits have not completely caught up with that reality.

There is something incredibly strange about going from planning when you are going to visit someone in their home, then visiting them in a nursing home, and then suddenly the place you go to visit them is a cemetery. It is such a drastic change in something that used to feel ordinary. The person you used to sit beside is now someone you stand beside a grave and speak about.

Psychologically, adjusting to someone’s absence is not simply about becoming better at tolerating missing them. It is also about rebuilding the routines, roles and assumptions that formed around their presence. There are practical adjustments in figuring out what occupies the spaces that used to belong to visits and care. There are emotional adjustments in understanding who you are when someone who anchored your childhood is no longer physically here. And there are internal adjustments in figuring out how you carry forward what someone gave you when they are no longer around to keep giving it.

I think dementia complicates this task because some of those adjustments began years before he died. Our relationship had already changed. There were things he could no longer do and conversations we could no longer have. I had already learnt how to love him without expecting recognition in return. Yet physical presence is its own thing. There was comfort simply in knowing he existed somewhere I could reach him. Even when he did not know exactly who I was, I knew who he was. Death takes away that physical certainty, and I think that is what I am learning to adjust to now.

His death has also made me more conscious of my Bobo. When you lose one grandparent, the mortality of the other suddenly becomes louder. You understand in a much more visceral way that these relationships are temporary in their physical form, and there is a danger in allowing that awareness to turn love into fear. I don’t want fear of another loss to steal the blessing of what I still have.

Islam repeatedly brings us back to the temporary nature of dunya, but I do not think that reminder is supposed to make us emotionally detached from one another. If anything, I think it should make us more intentional. People are an amanah, and so is the time we are given with them. The fact that something is temporary does not make it less valuable. Sometimes knowing it is temporary is precisely what teaches us how valuable it always was.

So perhaps adjusting to a world without my grandfather also means allowing his death to change how I exist in the world that remains. It means calling the people I love, visiting them, listening to the same story for the hundredth time without rushing them, taking the photograph even when nobody feels like taking one, sitting a little longer and saying I love you while there is still someone here to hear it. Death has made time feel different to me. I don’t want that awareness to make me anxious about losing everyone. I want it to make me better at loving them while they are here.

Task Four: Find an Enduring Connection With the Deceased While Embarking on a New Life

This is the task that means the most to me, and Alhamdulillah, because without my relationship with Allah (SWT), I genuinely do not know how I would approach it.

There have been approaches to grief that conceptualised healing as detaching from the person who died, almost as though moving forward requires leaving them behind. But I don’t want to leave my grandfather behind, and I don’t think I need to. What resonates far more with me is the idea that the relationship changes rather than simply disappears. I cannot love him through physical presence anymore, so I have to learn how to love him differently.

That distinction has been incredibly important to me because Islam gives that continuing relationship a spiritual dimension. I cannot sit beside him or hold his hand. I cannot walk into his room and see him physically there. But death does not mean there is suddenly nothing left for me to do with the love I still have for him. I can make dua for him. I can give sadaqah on his behalf. I can ask Allah to forgive him and have mercy upon him. I can continue the good things he taught me and care for the people he cared about. InshaAllah, one day I can tell my own children about the man who taught their mother gentleness before she was old enough to even understand that she was being taught it.

That is perhaps where psychology’s idea of an enduring connection becomes particularly beautiful to me as a Muslim. Death changes what I can do with my grandfather, but it does not mean there is nothing I can do for him. My love for him does not have to become something passive that exists only as nostalgia. It can become dua, sadaqah, stories, values and actions. His gentleness can become something I deliberately reproduce in the world because I was fortunate enough to experience it from him first.

Even the birds mean something different to me now. Something as ordinary as seeing one can take me back to my earliest memory of him caring for that injured bird. That memory does not need to trap me in the past. It can remind me of the kind of person he was and, more importantly, the kind of person I want to continue becoming because I knew him.

Maybe that is what an enduring connection actually looks like. It is not desperately trying to keep someone physically present when Allah has called them back. It is allowing the relationship to take a different form. There is a difference between refusing to let someone go and carrying them with you.

I want to carry him.

One thing I keep returning to is the question of what kind of person I want to become because of this loss. I don’t want to become angry or bitter, and I don’t want grief to make me afraid of loving people deeply simply because I now understand more intimately what it feels like to lose them. If anything, I want losing someone gentle to make me more gentle.

There is a strange tension in grief because gratitude and devastation can exist in exactly the same place. I am devastated that he is gone, but overwhelmingly grateful that I had him. I desperately wish we had been given more time, while also knowing how fortunate I was to have the time Allah gave us. I hate what Alzheimer’s took from him and from us, while simultaneously feeling grateful that even when his memory disappeared, there were parts of love that seemed to remain.

I don’t think I need to resolve those contradictions. Perhaps grief is partly learning how to hold them. Human beings have a tendency to want emotions to be clean and understandable. We want to decide whether something was beautiful or painful, whether we feel grateful or heartbroken, whether we have accepted something or are still grieving it. But losing my grandfather has made me realise that some experiences are big enough to hold all of those things at once.

Islam does not promise us a dunya without loss. In fact, it repeatedly reminds us that this world was never meant to be permanent. But Islam also does not teach us to despair because something we love here has ended. That distinction has become incredibly important to me.

Hope after death feels different when you do not believe death is annihilation. The grave is not where my understanding of my grandfather’s existence ends, and the last time I saw him does not have to be the final chapter of our relationship. I believe in the akhirah. I believe in Allah’s mercy. I believe in the possibility of reunion, inshaAllah. There is something profoundly hopeful about being able to miss someone this much while still believing that goodbye was not necessarily forever.

And that hope does not eliminate grief. In some ways, I think it gives grief somewhere to go.

Alzheimer’s took so much from my grandfather before death did. It took memories, names, independence and pieces of the person I had known my entire life. But somehow, even when he could no longer remember us in the way we desperately wanted him to, there were parts of him that remained. Now that he is gone, I think I understand something I had been trying to articulate long before his death: memory is not the only place love lives.

His memory failed him, but ours did not. And now, in some way, we become custodians of it.

We remember the man who loved birds and flowers, his gentleness, his silliness, the things he said and the things that made us laugh. We remember the person Alzheimer’s slowly made harder for the outside world to see. I remember the man who taught a little girl to care for an injured bird, probably having no idea that years later she would still remember exactly how gently he cared for something so small.

Maybe grief is partly learning what to do with all the love that remains when the person is no longer physically here to receive it. For me, I want to turn some of that love upwards. I want it to become dua and sadaqah, gratitude and gentleness. I want it to make me more conscious of Allah and more conscious of the people around me. I want to ask Allah (SWT) to forgive my grandfather, have mercy on him, illuminate his grave, grant him peace and grant him the highest levels of Jannah. And perhaps selfishly, I will keep asking Allah to let me see my Boba Jan again.

Until then, I think I will continue finding him in ordinary things. In birds and flowers, in the voices of his sons, in the faces of his grandchildren and in the parts of myself that he helped create. I think this is what I am slowly beginning to understand about continuing bonds: remembering someone does not have to mean refusing to move forward. Sometimes moving forward means taking them with you.

There is a saying that grief is the price we pay for love. I understand the sentiment more now, but I think I would phrase it differently. Grief is evidence that someone existed in our lives in a way that mattered enough for their absence to hurt. If I could remove the grief only by removing the love that came before it, I would choose the grief every time.

So, Alhamdulillah that I got to love him at all. Alhamdulillah that Allah chose him to be my grandfather. Alhamdulillah for every weekend, every visit, every phone call, every ordinary memory that did not feel important enough to treasure at the time, but feels priceless now.

And Alhamdulillah that, by the mercy of Allah, I can hope that this love does not end here.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Aro <3

Truthfully, I didn’t know much about it before I picked it up. I’d heard the title countless times over the years, usually followed by someone calling it “life-changing”, but beyond that, I knew almost nothing. I didn’t know the story, I didn’t know the message, and I certainly didn’t know why so many people spoke about it with almost reverential admiration.

Recently, my friend Sabrine gifted me a copy for my birthday.

There was something lovely about receiving a book from someone who thought, I think you’ll like this. Books have always felt deeply personal to me. They aren’t just stories. They’re invitations into the way another person thinks. So when someone gives you a book, they’re often giving you a small part of themselves, too.

Tonight, I finished it.

There’s something I love about reading a book without carrying preconceived ideas into it. You aren’t trying to find the quote that changed someone’s life or discover the hidden meaning you’ve been told is there. You’re simply reading. You’re allowing the story to unfold at its own pace, and whatever you’re meant to take from it arrives naturally.

I think that’s why, when I closed the book tonight, I wasn’t thinking about dreams.

That seems to be the conclusion many people reach with The Alchemist. It’s a novel about following your dreams, discovering your purpose and listening to your heart. Those themes are certainly there and very prominent. I understand why they’ve resonated with so many people.

But they weren’t what stayed with me.

What lingered after I closed the final page was something much quieter.

It was a surrender.

Not surrender in the sense of giving up.

Surrender in the sense of accepting that my life was never mine to control in the first place.

As I read, I realised I was almost unconsciously translating the story into an Islamic framework. Whenever Coelho spoke about destiny, my mind wandered to qadr. Whenever he described trusting the path before you, I thought about tawakkul. Whenever he suggested that wisdom was hidden beneath life’s seemingly random encounters, I found myself thinking of the countless verses in the Qur’an that remind us that Allah (SWT) knows what we do not.

One of the greatest differences between modern life and faith is that modern life teaches us to eliminate uncertainty, while faith teaches us how to surrender to it.

So much of our lives is spent trying to know what’s coming next.

I think one of the most beautiful lines in The Alchemist is

At its heart, the quote is about fear and control.

We fear loss because we imagine that everything depends on us. We become attached to people, possessions, careers, opportunities and even particular versions of our future because we believe our security lies in keeping them. The possibility of losing them feels devastating because we see ourselves as responsible for holding our lives together.

The second sentence challenges that assumption.

If the same hand has written both your individual story and the story of the world, then your life is not unfolding independently of a greater purpose. Your joys, losses, delays and encounters are not isolated accidents. They exist within a larger narrative.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we understand why things happen.

It means we trust that they are not meaningless.

We choose degrees because we’re trying to predict careers. We overanalyse relationships because we’re trying to predict endings. We ask people for advice not because they know our future, but because we desperately hope someone might. Even our anxiety often disguises itself as preparation. We convince ourselves that if we think through every possible outcome, perhaps we’ll eventually reach a point where nothing can surprise us.

But certainty was never promised to us.

Guidance was.

I’ve realised recently that I like plans. I like structure. I like knowing where things are headed. There’s comfort in believing that if I work hard enough, make good decisions and trust the process, life will unfold exactly as I’ve imagined.

Except it rarely does.

And maybe that’s one of Allah’s greatest mercies.

Because if I had known every chapter of my life before I lived it, I don’t think I would have walked into it with the same trust. If I’d known every hardship that was coming, I might have spent years fearing it before it arrived. If I’d known every blessing, I might have rushed towards it before I was ready. If I’d known exactly how every du’a would be answered, perhaps I never would have learned what it means to wait.

Maybe uncertainty isn’t a flaw in life. Maybe it’s one of the ways Allah teaches us reliance.

As I sat reflecting on all of this tonight, I found myself smiling at one small detail.

It was Sabrine who gave me The Alchemist. She’s also the person who introduced me to Substack. I don’t think either of us realised what either of those gifts would become.

When she recommended Substack, it was simply another platform. I signed up because I enjoyed writing and thought it might be a nice place to share a few previous essays I had written.

I had no idea it would become so much more than that.

Looking back now, I can honestly say that Substack has brought me closer to Allah (SWT).

I came here because I wanted somewhere to share my writing.

I didn’t expect it to become somewhere that would deepen my relationship with my Creator.

Every article has required me to slow down before I speak. To sit with difficult questions instead of rushing towards easy answers. To return to the Qur’an before writing about faith. To think more carefully about psychology, womanhood, identity, suffering and purpose. To ask myself whether what I believe is actually grounded, or whether I’ve simply inherited it without reflection.

Somewhere along the way, writing stopped being about publishing.

It became about seeking.

There have been so many evenings when I’ve opened my laptop intending to write about one thing, only to find myself returning to Allah (SWT). An article about modesty became an opportunity to reflect on sincerity. An article about feminism became an opportunity to revisit the Qur’an. A piece about psychology reminded me of the wisdom embedded within our faith. Even when I begin somewhere entirely different, I somehow keep finding my way back.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Writing has become an act of reflection.

It has taught me to notice Allah’s wisdom in places I might have otherwise overlooked. It has made me more grateful, more curious and more intentional in my faith. It has encouraged me to read more deeply, think more critically and approach my religion not as something inherited, but as something continually lived.

Substack didn’t simply give me readers.

Through Allah’s permission, it became one of the means through which He drew me closer to Him.

Perhaps that’s why it feels so symbolic that the same friend who introduced me to Substack also placed The Alchemist into my hands.

I don’t think either of us could have imagined where those two gifts would lead.

Both quietly changed me.

I think we spend too much time waiting for life to feel significant. We expect purpose to arrive with certainty and clarity, when in reality it often arrives disguised as something remarkably ordinary. A conversation. A recommendation. A book wrapped in paper. A website someone thought you’d enjoy.

Only later, when enough time has passed, do you realise those moments weren’t isolated at all.

They were chapters in the same story.

That’s one of the reasons I find Islam so comforting.

As Muslims, we don’t believe our lives are random. We don’t believe that every coincidence is simply chance. We believe Allah (SWT) is Al-Hakim, the Most Wise. We believe He writes what we cannot yet understand. We believe that what reaches us was always meant for us, and what passes us by was never written for us in the first place.

That belief doesn’t remove uncertainty. It transforms it. Because uncertainty is no longer evidence that life is out of control. It’s simply a reminder that I cannot see what Allah already can.

Perhaps that’s why The Alchemist resonated with me more than I expected, not because it taught me something entirely new, but because it reminded me of something Islam had already been teaching me all along.

That I don’t need to know where every road leads, that I don’t need to understand every delay, that not every unanswered du’a is a rejection, and not every closed door is a punishment.

Sometimes Allah protects us with “no”, sometimes He teaches us through waiting, sometimes He places people in our lives who unknowingly become part of our story in ways none of us could have anticipated, sometimes He places a book in your hands through a friend, not because the book contains every answer, but because it becomes another reminder to trust the One who does.

Looking back, it’s strange how often Allah writes our stories through other people.

They think they’re offering a conversation.

A recommendation.

A book.

A platform to write on.

They don’t realise that Allah may be using them to draw someone closer to Him.

Sabrine probably thought she was giving me a novel and recommending a writing platform.

Instead, through Allah’s permission, she became part of a chapter of my life that strengthened my faith, deepened my writing and reminded me, once again, that surrender has never been about knowing where the path ends.

It’s about trusting the One who wrote it.

The future is not mine to write.

Alhamdulillah, it never had to be.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

Someone asked me this recently.

It seemed, at first, like one of those philosophical questions that has an obvious answer until you actually try to answer it. My immediate instinct was that it was asking me to separate who I am from the labels I have accumulated throughout my life. My name was given to me before I was old enough to answer to it. I didn’t choose the family I was born into, the culture that shaped me or the traditions that were passed down long before I existed. My occupation is simply what I spend my days doing, and even religion, many would argue, is something a person believes rather than something they are. Remove all of those things and, supposedly, whatever remains must be the real me.

It is an idea we seem to love.

We tell people to “be themselves” and “find themselves” as though there is already a complete version of each of us quietly waiting beneath the surface. We imagine identity as something that life places upon us. Society gives us expectations. Our families give us traditions. Our work gives us titles. Culture gives us customs. If we peeled enough of those things away, perhaps we would eventually arrive at the person we have always been.

The more I sat with the question, however, the less convinced I became that it was asking the right thing.

Because it quietly assumes something about identity that I am no longer sure is true.

It assumes there is a self waiting underneath everything else.

I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t.

I don’t mean that we are nothing more than our labels. Quite the opposite. I don’t think we should reduce ourselves to our careers, our cultures or our beliefs. But perhaps we’ve gone so far in trying not to reduce people to those things that we’ve started pretending they don’t shape us at all.

I don’t think we spend our lives uncovering who we are.

I think we spend our lives becoming who we are.

When I first started thinking about the question, I thought perhaps the answer lay somewhere deeper, in the soul itself. If I removed everything external, surely what remained would be the things that felt mine entirely. My curiosity. My resilience. My compassion. My patience. My love of learning. Those qualities seemed much closer to who I was than something like an occupation or a surname. People change jobs. They move countries. Some people even change religions. Surely there must be something beneath all of that that remains untouched.

Then another question occurred to me.

Where did those qualities come from?

Take resilience, for example.

Are we born resilient? Or does resilience slowly emerge because life demanded it of me? Had my life been easier, had I never experienced uncertainty, hardship or disappointment, would I still possess that same quality? We often speak about resilience as though it is something we own, but perhaps resilience is simply what grows when life refuses to let us remain unchanged.

The same thought kept returning, no matter which part of myself I considered.

Compassion feels deeply personal, yet compassion is often born from witnessing suffering. Patience usually develops because something has tested it. Curiosity grows because we first realise how much we don’t know. Even the characteristics we describe as someone’s “nature” seem to carry the fingerprints of the life they have lived. They did not simply appear one morning, fully formed. They were cultivated, quietly and gradually, through years of ordinary moments that probably didn’t seem significant at the time.

That was the point where the question began to shift for me.

Perhaps we have been imagining identity backwards.

Instead of asking what remains after everything has been stripped away, perhaps we should be asking how those things became part of me in the first place.

After all, we are constantly being shaped by things we rarely notice while they are happening. We inherit values long before we are capable of questioning them. We absorb the habits of the people around us. We carry conversations we barely remember into future decisions.

A book changes the way we think without asking permission. A season of grief quietly rearranges our priorities. A friendship teaches us a new way of loving. None of these things announce themselves as a life-changing moment, and yet years later, we struggle to imagine ourselves without them.

Maybe identity isn’t something that exists before experience.

Maybe experience is what slowly gives identity its shape.

That is certainly true for me.

I am not the same person I would have been had it not been for my faith.

Not because Islam is simply something I practise, but because it has fundamentally changed the way I understand the world. It has shaped what I believe suffering is for, what I think success actually means and where I place my hope when life becomes uncertain. It has taught me that hardship is not always punishment, that patience is an act of worship, and that there can be wisdom even in experiences I do not yet understand. Prayer has become the place I instinctively return to, not because I force myself to, but because it has become woven into how I make sense of my life. If someone removed my religion, they would not simply be removing one belief among many. They would be removing one of the foundations upon which my understanding of the world has been built.

The same is true of my ethnicity.

People often reduce culture to the visible things: language, food, clothing or traditions. Those things matter, but culture also lives in quieter places. It exists in the stories that are told around dinner tables, in the values children absorb without ever being explicitly taught them and in the countless small moments that teach us what family, generosity, grief and belonging look like. Long before we are old enough to consciously decide who we are, the people who came before us have already left pieces of themselves within us. We carry their stories without always realising it.

Even my occupation has done this.

Psychology began as something I wanted to study. Somewhere along the way, it stopped being something I learnt and became part of how I think. I can’t observe someone’s behaviour without wondering what experiences shaped it. I can’t hear someone’s anger without wondering what pain came before it. I find myself looking for patterns instead of isolated moments, histories instead of first impressions. It has made me slower to judge and quicker to become curious. If I had chosen a different path, perhaps I would still have been compassionate, but I doubt I would have understood people in quite the same way.

Perhaps this is why I struggle with the idea that identity is simply a collection of labels.

Labels sit on the surface.

Formation happens underneath.

We are not shaped only by the things we call ourselves, but by the things we repeatedly love, repeatedly believe, repeatedly practise and repeatedly return to. Eventually, those things stop feeling external because they no longer are. They become part of the architecture of who we are.

Architecture has always fascinated me because buildings carry the history of their own construction. A finished building doesn’t simply appear. Foundations are laid first. Walls are raised. Windows are added. Some rooms are renovated decades later. Cracks appear and are repaired. Storms leave marks that become part of the structure itself. If you removed the foundations, it would no longer be the same building. If you removed every wall added over time, eventually nothing would remain standing.

Perhaps people are much the same.

We are built.

Not all at once, but slowly.

Through every conversation that lingers longer than we expected. Through every heartbreak we thought would undo us. Through every prayer whispered when no one else could hear. Through every mistake that humbled us. Through every person who loved us well. Through every person who didn’t.

Those things do not merely happen to us.

They become us.

Maybe that is why understanding another person even feels so profound. Every genuine attempt to see the world through someone else's eyes leaves something behind in us. It is a reminder that we are never formed in isolation. As Before Sunrise puts it, "If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something." Perhaps the magic is not simply that we come to know another person, but that, in doing so, we become someone slightly different ourselves.

There is something deeply beautiful about the Islamic understanding of human beings that I think speaks to this. Islam teaches that every person is born upon the fitrah—an innate disposition towards Allah (SWT), a natural inclination towards truth and goodness. But fitrah is not the finished story. It is the beginning of one. We are then entrusted with a life full of relationships, choices, blessings and trials, all of which shape the people we become. Allah (SWT) says:

Difference was never presented as something to erase.

It was something to know. To learn from. To carry.

Perhaps that is why I no longer think the original question has an answer. Or at least, not the answer it expects. Who am I without my name, my ethnicity, my religion or my occupation?

I honestly don’t know.

Because I don’t think there is a version of me waiting patiently beneath all of those things.

There is only the person they have helped shape.

Not because they define me individually.

But because, over time, they have become woven together so completely that separating them would be like asking a tree to exist without the years that taught it to grow.

Perhaps we don’t spend our lives finding ourselves after all.

Perhaps we spend our lives, by the permission of Allah (SWT), becoming the people we were always capable of being.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

Watching the memories fade from someone you love is a kind of grief I would not wish on anyone.

The way our brains work is remarkable, yet incredibly fragile. A lifetime of conversations, birthdays, holidays and ordinary moments can slowly disappear until even the people closest to you become strangers.

For years now, my grandfather hasn’t known who his children are. He doesn’t recognise his grandchildren. He doesn’t remember the woman he spent his life with.

And yet, he knows he loves us.

Without fail, every time he sees one of his sons, his face lights up. He smiles. He reaches for him. He sits beside him with a sense of comfort that words cannot explain. He no longer has the memories of raising him, teaching him or watching him grow, but the love has never faded.

He knows we are important.

He just doesn’t know why.

That has always stayed with me.

As someone studying psychology, I know there are scientific explanations for why emotional recognition can sometimes remain even when autobiographical memories are lost. Different parts of the brain are affected differently, and emotion often survives where memory does not.

But every time I visit my grandfather, I find myself thinking less about neuroscience and more about Allah (SWT).

The Qur’an speaks constantly about the qalb, the heart. Not simply as an organ, but as the place of faith, sincerity, tranquillity and understanding. Allah (SWT) says,

We often reduce ourselves to our minds. We celebrate intelligence, memory and knowledge as though they are the most important parts of being human. But Islam reminds us that there is something deeper.

The heart.

Watching my grandfather has made me wonder whether love leaves its deepest imprint there.

Perhaps that is one of Allah’s greatest mercies.

Perhaps when memories begin to fade, Allah allows love to remain.

Not because memory isn’t important, but because love is.

What good would our memories be if they carried no emotion? A photograph only has meaning because of the love attached to it. A family home is just bricks and mortar without the people who filled it with warmth. A lifetime of memories would mean very little if they were not accompanied by affection, compassion and mercy.

Love is what gives our memories value in the first place.

Allah (SWT) describes Himself as Al-Wadud, The Most Loving. Love is not simply a human emotion; it is one of the ways we experience His mercy in this world. So perhaps it should not surprise us that even when illness takes so much away, love can still remain.

I have watched my grandfather forget names he once knew by heart. I have watched him ask the same questions countless times. I have watched entire chapters of his life disappear.

Yet I have also watched his face soften when he sees his family.

I have watched him instinctively reach for the people he loves.

I have watched him find comfort in their presence, even when he cannot explain who they are.

That doesn’t feel insignificant to me.

It feels like mercy.

This world was never meant to last. Our bodies weaken. Our minds weaken. Our memories fade. Everything we place our confidence in eventually changes. Yet Allah (SWT) never tells us that what ultimately matters is the sharpness of our memory. Instead, He tells us,

Not a sound memory.

A sound heart.

Perhaps there is wisdom in that.

I don’t know exactly where science ends and the unseen begins. I don’t know why some people with dementia can no longer remember names but still remember how someone makes them feel.

Maybe I don’t need to know.

Sometimes witnessing Allah’s mercy is enough.

Watching my grandfather has changed the way I think about what truly lasts. We spend so much of our lives trying to preserve memories. We fill our phones with photographs, write journals and record videos because we are afraid of forgetting.

But perhaps Allah (SWT) reminds us that while memories may fade, love can endure.

Because at the end of the day, our memories tell the story of our lives.

But it is our love that tells the story of our souls.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ariana <3

Sin does not make someone cease to be Muslim. If it did, none of us would have any hope. Islam does not teach that believers are flawless. Rather, it teaches that believers are imperfect people who continually return to Allah (SWT). The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said, “Every son of Adam sins, and the best of those who sin are those who repent.”

One of the key distinctions that Islam places great emphasis on is Salah. While Muslims may struggle with many sins, prayer remains the foundation of our relationship with Allah (SWT). It is the act that repeatedly brings us back to Him, no matter how far we feel we have drifted.

I am not a perfect Muslim, far from it. I do not pray five times a day every single day, although recently I have become much more consistent and intentional in making time for Allah (SWT) and Salah. Through this process, I have begun to notice changes within myself and to reflect more deeply on the struggles of those around me.

Recently, I spoke with someone who told me they had stopped praying because of a particular sin they were committing. They wanted to return to Salah, but they felt hypocritical doing so while still struggling with that behaviour. It is a sentiment I have heard many times before.

My response was simple: do you think Allah (SWT) would rather you commit this sin and abandon prayer as well, or commit this sin while continuing to pray and striving to improve?

If we all waited until we were sinless before praying, nobody would ever pray.

This idea that we must be spiritually “clean” before turning to Allah (SWT) misunderstands the purpose of prayer. Salah is not a reward for being perfect. It is not something reserved for those who have already conquered their weaknesses. It is one of the very tools Allah (SWT) has given us to help us overcome them.

Prayer is an act of worship, but it is also an act of humility. Every time we stand before Allah (SWT), we acknowledge our dependence on Him. We admit our shortcomings. We recognise that we need His guidance, His mercy, and His forgiveness. In doing so, we reinforce a powerful truth: no matter how many times we fail, we can always return.

I think many of us may have experienced periods where we feel distant from Allah (SWT). We stop praying, we become consumed by the dunya, or we allow our sins to convince us that we are somehow unworthy of turning back. Yet when we feel far from Allah (SWT), it is worth asking ourselves: who moved?

Allah (SWT) has not abandoned us. His mercy has not diminished. His door has not closed. If anything, Islam repeatedly teaches us that Allah (SWT) is always waiting for our return. The distance we feel is often the result of our own turning away, not His. This is what makes Salah so powerful. No matter how long it has been, no matter how many mistakes we have made, prayer is always an invitation to come back.

This repeated return matters. Human beings are shaped by what they do repeatedly. The habits we engage in every day gradually shape the kind of people we become. The more frequently we pause to reflect on our actions and measure them against our values, the harder it becomes to ignore the gap between who we are and who we wish to be. Salah creates those moments of reflection. Five times a day, it asks us to step away from distraction, examine ourselves honestly, and realign with what matters most.

There is a saying that prayer may not always immediately change a person’s circumstances, but it changes the person who prays. I think there is a great deal of truth in that. A person who stands before Allah (SWT) day after day, asking for guidance, forgiveness, and strength, cannot help but be influenced by that practice. Change is often gradual rather than dramatic. It happens through repeated acts of returning, reflecting, and trying again.

Perhaps this is also why the advice of our elders is often more valuable than we realise. When we are younger, it can be tempting to hear their reminders about prayer, faith, and avoiding certain mistakes as lectures or restrictions. Yet many of the people giving that advice are not speaking from a place of perfection. They have lived longer than we have. They have made mistakes, committed sins, faced consequences, sought forgiveness, and learned lessons through experience.

When they tell us they wish they had prayed more, trusted Allah (SWT) sooner, or avoided certain choices, they are often reflecting on their own lives. In many cases, they are trying to save us from the same pain they once experienced themselves. Of course, some lessons can only be learned through our own experiences, and some mistakes we may have to make ourselves. But there is wisdom in listening to those who have already walked the road ahead of us. Their guidance is not always about controlling our future; often it is an expression of care, born from a desire to spare us regrets they know all too well.

This is one reason why abandoning prayer because of sin can be so counterproductive. The very practice that encourages self-awareness, accountability, and growth is removed. Continuing to pray does not make someone a hypocrite. In many ways, it is what keeps the process of change alive. The person who continues returning to Allah (SWT) despite their shortcomings is still engaged in the struggle to become better.

I have experienced this in my own life, particularly in relation to anxiety. There are periods where my mind races, my chest feels tight, and every possible outcome seems to demand my attention at once.

What has surprised me is how often Salah interrupts that cycle.

I can begin prayer with a racing heart, a mind full of worries, and thoughts pulling me in a hundred different directions. Yet by the time I finish, I often feel calmer. Not because my circumstances have changed, but because my attention has. For a few moments, my mind is no longer jumping between future possibilities and worst-case scenarios. It is focused on the words I am reciting, the movements I am performing, and the presence of Allah (SWT).

The rhythm of Salah requires stillness in a world that constantly encourages distraction. It pulls me out of endless mental loops and back into the present moment. More importantly, it shifts my focus from what I cannot control to what I can. I am reminded that my responsibility is to make the effort, while the outcome ultimately belongs to Allah (SWT).

Salah reminds me that I am not carrying the weight of the world by myself. It reminds me that Allah (SWT) is in control of what is beyond my control. It reminds me that my role is to strive, while trusting Him with the results.

There is something deeply comforting in Allah's (SWT) words: "So remember Me; I will remember you." In moments where I feel overwhelmed by anxiety, uncertainty, or my own shortcomings, Salah becomes a practical expression of that remembrance. However many times a day, I turn towards Allah (SWT), and in doing so, I am reminded that I am not facing life's difficulties alone.

I finish prayer not necessarily with answers, but with trust. Trust that what Allah (SWT) has written for me will come to pass. Trust that what misses me was never meant for me. Trust that His wisdom extends far beyond my own understanding.

We all sin. We all struggle. We all fall short.

But perhaps that is exactly why we need Salah.

Not because we are perfect, but because we are not.

Prayer truly changes the one who prays.

And so I leave you with one last thing to remember:

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

In that article, I focused primarily on the tendency to deny religious women intellectual agency. I argued that many secular critiques of religion begin from the assumption that religious women cannot be trusted to interpret their own experiences. If they remain religious, their faith is frequently understood as evidence of conditioning. If they wear hijab, their modesty is interpreted as proof of internalised oppression. If they speak positively about religion, they are often viewed as participating in the very systems that supposedly harm them.

What interested me most, however, was not simply the disagreement itself but the assumptions underpinning it.

Throughout the conversations that followed, I repeatedly encountered a particular idea that is rarely stated directly but nevertheless seems to shape much of contemporary discourse surrounding women, religion, and liberation. It is the assumption that visibility is freedom.

The logic is deceptively simple. A woman who reveals more of her body is often viewed as empowered, while a woman who covers more of her body is often viewed as restricted. Exposure becomes associated with confidence, autonomy, and liberation, while modesty becomes associated with repression, shame, and control. The woman who embraces visibility through the body is often understood as autonomous, while the modest woman is expected to justify her choice.

This assumption has become so deeply embedded within contemporary culture that it often escapes scrutiny altogether. Rather than functioning as a particular understanding of liberation, it is treated as liberation itself. Visibility is no longer one possible expression of freedom among many; it increasingly functions as the measure by which freedom is recognised.

Yet the more I think about this assumption, the less obvious it appears.

Why should visibility be understood as liberation in the first place?

Why is exposure treated as self-evidently empowering while concealment is expected to justify itself?

And perhaps most importantly, who benefits from the belief that women’s freedom is best expressed through making themselves increasingly visible?

At first glance, these questions may seem strange. After all, the association between visibility and liberation did not emerge randomly. It has a history.

To be clear, the association between veiling and oppression did not emerge out of nowhere. Throughout history, women’s clothing has often been regulated by patriarchal institutions, religious authorities, families, and states. In some contexts, women have been compelled to veil against their will. In others, restrictions surrounding dress have functioned as mechanisms of social control, limiting women’s autonomy and reinforcing broader gender hierarchies. These realities should not be dismissed or minimised. They help explain why many feminists instinctively view modesty with suspicion and why practices such as veiling can carry political meanings that extend far beyond the intentions of individual women.

For centuries, women in many societies were excluded from political participation, denied access to education, restricted in their economic opportunities, and largely confined to the private sphere. Against this backdrop, becoming visible was itself a political act. To enter public life, to speak publicly, to organise politically, and to challenge restrictions placed upon women represented genuine forms of liberation. Visibility became associated with freedom because, historically, many women had been denied visibility altogether.

At the same time, acknowledging this history does not resolve the questions raised in this article. Historical associations do not automatically determine contemporary meanings, nor do they explain why visibility itself has become so strongly associated with liberation. A practice can have been imposed coercively in some contexts while being embraced voluntarily in others. The fact that modesty has sometimes functioned as a tool of control does not necessarily mean that every act of modesty is reducible to control, just as the fact that visibility can be empowering does not mean that visibility exists outside social expectations, economic incentives, or systems of power.

The problem is not that these gains occurred. Nor is it that visibility became associated with emancipation. The problem is that over time, a particular historical relationship gradually hardened into a philosophical assumption. Visibility ceased to be one expression of liberation and increasingly became liberation itself.

As a result, contemporary discussions of women’s freedom often begin from a premise that is rarely acknowledged. Movement towards greater bodily visibility is assumed to be progressive, while movement towards greater bodily concealment is assumed to be regressive. The woman who embraces contemporary norms of bodily visibility is understood as autonomous. The modest woman becomes a puzzle requiring explanation.

This is perhaps why modest women are so frequently treated as intellectual anomalies.

When a woman embraces modesty for religious reasons, many people instinctively search for an explanation beyond the choice itself. She must have been pressured. She must have been conditioned. She must have internalised patriarchal values. There must be some external force accounting for her behaviour. The possibility that she has reflected upon her beliefs and arrived at her conclusions consciously is often treated as less plausible than the assumption that she has somehow been misled.

The woman who embraces visibility, by contrast, rarely receives the same scrutiny. Her choices are generally interpreted as expressions of individuality, confidence, or autonomy. Yet this is not because her choices exist outside social influence. Rather, it is because the influences shaping those choices are so culturally familiar that they have become difficult to see.

One of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary discussions surrounding women’s agency is that they often operate according to standards that would be impossible to apply consistently. Religious women are frequently criticised on the grounds that their choices are shaped by religion, tradition, family expectations, or broader theological frameworks. Yet no human being exists outside such influences. Secular women are shaped by secular culture just as religious women are shaped by religion. Consumer culture shapes desires. Beauty standards shape perceptions of attractiveness. Political ideologies shape understandings of freedom. Social media shapes ideas about identity, self-presentation, and self-worth. The existence of influence is not evidence of oppression. It is a feature of human existence itself.

What makes religious women distinctive is not that they are influenced. It is that the influences shaping them remain visible. Religious traditions openly present themselves as moral frameworks. They explicitly discuss values, obligations, virtues, and ethical commitments. By contrast, many secular influences present themselves as natural, neutral, or simply common sense. We recognise religious norms as norms. We struggle to recognise our own.

This distinction becomes particularly important once we begin examining the politics of visibility itself. If visibility has become one of the defining symbols of modern liberation, then it is worth asking not only why women are encouraged to be seen, but why powerful social systems have so often been invested in making them visible in the first place.

Perhaps one of the most compelling critiques of the relationship between visibility and liberation comes from Frantz Fanon’s analysis of French colonial rule in Algeria. Writing in A Dying Colonialism, Fanon examined the extraordinary preoccupation French colonial authorities developed with unveiling Algerian women. What is striking is that this obsession was consistently framed through the language of emancipation. Colonial officials presented themselves as rescuers liberating Muslim women from oppressive traditions and bringing them into modernity. The veil was portrayed as a symbol of backwardness, while unveiling became symbolic of progress, civilisation, and freedom.

At first glance, this framework appears remarkably familiar. Contemporary discussions surrounding modesty often reproduce similar assumptions. The covered woman is interpreted as constrained while the uncovered woman is interpreted as liberated. Visibility becomes associated with autonomy, while concealment becomes associated with restriction. What Fanon recognised, however, was that the colonial fixation on unveiling revealed something deeper about the nature of power itself.

For the French colonial administration, the veil was not merely a religious garment. It represented a limit on the colonial gaze. The issue was not that veiled women were invisible. They remained active participants in public and social life. Rather, the veil restricted a particular form of visual access that colonial authorities increasingly associated with modernity, transparency, and control. Fanon famously described the veiled woman as one who “sees without being seen,” highlighting the asymmetry this created. The coloniser could observe much of colonial society, but the veiled woman remained partially outside that gaze. She was visible enough to participate in public life yet not fully accessible to those who wished to scrutinise, categorise, and possess her. The veil therefore frustrated a colonial project that sought not only territorial control but cultural and social penetration.

This is significant because Fanon’s analysis shifts attention away from the veil itself and toward the assumptions underlying visibility. The issue was never simply whether women covered their bodies. After all, veiled women remained active participants in public life. The issue was why the coloniser felt such a strong need for greater visual access to women's bodies in the first place. Rather, the issue was why the coloniser felt such a strong need to remove that covering in the first place. If unveiling were merely about freedom, it would be difficult to explain why colonial authorities invested so much political and symbolic energy into the project. Fanon argued that unveiling functioned as part of a broader attempt to penetrate, understand, and ultimately dominate Algerian society. The veil became threatening not because it oppressed women, but because it represented a limit on colonial access.

What makes Fanon’s analysis so useful is that it complicates a tendency that remains common today: the assumption that visibility is inherently emancipatory. Fanon does not argue that visibility is oppressive or that modesty is inherently liberating. Rather, he forces us to recognise that visibility is never politically neutral. To make something visible is not simply to see it. It is also to render it legible, knowable, and available for observation. Throughout history, powerful institutions have repeatedly sought greater visibility over populations because visibility facilitates administration, regulation, and control.

This does not mean that every form of visibility serves domination, nor does it mean that every act of concealment constitutes resistance. The point is more subtle. Fanon invites us to question why visibility is so often treated as an unquestioned social good. Why do we instinctively assume that making women more visible is synonymous with making them more free? Why is concealment expected to justify itself while visibility rarely faces the same scrutiny?

These questions become particularly interesting when considered within contemporary societies. While colonial administrations sought visibility through political power, modern economies pursue visibility through economic incentives. Women today are not generally encouraged to become visible in the name of colonial civilisation, but they are encouraged to become visible in the name of empowerment, authenticity, confidence, self-expression, and personal freedom. The language has changed considerably. Yet the cultural investment in visibility remains.

There is also an important distinction that often disappears within these discussions. Modesty does not necessarily mean invisibility.

One of the assumptions embedded within contemporary discourse is that covering the body represents a withdrawal from public life, as though modest women are attempting to disappear from society altogether. Yet this framing is difficult to sustain when confronted with the reality of how modest women actually live. Women who dress modestly still work, study, teach, lead organisations, raise families, participate in politics, contribute to intellectual life, and engage with their communities. They are not absent from public space. They are not invisible.

What modesty often involves is not the concealment of the woman herself but the concealment of certain aspects of the body. These are not the same thing.

This distinction matters because it reveals how frequently women become conflated with their physical appearance. If reducing the visibility of the body is interpreted as reducing the visibility of the person, then we are implicitly treating a woman’s body as the primary site through which her presence is recognised. The assumption becomes that to be seen as a person, one must first be seen physically.

Yet many modest women would reject precisely this premise. Their argument is not that women should disappear from public life but that visibility need not be synonymous with bodily exposure. A woman can be intellectually visible, socially visible, politically visible, professionally visible, and culturally visible without making every aspect of her body available to public view.

This is why I find discussions surrounding modesty and visibility so fascinating. Too often, the debate is framed as though the only options are concealment or self-expression, invisibility or freedom. In reality, the issue is far more complex.

The modest woman is not invisible. She is simply challenging the assumption that visibility must be performed through the body.

If Fanon’s analysis encourages us to question why powerful systems have historically sought to make women visible, contemporary capitalism raises a similar question from a different angle: who benefits from women’s visibility today?

The answer is difficult to ignore.

One of the defining characteristics of modern capitalism is its ability to transform aspects of human life into commodities. Our attention becomes a product. Our preferences become data. Increasingly, our identities become marketable brands. Within this economic landscape, visibility is not merely a social phenomenon. It is a resource. The more visible something becomes, the more opportunities exist to monetise it.

This is particularly apparent when examining the relationship between women and consumer culture. Entire industries derive enormous profits from encouraging women to think about, modify, present, and display their bodies. Fashion, cosmetics, skincare, fitness, plastic surgery, advertising, entertainment, influencer culture, and social media all rely, to varying degrees, upon women’s visibility. The female body remains one of the most effective mechanisms for generating attention, engagement, and consumption.

Importantly, this observation should not be confused with a claim that women lack agency. Nor is it an argument that women who participate in these industries are somehow victims. Such conclusions would simply reproduce the same paternalistic logic that is so often directed towards religious women. The issue is not whether women are capable of making choices. The issue is whether we are willing to critically examine the systems within which those choices are made.

This is a distinction that many feminist thinkers have long recognised in other contexts. Consider contemporary debates surrounding pornography or platforms such as OnlyFans. Even among feminists who disagree about these industries, there is often a shared recognition that individual choices cannot be understood independently of broader social and economic structures. Questions of market demand, financial incentives, cultural expectations, and the commodification of sexuality are frequently raised because most people understand that choices do not emerge in a vacuum.

Contemporary societies often imagine themselves as having liberated women from restrictions surrounding appearance. Yet women remain subject to an extraordinary number of expectations regarding how they should look. Women are expected to be attractive but not vain, sexually confident but not promiscuous, youthful but not artificial, and natural but carefully maintained. The female body continues to be regulated, judged, and evaluated, albeit through different mechanisms than those operating in many traditional societies.

Yet what I find interesting is how rarely this analytical framework is extended to visibility itself.

Modern culture often presents visibility as empowerment while simultaneously profiting from that visibility at every possible opportunity. Social media provides perhaps the clearest example of this dynamic. Platforms encourage users to share more of themselves, reveal more of their lives, and continuously transform personal experiences into content. Visibility is rewarded through attention, validation, status, and, for some, financial gain. The more visible one becomes, the more valuable one becomes within the logic of the platform.

Women are not uniquely subject to these pressures, but they often experience them in distinct ways. Female influencers, celebrities, and content creators are evaluated heavily according to appearance. Visibility frequently becomes intertwined with attractiveness, desirability, and aesthetic presentation. Success is often tied not only to what women produce, but to how they look while producing it. Consequently, participation in contemporary digital culture often requires women to navigate expectations surrounding beauty and self-presentation that are both social and economic in nature.

What makes this particularly significant is that these expectations rarely present themselves as expectations at all. Unlike religious traditions, consumer culture rarely announces itself as a moral framework. It does not explicitly tell women how they ought to understand their bodies. Instead, it communicates through incentives. Through advertising. Through algorithms. Through representation. Through endless images of what is celebrated, rewarded, admired, and desired.

This is why I find contemporary discussions surrounding modesty so fascinating. Religious modesty is frequently criticised as a system that regulates women’s bodies. Women are encouraged to question why they cover, who benefits from their covering, and what social forces might have shaped their choices. These are entirely legitimate questions.

What is less common is applying the same level of scrutiny to visibility itself.

Why are women encouraged to be visible?

Who benefits from that visibility?

What economic interests are served when women are taught to view public self-presentation as a central component of empowerment?

These questions are rarely asked with the same urgency, perhaps because visibility has become so closely associated with freedom that it no longer appears ideological. It appears natural.

Yet if Fanon teaches us that visibility has historically been intertwined with power, contemporary capitalism reminds us that visibility can also be intertwined with profit. The fact that something is celebrated culturally does not mean it exists outside systems of influence. Indeed, one of the most effective forms of influence is the kind that ceases to appear as influence at all.

None of this means that visibility is inherently oppressive or that modesty is inherently liberating. Such conclusions would merely reverse the binary rather than challenge it. What it does suggest, however, is that visibility deserves the same critical examination we routinely apply to modesty. If we are willing to ask who benefits when women cover their bodies, we should be equally willing to ask who benefits when women are encouraged to reveal them.

Because once we recognise that visibility is socially rewarded, economically incentivised, and culturally celebrated, it becomes much more difficult to maintain the assumption that visibility is simply freedom while modesty is simply oppression.

At this point, it is important to avoid replacing one simplistic narrative with another.

The argument I am making is not that modest women are uniquely free while women who embrace visibility are uniquely constrained. Nor am I suggesting that secular women are victims of false consciousness while religious women possess some privileged access to truth. Such arguments merely invert the hierarchy without challenging the assumptions underlying it. They continue to divide women into categories of the enlightened and the deceived, the liberated and the oppressed, while leaving the broader question of agency untouched.

What I find more interesting is the tendency to treat religious influence as fundamentally different from every other form of social influence. Underlying many critiques of religious modesty is the assumption that choices shaped by religious belief are somehow less authentic than those shaped by secular values. A woman who wears hijab is frequently understood as acting under the influence of religion, tradition, family expectations, or communal norms. Her choice is therefore subjected to scrutiny. It becomes something to explain, analyse, or decode.

Yet this raises a broader question. What exactly would an uninfluenced choice look like?

Human beings do not make decisions from a position outside culture, history, language, or social life. We do not enter the world as autonomous individuals and then choose our values independently. Rather, we inherit frameworks through which we understand ourselves long before we begin consciously reflecting upon them. Our ideas about beauty, success, morality, fulfilment, sexuality, freedom, and identity are shaped by the societies in which we live. Even our most personal preferences emerge within broader systems of meaning that help determine what appears desirable, reasonable, or worthwhile.

This insight is hardly controversial within the social sciences. Sociologists, philosophers, and psychologists have spent decades examining how human behaviour is shaped by social environments. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, for example, describes how social structures become internalised so deeply that they often appear natural rather than learned. Similarly, Michel Foucault argued that modern power frequently operates not through direct coercion but through the production of norms that individuals come to regulate themselves according to. In both cases, the central observation is the same: human beings do not stand outside society making perfectly autonomous choices. We make choices from within social worlds that shape what we can imagine as choices in the first place.

This applies just as much to secular women as it does to religious women.

A woman who chooses modesty may be influenced by religious teachings, spiritual commitments, family traditions, and theological understandings of the body. These influences are real and should not be denied. At the same time, a woman who rejects modesty may be influenced by entirely different systems of meaning: contemporary ideals of self-expression, dominant narratives surrounding empowerment, beauty culture, media representations of sexuality, consumer values, and broader cultural understandings of freedom. These influences are equally real.

The existence of influence does not invalidate either choice. It simply reminds us that agency does not operate in the absence of social influence but within it.

This is why I find the language of “brainwashing” so unhelpful when discussing religious women. The term is often deployed selectively, as though religious belief represents a uniquely corrupting force while secular beliefs emerge from a position of neutrality. Yet neutrality itself is largely an illusion. The woman who embraces religion and the woman who embraces contemporary secular values are both navigating systems of meaning larger than themselves. The difference is not that one is influenced while the other is free. The difference is that some influences are easier to recognise than others.

Religious traditions openly present themselves as moral frameworks. They explicitly discuss values, obligations, virtues, and ethical commitments. Consumer culture rarely does. Beauty standards rarely do. Social media algorithms rarely do. Their influence often appears natural precisely because it is ubiquitous. The values they communicate are woven into everyday life so thoroughly that they cease to appear as values at all.

This is ultimately why I remain unconvinced by arguments that automatically interpret modesty as evidence of oppression while interpreting visibility as evidence of liberation. Both modesty and visibility exist within social worlds that shape their meanings. Both can be embraced sincerely. Both can be imposed coercively. Both can function as expressions of agency. Both can function as responses to social pressure.

The question, therefore, is not which choice is entirely free from influence. No such choice exists. The more interesting question is why some forms of influence are immediately recognised as constraints while others become so deeply embedded within the cultural landscape that they are mistaken for freedom itself.

What I have tried to question throughout this article is not whether modesty is inherently liberating, nor whether visibility is inherently oppressive. Both conclusions are too simplistic to capture the realities of how human beings navigate the world. Women choose modesty for different reasons. Women choose visibility for different reasons. Some choices emerge from conviction, some from social pressure, and most from a complicated mixture of both. Human lives are rarely as ideologically neat as the debates surrounding them often suggest.

What interests me far more is the assumption that visibility has become the unquestioned measure of liberation itself.

From colonial attempts to unveil Algerian women to contemporary economies that profit from women’s visibility, there is a recurring tendency to treat visibility as an unquestionable social good. Fanon’s analysis reminds us that visibility has never been politically neutral. To make something visible is not merely to see it; it is also to render it legible, knowable, and accessible to the gaze of others. Contemporary capitalism similarly reminds us that visibility can be monetised, incentivised, and transformed into economic value. The fact that something is celebrated culturally does not mean it exists outside systems of power.

At the same time, recognising these realities should not lead us to romanticise modesty or imagine that religious choices somehow exist beyond social influence. They do not. Religious women are shaped by communities, traditions, and theological commitments just as secular women are shaped by consumer culture, media environments, beauty standards, and dominant cultural narratives. The existence of influence is not a uniquely religious phenomenon. It is a condition of social life itself.

This is why I remain sceptical of conversations that treat modest women as intellectual puzzles requiring explanation while treating the cultural preference for visibility as self-evidently rational. The modest woman is asked why she covers. The woman who embraces contemporary norms of visibility is rarely asked why she reveals. One choice is scrutinised while the other is naturalised. One is understood as ideological while the other is understood as freedom.

Yet both emerge from systems of meaning that shape how women understand themselves and their place in the world.

Perhaps the most important lesson here is that liberation cannot be reduced to a particular aesthetic outcome. A society that insists women must cover is not free. But neither is a society that assumes freedom must always look like uncovering. Genuine agency requires something more difficult than either position. It requires the recognition that women are capable of thinking, reflecting, negotiating, and making meaning within the complex social worlds they inhabit.

The question, then, is not whether women are visible enough in public life. The question is whether bodily visibility should be treated as the measure of liberation itself.

Covering the body does not mean shrinking oneself. A woman can be modest and still be ambitious, outspoken, influential, intellectually engaged, and fully present in public life. The assumption that women become smaller when they cover themselves reveals how deeply we have come to associate female presence with physical exposure. Yet a woman can take up space in the world without making her body the primary way she is seen.

Once liberation becomes tied to a particular way of presenting the body, we cease asking women what freedom means to them and begin telling them what it should look like.

And that has never been liberation at all.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

It feeds into the idea that, as a woman, you can only choose one: love or ambition.

Women are constantly placed into two opposing categories. The “independent girlboss” who centres her career, emotionally distances herself from men, and treats detachment as empowerment. Or the “wifey material” woman, who is supposedly soft, dependent, and willing to shrink herself around a man in exchange for love and protection.

Obviously, these are not the only types of women who exist. But they are the boxes women are repeatedly pushed into, both by society and by each other.

When people say things like “love is an illness to a woman with goals,” they are almost always referring to romantic love. And I understand where this idea comes from. There is a deep history of women sacrificing their dreams, standards, identities, and ambitions for relationships. A history of women being expected to mould themselves around men until there is barely anything left of them.

But perhaps what has historically harmed women was never love itself, but relationships built on inequality, sacrifice, and the expectation that women must shrink themselves in order to be loved.

Because describing love itself as an illness feels deeply wrong to me.

An illness is something debilitating. Something that consumes you against your will. Something that slowly destroys you.

And maybe that is exactly the problem: we have become so used to seeing women lose themselves in relationships that we now speak about love itself as though it is inherently dangerous to women with ambition.

Why do we speak about women as though we are incapable of loving intelligently? Why do we assume women are destined to become so emotionally consumed by another person that they inevitably abandon themselves?

I rarely see women’s choices and intelligence questioned in the same way men’s are. Men are often criticised for failure, but women are frequently treated as though emotion itself compromises our judgement. A man can fall in love, prioritise relationships, make emotional decisions, or choose family, and people still largely assume he is rational, ambitious, and in control of himself. Women, however, are so often spoken about as though our emotions make us inherently less capable of making intelligent choices. As though love automatically weakens our judgement or strips us of ambition.

Men are allowed complexity. They are allowed ambition and love, emotion and intellect, softness and success, without one cancelling the other out. Women, however, are constantly pushed into binaries. You are either “too emotional” or “too cold”. Too career-focused or too dependent. Too ambitious to be lovable or too loving to be ambitious.

It reinforces the very stereotypes so many people claim to want to dismantle.

We can have both.

And honestly, I understand why this mindset has become so appealing to so many women. For many women, distancing themselves from love is not born from superiority, but from fear. Fear of repeating patterns they have watched consume other women. Fear of abandonment. Fear of sacrificing too much of themselves for someone who would never do the same in return.

But I still refuse to believe the answer is treating love itself as something inherently destructive to ambitious women.

What fascinates me is that this framing of love as inherently damaging to women also clashes with many historical and religious understandings of love.

The idea that love is always all-consuming and slowly destroys a person makes me think about Islamic ideas surrounding love.

In Islam, love is not meant to erase you. It is meant to bring tranquillity, mercy, and growth. The person you love should not overwhelm your identity, but become a place of peace within it.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ never framed love as something that should consume a woman until she loses herself. In Islam, love is described through mutual care, mercy, companionship, and dignity, not through self-destruction.

And all we have to do is look at the women throughout Islamic history to see this.

Fatima al-Fihri founded one of the oldest universities in the world. Rabi’a al-Adawiyya became one of the most influential spiritual thinkers in Islamic history. Nusaybah bint Ka’ab defended the Prophet ﷺ in battle.

These women loved, believed, connected, nurtured, and still remained intellectually, spiritually, and politically influential. They were not reduced to love, nor stripped of softness, faith, or connection in order to be respected. They existed as full people.

History has never actually shown us that women must choose between love and ambition. Society just keeps insisting that they should.

Perhaps love is not about finding someone you can lose yourself in, but someone you can remain yourself beside.

To love, whether romantically, platonically, or familiarly, is part of what makes us human. Love can coexist with ambition, discipline, intelligence, and self-respect.

And I think that is another uncomfortable truth within all of this: society is incredibly quick to interpret women’s experiences in relationships as evidence of weakness, irrationality, or a lack of self-respect.

“She let him treat her like that.”
“She lost herself.”
“She chose a man over her future.”

There is often very little room for complexity in the way we speak about women and love. We rarely acknowledge how deeply social conditioning, emotional attachment, hope, fear, and sacrifice shape human relationships. Instead, women are so often reduced to cautionary tales, as though loving deeply automatically means lacking intelligence or self-worth.

But what about the women who fight for all that they desire? The women who refuse to settle in love and refuse to abandon their ambitions? The women who build careers, communities, families, art, knowledge, and still allow themselves to love deeply?

I think we are constantly sold the idea that we cannot have it all. That choosing ambition means rejecting intimacy, and choosing love means sacrificing independence.

And maybe part of why this narrative has become so appealing is because avoiding love feels safer. If you rely only on yourself, you cannot be disappointed by another person. You cannot lose yourself in them. You cannot be hurt.

But as the film ‘Before Sunrise’ asks:

Women do not become less intelligent, less capable, or less ambitious when they love. We are human beings, not cautionary tales.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

I recently read Sonia Albert’s article “You Cannot Liberate Women Through God,” which argues that religion, particularly Abrahamic religion, is fundamentally incompatible with women’s liberation. Throughout the article, religious women are framed not simply as oppressed, but as participants in their own oppression, women attempting to romanticise systems supposedly designed to control them.

This is not a new argument. In fact, it reflects a long intellectual tradition rooted in secular liberal thought, where religion is often treated as inherently regressive while liberation is imagined as necessarily secular. Religious women, especially Muslim women, are frequently positioned within Western discourse as symbols of false consciousness, women who cannot fully understand their own oppression because faith itself has blinded them to it.

What struck me most about the article was not simply its criticism of religion, but how fundamentally reductionist its understanding of religion actually was.

Throughout the piece, religion is reduced almost entirely to social control. God becomes little more than a mechanism men invented to regulate women. Faith is framed as obedience, restriction, guilt, and submission, but never as sincere metaphysical belief, transcendence, moral philosophy, or spiritual conviction.

And I think this is where many critiques of religion fundamentally fail. They see God as a man.

Because masculine pronouns are often used for God in English, many critics begin conceptualising God as a male authority figure. So when they see women practicing modesty, prayer, devotion, or submission to God, they interpret it as submission to men. Religion becomes understood entirely through the lens of patriarchy rather than theology itself.

But within classical Islamic theology, God is not male in any human or biological sense. God transcends human categories entirely. Masculine pronouns function linguistically, not literally. Once that distinction is ignored, female devotion becomes unintelligible except as internalised oppression.

This becomes particularly obvious in the article’s treatment of modesty and religious practice. The assumption throughout is that no woman could meaningfully engage in religious devotion except through coercion, conditioning, or patriarchal pressure. Religious women are therefore denied full intellectual agency before they are even allowed to speak for themselves.

Ironically, this reproduces the very paternalism feminism claims to oppose.

The article states:

“No Abrahamic religion treats women as people.”

But statements like this collapse thousands of years of theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, interpretation, and history into a singular caricature. They treat religion as static and monolithic, as though all religious traditions across all historical contexts have functioned identically.

Historically, the emergence of Islam in seventh-century Arabia introduced legal and social reforms regarding women that were significant within their context. Women were granted rights to inheritance, property ownership, financial independence, contractual marriage, and divorce under certain conditions at a time when women in many societies possessed few formal legal protections. Importantly, a woman’s wealth remained legally her own after marriage in Islamic law, something that was not consistently recognised in parts of Europe until centuries later.

Khadija bint Khuwaylid, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, was one of Mecca’s most successful merchants and employed men, including Muhammad himself before their marriage. Aisha bint Abu Bakr became one of the most influential intellectual authorities in early Islamic history, narrating thousands of hadiths and teaching male scholars. Fatima al-Fihri founded the University of al-Qarawiyyin in 859 CE, recognised as the world’s oldest continually operating university.

These women were not anomalies existing outside religion in spite of it. They existed within religious civilisation itself.

This does not mean religious societies were free from patriarchy, nor does it mean religion has never been weaponised against women. Religious institutions, like all human institutions, have histories of misogyny, abuse, and injustice. But recognising this is different from reducing religion entirely to male domination.

The article repeatedly collapses the distinction between religion and the behaviour of religious men. Men abuse women, therefore religion must exist to legitimise abuse. Patriarchal cultures misuse scripture, therefore scripture itself becomes reducible to patriarchy alone.

But this flattening ignores the enormous diversity of theological interpretation across history. It also ignores the extent to which misogyny exists across secular societies too. The oppression of women did not begin with religion, nor did secular modernity suddenly eradicate it.

The article further claims:

“Religion exists so men can invent rules for women and justify them with an authority higher than ‘because I said so.’”

But this interpretation assumes religion emerged solely as a sociopolitical tool rather than engaging seriously with the possibility that billions of people genuinely understand faith as truth. Once religion is reduced entirely to power structures, religious belief itself becomes impossible to understand except as manipulation or delusion.

Sociologically and philosophically, religion has never functioned merely as social control. Thinkers such as Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and William James all recognised religion as deeply tied to meaning-making, ethics, identity, transcendence, ritual, and psychological orientation toward existence itself. Even outside theology, religion cannot be explained purely through patriarchy without ignoring its immense intellectual, historical, and metaphysical complexity.

To be clear, acknowledging the complexity of religion does not mean pretending difficult scriptural passages do not exist.

They do.

The article references Deuteronomy 22:28–29, a passage often translated as requiring a rape victim to marry her rapist. And understandably, modern readers find passages like this morally disturbing. Similar debates exist surrounding certain Qur’anic verses, particularly those related to gender roles, marriage, or interpretations of male authority.

These are not insignificant issues, nor should they be dismissed casually.

But what often disappears in contemporary discussions is the reality that religious traditions have never functioned through scripture alone, detached from interpretation, historical context, jurisprudence, language, and centuries of theological debate. Religious texts emerged within ancient societies that operated according to fundamentally different legal, economic, and social structures than modern liberal democracies.

Recognising historical context does not automatically resolve moral discomfort, nor does it mean every interpretation throughout history has been ethical. Religious communities have absolutely used scripture to justify misogyny, abuse, and domination. That reality should be confronted honestly.

At the same time, reducing entire religious traditions to their harshest or most literal readings ignores the enormous interpretive complexity within those traditions themselves. The history of religion is not simply the history of blind obedience to static texts. It is also the history of interpretation, disagreement, reform, philosophical inquiry, legal debate, and moral struggle.

This is particularly important because secular ideologies are rarely judged exclusively by their worst historical applications in the same way religion often is. Liberal democracies, secular states, and modern political systems have their own histories of colonialism, violence, exploitation, misogyny, and oppression, yet few people argue these histories render secularism itself inherently irredeemable.

Religion should not be exempt from criticism. But neither should it be flattened into caricature.

The article’s treatment of modesty is perhaps where this reductionism becomes most obvious.

Modesty within Islam has historically been understood through multiple ethical and spiritual frameworks, not simply through the regulation of women’s bodies. The Qur’an first instructs believing men to lower their gaze and guard their modesty before instructing women to do the same. Both men and women are positioned as morally accountable subjects required to practice discipline over the self.

Within Islamic ethics, modesty, or haya’, is not merely about clothing. It is tied to humility, self-restraint, dignity, discipline, and ethical conduct. Lowering the gaze for men is understood as disciplining desire and resisting the reduction of others into objects of visual consumption. Modesty for women is similarly connected to humility, intentionality, and spiritual consciousness.

Importantly, visible modesty in Islam has never existed only for women.

The modern discussion around hijab often isolates women’s covering as though visible religious identity itself is uniquely imposed upon women, but Islamic traditions have historically maintained visible markers of religious identity for men as well. Men are also instructed regarding modest dress, lowering the gaze, humility, and bodily presentation. Across many Islamic traditions, the beard functions not merely as facial hair, but as a visible marker of religious identity, piety, and adherence to Prophetic tradition.

In this sense, visible religious identity is not exclusive to women. Both men and women carry outward practices that communicate belonging, discipline, and devotion.

And this is important because critics often interpret hijab exclusively through the framework of patriarchal control while ignoring the broader religious understanding of visible devotion itself. For many Muslim women, hijab functions not merely as modest dress, but as an outward expression of faith, communal identity, ethical orientation, and spiritual intentionality. Particularly in modern secular societies, hijab can also function as resistance against pressures to privatise religion entirely.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of these discussions is how frequently modesty itself is treated as inherently incompatible with liberation.

my question is why is modesty automatically interpreted as oppression, while exposure is interpreted as liberation?

This assumption is so deeply embedded within contemporary Western discourse that it often goes unquestioned. A woman covering her body is viewed with suspicion, concern, or pity, while a woman uncovering it is framed as empowered, liberated, and autonomous. Visibility becomes synonymous with freedom. Exposure becomes interpreted as resistance. Modesty becomes interpreted as submission.

But why has liberation become so heavily tied to the visibility of women’s bodies in the first place?

Much of this framework emerges from modern secular liberalism, particularly post-sexual revolution understandings of freedom. Within these frameworks, liberation is often conceptualised as the removal of restrictions, especially restrictions surrounding sexuality, bodily presentation, and individual expression. Practices involving restraint, discipline, obligation, or transcendence are therefore frequently interpreted as inherently oppressive because they appear to limit unrestricted self-expression.

But this understanding of freedom is neither universal nor politically neutral. It is historically and culturally specific.

Religious traditions, particularly Islamic ethical traditions, often conceptualise freedom very differently. Freedom is not understood simply as the unrestricted ability to act upon every desire or impulse. Rather, freedom emerges through discipline over the self, through resisting ego, vanity, excess, social pressure, and compulsive desire. Within this framework, modesty is not necessarily humiliation or repression. It can instead function as an ethical orientation toward humility, dignity, intentionality, and spiritual consciousness.

This broader concept exists throughout religious ethics. Fasting disciplines hunger. Charity disciplines greed. Prayer disciplines time and attention. Lowering the gaze disciplines desire and objectification. Modesty similarly becomes part of a larger framework of self-regulation and ethical conduct rather than merely sexual restriction.

Yet contemporary discussions often isolate female covering from this broader ethical system and reinterpret it exclusively through patriarchal power dynamics.

This reduction becomes even more questionable when considering the pressures women face within modern secular societies themselves. Women today are constantly subjected to immense social pressure surrounding visibility, beauty, desirability, and bodily presentation. Entire industries are built upon the aesthetic consumption of women’s bodies. Women are encouraged to remain permanently visible, attractive, youthful, sexually confident, and publicly consumable, while this pressure is frequently reframed as empowerment rather than recognised as another form of social regulation.

In this context, it becomes difficult to ignore the possibility that modern societies have not eliminated pressures upon women’s bodies so much as transformed them.

The unveiled woman is often interpreted as liberated not because she is necessarily freer, but because her body aligns more comfortably with dominant secular understandings of empowerment, visibility, and autonomy. By contrast, the modestly dressed religious woman disrupts these assumptions. Her refusal to participate fully in contemporary norms surrounding bodily visibility becomes unintelligible within frameworks that equate exposure with freedom.

This is particularly evident in discussions surrounding hijab. The hijab is frequently interpreted in Western discourse as symbolic of patriarchal oppression regardless of the intentions, beliefs, or experiences of the women who wear it. The possibility that modesty could carry spiritual, ethical, communal, or philosophical meaning is often dismissed before religious women are even allowed to articulate it themselves.

Ironically, this can produce its own form of paternalism. Religious women are told that they are oppressed, but if they deny feeling oppressed, their denial itself becomes proof of internalised oppression. Their voices become invalidated in advance because secular frameworks have already predetermined what liberation is supposed to look like.

This does not mean every woman experiences hijab positively, nor does it mean coercion does not exist. Forced veiling is real and deserves criticism. But reducing all forms of covering to oppression erases the diversity of meanings religious women themselves attach to it.

I do not wear hijab myself, but the ease with which religious modesty is dismissed as inherently oppressive still unsettles me. Not because modesty is beyond critique, but because the conversation often reveals how narrow modern definitions of liberation have become.

The article also argues that feminism and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable. But this assumes liberation can only exist within secular liberal frameworks. It assumes women must understand freedom, dignity, and fulfilment in exclusively modern Western terms.

And that assumption itself deserves scrutiny.

Not every conception of freedom is rooted in radical individualism or liberation from obligation altogether. Religious traditions often conceptualise freedom differently, through discipline, moral responsibility, submission to God rather than submission to ego, and orientation toward transcendent meaning beyond the self.

One may disagree with those frameworks. But disagreement is not the same thing as intellectual incoherence.

Ultimately, what the article cannot account for is the possibility that religious women are not simply passive subjects waiting to be rescued from faith by secular enlightenment. Religious women think critically about theology, interpretation, morality, law, spirituality, and power. They negotiate their faith consciously and intellectually, not merely emotionally or culturally.

Religion is not beyond criticism. No institution or worldview is. But there is a difference between critiquing religion and dismissing religious women altogether as incapable of meaningful thought, agency, or self-understanding.

Because the moment feminism begins deciding that women can only be liberated if they arrive at the “correct” secular conclusions, it ceases to be liberation too.

Perhaps the line that struck me most in the article was:

“People are dying. Fuck God. Stay focused.”

And emotionally, I understand the anger behind that sentence. In a world filled with war, suffering, famine, violence, and injustice, faith can feel incomprehensible to people who see religion only through the lens of cruelty or hypocrisy.

But history repeatedly shows that suffering does not necessarily eradicate faith. In many cases, it deepens it.

One only has to look at Palestine to see this. Amid bombardment, displacement, grief, starvation, and unimaginable loss, countless Palestinians continue turning toward God rather than away. Mosques and churches become places of shelter, mourning, prayer, and community. Muslims pray beneath rubble. Palestinian Christians continue gathering in some of the oldest churches in the world despite living under constant threat and devastation.

And this matters because it directly challenges the idea that religion exists merely as social control. Oppressed people are not always secularised by suffering. Often, faith becomes the very thing that allows people to endure suffering without collapsing beneath it entirely.

Religion, for many people, is not escapism from reality. It is what gives reality meaning when everything else has fallen apart.

And beyond spirituality itself, religious communities have historically functioned as sites of collective care, charity, solidarity, and survival during crises. Mosques, churches, synagogues, temples, and other faith communities have long organised food drives, refugee support, shelters, fundraising efforts, burial services, disaster relief, and mutual aid networks in moments where institutions and governments fail people entirely.

This does not erase the harm religion has caused historically, nor does it place religion beyond criticism. But it complicates the simplistic idea that religion exists only to oppress.

Because when people are grieving, starving, displaced, or terrified, they do not always turn toward secular philosophy. Many turn toward prayer, ritual, community, and the belief that suffering is not meaningless.

And whether one personally believes in God or not, dismissing that entirely as weakness, delusion, or false consciousness fails to account for the profound role faith continues to play in human resilience, survival, and collective care.

And perhaps this is also why I struggle with the idea that religion can only ever be understood as brainwashing or oppression.

My family is from Afghanistan. The women in my family do not need secular liberal feminists to explain to them what female suffering looks like. They have lived through war, instability, displacement, violence, and the realities of patriarchal societies firsthand.

My grandmother, in particular, has seen more hardship than many people discussing these issues online could even conceptualise. She knows what it means for women to lack safety, freedom, and opportunity.

But what matters is that she never interpreted the suffering inflicted by men, war, and political instability as evidence that God was the oppressor.

If anything, her relationship with faith deepened after leaving those conditions behind.

She wears hijab. She still prays. She still holds deep faith in God. At the same time, she has spent her life insisting that her granddaughters receive educations, are treated with dignity, develop independence, and never have to endure the violence and instability she lived through.

And this is precisely the kind of woman Sonia Albert’s framework struggles to explain.

Because if religion is merely patriarchal conditioning, then how do we account for women who have experienced genuine suffering, left oppressive environments, encountered secular alternatives, and still consciously maintain faith?

At what point do religious women become intellectually credible enough to speak for themselves?

This is ultimately what unsettles me about arguments like Albert’s. Religious women are granted no interpretive authority over their own lives. If they reject religion, they are viewed as enlightened. If they remain religious, their faith itself becomes evidence of brainwashing.

Their disagreement is pathologized in advance.

And that is not intellectual openness. It is ideological certainty masquerading as liberation.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

One thing about me is that I live in my head far more than I should. To the point where it exhausts me sometimes. A single pause in someone’s text message, a slight shift in tone, a shorter reply than usual, and suddenly my mind is building entire narratives out of fragments. I can make something out of nothing so quickly that even I struggle to keep up with it.

And the frustrating part is, I actually do love myself.

Not in an arrogant way, not in a performative “self-love” way, but in a genuine, quiet way. I like the person I am. I love how deeply I feel things. I love how passionate I get, how nerdy I can be, how ambitious and driven I am. I love that I care intensely about people and ideas, and meaning. I love that there are still parts of me that remain tender despite everything life does to harden people over time. I love my faith, and how no matter what happens, I still carry it with me through everything.

So why is it that I can believe I am loveable, yet still struggle to feel loveable?

That is the part that confuses me.

Because logically, I know people love me. The people in my life continue to choose me. They show up for me. They stay beside me through different seasons of my life when they could easily leave. Nobody is forcing them to care about me. Nobody is obligated to continue answering my calls, replying to my messages, making time for me, remembering things about me, or standing beside me through different versions of myself.

And yet there is still this voice in me constantly preparing for abandonment before it even exists.

“They’re getting tired of you.”
“You’re too much.”
“You’re not enough.”
“They’re going to leave eventually.”
“They just haven’t figured out how yet.”

And the scariest part is how convincing those thoughts can sound, even when reality says otherwise.

I think what makes this feeling so difficult to explain is that it exists as a contradiction.

Because I do love myself.

I can sit here and list the things I like about who I am. I know I am caring. I know I am thoughtful. I know I am loyal, passionate, driven, and emotionally intelligent. On paper, I can completely understand why somebody would love me.

But emotionally, I still struggle to feel lovable.

And maybe those are two entirely different things.

Because being loveable as a concept is easy for me to understand. Other people are loveable to me so effortlessly. Human beings are inherently complex and flawed and emotional, and I have never struggled to understand why others deserve love despite those things.

Yet when it comes to myself, there is still this underlying feeling that eventually people will realise I am too much, or not enough, or simply too difficult to hold onto long term.

It is strange to simultaneously think highly of yourself while also feeling deeply unsure that people could truly stay once they know you fully.

I think people misunderstand feelings like this. They assume insecurity must always come from self-hatred or low self-worth. As though struggling to feel loved automatically means you dislike yourself. But I do not think that is always true.

Sometimes the issue is not that you think you are worthless.

Sometimes the issue is that you do not fully trust the love itself.

Because after enough disappointments, enough moments where people change unexpectedly, pull away, become distant, or leave entirely, your mind starts approaching connection cautiously. You begin bracing for loss before anything has even gone wrong. Not because you want to distrust people, but because some part of you becomes convinced that if you expect abandonment first, maybe it will hurt less when it comes.

So you become hyperaware.

You notice every change in tone.
Every slight difference in wording.
Every unanswered message.
Every pause.
Every energy shift.

You become someone constantly trying to predict whether love is slipping away before it actually does.

And what makes it worse is that another part of you knows how irrational it sounds while it is happening.

I know people have lives outside of me. I know stress changes people’s energy. I know not every silence means rejection. I know love is not supposed to require constant proof to be real.

But emotions are rarely logical things.

And maybe that is the hardest part about being self-aware. You can recognise the spiral while still drowning in it. You can know your fears are irrational while still physically feeling them in your chest. You can talk yourself through every logical explanation possible and still feel your mind reaching for the worst one instead.

Sometimes I think people assume insecurity always looks loud. It always looks like somebody is fishing for compliments or constantly needing validation. But sometimes it looks incredibly quiet. Sometimes it looks like convincing yourself not to ask for reassurance because you are terrified of becoming burdensome. Sometimes it looks like swallowing your fears whole so nobody else has to carry them for you. Sometimes it looks like overanalysing tiny interactions in private while acting completely normal on the surface.

And honestly, it is exhausting.

It is exhausting to know someone loves you while simultaneously fearing they will wake up one day and realise you are too difficult to keep.
It is exhausting to constantly question whether your emotions, your personality, your intensity, and your needs are becoming too heavy for the people around you.
It is exhausting to crave closeness while simultaneously distrusting it.

I think that is the strangest part of all of this: I do not fear love itself. I fear its impermanence.

Maybe healing is not learning how to love myself more. Maybe I already do.

Perhaps healing means learning to appreciate that not every good thing in my life is already on its way out the door.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari.

And yet, what feels most unsettling is not just the existence of this suffering, but the level of indifference that surrounds it.

People know, at least to some degree, that these things are happening. Information is more accessible than it has ever been. It takes minutes, not hours, to understand the basics of a conflict, a crisis, or a policy. And still, there is a widespread reluctance to engage. Not a lack of access, but a lack of willingness.

Instead, engagement seems to operate on a sliding scale of personal impact. When something directly affects people, suddenly, there is outrage. Suddenly, there are conversations, opinions, and urgency. Rising living costs, fuel prices, and financial strain are the moments when people say, “Now I care. Now I’m paying attention.”

And it is hard not to feel frustrated by that.

Where was that same energy when the issue was human lives? Where was that urgency when people were being displaced, when violence was escalating, when entire communities were being reduced to statistics? Why does it take personal inconvenience for something to feel real enough to care about?

It is not that economic issues do not matter. They do. But the inconsistency in what provokes outrage reveals something deeper. For many, politics is not something inherently important; it is something that becomes important only when it becomes personal.

That mindset is part of the problem.

“I’m not really into politics” is often said casually, as if politics is a niche interest, like sport or entertainment. But politics is not optional. It is the structure that determines whose lives are protected and whose are neglected. It dictates access to safety, resources, and basic rights. Choosing not to engage with it does not remove someone from its effects; it just removes their awareness of them.

And that choice has consequences.

Because disengagement does not exist in a vacuum. When people opt out of learning, questioning, or even paying minimal attention, they leave space for misinformation to spread unchecked. They allow harmful narratives to go unchallenged. They contribute, even if unintentionally, to an environment where injustice can continue with less resistance.

Ignorance is not neutral. It is enabling.

And this is where the frustration becomes more personal. It is difficult to maintain patience with people who have the capacity to learn, to listen, to care, and simply choose not to. Not because they are overwhelmed, not because they lack access, but because it is easier not to engage.

There is a difference between not knowing and not wanting to know.

No one is expecting perfection. No one is expecting encyclopaedic knowledge of every global issue. But there is a baseline level of awareness and effort that should not feel unreasonable. Taking the time to understand even the basics, to question sources, to listen to perspectives beyond one’s own, this is not an extreme expectation. It is the minimum required to participate meaningfully in the world we are all part of.

And it matters more than people think.

Because knowledge does not just stay contained within an individual. It shapes conversations. It influences how people talk about issues, how they interpret events, and how they respond to others. A single informed person can challenge misinformation in a room full of people who might otherwise accept it. A single conversation can shift how someone understands an issue.

That is not insignificant.

What is insignificant is choosing to remain uninformed while still benefiting from systems that affect others far more severely.

This is how harmful ideologies gain traction. Not always through loud, explicit support, but through quiet, widespread disengagement. When people are not paying attention, it becomes easier for simplified, often dangerous narratives to take hold. Figures like Donald Trump do not rise in isolation. They are enabled by environments where critical thinking is inconsistent, where misinformation is not challenged, and where too many people have decided that staying informed is not worth the effort.

At the same time, there is an important distinction to make. There is a difference between disengagement and emotional limitation. The reality is that constant exposure to global suffering can be overwhelming. People are not built to carry the weight of every crisis at once, and there is nothing wrong with setting boundaries to protect mental well-being.

But that is not what this is about.

This is about selective care. About choosing when to engage based on personal convenience. About deciding that something only matters when it disrupts your own life. That is not self-preservation; that is avoidance.

And avoidance has consequences.

Because the world does not pause when people look away. Injustice does not lessen because it is ignored. The only thing that changes is the level of accountability.

So yes, there is frustration. There is anger. And maybe there should be.

Not the kind of anger that is impulsive or performative, but the kind that pushes people to think, to question, to engage more critically with the world around them. Anger, when grounded in understanding, is not a weakness. It is often a response to recognising that something is fundamentally wrong.

The issue is not that people are not angry enough in general. It is that their anger is often misdirected, delayed, or conditional.

So be angry. But be consistent about it.

Be informed. Even if it is uncomfortable.

Pay attention. Even when it does not directly affect you.

Because the measure of awareness should not be whether something impacts you personally. It should be whether it is happening at all.

And right now, too much is happening for indifference to be an acceptable response.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love (and rage), always.

Ari <3

In my life, I am the person people come to with questions or doubts about faith. I have had to teach myself my religion, engaging with it through both theological and academic research, as well as personal reflection. Over time, that has positioned me as someone who is expected to have answers, or at least a sense of clarity.

But there is one question I can never quite answer. What did I do when I doubted Allah’s existence?

I don’t have an answer, because I never have.

I am not entirely sure why I have never experienced that kind of doubt. You would assume that growing up around two different religious traditions would have led me to question things more deeply, to feel pulled in different directions, or to hesitate in choosing what I believe. But for me, there was never really a moment when I questioned whether Allah was real, or whether His word was true.

That absence of doubt is something I have become more aware of over time. Not as something I take pride in, but as something I try to understand. Because when people come to me struggling, when they are questioning everything, I realise that I cannot draw from lived experience in the same way. I can offer knowledge, reasoning, and reassurance, but I cannot say I have been where you are.

That does not mean my faith has been effortless. I have struggled to understand certain concepts, rulings, and elements. There have been moments where things felt difficult to reconcile, where I have sat with questions longer than I would have liked. But when I reach the limits of my understanding, I find comfort in the idea that perhaps I am not meant to understand everything, and that it is okay if only Allah knows the true purpose of some things.

There is a kind of humility in that realisation. It forces me to acknowledge that my ability to understand is limited, and that faith is not always about reaching an answer, but about knowing when to stop searching for one.

I like to think I am strong in my faith. I am far from a perfect Muslim, and I have so much to work on. Sometimes that growth feels slow, sometimes it feels still, and sometimes it comes quickly, almost all at once. There are moments where I feel deeply connected, and others where that connection feels quieter, less visible, but still present.

But I am always striving. The intention is always there, and for the most part, it is followed by action. And when it is not, that gap itself becomes something I am aware of, something I try to close.

I am not saying this to present myself as someone who has never struggled, but rather to reflect on my experience so that I can better guide those around me who do struggle with doubt. Because I think there is a difference between struggling within faith and struggling to have faith at all.

Maybe the reason I have never doubted Allah is that I searched for Him. Not in a passive way, but in a deliberate and ongoing way. When you genuinely research Islam, when you engage with it deeply, both intellectually and spiritually, it becomes difficult to deny. The more I learned, the more things began to align.

And as someone who did not grow up in an environment where these beliefs were strongly imposed, but instead arrived at them independently, that search feels significant. It does not feel like something I simply inherited. It feels like something I recognised.

There is still so much left for me to learn. I will spend my life seeking knowledge, knowing that I will never reach a point of complete understanding. But even within that, I find myself asking, how could I deny Allah, when so many points back to Him?

When I need to feel close to Him, I look at the sky, the people around me, the intricacy of nature, the way everything exists with a kind of order and purpose. There is a sense of intentionality in the world that feels difficult to attribute to anything other than the divine.

This reflection is not exclusive to Islam. It can be applied to any belief in a higher power. But for me, Islam is right. Islam is home. It calls to me the way a siren calls to a sailor, something deeply felt, something that pulls you in without needing to be explained.

I think the distinction comes down to trust. Not blind acceptance, but a kind of grounded trust that is built over time. It is the point where I have genuinely tried to understand something, where I have questioned it, reflected on it, and engaged with it sincerely, yet an answer still remains out of reach.

In those moments, acceptance is not about shutting down thought, but about recognising my own limits. It is an understanding that my perspective is finite, while Allah’s knowledge is not. That space is not fixed either. It shifts depending on what I am facing and how much I am willing to sit with uncertainty.

There is also a level of emotional discipline in that acceptance. It requires resisting the urge to resolve everything immediately, to sit with discomfort without turning it into doubt.

I have found that acceptance, in this sense, is not passive. It is an active decision to trust, even when clarity is not given.

I think the reason I am so comfortable without having all the answers comes from what I have experienced in my own life. In a way, my faith operates similarly to the principles of CBT. When dealing with anxiety, CBT teaches you to look at evidence, to step back from overthinking and recognise when your mind is catastrophising.

My faith developed in a similar way. I began to look at the evidence in my own life, the way things unfolded, even when they did not align with what I had prayed for. The missed opportunities, the hardships, the delays, the moments that felt unfair at the time.

Over time, I came to see a pattern. Things worked out in ways that were ultimately better for me, even when I could not see it in the moment. Situations I once resisted became the very things that protected me. Outcomes I did not want led me somewhere I needed to be.

That pattern became its own form of evidence.

It made it easier to trust Allah beyond my own understanding. Because I was no longer relying on abstract belief alone, but on something I had observed repeatedly in my own life.

As someone who struggles with anxiety and overthinking, faith often becomes the thing that grounds me. It allows me to sit with uncertainty, knowing that even if something painful happens, it exists within a greater plan.

There is a certain kind of peace in that. Not because everything is easy, but because everything feels held.

And if I continue to follow His guidance to the best of my ability, I trust that what unfolds will be what is best for me, even if it does not feel that way at first.

One of the unexpected beauties of my journey with Islam, having to teach myself, is that I do not just have theoretical knowledge, but lived experience. I have wrestled with many of the same questions that others ask, even if not in the form of doubting Allah’s existence.

And now, I find myself in a position where I can begin to bridge the gap between psychology and faith, between understanding the mind and understanding belief. To see how patterns of thought, emotion, and behaviour intersect with something that is often framed as purely spiritual.

I am still learning. I always will be.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

What grounded this for me was something I learnt while overcoming my anxiety. I had to learn to separate my thoughts from reality, to stop treating every anxious thought as truth. Instead, I learnt to look at evidence. What is actually happening, not what I fear might happen. That shift changed everything for me. And over time, I began to realise how deeply this aligns with tawakkul. Because when I look at the evidence of my life honestly, I can see that Allah has always been there. That even in moments where I felt alone, there were outcomes I could not have planned that carried goodness for me. That what I once saw as loss was sometimes protection, and what I saw as delay was sometimes mercy.

There is a reminder in the Qur’an that we may dislike something that is good for us, and love something that is not. That has always stayed with me because it grounds me in the reality that my perspective is limited. I only see moments, while Allah sees the full picture. So when something hurts or does not make sense, I try to remind myself that my understanding is incomplete, and that there is wisdom in it, even if I cannot yet see it.

When I reflect on the hardest moments in my life, I no longer just see pain. I see formation. I see how Allah was shaping me through them. There is a difference between simply going through something and being transformed by it. And I can say, sincerely, that I like who I have become. I see more patience in myself, more empathy, more strength, more awareness of others. My iman feels more anchored, not because my life has been easy, but because I have seen what it means to rely on Allah when things are not.

The promise that “with hardship comes ease” is something I return to constantly. Not just as comfort, but as something I actively hold onto. Because Allah does not say after hardship comes ease, but with it. Meaning that even within difficulty, there are forms of ease present, even if they are subtle. Sometimes it is in the people He places around you. Sometimes it is in the strength you did not know you had. Sometimes it is in the way your heart turns back to Him more sincerely than it ever has before.

But recently, I came across an understanding that deepened this even more for me. That the ease that comes from hardship is not always something we receive in a direct or obvious way. That sometimes, the outcome of our tests is that we become a source of ease for others.

And that changed the way I see my own experiences.

Because when I think about the things I have gone through, I can see how they have shaped the way I show up for people. I listen differently. I understand without needing everything explained. I recognise emotions that are not spoken out loud. There is a kind of softness and attentiveness that only comes from having struggled in your own way. And in that sense, the test was never just about me. It was about what Allah was cultivating within me for the sake of others as well.

This is where I think intention becomes so important. Because hardship can harden you, or it can soften you. It can make you withdraw, or it can make you more present. And I think choosing to let it soften you, for the sake of Allah, is part of passing the test. To take what you have been through and use it in a way that benefits others, even if it is something as simple as being able to sit with someone in their pain.

When I look at my life now, I can see clearly how my hardships shaped my direction. They are what drew me to psychology. They are what gave me a deep care for children and young people, especially those who feel unseen or misunderstood. They gave me a sense of purpose that is rooted not just in ambition, but in sincerity. In wanting to be of benefit.

And that, to me, feels like a different kind of ease. Not the absence of hardship, but the presence of meaning.

I also think that seeing life as a test reframes success and failure entirely. Success is no longer just about outcomes, but about how you respond. About your sabr, your trust, your intentions. And failure is not simply falling short in worldly terms, but losing sight of Allah within what you are going through. It makes everything feel more intentional, more connected.

And maybe that is why, despite everything, my faith has always felt unwavering. Not because my life has been perfect, but because I have seen, again and again, that Allah is consistent. That He does not burden a soul beyond what it can bear. That every hardship carries something within it, even if it takes time to uncover.

So I keep returning to that same conclusion. That this life is a test. But not in a way that is meant to break us. In a way that is meant to shape us, to return us, to refine us.

And maybe the ease we are promised is not always in what we receive, but in who we become, and in the quiet ways we are able to ease the lives of others because of what we have endured.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

Because if something feels natural, it becomes much harder to question who benefits from it.

The cosmetic industry does not simply profit from insecurity. It requires it. More than that, it actively participates in its production, circulation and stabilisation. This is where capitalism becomes central. These industries are not designed to resolve dissatisfaction. They are structured to sustain it at a productive level. Productive in the sense that it generates ongoing consumption, repeat engagement, and long-term investment in the self as a project.

In this context, the body is no longer something one simply inhabits. It becomes a site of labour. Not in the traditional economic sense, but in the sense of continuous work, monitoring and optimisation. Neoliberal frameworks place responsibility on the individual to manage and improve themselves, and appearance becomes one of the most visible domains through which this responsibility is enacted. To look “put together” is not just aesthetic. It signals discipline, control and worth.

This is why the language surrounding cosmetic intervention has shifted so significantly. Botox is framed as preventative, filler as refinement, and surgery as a form of self-actualisation. These framings depoliticise the practice. They remove it from its structural context and reposition it as a neutral, individual choice. But this obscures the conditions under which those choices are made.

Because choices do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by cultural norms, economic incentives and systems of reward and recognition.

We live within what can be understood as a regime of visibility, where appearance is constantly assessed, circulated and validated. Social media intensifies this by creating an environment of perpetual exposure. Faces are no longer private. They are public, repeatable and subject to algorithmic evaluation. Certain features are consistently amplified, while others are rendered less visible. Over time, this produces a narrow and highly standardised aesthetic.

Filler is especially revealing here because it is so often marketed as subtle. It is presented not as a transformation, but as balance, harmony, refinement. Yet what is being called balance is rarely neutral. It usually refers to proximity to a highly specific set of aesthetic preferences: fuller lips, higher cheekbones, sharper jawlines, smoother skin, fewer visible signs of fatigue or age. These features are treated as if they are universal markers of beauty, when in reality they reflect a socially produced ideal that has been circulated so relentlessly it begins to appear objective.

What makes filler particularly powerful within this system is that it blurs the line between enhancement and conformity. Women are told they are simply bringing out their features, restoring volume, or looking fresher. But beneath this language is a more disciplinary message: that the face should be brought closer to what is currently recognisable as desirable. In this sense, filler does not just alter appearance. It standardises it. It encourages women to mould their faces toward a template that is repeatedly rewarded across digital culture, celebrity culture and everyday social interaction.

Lip filler is perhaps the clearest example of how this standardisation operates in practice. It is often framed as one of the most accessible, low-commitment procedures, something almost casual. A small tweak, a subtle enhancement. Yet the outcome it moves towards is remarkably consistent. Across different faces, backgrounds and natural features, the end result begins to converge. The same volume, the same projection, the same rounded shape. What is presented as personal choice starts to produce a collective sameness.

This is where the language of individuality becomes strained. Because while each decision is made at the level of the individual, the aesthetic being pursued is shared. Lips are not being shaped in isolation. They are being shaped in reference to an already circulating ideal, one that has been stabilised through influencers, celebrities and algorithmically amplified images. The result is that faces begin to echo one another. Not identically, but recognisably.

In this sense, lip filler does not just add volume. It participates in a quiet erosion of difference. Features that once marked individuality, the slight asymmetry, the thinner upper lip, the particular proportions that made a face distinct, are gradually smoothed into alignment with a dominant template. What is lost is not always obvious at first. It is subtle. But over time, the range of what is seen as acceptable or attractive narrows.

The paradox is that this is happening under the banner of self-expression. Women are told they are enhancing what they already have, becoming more confident, more themselves. Yet the version of the self that is being produced is one that has been heavily mediated by external standards. The “best version” begins to look strikingly similar across different individuals.

The pressure this creates is not always dramatic or explicit. More often, it operates through a quiet but persistent awareness that the standard is always moving. What is considered desirable is never fixed. Lips that were once considered full enough become thin in comparison to a new ideal. Cheekbones are lifted higher. Skin becomes smoother, tighter, more reflective. Even the “natural” look is recalibrated, requiring increasing levels of intervention to achieve something that still reads as effortless.

This constant movement is central to how the system sustains itself. A stable beauty standard would allow for completion. A shifting one ensures that there is always more to be done. The goalpost does not just exist in the distance. It is actively being moved.

Filler plays a key role in enabling this adaptability. Unlike more permanent procedures, it is temporary, adjustable and responsive to trends. This makes the face itself subject to cycles of modification, where what is considered an improvement one year may be dissolved and redone the next. The body becomes not only a site of labour, but a site of ongoing revision, shaped in accordance with emerging aesthetic norms.

This produces a particular kind of anxiety. Not simply about not meeting the standard, but about falling behind it. There is an implicit expectation that women remain current, that they are aware of what is in and what is no longer desirable. Beauty becomes temporal. It requires not just conformity, but constant updating.

Within this framework, opting out is not experienced as neutral. It can be read as neglect, as a lack of effort, or as a failure to keep up. This is where the pressure intensifies. It is no longer just about wanting to look a certain way, but about avoiding the social and cultural penalties attached to not participating.

Importantly, this aesthetic is not simply observed. It is internalised.

Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power is useful here, not as abstract theory, but as a way of understanding how control operates without coercion. Individuals come to regulate themselves according to dominant norms. The gaze is no longer external. It is internal. Women learn to look at themselves as if from the outside, assessing, correcting and anticipating judgment before it is even expressed.

The mirror is no longer just a mirror. It becomes a site of surveillance.

Social media extends this further through what could be described as a form of hyperreality. The faces that circulate are not unmediated representations of real bodies. They are constructed through filters, editing, lighting and increasingly, cosmetic procedures. Yet they are consumed as if they are natural. This creates a distorted baseline against which real faces are measured.

The gap between the self and the ideal is therefore not accidental. It is produced.

And this gap is economically valuable.

Capitalism thrives not on fulfilment, but on the maintenance of desire. If the ideal were attainable, consumption would end. Instead, the ideal is continuously deferred. It shifts just enough to remain within reach, but never fully accessible. Each intervention promises proximity, not arrival.

This logic is particularly visible in the reframing of ageing. Ageing, once understood as a natural temporal process, is now constructed as a problem requiring intervention. The rise of preventative Botox illustrates this shift. Women are encouraged to act before visible signs of ageing appear, positioning time itself as something to be managed.

This is not simply about aesthetics. It reflects a deeper discomfort with women ageing visibly at all.

There is a clear gendered dimension to this. Men are often permitted to age into authority, into distinction. Their ageing can signify experience. Women, by contrast, are encouraged to remain static. To resist change. To maintain a version of themselves that aligns with youth for as long as possible. Ageing becomes not just undesirable, but a failure of upkeep.

From a political economy perspective, this creates an ongoing market. Anti-aging products, treatments and procedures are not one-off purchases. They are part of a continuous cycle. Maintenance replaces completion. The body becomes a long-term investment strategy.

Botox sits at the centre of this in a way that is both material and symbolic. It works by limiting facial movement, reducing the appearance of wrinkles by restricting expression. Often described casually as “face freezing”, it points to something that extends beyond surface-level appearance.

This convergence is not coincidental. It reflects a broader disciplining of the self, where both how one looks and how one feels are subject to norms of control and optimisation.

The beauty industry more broadly reinforces this logic across multiple levels. Skincare identifies imperfections. Makeup corrects them. Cosmetic procedures refine them further. Each layer builds upon the previous one, creating a continuum of intervention. Importantly, each step also reinforces the idea that the natural state of the face is insufficient.

Makeup, often positioned as creative and expressive, also participates in this process. Techniques such as contouring, concealing and reshaping do not just enhance. They train the eye to identify deviation from the ideal. The face becomes fragmented into zones of correction. Over time, this produces a particular mode of self-perception, one that is analytical, critical and oriented towards improvement.

Within a capitalist framework, this mode of perception is highly functional. It generates demand.

What makes this system particularly effective is that it is rarely experienced as imposed. It is experienced as chosen. Women book the appointments, purchase the products and engage in the practices themselves. This creates the appearance of autonomy.

However, autonomy within a structured system is not absolute. It is shaped.

Neoliberal ideology emphasises individual responsibility, positioning self-improvement as a personal obligation. This obscures the structural pressures that make certain forms of self-improvement feel necessary. When beauty operates as a form of social and economic capital, participation is incentivised. Conformity yields rewards. Deviation carries consequences, even if they are subtle.

In this sense, the choice to engage in cosmetic practices cannot be fully separated from the conditions that make those practices desirable.

Two things can be true at once. A decision can feel empowering at the individual level, while still being produced within a system that benefits from ongoing dissatisfaction.

This duality is often flattened in mainstream discourse. Either women are framed as victims of beauty standards, or as fully autonomous agents. Neither account fully captures the complexity of the situation. What is required is an analysis that holds both individual experience and structural context together.

Because the system itself is highly coordinated.

Social media produces and circulates the ideal. The beauty industry commodifies it. Cosmetic medicine materialises it. These sectors operate in a mutually reinforcing loop, each legitimising and sustaining the others. The result is a highly stable system, one that continuously regenerates both the standard and the desire to meet it.

And crucially, it does so without needing to explicitly demand compliance.

The pressure becomes internal. Self-surveillance replaces external enforcement. Women come to monitor, assess and correct themselves in anticipation of a gaze that is always already present.

There is something deeply effective about a system that operates in this way. It does not need to tell women they are not enough. It simply creates the conditions in which that feeling emerges on its own.

And once it does, the solution is already available for purchase.

There is something quietly radical in interrupting that cycle. In questioning why ageing has been framed as something to resist. In allowing the face to move, to change, to reflect time and experience. In recognising that not every perceived flaw requires correction.

Not because beauty or self-care are inherently problematic, but because the current system has made them conditional. Conditional on spending, on maintenance, and on alignment with a standard that is continuously shifting.

Because if that standard were ever fully attainable, the system would cease to function.

So instead, it moves. And women are expected to move with it.

And the most important thing to recognise is that this movement is not natural. It is structured, incentivised and sustained by a system that depends on it.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

Within the online world, I have noticed an influx of videos repeating the same message. “You are young, go out.” “You are only young and hot once.” “Live your life to the fullest.”

And in a way, they are right. We only live this life once.

But I keep coming back to the same question. When did “living life to the fullest” become so narrowly defined?

It now seems to be synonymous with partying, drinking, being reckless, and constantly chasing stimulation. There is this quiet but persistent fear being pushed onto young people that if we do not participate in these things, we will grow older filled with regret. That we will have somehow missed life.

But is that really true, or are we being taught to fear the wrong kind of regret?

I think we are being taught the wrong kind of regret.

Because the regret people speak about online is surface level. It is about missing out on moments that are loud, visible, and easy to romanticise. But the deeper regret, the kind that sits with people at the end of their lives, is not about how many nights they went out. It is about how they treated people, what they prioritised, and what they neglected.

I know this perspective is shaped by my faith. When I think about the idea that we only live once, I do not feel urgency to be louder, wilder, or more reckless. I feel the opposite.

I think about slowing down. I think about being present. I think about showing gratitude for what I have been given. I think about loving more, and loving properly. Because a full life is not just about how much you do, but about how much meaning you find in what you do.

I was visiting my grandfather today, who has Alzheimer’s. He does not remember who I am, and some days he does not even remember his own name.

I was sitting beside him while he was falling asleep, quietly reciting the Shahada to him, as I always do before leaving, just in case. I know he is not necessarily at the very end, but with a condition like this, you never really know. He cannot say it himself anymore, so I say it quietly each time I leave, just in case. Not because I think that moment has come, but because I would rather say it for him than wish I had.

In that moment, I found myself thinking about regret. If he could speak clearly about his life, what would he say he wished he had done differently?

Not once did I think he would say he wished he partied more. Not once did I think he would say he should have gone out more, or drunk more, or chased more distractions.

What I know he would say is that he fears death, and he fears Allah. He would wish that he had spent more time with his family, more time with the people he loved, more time doing what actually mattered.

My grandfather was not someone who never drank or never partied. He lived that life, and continued drinking for much of it. But at the end, those things do not seem to hold weight.

Because no matter how much a person has sinned, as Muslims, there is still that awareness of Allah at the end. Even if faith was not always strong, it was always there.

So why does society scare young people in this way?

Because these behaviours are normalised to the point where they are seen as milestones. Drinking is framed as fun. Partying is framed as freedom. Hookup culture is framed as confidence. And when something is repeated enough, it begins to feel like truth.

But I have seen first hand that this version of “fun” is often just temporary escape.

The gratification from drinking and partying is not real fulfilment. It is short lived. It fades the next morning, sometimes replaced with emptiness, regret, or even shame. Over time, what starts as occasional fun can turn into something else entirely. It can become dependence, poor decisions, broken relationships, and a loss of direction.

I have seen how these things can slowly ruin people. Not always in obvious ways, but in quiet ones. In the way their priorities shift. In the way their self respect lowers. In the way they begin to rely on distraction instead of actually facing their lives.

So when I am told that I am missing out, I question what exactly I am missing.

If “living fully” means participating in things that harm me, distance me from my faith, and pull me away from the kind of person I want to be, then maybe it is not something worth chasing.

There is a pressure, especially in the West, to conform to this version of youth. To believe that if you are 21 and not participating in these things, then you are somehow behind, or wasting your life.

But I do not believe that.

I only live once, and because of that, I want my life to mean something.

I want to make positive change, even if it is small. I want to live by the word of Allah to the best of my ability. I want to love, and love, and love again. I want to forgive. I want to grow. I want to build a family and be present within it.

I want a life that feels full, not just busy.

Because while we only live once in this world, this life is not all that there is. As Muslims, we believe in what comes after. We believe that this life is temporary and that it is a test.

Allah has given us guidance on how to live well, and there are reasons certain things are prohibited. They are not restrictions meant to limit us, but protections meant to preserve us.

So I find it frustrating to be told that because I choose not to engage in these things, I am not living to my fullest potential.

To me, living fully is not about doing everything. It is about doing what matters.

I am educating myself. I am loving all that I can. I am trying to forgive. I am trying to strengthen my Deen and my relationship with Allah.

Is that not living life to the fullest?

To me, it is.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

I have written before about being mixed and about my faith and mixed background in articles such as Confessions of a Mixed Kid and She Who Seeks. In those pieces I mainly focused on the positive aspects of growing up in a mixed household and how that experience shaped who I am today. Having parents from different religious backgrounds exposed me to different traditions, ways of thinking and perspectives on belief. In many ways it encouraged me to reflect on faith rather than simply inherit it. I would not change who I am or the experiences that have shaped my faith and personality.

However, there is another side to that experience that I have not written about as openly. While I appreciate many aspects of my upbringing, growing up in an interfaith household that was not particularly practising has also influenced a personal decision I have come to later in life. It has made me realise that I would not want to marry outside of my faith.

Islamically, a Muslim woman cannot marry someone outside of Islam. Despite this, we increasingly see interfaith relationships involving Muslim women, particularly in Western contexts where people from different religious and cultural backgrounds interact more frequently. Because of this, I am often asked by friends or acquaintances who are in interfaith relationships how they should navigate them. Most of the time they are looking for reassurance that these relationships can work, and in many cases I am sure that they can. Every relationship is different and many couples successfully manage religious differences.

Nonetheless, when people ask whether it is something I would personally recommend based on my own experience growing up in an interfaith household, my answer is no.

It is important to say that not all interfaith households are the same. Families have different dynamics, different levels of religious commitment and different approaches to belief. My experience is only one experience and it should not be taken as representative of every interfaith family.

For those who are new here, I am Muslim. My father is Muslim and my mother is Anglican Christian. However, neither of them are particularly strong in their religious practice. The belief is there and religious holidays are acknowledged, but faith was never something that structured everyday life in our home. Religion existed more in the background rather than as a central part of family life.

My siblings and I were raised learning about both faiths and traditions and we were given the freedom to choose what we believed. I genuinely appreciate that aspect of my upbringing. Being exposed to both Islam and Christianity gave me a broader foundation and helped me understand the shared history of the Abrahamic traditions. In some ways it made my eventual commitment to Islam more deliberate because it was something I consciously chose rather than something that simply happened by default.

My siblings are also younger than me and are not particularly practising. Because of that, religion has never really been something that shapes the atmosphere of our home in a strong or collective way.

Even within such a relaxed household, however, I have still noticed that religion can carry quiet emotional weight. My mother, who is not particularly practising in her Christianity, sometimes shows a subtle sense of sadness that all three of her children identify as Muslim. It is never expressed in a dramatic or confrontational way, but it appears in small moments. There is a sense that something important to her identity has not quite continued through the next generation.

Seeing this made me realise something important. If even someone who is only loosely connected to their faith can still feel a degree of disappointment when their children follow a different path, it suggests that religion often operates on a deeper level than daily practice alone. Faith can be tied to identity, heritage and a sense of continuity across generations. When those expectations shift, even slightly, it can create quiet tensions.

Another aspect of growing up in an interfaith household is that practising religion can sometimes feel isolating. I often tell people that I feel almost like a revert despite technically being born into a Muslim family. My experience of practising Islam has often felt individual rather than communal within my own home.

Ramadan, for example, is something that is experienced on my own. I fasted alone and broke my fast alone. When I pray, there is sometimes a slight sense of awkwardness about someone walking in on me praying, as if I am doing something private that might be misunderstood or treated lightly, prayer is also something I had to teach myself, and still at times struggle with as my praying is far from perfect. When religion comes up in conversation or when I try to encourage faith related practices, the response is often humour or light teasing rather than genuine engagement. It is rarely hostile, but it can sometimes feel dismissive.

Over time this has created a sense that faith is something personal and separate rather than something shared within the household. It is not something that structures the rhythm of family life or something that is collectively encouraged.

This experience has shaped the kind of household I hope to create one day. More than anything, it has made me realise that I want a home where faith is shared rather than practised alone. I imagine a household where Ramadan is something we experience together, where fasting and prayer form part of the natural rhythm of family life, and where religion is treated with sincerity rather than humour or indifference.

That does not mean religion should be forced or imposed. Faith cannot be meaningful if it is purely compulsory. However, there is a difference between coercion and encouragement. A household can nurture belief without pressuring it and can create an environment where religion is respected rather than quietly side-lined.

Growing up between faiths gave me valuable perspective and shaped my understanding of religion in ways that I appreciate. At the same time, it also showed me how isolating belief can feel when it is not shared within the home. It is not resentment that led me to my decision, but clarity.

This feeling has also extended into other parts of my faith journey, particularly with hijab. I have been trying to wear it occasionally, slowly building familiarity and comfort with it in the hope that one day soon I will fully commit. But even this has felt strangely private. It is not something I feel comfortable doing openly at home, so I usually put it on once I am already in the car before going somewhere. I often see videos online of people surprising their families by deciding to wear hijab and being met with excitement, hugs and encouragement. Watching those moments always stirs a strange feeling in me. Of course there can also be pressure in those situations, where the expectations of others might make it difficult to take it off later if someone is not ready. But there is also something beautiful about that support. Seeing families celebrate such a decision shows how powerful encouragement can be in someone’s faith journey. At times I wish I had that kind of environment around me. I also do not really have Muslim friends, so the sense of encouragement and shared understanding that often helps people through these milestones has been largely absent for me.

At the same time, I have come to see these experiences differently as I have grown in my faith. In Islam we are reminded that with hardship comes ease, and that challenges can sometimes be tests that shape our relationship with Allah ﷻ. Growing up in an environment where faith was not strongly shared has meant that many parts of my religious journey have been deeply personal. It has required me to choose Islam consciously and practise it even when it felt solitary. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether this was a test from Allah ﷻ that strengthened my conviction rather than weakening it. My faith has never felt fragile or uncertain. I have never questioned whether Allah ﷻ is real or whether my belief is justified. If anything, practising in a space where faith was not the norm made that belief feel even more deliberate and unwavering. And at the end of the day, I remember I am never truly alone, for Allah ﷻ is always with me.

One day, when I build my own family, I hope faith will be something we practise together. I hope Ramadan will mean waking up for suhoor in the same kitchen, praying in the same home and breaking fast at the same table. I hope belief will feel like something that belongs naturally to the rhythm of everyday life.

And perhaps it is growing up between two faiths that made me realise how deeply I want that unity.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

One of the most illustrative examples of this dynamic is Afghanistan. Following the United States led invasion in 2001, the international coalition initiated an extensive state building project intended to construct democratic institutions after the collapse of the Taliban government. Significant financial, military and political resources were invested in building a centralised Afghan government, training security forces and developing administrative infrastructure. In theory, this process was intended to cultivate a stable democratic state capable of governing independently and resisting insurgent groups. In principle, such external support could have helped create the foundations for independent governance.

However, the institutional structures that emerged were deeply embedded within a framework of Western military and financial support. Afghan political institutions were developed in a context where external assistance was assumed to be continuous. As a result, the Afghan state became structurally reliant on foreign military protection, international funding and logistical infrastructure. Scholars of state building frequently note that institutions created under these conditions often struggle to develop the autonomy necessary for long term political stability (Fukuyama 2004; Paris and Sisk 2009). Rather than enabling domestic political actors to consolidate authority and legitimacy, the external presence frequently displaced these processes. This does not mean that any external assistance is inherently damaging. Instead, it suggests that the particular model of United States dominated intervention in Afghanistan produced a state that was highly dependent and therefore vulnerable to sudden withdrawal.

The fragility of the Afghan state became evident in 2021 when United States and NATO forces withdrew after nearly two decades of occupation. Within weeks, the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban regained control of the country. The rapidity of this collapse surprised many observers but also reflected deeper structural weaknesses that had been present for years. Afghan security forces, despite receiving extensive training and funding, were heavily dependent on Western intelligence systems, air support and logistical coordination. Once those systems were removed, the Afghan military lost much of its operational capacity. Across two decades, this intervention claimed over 170,000 lives including more than 46,000 civilians, Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters alongside 2,400 US military personnel and thousands of contractors. This outcome illustrates a broader paradox: interventions that are formally justified as efforts to strengthen governance can, when organised around United States military primacy and short term objectives, leave domestic institutions unable to stand on their own while costing countless civilian lives.

The historical roots of instability in Afghanistan also complicate the narrative that Western involvement was purely a response to existing conflict. During the Cold War, the United States supported Afghan mujahideen fighters as part of its broader strategy to counter Soviet influence in the region. This support involved the provision of weapons, funding and training to various armed groups operating within Afghanistan. Although this policy was initially intended to weaken Soviet power, it also contributed to the militarisation and fragmentation of Afghan society. The proliferation of armed factions and the erosion of centralised authority during this period created conditions that later facilitated the emergence of militant movements and prolonged conflict. Again, this does not mean all foreign engagement necessarily has these effects. It does, however, highlight the way repeated United States interventions have tended to deepen, rather than resolve, structural instability.

The case of Iraq further illustrates the structural consequences of foreign intervention, and of United States involvement in particular. In 2003, the United States and its allies launched an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. These claims were later discredited, revealing that the central justification for the invasion was fundamentally flawed. Nevertheless, the intervention proceeded with the stated objective of removing Saddam Hussein’s regime and establishing a democratic political system.

Rather than producing stability, the invasion destabilised Iraq’s political order at devastating human cost. One of the most consequential decisions made by United States occupation authorities was the dismantling of Iraq’s existing state institutions, including the dissolution of the Iraqi military and the removal of large numbers of public officials through de Baathification policies. While these measures were intended to dismantle the previous regime’s influence, they also removed much of the country’s administrative and security infrastructure. The sudden collapse of state institutions created a power vacuum that fuelled sectarian violence, insurgency and widespread instability. The Iraq War resulted in between 200,000 and over 1 million excess deaths depending on methodology, with conservative estimates documenting over 200,000 civilian deaths alongside tens of thousands of combatants from all sides.

Political scientists have often pointed to the Iraq war as an example of the unintended consequences of regime change conducted through external force. Without a functioning state apparatus capable of maintaining order, the country experienced prolonged violence and institutional fragmentation. Infrastructure deteriorated, economic systems were disrupted and millions of civilians were displaced. The invasion not only destabilised Iraq internally but also contributed to broader regional instability. It is conceivable that external support might assist a political transition if it were genuinely subordinate to inclusive local processes and long term institution building. In some post conflict contexts, international actors have played constructive roles by facilitating peace agreements, providing humanitarian relief or supporting reconstruction under local leadership. However, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the dominant pattern of United States involvement prioritised military solutions and rapid political engineering over patient, locally owned reconstruction.

These cases highlight a recurring structural problem associated with certain forms of foreign intervention. External powers frequently justify military action through the language of democracy promotion, humanitarian protection or security threats. However, the process of intervention often disrupts existing political structures without successfully replacing them with sustainable alternatives, while claiming enormous numbers of civilian lives caught in the crossfire. When institutions are constructed primarily through external support, they may struggle to generate the internal legitimacy necessary for long term stability. Moreover, when those interventions are driven by United States strategic and security agendas, and when political orders are designed from the outside and enforced by military occupation, the resulting institutions often lack both autonomy and legitimacy. They come to be perceived less as representatives of the local population and more as extensions of foreign power.

International relations scholars have long debated the effectiveness of externally imposed political systems. Some argue that foreign assistance can help stabilise fragile states and provide the resources necessary for reconstruction. Others contend that such interventions often undermine domestic political development by concentrating authority within externally supported elites rather than cultivating broad based legitimacy. In many cases, state institutions become perceived as extensions of foreign power rather than representatives of the local population. The experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq suggest that externally driven political reconstruction frequently encounters profound structural limitations. While military power can remove existing regimes, it cannot easily generate the social and political foundations necessary for stable governance. Institutions require legitimacy, local ownership and the gradual development of political trust among citizens. These processes are difficult to impose from outside.

This does not mean that all instability in Afghanistan or Iraq can be attributed solely to foreign intervention. Both countries possess complex political histories, internal divisions and regional pressures that predate Western involvement. However, the forms of United States military intervention examined here frequently intensified these dynamics and disrupted the gradual development of domestic political institutions.

Ultimately, the histories of Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that the kind of United States led military intervention that seeks to redesign political systems from the outside has consistently produced dependency, institutional fragility, long term instability and catastrophic loss of life rather than meaningful democratisation. Foreign involvement is not automatically harmful, and in some circumstances carefully structured international support can help to facilitate peace processes, reconstruction and locally owned reform. However, given the repeated failures and destructive consequences of United States interventions in recent decades, further United States involvement in places such as Iran should be regarded as deeply concerning rather than as a credible pathway to stable, self governing institutions.

My prayers are with the people of Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and with all civilians across the world facing conflict and instability.

With love, always.

Ari.

Across many Western democracies, political discourse is undergoing a noticeable shift. Right wing populism has increasingly normalised language that questions the legitimacy, loyalty and moral character of minority communities. While each nation has its own historical context, the pattern is strikingly similar. Multiculturalism is celebrated rhetorically, yet conditional in practice. Diversity is applauded, but only within carefully managed limits.

This contradiction sits at the centre of contemporary liberal democracies. Nations describe themselves as tolerant, plural and inclusive. Immigration is framed as economically beneficial and culturally enriching. Yet beneath these narratives lies an enduring expectation that minorities adapt in ways that minimise visible difference. Belonging becomes contingent.

The language may differ from country to country, but the structure of the argument remains familiar. Minorities are told they are welcome, provided they integrate. Integration, however, often functions as a euphemism for assimilation.

Assimilation is commonly presented as necessary for social cohesion. It is framed as pragmatic and reasonable. Shared values are said to require shared norms, shared culture and shared expressions of identity. Yet this framing conceals a deeper imbalance. Assimilation does not require mutual adaptation. It requires minorities to approximate a dominant cultural standard. The majority culture is rarely asked to interrogate itself.

In this sense, assimilation is not neutral. It positions one cultural framework as the baseline and others as deviations. It assumes that harmony is achieved through sameness rather than through negotiated pluralism. This logic transforms difference into a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be accommodated.

Political rhetoric often crystallises this dynamic. In Australia, for example, Pauline Hanson, leader of One Nation, publicly questioned whether there are “good Muslims,” asking how anyone could determine such a thing. The statement is not merely inflammatory. It is conceptually revealing. It constructs Muslim identity itself as suspect and shifts the burden of proof onto individuals.

This type of framing is not confined to one national context. Across Europe and North America, Muslim communities in particular have been racialised through narratives of security, loyalty and cultural incompatibility. Religion is treated not simply as belief but as a fixed identity marker. Diversity within communities is flattened. Entire populations are reduced to symbolic threats.

The notion of the “good” minority emerges within this framework. A “good” Muslim, migrant or refugee is one who reassures the majority. One who avoids political disruption. One who demonstrates loyalty through silence. One who expresses culture privately rather than publicly. The “bad” minority is visible, vocal or politically engaged.

This binary reinforces assimilationist expectations. Cultural expression becomes conditional. Citizenship is no longer merely legal status but behavioural performance.

Yet extensive research in sociology and social psychology suggests that forced assimilation undermines rather than strengthens social cohesion. When individuals are pressured to suppress core aspects of identity, it generates alienation and marginalisation. It communicates that certain identities are fundamentally incompatible with full belonging. Cohesion built on erasure is fragile and often unsustainable.

Pluralism, by contrast, does not demand sameness. It requires shared civic commitments alongside cultural diversity. A functioning democracy does not depend on uniformity of belief, dress or tradition. It depends on mutual recognition and equal protection under the law. When assimilation is treated as the primary pathway to belonging, democratic equality is subtly compromised.

These tensions become particularly visible during moments of geopolitical crisis. Global conflicts reverberate within domestic political spaces. Communities with cultural, religious or familial ties to affected regions often experience heightened scrutiny. Public expressions of solidarity or protest are frequently reframed as divisive or destabilising.

In Australia, for instance, Anthony Albanese called for Australians to “turn the temperature down” regarding pro Palestine rallies. Similar language appears across Western democracies, where leaders urge calm, balance or restraint in response to public protest.

At face value, such appeals may appear reasonable. However, neutrality is not always neutral. When injustice is ongoing, calls to reduce intensity can function as mechanisms of containment. They redirect attention from structural harm to the tone of those who object to it. Emotional expression becomes the problem, rather than the conditions that produced it.

The expectation of assimilation intersects with this politics of neutrality. To assimilate culturally often implies assimilating politically. It implies moderating grief, tempering outrage and avoiding critique of dominant institutions. The ideal citizen becomes calm, grateful and non disruptive.

This framing raises a broader question about contemporary liberal democracies. Is multiculturalism merely aesthetic, confined to food, festivals and surface level celebration? Or does it involve protecting the political agency of communities whose identities shape how they experience global events?

If diversity is to have substantive meaning, it must include the right to visible difference and the right to dissent. It must reject the assumption that belonging requires cultural dilution. Assimilation may appear to promise stability, but it often conceals unequal power relations.

Hostility rarely begins with explicit violence. It begins with language that questions legitimacy. It begins with framing identity as a problem. It begins with presenting cultural erasure as common sense.

The challenge facing plural societies is not how to eliminate difference, but how to coexist without demanding disappearance. A democracy that requires its minorities to become indistinguishable from the majority in order to belong is not practising pluralism. It is reinforcing hierarchy under the guise of unity.

The political shifts unfolding across Western nations suggest that the debate is not simply about immigration or religion. It is about the meaning of belonging itself. Whether citizenship is conditional. Whether dissent is permissible. Whether difference can remain visible without being treated as threat.

These questions are not confined to any single nation. They define the moral trajectory of liberal democracy in the twenty first century.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3

The hijab is rarely treated as one practice among many expressions of faith. It is transformed into a civilisational symbol. In France, state secularism under laïcité has justified bans on religious symbols in public institutions. In Canada, Quebec’s Bill 21 restricts public servants from wearing visible religious attire. The European Court of Justice has upheld rulings allowing employers to ban religious symbols in the name of neutrality.

Neutrality, however, is selectively defined. The cross is heritage. The turban is tradition. The hijab becomes ideology. It becomes a test. To remove it is to integrate. To keep it is to resist. Muslim women are forced into the role of cultural barometers, their clothing interpreted as either evidence of progress or proof of failure.

This fixation reveals something deeper about liberal feminism and its celebrated commitment to choice.

Liberal feminism prides itself on centring agency. It insists that empowerment lies in the freedom to choose. Yet its recognition of agency is conditional. Choice is validated only when it aligns with Western ideals: individualism, sexual autonomy, visibility, self expression detached from communal obligation or religious submission.

When a woman chooses corporate ambition, cosmetic enhancement or sexual entrepreneurship, her choice is framed as liberation. When a Muslim woman chooses modesty, devotion or religious discipline, her choice is interrogated. It must be coercion. It must be brainwashing. It must be internalised patriarchy.

The logic is subtle but consistent. If the outcome resembles Western liberal subjectivity, it is empowerment. If it does not, it is false consciousness.

Muslim women who state plainly that they choose hijab are frequently told they are mistaken about their own lives. Their testimony is treated as unreliable. Their conviction is recast as conditioning. They are granted the language of agency only if they remove the garment.

Meanwhile, choices aligned with capitalism or commodification are rarely subjected to the same scrutiny. Beauty labour is empowerment. Cosmetic surgery is self determination. Subscription based sexual content is autonomy. The marketplace becomes a theatre of liberation. Yet religious devotion is automatically suspect.

This is the illusion of choice at the heart of liberal feminism. It claims neutrality while quietly ranking which choices count.

The contradiction extends beyond gender politics into security discourse. Muslim women are framed simultaneously as passive victims and potential threats. They are infantilised and demonised at the same time. They are oppressed daughters in need of saving, yet also visible markers of suspicion.

Since 9/11, Muslim visibility has been entangled with surveillance. Women in hijab or niqab report additional questioning at airports. The niqab is framed as a security risk rather than a religious practice. Veiling is described as concealment, as though modesty itself signals danger.

Young Muslim women are often described as vulnerable to radicalisation. This language denies their capacity for political thought. It pathologises religious belief. It implies Muslim men control their ideology. In one breath, Muslim women are powerless. In the next, they are ideological risks.

When Muslim women participate in activism, whether for Palestine, climate justice or anti racism, their political commitments are often reframed as extremism. Their arguments are dismissed as emotional rather than analytical. Their convictions are attributed to manipulation. The assumption remains that Muslim women cannot be ideological actors in their own right.

The paradox is clear. They are either brainwashed or threatening. Either way, they are denied intellectual sovereignty.

This selective recognition of agency becomes even more visible when we look beyond the West. Western feminism mobilises loudly around compulsory hijab protests in Iran, and rightly so. Yet the pattern of attention raises uncomfortable questions.

Where is the sustained feminist outrage for Afghan women banned from education under the Taliban? Where is the mobilisation for Palestinian women enduring bombardment in Gaza? Where is the consistent attention to Uyghur women detained in camps in East Turkestan, or to Sudanese women navigating displacement in Sudan?

Empathy often aligns comfortably with geopolitics. Feminist solidarity becomes loudest when it reinforces Western moral superiority and quietest when it requires confronting Western complicity.

There is also a perfect victim problem. Western feminist discourse frequently centres women who reject religion, resemble secular ideals and do not implicate Western military or political power. Women who complicate the narrative, who critique both local patriarchy and global empire, rarely receive the same visibility.

Muslim women are invoked when their suffering validates Western civilisation as enlightened. They disappear when their suffering demands Western accountability.

Against this backdrop, the reality of Muslim women’s agency is far more expansive than the narrow scripts imposed upon them. Muslim women choose hijab. Muslim women reject hijab. Muslim women practise faith, raise families, pursue careers, organise politically, resist occupation and build communities. Agency is not confined to hyper individualistic self branding. It can be relational. It can be spiritual. It can be collective.

For many Muslim women, faith is not a cage but a grounding force. Hijab can feel empowering. Community can feel liberating. Spiritual discipline can feel autonomous. Autonomy does not require detachment from belief. It can be rooted in devotion and chosen commitment.

There is no singular Muslim woman. Experiences differ across class, race, geography, migration histories and sect. The imagined monolith collapses under real complexity. Yet liberal feminism often struggles to conceptualise liberation that does not mirror its own genealogy.

Its conceptual limitations are clear. Individualism can overlook communal and spiritual values. Secular universality casts religion as inherently oppressive. Eurocentrism treats Western history as the template. Saviourism positions Muslim women as perpetual beneficiaries of intervention.

Debates fixate on clothing and family structures while larger forces receive less scrutiny. War, surveillance, racism, refugee precarity and class inequality shape Muslim women’s lives in profound ways. These structural violences often exceed the impact of dress codes, yet they generate far less outrage in mainstream feminist discourse.

At its core, this is a failure of imagination. Liberal feminism struggles to imagine empowered religious women. It struggles to recognise political resistance outside Western frameworks. It struggles to conceive of collective agency or liberation rooted in spirituality.

Decolonial scholars such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad have challenged the assumptions embedded in liberal feminist frameworks. Their work foregrounds lived experience, structural power, empire, race and historically situated understandings of religion and gender. Rather than treating faith as inherently oppressive, they examine how religious subjects are formed within particular moral and political contexts. They remind us that autonomy can be embodied through practice, discipline and devotion, not only through visible rejection of tradition.

A more ethical discourse would begin by listening to Muslim women without pre deciding which answers are acceptable. It would recognise religious practice as legitimate agency. It would prioritise structural violence over symbolic debates and reject the lazy binary of brainwashed versus threat.

Across Gaza, Afghanistan, East Turkestan, Sudan and Rohingya communities, Muslim women demonstrate resilience, leadership and political clarity under immense pressure. They are organising, educating, resisting and rebuilding. Yet they often receive the least feminist solidarity precisely because their realities complicate Western self narratives.

The liberal feminism illusion of choice ultimately reveals an anxiety. It is not Muslim women’s lack of agency that unsettles Western discourse. It is the possibility that agency can look different, feel different and be rooted in worlds that liberalism does not fully understand.

Until feminism expands its imagination beyond its own borders, it will continue to mistake difference for oppression and autonomy for conformity. And Muslim women will continue to speak for themselves, whether the West is ready to listen or not.

That’s all from this chatterbox today.

With love, always.

Ari <3