This essay contains spoilers of Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

I thought I knew exactly what kind of book Rebecca was going to be—woman marries widower, only to find herself living in the shadow of his dead wife. Naturally, one would expect a lot of insecurity, comparison, and eventually some form of self-actualisation.

The character Rebecca would seem perfect; our narrator (whose name is never mentioned, by the way) would spend half the book obsessing over being more like her; along the way, something would happen to reveal that Rebecca was never as perfect as everyone made her seem; and our narrator would finally realise that she did not need to become her anyway. Somewhat I was right, but not in the way I thought I would be.

My initial reaction to the narrator was, honestly, a lot of secondhand embarrassment. I understood where her character came from; she seemed like someone who had not experienced much love in her life. It made sense that Maxim’s attention meant so much to her, but geez it was so hard to watch. She fell for him too quickly, and then came that ‘proposal’.

No, I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool.

I guess I expected more? Maxim gave us so little to work with. Honestly, I did not believe he really loved her. At the time, it felt more like he had this huge Rebecca-shaped void in his life and our narrator just happened to be there to fill it. Meanwhile, she was so happy to be chosen. I felt so bad for her.

Then, they got to Manderley and my embarrassment turned into sympathy. Everyone seemed to be igniting constant competition with Rebecca. She entered Manderley already insecure only to find herself surrounded by people, objects and routines that constantly reminded her of she who came before. The servants barely addressed her as Mrs. de Winter—that was reserved for Rebecca. Mrs. de Winter knew how things were done. Mrs. de Winter knew how to dress. Mrs. de Winter knew how to host. Let’s not forget Mrs. Danvers, Rebecca’s right-hand woman, always there to make sure none of this could escape her.

But Rebecca? Can anyone ever be that perfect? I waited for the shoe to drop, anything really that would show that she was not as perfect as she was being portrayed. Given my initial thoughts on the plot, I expected that discovery to free the narrator—she would realise that Rebecca was not perfect, and on turn she did not need to be.

Then Maxim confessed. I never expected that. To make matters worse, out of all the things he confessed, the one thing our narrator seemed to hear was that he never loved Rebecca

None of the things that he told me mattered to me at all. I clung to one thing only, and repeated it to myself, over and over again. Maxim did not love Rebecca.

I found this so funny. Not because the situation was funny, obviously, but because I remember wondering: This is what you are focusing on? Your husband just confessed to murdering his wife, with whom their marriage was a facade, and your biggest takeaway is essentially that he never loved her?

It’s funny but also really sad. Suddenly, I understood her insecurity a bit differently. It was not Rebecca’s character that intimidated her but the assumption that Maxim would never love her as he did Rebecca. She wanted Maxim’s love—that’s what she was competing for. Once she discovered that that was not the case, Rebecca seemed to lose all her power. Our narrator became more confident. I was happy for her. It was not nice watching her spend much of the book tortured in a dead woman’s shadow.

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In that moment, I also realised that this was not going to be the self-actualisation story I expected. There was no grand realisation of her own worth. The narrator’s confidence stemmed from Maxim’s love—not her own. There is a difference. Yes, she had stopped measuring herself against Rebecca but only because she discovered that by the measure that mattered the most to her, she had won. Much as she changes throughout the book, I do not think I would say she ever truly finds herself. She continues, even in her newfound confidence, to be completely attached to Maxim and his feelings for her.

This brings be to Maxim. Honestly, I had not actually thought very deeply about my feelings towards him until after I finished the book. I mean, yes, I was sympathetic towards his first marriage being a lie, but more than that a bit disturbed by how much unhappiness this man was willing to put himself through to maintain the facade surrounding Manderley. He was miserable but he did not leave. He faced infidelity multiple times but he did not leave. He was emotionally and psychologically abused but he did not leave. There was an image to maintain.

I thought about Manderley too much. I put Manderley first, before anything else. And it does not prosper, that sort of love.

I began to see Manderley differently as well. Both the narrator and Maxim had been trapped by it in different ways. Maxim had spent years protecting what it represented, while the narrator found herself stuck trying to live up to its idea of who Mrs. de Winter was supposed to be. When it burned in the end, it felt almost symbolic to me. It felt like release. The thing that held so much power over both of their lives was finally gone. They were no longer bound by everything that came with it.

After all that, this book left me with one question: Did these two actually love each other? I genuinely do not know. I think the narrator was devoted to Maxim. There is very little I can imagine she would not do for him—but is that kind of devotion necessarily love? Love is a multifaceted concept. Her love may have been tangled up in insecurity, dependency, and a need to feel chosen, but perhaps that does not make it any less real. Maybe it just makes it a more complicated kind of love.

Maxim, on the other hand, I struggle. At the beginning, it really feels like he is trying to fill a void, but towards the end, I felt differently. After his confession, he no longer had this enormous secret hanging over him and strangely, it seemed to put him in a better position to love the narrator. There was less pretence between them. Whether he actually loved her though, I am still not sure.

In this book, there is an obvious lesson: Not everything is as it seems. Rebecca was not who we thought she was. Her marriage was not what everyone envied it to be. Manderley was not simply a grand, enviable home. Even the narrator’s eventual confidence does not turn out to be the triumph I expected.

I started Rebecca expecting to read about a woman who realises her own self-worth against the ghost of her predecessor and ended it wondering whether the two people at its centre ever loved each other at all.

I am still yet to decide.

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This essay contains major spoilers for A Little Life and discusses abuse, self-harm and suicide.

I was relieved when Jude died. (I feel so guilty just admitting that.)

I do not believe that suicide is a solution to suffering. One of the reasons I struggle so deeply with it is the way pain does not necessarily end; it simply changes hands. It leaves one body and settles into the lives of the people left behind.

Jude’s death ended his suffering, but it became Harold’s grief. It became Julia’s. It became JB’s. It became Andy’s, and the grief of everyone who had spent years loving him, worrying about him and trying, in all the ways they knew how, to keep him alive. To feel relieved seemed to betray all of them. It seemed to betray my own beliefs. Perhaps, in some way, it also seemed to betray Jude himself—the years he had spent trying to survive, the people he had remained alive for, and the small, difficult life he had fought to build despite everything that had been done to him.

But the relief remained. Not because I thought his death was good and I had suddenly come to believe that it was an answer. I was relieved because Hanya Yanagihara had made his life so relentlessly painful that, by the end, continuing to live began to feel like the crueler fate.

The novel seemed to close every door through which hope might have entered. Healing could not reach him. Love could not save him. Happiness could not settle inside him. Then Willem—the person who had become Jude’s strongest reason to remain alive—was taken too. By the time Jude died, death felt like the only mercy the story was still willing to offer him. And after spending eight hundred eighteen pages watching him suffer, I could not ask him to endure any more.

I began A Little Life already knowing that Jude would not survive it. I had been warned about the book long before I read it, and I knew where his life was heading. This did not make me less emotionally invested. It made me more so. I was not reading to discover what would happen. I was reading to understand how it would happen. How someone so intelligent, so successful and so deeply loved could still arrive at an ending like that.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like a reader waiting for the next event and began to feel like a witness. Knowing the ending made me pay closer attention to every attempt Jude made to live. Every friendship became more precious. Every moment of tenderness carried the grief of its impermanence. Each time happiness moved towards him, I wanted to believe, despite everything I knew, that perhaps this time he would be able to hold it.

There were moments when the book made it seem as though he might. Jude built a career. He found a family in Harold and Julia. He was surrounded by people who did not merely tolerate him but chose him, again and again. With Willem, he experienced a love that was patient, intimate beyond physicality and at times, almost ordinary. But Jude could never quite internalize the happiness that existed around him.

Even during his happiest years, he was still harming himself. He was still carrying shame. He was still unable to understand the goodness in his life as something he deserved rather than something temporary that had somehow been mistakenly given to him. His suffering became quieter at times, but it did not disappear.

Perhaps those years were not pauses in his pain but simply periods in which the pain became less consuming. That does not make them meaningless. If anything, their meaning is what made hope feel so convincing. Jude’s happiness was real. His love for Willem was real. His devotion to Harold, Julia and his friends was real. He experienced beauty, achievement, friendship and tenderness.

But none of those things became more believable to him than his shame. Shame was the deepest truth Jude knew. The abuse he suffered did not only injure his body. It changed the language through which he understood himself. His abusers taught him to believe that their cruelty revealed something about him: that he was disgusting, unworthy and responsible for what had been done to him.

Long after they were gone, he continued their work for them. He punished himself for the violence they had committed. He distrusted kindness. He interpreted love as pity and care as obligation. Every good thing had to be explained away because accepting it would have required him to question the shame upon which his entire understanding of himself had been built.

Jude knew, intellectually, that people loved him. What he could not do was turn their love into something he believed about himself. Love reached him, but it never became his own voice. That may be the most devastating thing A Little Life left me with: sometimes love is not enough to save someone. This is not the same as saying that love is powerless. Willem’s love mattered. Harold and Julia’s love mattered. Andy’s care mattered. Everyone else mattered. Their love gave Jude years he may not otherwise have had. It gave him family, friendship and moments in which the world was gentler than the one he had known as a child.

It’s so unfortunate that love could not heal him on his behalf. The people around Jude could tell him that he deserved good things, but they could not make him believe it. They could offer him safety, but they could not make him feel safe within himself. They could give him reasons to stay alive, but they could not make him see his own life as one of those reasons. Jude survived largely for the people he loved. His reasons for living were borrowed reasons. For a long time, they were enough. They kept him alive for years. They gave him people to come home to and lives against which he could measure his own. But because those reasons never fully became his, they remained frighteningly dependent on the continued presence of others. This was especially true of Willem.

Jude and Willem’s relationship was, for me, one of the most beautiful parts of the book. Their bond carried a tenderness that felt almost defiant in the face of everything Jude had endured. Willem loved him patiently. Jude, despite all his fear, allowed himself to love Willem in return. That alone felt like a victory. For someone whose body had been made into a site of violence, allowing intimacy, no matter for how short a time he could endure it, was no small thing. For someone who had been taught that love always carried a price, trusting another person with even a part of himself was an act of enormous courage.

Eventually, Willem became more than the person Jude loved. He became the structure holding Jude’s will to live together. When Willem died, Jude did not only lose his partner; he lost the future that love had made imaginable. His death did not make Jude unloved. It made him unanchored. I still hoped Harold’s love, in the very least, might hold him. I wanted friendship, family and memory to carry him forward. But Willem had become the place where Jude had stored his will to live and because that will had never completely become his own, it disappeared with him.

I must admit that reading Jude was not only painful. It was frustrating. There were moments when I wanted to shake him. I wanted him to tell the truth. I wanted him to accept help. I wanted him to stop pushing away the people who loved him. More than anything, I wanted him to understand that none of what happened to him was his fault. The reader can see this so clearly. We know that he deserved tenderness. We know that the shame belonged to the people who hurt him. We know that his suffering said nothing about his worth. But knowing the truth from outside a person’s pain does not mean they can feel it from within.

I think what made it worse for me was the fact that my frustration with Jude was complicated by how hard I could see him trying. He was not simply refusing healing. He was trying to survive using instincts shaped by cruelty—his secrecy, withdrawal and self-punishment were destructive, but they had also been formed in circumstances in which survival required him to disappear inside himself. The danger might have passed, but the habits of danger remained.

That is one of the ways the novel changed me. It made me more sympathetic towards people who have experienced trauma and the ways they sometimes behave because of it. It made me slower to assume that a person has not healed because they do not want to heal. Sometimes people want to get better and still cannot imagine what “better” would require of them. Sometimes, like Jude, they have lived with shame for so long that healing feels less believable than pain. Sometimes the very things that once kept them alive become the things preventing them from living fully.

People do what they have to do to survive. We might judge them for it, especially when their coping mechanisms hurt themselves or the people around them, but our judgment does not change what those behaviours once did for them. Survival is not always noble. It is not always graceful. Sometimes it looks like secrecy, dependence, withdrawal or self-destruction. Understanding this does not mean pretending those behaviours are harmless. It simply means recognising that they may have begun as attempts to endure what once felt impossible.

That is why Andy’s anger in particular never felt like a lack of compassion to me. Andy understood Jude’s pain, but he also understood the physical danger of what Jude continued to do to himself. He repeatedly repaired wounds that Jude would later reopen. His anger came from helplessness—from caring deeply and being forced to witness the limits of that care. Compassion is not always soft. Sometimes love becomes angry because it is terrified. Sometimes frustration is what helplessness sounds like when it has nowhere else to go.

Perhaps my frustration with Jude came from a similar place. I was frustrated because I cared whether he lived. Because I could see the goodness around him that he could not allow himself to believe in. Because I wanted healing for him so badly that watching him turn away from it felt unbearable. That frustration did not cancel my compassion. It grew from it. At times, I also resented the book itself. Jude’s suffering is excessive. Whenever happiness appears within reach, the novel seems prepared to take it away. The pain accumulates so relentlessly that the author’s hand sometimes becomes visible, as though she is deliberately testing how much Jude and the reader can bear.

And yet, the suffering still felt emotionally truthful to me. Its excess did not distance me from Jude. It immersed me further into the cumulative nature of trauma. Each new cruelty landed upon injuries that had never healed, deepening the shame already inside him. The novel did not merely show me that Jude was suffering. It showed me how suffering can become an architect: how it can shape a person’s understanding of love, safety, happiness, and even the possibility of a future.

Still, I do not think Jude’s fate should be read as a universal truth about trauma. His inability to heal does not mean that healing is impossible, or that every person who has been deeply wounded is destined to remain so. It means that this particular novel created a character whose shame had become almost impossible to reach, and then repeatedly removed the people and possibilities that might have helped him imagine another life. Jude’s ending tells us something about the world Yanagihara constructed around him. It does not have to become a prophecy for everyone who has survived trauma. I resented the novel for cornering both Jude and the reader. But I also think that is part of what made it so powerful. It did not simply tell me that love might not be enough. It made me experience the helplessness of learning that alongside every person who loved him.

Even the title changed for me as I read. At first, I connected A Little Life to Brother Luke telling Jude to show “a little life” with the clients. In that context, the phrase was cruel. It was another command given to Jude while his body was being used against him. By the end, however, the title felt almost compassionate. For me, it came to mean Jude’s struggle to live his little life. Not little because it lacked meaning, but because so much of it had to be fought for in increments: another year, another friendship, another evening with Willem, another day in which he chose, however reluctantly, to remain. His life was not empty simply because it ended the way it did.

There was victory in the fact that he lived as long as he did. There was victory in the fact that he loved. There was victory in the fact that, despite everything, he allowed himself to be loved. His trauma may have shaped the ending, but it did not own every part of the life that came before.

This book had such a profound effect on my emotional well-being that, after I finished it, I called my mother. Mum, this book has made me so sad; I told her. Then I began narrating Jude’s suffering. I told her about the cruelty: the monastery, Brother Luke, the home, the truck drivers, Dr Traylor running him over. I told her everything as though Jude had been someone I knew and I needed her to understand what had happened to him. Perhaps I simply needed another witness. I had carried his suffering alone for hundreds of pages, and saying it aloud allowed me to place some of that weight somewhere outside myself. I cried. Afterwards, I felt lighter, but the relief remained.

I cannot call Jude’s death good. I cannot ignore the pain inherited by Harold and everyone else he left behind. I cannot condone suicide as a solution to suffering. But I also cannot pretend that, by the end, I wanted him to continue living through what the novel had made feel like hell on earth. I was too conscious of his exhaustion to be angry with him.

Perhaps that is the discomfort A Little Life leaves me with: the knowledge that a death can be devastating and still feel like release, that love can be real, transformative and profoundly meaningful while still being unable to save the person receiving it and that survival can be a victory even when it does not last forever.

I was relieved when Jude died. I still feel guilty about that relief. And perhaps the most unsettling thing the novel did was make me understand exactly why I felt it.

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x=x

I first encountered the Axiom of Equality while reading A Little Life. There is something reassuring about the certainty of it, in the way mathematics does not hesitate. It does not ask how much time has passed, what has been endured, or how much a thing has changed. Whatever x is, it remains. When applied to a human being though, the axiom begins to feel less certain.

In the novel, the character Jude understands it in its most unforgiving sense. To him, x=x means that a person remains what they have always been, regardless of what love, success, or time attempts to prove otherwise. His past does not merely belong to him; it becomes evidence of what he believes himself to be. The axiom becomes a sentence—leaving no room for becoming.

This unsettled me because we tend to believe that life changes us. More specifically, we like to believe that suffering changes us for the better, hardship makes us stronger, loss makes us wiser, disappointment makes us more discerning and pain makes us resilient. These are the stories we tell ourselves so that suffering does not feel wasted.

But what would it mean if despite the highs and lows of human experience, we remained fundamentally the same? What if pain did not always make us stronger? What if it did not make us wiser, better, or more mature? What if sometimes it simply hurts?

There is a hidden pressure inside the way we speak about suffering. We expect pain to explain itself. We ask it to leave behind a lesson, a stronger person, a clearer perspective. We are uncomfortable with the possibility that something terrible may happen to any of us while offering nothing in return.

Perhaps that is why we insist that what does not kill us must make us stronger. It is easier to believe that pain has a purpose than to admit that some suffering is simply unfair. Not every painful experience teaches us something. Sometimes an experience makes us feel smaller rather than larger. Sometimes we do not receive the time, safety, support, or tenderness required to heal. Sometimes the only truth available to us is that we survived—and perhaps that ought to be enough.

Accepting this changes the way we understand healing. It allows us to stop forcing ourselves to “get over” pain. It allows us to move through grief, anger, fear, confusion, or numbness without turning those responses into evidence of weakness. We measure ourselves against the person we think suffering ought to produce and feel that we have failed when we do not become them.

Healing does not always begin with a lesson. Sometimes it begins with permission: to grieve, to remain wounded longer than is convenient, or even to admit that we were affected without allowing that effect to become the final definition of who we are.

This is where the meaning of the axiom began to change. At first, x=x seemed to suggest rigidity—that despite everything we experience, we remain trapped within the same essential self. Perhaps equality does not have to mean exact sameness but continuity. Anyone who has looked at an old photograph of themselves may recognise the strangeness of this. The person in the image may have dressed differently, believed different things, carried different fears, and moved through the world with an entirely different understanding of who they are.

They may feel almost like a stranger and yet, we do not deny them. We recognise the road between us. We understand that the present self cannot exist without the earlier one. The connection is not sameness but succession. Each version makes the next one possible. This means that becoming someone new does not necessarily require abandoning the person we once were. We may outgrow our former selves without erasing them. We may contradict them without betraying them. We may become larger without becoming someone entirely separate.

Perhaps x=x survives because identity is continuous, even when it is not identical. This distinction matters because what we often refer to as our character is not always as fixed as it appears. Some parts of us may be innate. Others may have been formed so early and so deeply that they only feel innate. Sometimes what we call character is simply the oldest behaviour we can remember.

Guardedness may feel inherent when it was learnt through disappointment. Silence may feel natural when it was once necessary. Fear may become so familiar that we mistake it for instinct. This makes it difficult to distinguish who we are from what we learnt to survive. When there is no clear version of us from before the wound, healing cannot always mean returning to an original self.

Yes, sometimes healing is repair but other times it can be creation. Sometimes it requires the conscious choice to step into becoming anew, even while forgiveness remains unfinished. Though forgiveness is often a process, it does not demand rigidity. It is possible to begin becoming before we have fully forgiven ourselves. The act of becoming may itself become part of that forgiveness.

Honestly, we do not even have to love every former version of ourselves, because at times love is too great a demand. Perhaps tenderness is enough. We can offer gratitude to the selves who carried us here and forgiveness to the ones we believe led us astray. We can give permission and space to the selves we are still becoming.

Do not get me wrong—this tenderness does not require us to excuse everything those former selves may have done. Acceptance can exist alongside accountability. A person can acknowledge the harm they caused without treating that harm as proof that they are permanently bad. In fact, I personally believe that the capacity for accountability may itself be evidence that a person is not fixed in the worst thing they may have done. To accept accountability is to admit that our actions belong to us while refusing to believe they are the entirety of us. Everything we have been can belong to our identity without becoming its final definition.

This is the version of the axiom I can believe in. x=x does not mean we must remain exactly as we have always been and neither does it mean that pain cannot change us or that healing cannot expand us. I believe it means that every version of us belongs to the same continuous life. No single version has the authority to define the whole—not the most wounded version, the most ashamed, the one who made mistakes or even the one who believed they had finally figured themselves out.

I do not think self-knowledge is something we can complete. Rather, I believe it is something we revise as we live. Each revision not meaning the earlier version was entirely false but instead incomplete. We may have known who we were then without knowing everything we were capable of becoming. Perhaps this is what consistency should mean—not remaining unchanged, but remaining honest about who we are at each stage of becoming.

There is a particular fear in letting go of consistency. Change can make us wonder whether we ever knew ourselves at all. But perhaps changing does not prove that we were strangers to ourselves. Perhaps it proves that we keep knowing ourselves anew. Some possibilities may always have existed within us, waiting for room to emerge. Others may have been created by the lives we lived, the choices we made, and the circumstances that required something new from us.

We are shaped by both circumstance and choice. Some versions of us are chosen. Others are drawn out by experiences we never asked to have. They may still belong to us but that does not mean they control us. We are capable of acknowledging what has happened to us without allowing it to dictate how we experience the rest of life. We can carry pain without giving it authority over our worth, our capacity to trust, or the limits of our future.

Freedom may not be forgetting the past or fully overcoming it. It can simply be reclaiming the right to live beyond the terms once set for us. Though the past remains part of the equation, it does not get to decide its final answer. What guides us instead is the possibility of becoming larger. Not stronger because suffering demanded it or wiser because pain had to leave behind a gift but simply larger because we are capable of making room for everything we have lived through—the things that taught us, wounded us, changed us or never needed to teach us anything at all.

Becoming larger does not mean changing who we are; it means discovering that who we are has always contained more possibilities than we first understood. In that sense, the axiom no longer feels like a prison. It feels almost like a promise. We remain ourselves, but the meaning of ourselves is allowed to expand. Everything we may become still belongs to us.

I wish Jude had known that the axiom did not have to be a sentence. That remaining himself did not require remaining confined to the most wounded definition of who he was. Maybe the question is not whether becoming someone new means ceasing to be ourselves but rather: What if becoming someone new is simply allowing ourselves to become larger than any one version of who we have been?

P.S: Guys, this book is killing me.

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I have always been interested in the kind of sadness that quietly stays with you. I do not mean the dramatic kind nor the kind that announces itself with tragedy, loss, or a devastating ending. Rather, a feeling left behind by a book, a film, or a poem—a heaviness, a tenderness or that strange ache of having encountered something painful and still feeling grateful that you did.

I find this interesting about myself. I mean, I do not think I go looking for sadness exactly. At least, not consciously. I do not open a book and think: I hope this ruins me. Yet, I keep finding myself drawn to stories that I already know may hurt—stories people warn me about and often describe as devastating, heavy, emotionally exhausting and generally unsafe for anyone trying to have a normal week. Instead of being discouraged, I become curious.

Last week, a friend of mine told me about “A Little Life”. By told me about it, I mean he practically narrated most of the novel. He spoke about it with the kind of seriousness people reserve for books that have done something to them. By the time he was done, I knew enough to understand that this was not going to be an easy read.

Oddly, that made me want to read it more. I wanted to see how the pain would unfold, how Hanya Yanagihara would place it into language, to understand how a book could hold that much sadness and still keep people reading, and perhaps most honestly, I had this dire need to feel something outside my own life.

At times, I feel like I am carrying too much—not in a way I know how to explain neatly, not that I would want to anyway. Seriously though, I can only sit in my own feelings for so long. At times, I just want to feel something that is not mine—someone else’s grief, unravelling or pain, held at a distance close enough to move me, but far enough that I do not have to call it by my own name.

Of course, when I say this out loud, it sounds slightly strange. I realise that. I only started thinking about it seriously when I told a friend that I sometimes seek out sad books, and he found it strange. I understand why. There is something almost irrational about being overwhelmed by your own life and still choosing to enter someone else’s pain for leisure. On the surface, it sounds like emotional self-sabotage with a bookmark. Why would anyone go looking for sadness when life is already so generous with it? Despite this, I do not think I go to sad books because I want to be wounded. I think I go to them because strangely, they make being wounded feel less lonely.

I am still reading “A Little Life”, so I do not know yet what the book will do to me. I do not know whether I will love it, resent it, need a break from it, or finish it and stare at the wall like people online keep threatening that I will. I only know that the curiosity that brought me to it in the first place has not left. If anything, it keeps deepening. I keep wanting to know how the pain unfolds. How much of it can fit into a sentence? How far can a person be written into suffering before the reader begins to feel implicated in it? There is also something else there, a quiet pull towards the pages, as though the book knows something about feeling that I am trying to remember.

I do not think I am drawn to one particular kind of sadness. It is not always grief, or loneliness, or love gone wrong, or people slowly breaking under the weight of their lives. Sometimes I think I am drawn to sadness itself, not because it is beautiful exactly, but because it feels honest. Sad books do not ask me to tidy my emotions before entering them. They do not require me to make pain useful, inspirational or easy to explain. They simply allow it to exist. There is something comforting about that.

In ordinary life, sadness often feels like something we are expected to manage quickly. We are allowed to be sad, but not for too long. We are allowed to talk about pain, but preferably after we have already understood it. There is this quiet pressure to turn everything difficult into a lesson, a testimony, a growth moment, a neat little paragraph about resilience. While I do believe there is meaning to be found in pain, I also think we sometimes rush to make suffering profound because we are uncomfortable with letting it be painful first.

Sad books do not always do that—at least, the good ones do not. They let sadness take up space. They let it be ugly, excessive, inconvenient, repetitive and human. They do not always try to redeem it immediately or soften the blow. Sometimes they simply sit beside the thing and say: Yes, this hurts. Yes, this changed you. Yes, this is part of the story too. Maybe that is what I find comforting. Not the sadness itself, but the permission around it.

When I think about some of the books, films and poems I have loved before, I realise this is not new. They are not the same stories, do not carry the same grief or hurt in the same place, but something about them feels connected. They are stories where pain is not treated like an interruption to life, but as part of its language. These are stories where people are lonely, displaced, misunderstood, grieving, silenced, surviving, or trying to become human again after life has been unkind to them. In them, sadness is not just a plot device but an atmosphere. It is history and a way of moving through the world.

I am drawn to the way some writers refuse to look away from pain. They sit with it long enough for it to become recognisable—that recognition matters to me. What stays with me most after a sad book is not always the plot or even the ending. Most times, it is the feeling of having been quietly understood, as if the author has reached into some unnamed place in me and written it before I knew how to explain it. A sentence will arrive before my own understanding does, and suddenly something in me feels translated.

Other times, it is simply admiration—a quiet, almost reverent admiration for anyone who can write pain without making it feel cheap. Anyone can say that something hurts. The harder thing is to make the hurt feel true without making it feel decorative and to write pain in a way that does not exploit it, rush it, flatten it, or turn it into something pretty before it has been allowed to be devastating. There is something almost sacred to me about a writer who can sit with suffering long enough to understand its shape, the habits it creates, the silences it teaches and the way it follows a person into rooms where no one else can see it.

Maybe that is why sad books feel different from sadness in real life. In real life, pain can feel shapeless. It does not always arrive with a beginning, middle and end. It does not explain itself. It does not always make sense. Sometimes it just sits in your chest and refuses to introduce itself properly. But in a book, even when the pain is devastating, it has been arranged. Not made easier, necessarily, but given a form. A chapter. A sentence. A voice. In that, there is comfort.

There is comfort in being able to enter someone else’s sorrow and leave when you need to. To close the book, pause, underline a sentence and return when you are ready. It is pain, yes, but it is pain with margins, held between covers, that does not immediately require you to explain yourself.

However, sad books do not only give me somewhere else to place my feelings. Sometimes they quietly hand them back to me. When a writer moves through the ‘overwhelm’ without being swallowed by it, I sometimes feel confronted by my own life—not in a loud, motivational, or “you can do anything” way that makes me want to do absolutely nothing out of principle but in the quieter, more uncomfortable way that asks: If this can be held on a page, what might I learn to hold in myself?

I think that is part of the strange comfort too. Sad books let me borrow someone else’s pain, but they also return me to my own with slightly more language than I had before. They do not fix me. I do not think I go to them expecting answers, but sometimes they make my own emotions feel less shapeless, embarrassing or even private. They remind me that there are whole books built out of feelings people do not know where to put.

Maybe that is what I am seeking. Not sadness exactly. Not suffering. Not the aesthetic of devastation (though I will admit literature makes devastation look a little too well-written sometimes). Maybe I want the honesty of it—the permission to feel deeply without immediately being asked to recover. The reminder that pain, when carefully held, can become language and it, somehow, can become a place to rest.

I do not know what this says about me. Maybe I keep reaching for books that hurt because pain, when placed in language, feels less frightening than pain left unnamed. Or maybe the truth is less poetic than that. Maybe I read sad books because they do not lie to me. They do not pretend that pain is always brief, that healing is always graceful, or that every wound becomes wisdom if you wait long enough. They do not rush to comfort me before they have told the truth.

Perhaps that is why I keep turning towards sadness, because sometimes, it is the only thing on the page honest enough to meet me where I am, and maybe that is what frightens me most. Not that sad books hurt, but that sometimes when they do, I feel found.

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For a long time, I thought I knew what honouring kindness looked like. If someone had been good to me, then surely the right response was to remain good to them in return—to stay close, be agreeable and make room for them, even when that meant slowly making less room for myself. It felt like gratitude. Looking back, I am no longer sure that it was.

I had always believed that being chosen required repayment. There are a lot of places I could say I learnt that—from life, love or the quiet ways we sometimes begin to believe that receiving kindness is something we must spend years proving we deserve. Whatever the source, I carried it with me.

Whenever someone showed me extraordinary kindness, I instinctively searched for a way to repay it. I became careful with my disappointment, my boundaries and my distance. Somewhere along the way, gratitude became less about remembering kindness and more about preserving relationships exactly as they had always been. I do not think I noticed the difference until recently.

There have been seasons of my life when I have found myself holding two truths that seemed impossible to reconcile; though someone had been genuinely good to me, our relationship no longer felt good for me. For a long time, I thought those two truths could not coexist. If I admitted the second, surely I was betraying the first. If I needed distance, perhaps I had not been grateful enough all along.

It is strange how easily guilt disguises itself as gratitude. Only recently have I begun to suspect that I may have confused gratitude with obligation. Though that sentence feels almost embarrassingly obvious to me now, I do not think I had ever truly believed it. For a while, I thought honouring kindness meant preserving the relationship exactly as it had been. I thought if someone had once made my life easier, then I had to spend the rest of my life proving that I appreciated it.

I think I had confused remembering with remaining, yet they were never the same thing. Someone can have been profoundly good to us in one season of our lives, and yet the relationship may no longer be good for the people we are becoming. One truth does not erase the other. I can remember every kindness without pretending every hurt did not happen. I can thank Allah for the people He used to make my life easier without believing I owe them permanent access to me. I can honour the good without remaining bound to the guilt.

More than anything, I think I am learning that protecting someone’s honour does not require abandoning my own peace. For a long time, I assumed that if a relationship changed, I had only two choices: remain close or rewrite the other person into someone they had never been. The former felt dishonest to me, while the latter felt dishonest to them.

There has always been a third option: to quietly remember. To resist the temptation to make my hurt the centre of their story. To allow someone to have been a gift in one season of my life without expecting them to remain one forever. To let gratitude become remembrance instead of obligation. Perhaps that is what honouring kindness has been asking of me all along—not to remain but to simply not forget.

The greatest kindness we can show the people who once carried us is not to remain indebted to them forever, but to remember them truthfully, thank Allah for them often, and become that same mercy for someone else.

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I used to think friendship was about being liked—not loved. There is a difference. To be liked felt like proof that I mattered, belonged and was enough. It quietened the part of me that was always asking whether I was worth choosing and softened the fear of being alone.

Looking back, I do not think I was searching for friendship at all. I was searching for reassurance. Maybe that is why I struggled to keep friends for so long. I was so preoccupied with whether people liked me that I rarely stopped to ask whether I was learning how to love them well. I trusted too quickly, mistaking familiarity for intimacy and closeness for connection. I called people friends before we had given each other the time to become them.

When those friendships ended, as many of them did, I mourned them without ever asking what they had been built on in the first place. It has taken me years to realise that friendship was never meant to answer the questions I was asking of it. It cannot decide whether I matter or convince me that I am enough. It was never meant to carry the weight of my self-worth. Perhaps all it was ever meant to do was gently assist me in recognising the worth that was already there. That understanding came slowly as most meaningful things do.

When my life began changing in ways that reached far beyond myself, I found my relationships changing too. Some people met that change with remarkable gentleness. Others did not know what to do with the unfamiliar version of me standing before them.

For a while, I thought that was the lesson: Change reveals who your real friends are. Now I think the lesson was much quieter than that: Change also reveals the kind of friend you have been. It forced me to ask questions I had spent years avoiding.

Why had I been so committed to people who were not committed to my growth? Why had I overlooked the quiet consistency of those who were? And perhaps the hardest question of all: Was I the kind of friend I hoped to find?

Honestly speaking, I do not think I liked all the answers, but growth rarely begins where comfort lives. The friendships I cherish now look very different from the ones I imagined I needed when I was younger. They are not loud and effortless but steady. They are made up of difficult honesty offered with tenderness, grace that leaves room for mistakes without pretending they do not matter, celebration without comparison and encouragement that never feels like pressure.

I think my favourite kind of love is the kind that quietly believes you are capable of more—not because it is dissatisfied with who you are but because it can already see who you are becoming. I am lucky to say that I have friends who love me this way. They never simply wait for me to become better; they call me towards it. They do not do it forcefully, impatiently or in a way that makes me feel as though I was constantly falling short, but so gently that it never feels corrective. It feels like belief.

There is something quietly unsettling about being loved this way. Not because it asks too much of you, but because it leaves you with fewer places to hide. When someone sees you honestly, loves you generously, and still believes you are capable of more, you can no longer mistake acceptance for permission to remain unchanged. You begin to realise that love and growth were never opposing things. Sometimes the deepest form of love is to be known completely, and still be called gently forward.

Being loved well has a peculiar effect. It does not make you feel indebted or make you spend your days trying to earn what has already been freely given. Instead, it awakens something in you. A quiet desire to love with the same generosity you have been shown. To become, not because you are finally worthy of love, but because you have encountered a love that makes becoming feel possible.

I used to think friendship would teach me how to find better people. Instead, it has been teaching me how to become one. Perhaps that has been the greater gift. The people I love most have not simply filled my life with companionship. They have quietly participated in my formation. Their honesty has taught me courage. Their grace has softened my judgment. Their steadfastness has shown me that love does not always have to be loud to be certain. Most of all, they have given me a place from which I can grow. Because you love me the way you do, I was able to start becoming someone I, too, could love. There are very few gifts greater than that.

Perhaps this is one of friendship’s quietest miracles—not that it convinces us we are worthy. But that, in being loved well, we are taught how to recognise the worth that was there all along.

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Before law, I wanted to study Drama and Film. Life, however, as it often does, revised the script without asking me. Somewhere along the way, I found myself in law school, cast in a role I had not exactly auditioned for. There was some sadness in that. Not the loud, theatrical kind, but rather a quieter sadness of watching one version of your life close before you have fully made peace with it.

I did not enter law school dreaming of statutes and courtrooms. I did not have some childhood vision of myself standing before a judge, making brilliant submissions while everyone in the courtroom quietly realised I was born for this. If anything, I arrived in a state of confusion, like someone who had been placed in the wrong genre.

Still, I tried to understand the role. Initially, I thought the law was simple in the way we are first taught simple things. A set of rules. A structure for order. A way of making society behave itself. Law, to me, seemed like the thing that stepped in where chaos ended. It was supposed to govern people, power, and institutions, and the many ways human beings are tempted to harm one another when left unchecked.

There was something almost comforting about that—the idea that somewhere, written into the bones of the country, there was a system. The belief that power had limits, that rights had meaning, institutions had duties, procedure mattered, and justice was not just a decorative word people used in speeches, but something with shape, consequence, and teeth.

My disillusionment began early, in my constitutional law classes with Dr. Busingye Kabumba. It is almost funny that constitutional law, the class that was supposed to introduce me to the foundations of legal order, became the class where I first began to see the cracks. From the outset, it was clear that what we were studying in class was not always applied in Uganda’s legal system. I do not mean this in some vague, dramatic way.

We would learn about the rule of law, constitutionalism, separation of powers, human rights, judicial independence, and fair procedure—all these grand, polished concepts that sounded almost too reasonable to be controversial. It seemed simple—respect rights, follow procedure, do not abuse power, let institutions function as they were created to function and do not place anyone above the law.

Simple enough, no? Apparently not.

What made the disillusionment worse was that the rules were not even difficult to understand. They sounded perfect, clean and almost embarrassingly easy to follow. Yet outside the classroom, they seemed to be broken so spectacularly that I sometimes wondered whether everyone else had received a different Constitution.

There is something almost funny about being examined on principles your country keeps failing in real time. You sit in a lecture room learning about all the proper and polished things while outside, Uganda seems to be treating those same principles as optional reading.

Maybe that is where the trial begins, not in the coursework or the cases or even in the exams that make you question your life choices at 2:00 a.m. The real trial is learning how things are supposed to work, and then living in a country that keeps reminding you that knowing the rule is not the same as living under it.

Sometimes, it is genuinely disappointing. You sit there trying to understand doctrines, principles, cases, and constitutional safeguards, and a quiet question starts forming at the back of your mind: Why am I studying this so seriously if the law itself can be treated like something disposable? It is difficult to keep studying the law with reverence when you keep watching it being dragged through the mud by the very people entrusted to uphold it.

I do not think the law itself is the problem though. If anything, studying law has shown me how much sense the law can make when it is allowed to do what it was created to do. The problem is the people and institutions entrusted with applying it. A good law in dishonest hands becomes another performance, another document and another beautiful thing waiting to be ignored.

Uganda knows the language of justice. That is part of what makes the disappointment so difficult to sit with. It knows the words. It knows how to speak in the polished language of order, but knowing the language of justice is not the same as speaking it honestly and it is certainly not the same as living by it.

For many ordinary Ugandans, the law is not experienced as theory. It is experienced as delay, fear, money you do not have, a call you cannot make because you do not know the right person, silence, waiting and the quiet understanding that justice may depend less on what happened to you and more on who is willing to care.

This is why the rule of law feels less like an absence and more like a selective presence. It is not that it never appears. That would almost be easier to name. It appears for some people and disappears for others. It works in some situations and collapses in others. It is respected when convenient and abandoned when it becomes inconvenient to power. That, I think, is what makes it so unsettling.

The law is not always missing. Sometimes it is right there, dressed properly, speaking well, quoting itself and looking official. Then when the ‘wrong’ person needs protection or the ‘wrong’ power needs restraint, it suddenly becomes shy, procedure is flexible, rights are negotiable and accountability is an idea for another day.

Studying law has made me lose a certain innocence. Not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet, unsettling way knowledge often works. I can no longer look at systems and assume they are neutral simply because they are dressed in procedure, titles, buildings, and official language. Law school has taught me that systems are made, managed, interpreted, protected, and sometimes abused by people.

This is what law school does to you. It teaches you too much for you to look away.

Before, you could see dysfunction and only feel that something was wrong. Now, you can name it. It is easier to accept disorder when you do not know what order was supposed to look like. It is easier to say that is just how things are when nobody has sat you down and shown you, case by case, provision by provision, that things were not designed to be this way.

Sometimes I think it would be easier if I did not know anything at all. Ignorance is bliss—or at least it has better sleeping patterns.

Before law school, injustice was just injustice. Sad, yes. Frustrating, yes. But still distant in some way. Now, I know the language and the principles. I know when something is not just unfortunate but unlawful, when power is overreaching, when rights are being treated like privileges and when procedure is not a technicality, but the very thing standing between a person and abuse.

Knowing the law has made me tired, but it has also made me harder to lie to. It has changed the way I see Uganda. It has opened my eyes to just how rotten the system can be, and how selfish its proprietors are. The law is spoken of as though it belongs to all of us, but sometimes it feels like it is owned by a few people who use it, bend it, hide behind it, or abandon it, depending on what serves them.

Maybe my love for the arts is why I cannot help but see law as a tragedy. It sounds dramatic to call law a tragedy but then again, I did want to study drama first. Perhaps that is why I cannot help but see the performance of it all: the grand language, the solemn institutions, the promises made in polished legal terms, and the quiet collapse that follows when those promises meet power.

The tragedy is not that the law does not make sense. The tragedy is that it does. The tragedy is that the law has so much potential for beauty and order, yet so often collapses in the hands of people who should know better. The law suffers because it is reduced from a promise to a performance, the ordinary citizen suffers because they are the ones left exposed when systems fail, the law student suffers because they are taught to believe in the architecture of justice while standing in a country where some of the walls are visibly cracking and Uganda suffers because it is not a country without laws. It has laws. It has a Constitution. It has institutions. It has the language of justice. That is what makes the betrayal weigh more heavily.

Still, somehow, I do not regret studying law. That surprises me sometimes. Law was not what I wanted, and maybe some part of me will always carry the version of my life where I studied drama and film instead. That girl has not disappeared. My love for the arts did not die simply because I ended up in law school. It just stopped being academic. It became more literary than theatrical. Less drama and film, more essays, poems, unfinished thoughts, and long attempts to make meaning out of things that disturb me. The law has disturbed me but it has also given me something.

Awareness. Anger. Responsibility. Awareness, because I can no longer pretend not to see the cracks. Anger, because the cracks are not always accidents; they are often maintained by people who benefit from them. Responsibility, because once you know how a system is supposed to work, it becomes harder to excuse yourself from caring when it does not.

That is the cruelest and kindest thing law school has done for me. It has shown me what the system could be and that the problem is not always that the rules do not exist, but that they are ignored, bent, delayed, or reserved for those already closest to power. Knowing that makes me angry, but it also keeps a small part of me hopeful, because if the system can be imagined, written, taught, and studied, then maybe it can also be demanded.

What keeps me from becoming completely hopeless is the fact that there are still people fighting to make it better. There are still people who refuse to let dysfunction become normal. People who keep speaking, writing, litigating, teaching, organising, and demanding more from Uganda than what it currently gives. Maybe that is where my hope lives now—not in the system as it is, but in the people who insist it can become something better.

I am still in the middle of this disillusionment. I have not arrived at some neat conclusion where everything suddenly makes sense. I am still studying, underlining principles, preparing for exams, watching Uganda contradict the very things I am expected to understand and trying to decide what to do with the disappointment, other than let it make me numb.

But I know this: the law should not be a luxury good.

It should not be something only the powerful can afford to enjoy, interpret, delay, or escape through. It should not arrive as a weapon for the poor and a shield for those at the top of the food chain. A better system, to me, is one where the law is used for the benefit of all people, not just those with names, money, connections, or proximity to power.

I do not want to become the kind of person who knows and does not care. I do not want the rot to make me numb. Law school has made me more serious about my place in the world, not in the grand, self-important way of thinking I can fix everything because I have read a few cases and survived constitutional law, but in the quieter way of knowing that awareness comes with responsibility. I know too much now to look away comfortably.

That is the burden of studying law in a country like Uganda but it is also the beginning of responsibility. The law should not belong only to those at the top of the food chain. It should belong to all of us. If it does not yet, then that is enough to begin with the refusal to stop saying that it should.

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We are so much more than better halves.

I know what it feels like to choose Allah and have people search for a man behind your Shahada, to watch the most sacred decision in your life be reduced to gossip, and be asked before anything else, whether romance brought you here—as if Allah could not have called you by Himself.

We have had our Deen reduced time immemorial
To sacrifice for love, a desire to make ourselves whole
As if our life’s purpose is to be better halves.

This is our wound.

It is not love itself , marriage or even the possibility that someone may have first shown us the beauty of Islam. The wound is the assumption and the ease with which people hear “Revert Muslimah” and begin looking for a man to explain us. It is the way a woman’s surrender to Allah becomes suspicious when it cannot be attached to romance, the way people can imagine us changing our clothes, habits, names, futures, families, and entire lives for love, but struggle to imagine us doing it for faith. It is the way they ask,

Did you convert because of him? Before they ask, What did Islam awaken in you?

It is the way they make male influence the first explanation for female conviction. I need us to name that honestly.

When people ask us whether we converted to Islam because we were in love with a Muslim man, it is angering and belittling. This is not because we need everyone to understand us immediately nor because curiosity itself is always cruel. It is because underneath that question is an old and tired assumption that women cannot become unless a man becomes the reason. The assumption that our choices are not fully ours, that our faith must be audited before it is believed and that our closeness to Allah is somehow less believable than our attachment to a man.

Why is romance the easiest explanation you can imagine? Why is it easier to believe that we changed for a man than because Allah called? Why does our Islam need to be explained through someone else’s love before it is respected as our own?

May our choices be seen as our own,
Independent
From the men we lend our hearts.

This line still sits heavy with me.

The assumption that women convert for men does something cruel. It does not only question our sincerity but it steals authorship from us. It makes us supporting characters in our own spiritual lives. It suggests that the most intimate decision we may ever make was not truly ours, but borrowed, inherited, seduced, or performed.

It turns faith into evidence of romance, surrender into suspicion and Allah’s call into a man’s influence. That is where we must draw the line. This is neither a rejection of love nor marriage. It is a refusal to let love become the only language people use to understand women. It is a rejection of being reduced to wife.

It happens— a woman may encounter Islam through someone she loves. She may learn her first surah from him, ask him questions, admire the way he prays, the way he speaks of Allah, the way Islam seems to steady him and see the beauty of Deen through his life first.

Even then, he is not the source. He is a means. Allah is the Caller. A person may open a door, but Allah is the One who invites us in. A person may show you beauty, but Allah is the One who makes it settle our chests. A person may be part of your path, but they are not the destination.

To the Revert Muslimah who first experienced the beauty of Islam through someone she loved: Your faith is not less valid. Your religion is not sustained by that person’s faith. It is not kept alive by his presence, his character, his love, nor his ability to remain good to you. He may have been part of how you found the door, but Allah is the One who brought you through it. Do not let people shame you into believing that the route makes the destination less sacred. Do not let them convince you that because love was somewhere near your story, Allah was not at the centre of it.

Our calling by Allah is far greater than romance.

This is the soul of what I am trying to say.

Our calling by Allah is far greater than the man people imagine behind our shahada, than the love story they try to force onto our faith and than the suspicion that a woman cannot be moved by Allah unless she was first moved by a man.

Being called by Allah feels intimate—like it is just for you. It is neither public nor performative. It is neither borrowed from someone else’s faith nor sustained by their love. It feels like something placed quietly in a part of your chest that only Allah could know how to reach.

Before anyone had an opinion, there was that private call. Before anyone asked about a man, there was the ache in our own hearts. Before anyone tried to explain our Islam, Allah was meeting us in places people did not even know were broken.

For me, Islam first felt personal the first time I prayed Salat. I do not even know if I had all the movements right or if I looked composed. Maybe I was awkward and unsure. Maybe my body was still learning how to speak the language of worship. But I remember how it felt—peaceful and sacred. It felt like Islam had stopped being something I was learning from the outside and had become something my body was answering from within. I did not feel like I was performing a new identity. I felt like I had been invited into a conversation that had been waiting for me all along.

That is what people miss when they make our faith about men. They miss the prayer, the trembling, the first time we lowered our heads and felt known. They miss the nights we cried in Tahajjud because our hurt finally had somewhere to go. They miss the private freedom that came with surrender. They miss the fact that Islam did not feel like oppression to some of us. It felt like being rescued from the versions of ourselves we built to survive other people’s expectations.

Before Islam, I think I was oppressed in ways people could not see—not always by a person but often by myself, by people-pleasing, fear of judgment, the need to be liked, dressing for approval, swallowing hurt to keep peace, shrinking so no one would accuse me of being difficult and living for others while calling it kindness.

So when people look at me now and assume I am oppressed because I chose Islam, I want to ask them:

Oppressed compared to what? Compared to the girl who was terrified of disappointing everyone, who could not express hurt because peace mattered more than honesty and made herself smaller so other people could remain comfortable?

Islam does not teach us self-hate. It gives us self-respect. It softened my heart towards the girl I had spent years correcting, criticising, and offering up for approval. It taught me that patience is not self-erasure, that forgiveness is not pretending I was never wounded, that softness is not silence and keeping peace should not require me to keep betraying myself.

Tahajjud, specifically, taught me that my pain did not have to become bitterness to be real. In the quiet, when everyone else was asleep, I could stop being the girl who kept peace for everyone, bring my hurt to Allah without editing it into something more polite and be angry without being cruel, soft without being weak and wounded without being ashamed. That is not oppression. That is release. That is being witnessed by the One who already knew.

We have tried to re-learn
Faith, to grow into something bigger than culture.

This is where the conversation becomes bigger than Reverts alone.

So much of what people call religion is culture refusing to admit it is culture. So much of what is placed on women in the name of faith is really society protecting the comfort of men. So many expectations around Muslim womanhood are handed to us as if they came directly from Allah, when they really came from patriarchy wearing religious language. We are taught to be pleasing, quiet, marriageable, useful and forgiving. We are told to be soft but never complicated, modest but still acceptable, religious but not too changed and committed to Allah but not in a way that makes people uncomfortable.

For us the Revert Muslimahs, the burden becomes even stranger. If we become Muslim, they ask if it was for a man. If we cover, they ask if we are oppressed. If we change, they call it a phase. If we are firm, they call us extreme. If we struggle, they say we were never serious. If we love, they reduce our faith to him. If we leave love behind, they still reduce our faith to him.

Tell me, then, when is a woman allowed to simply belong to Allah?

One day may we be more than wives.

I believe marriage can be beautiful, motherhood can be sacred and family can be mercy. However, I do not believe that any of them should become a woman’s entire orbit. Marriage and motherhood are choices—beautiful choices, maybe even sacred ones, but still choices. They can add to a woman’s life without swallowing her whole. Womanhood does not begin at marriage and neither does it become complete only through motherhood. A woman does not become more worthy because someone chooses her, nor less whole because she is still becoming by herself.

Islam taught me that there is more to womanhood than servanthood to patriarchy. There is worship, knowledge, art, discipline, softness, intellect, self-respect and service to Allah before service to people’s expectations.

The woman I am becoming through Islam is firm. She is independent. She cares about Allah, about art, about peace, about learning herself. She is leaving behind the life of living for others. She is neither anti-love, anti marriage nor anti-family. She is simply no longer willing to be reduced to any of them.

We stop apologising for changing, feeling guilty for choosing differently, shrinking because family does not understand yet, feeling ashamed because we do not know everything, believing that needing time makes our faith weak and thinking anger makes us less soft or that softness makes us less serious.

We stop believing that wanting more than marriage makes us difficult to love. We are allowed to want Jannah more than approval. We are allowed to want Allah more than being understood. We are allowed to become unfamiliar to the people who only loved the versions of us they could explain.

To the people who keep using “you converted because of a man” as an accusation: stop. Stop pretending your curiosity is harmless when it is patriarchy with better manners. Stop making men the hidden authors of women’s spiritual lives. Stop treating feminine faith like something that must be investigated before it is respected. You are not the auditor of a sincerity that belongs to Allah alone.

If a woman tells you Allah called her, believe that she is capable of being called. If a woman tells you Islam changed her, believe that she is capable of change. If a woman tells you her faith is her own, stop searching for the man you think must have given it to her.

A woman can change because she has thought. A woman can cover because she has chosen. A woman can surrender because Allah called her. A woman can love Islam without needing romance to explain it, and even when romance exists somewhere in the story, it is still not the whole story. It is neither permission to belittle her faith, evidence that her sincerity is borrowed nor an invitation to turn her shahada into gossip.

May Allah acknowledge the knives in our backs
And grant us the ultimate reward —
A place with Him in Jannah.

To my Revert Muslimahs,

We were called personally to this Ummah—neither as an attachment, an afterthought nor as someone’s better half. We were called as us. We are not alone.

May we be more than wives, than rumours, than the small stories people tell because they cannot imagine the vastness of what Allah can do in a woman’s life. May our choices be seen as our own, our faith be honoured as sincere and our surrender never again be reduced to romance.

May Allah grant us the ultimate reward — a place with Him in Jannah.

Ameen.

P.S : The quotes in this article are from “Revert Part 2”, a piece from my poetry collection “REVERT”. If you are interested in getting a copy, follow the link below to the Instagram page of Luwafu Road Press ( my lovely publishers) and send us a dm. xx

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I used to think that forgiveness was something that came when pain left, when conversations got easier, people finally understood each other, and defensiveness became obsolete. However, I am learning to understand that sometimes forgiveness begins when the ache is still there, not because of the minuteness of pain but because a wound should not determine who one becomes.

Forgiveness is not one dramatic moment but a slow untangling. It is a quiet loosening of the self from resentment, guilt, shame, fear and the need to be understood. A forgiveness of others and self.

Reversion presents a special kind of life-shift— the carefulness, the disappointment people try to hide, the fear sitting behind their questions, the way they look at you like they are searching for someone they think they have lost. It presents a paradox; the joy of finding Islam tangled with the grief of unfamiliarity.

For a long time, I have carried that grief as guilt.

I blamed myself for the discomfort created, the conversations that became tense, hiding my faith out of fear, needing acceptance, crying, wondering whether I had changed too quickly and not always feeling “Muslim enough”.

It is a strange but common pain to carry because it is rarely strangers who hurt us. It is the people who carry weight in our emotions. Their hurt wrapped in concern, with fear just as real as the wounds it caused. I understand now that some were afraid of losing the old me, for me, of Islam and its PR (terribly misguided).

Maybe to them, Islam was something that was taking me away. It was not. It was the very thing that revealed me. I did not always know that. In the beginning, it felt like I was walking through fog. I knew there was a path beneath my feet, that I was moving towards something real, that Islam had touched something in me, but everything was still blurred.

There was fear, guilt, grief, the need to explain myself in a manner that did not disappoint, a constant desire to defend my faith but at the same time, an exhaustion from constantly feeling like I had to defend myself. There was the ache of needing someone to say: Islam did not ruin you. You are neither unreachable nor unlovable.

It is so hard to watch people grieve you while you stand right in front of them. All while you continue to grieve too—the ease that used to exist, the way love felt before it seemed conditional on being understandable and the possibility that some relationships may never fully function the way they used to.

That is where forgiveness becomes necessary. I do not want to carry pain in a way that it holds me captive. In this journey, forgiveness begins with the truth that such fear can be both understandable and harmful. Fear can come from love and still wound. It can be both sincere and controlling. It can be protective in intention and still painful in effect. Now that I understand that, I think I can softly say: I understand your fear even if it hurt me.

I also need to say this, maybe more for myself than anyone else: I was not leaving you by choosing Islam. I was not disappearing. I was not ruined. I was not erased. I was being revealed. That truth feels like forgiveness too. Not of them first, but of myself for believing, even for a moment, that maybe they were right. For wondering if my becoming was betrayal, for fearing that my change had made me harder to love. It had not.

Reversion brought my truest parts closer to the surface. It revealed my quiet search for Allah, even before I knew how to name it. To the people who loved the version of me they could easily recognise, it looked like loss.

I am learning to forgive them for not seeing it clearly. I am learning to forgive myself for needing them to. That might be the deeper forgiveness because for so long, I thought peace meant being understood. I thought peace meant everyone finally seeing my intentions, being able to explain myself so well that nobody could reject me, misunderstand me or fear for me anymore.

I am learning that peace cannot depend on being understood by everyone, especially when some people look at you through their own fear. There is a point when the need to be understood becomes a kind of prison. It is a constant placing of the heart in rooms that cannot recognise what Allah has been growing within. A constant explaining, defending, hoping that if you say it softly enough, clearly enough, lovingly enough, people will finally see that you are not lost.

What if forgiveness begins when you let Allah’s understanding be enough? Yes, we all want to be known and loved in ways that do not require endless translation. I do not want my healing to depend on whether people fully understand what Allah is doing in me.

My growth is its own quiet proof.

This is where there is a need to untangle—from the desperation to be understood by everyone, the shame of hiding when afraid, the guilt of needing approval, the belief that love has to be earned by being easier to accept, from silence often mistaken for peace, from resentment that feels like protection and the idea that fear makes faith less real.

Fear is part of the journey, but never proof of Allah’s abandonment. Fear has taught me what still needs healing. It has shown me the desperation to belong, the desire to become Muslim without losing love, the thought of approval being synonymous with safety and the belief that keeping everyone comfortable is the same as keeping peace.

I am trying not to hate myself for that. I survived. I continue to survive. I am enough—even when I am scared, hiding, crying, not knowing how to explain myself. Maybe that is what self-forgiveness looks like for a Revert. The acknowledgement that the journey is not clean. The acceptance of the fear and need for approval. Looking back at that trembling version of yourself and saying:

I forgive you for being afraid. I forgive you for needing approval, for crying, for becoming smaller to keep peace, for not knowing how to carry the change without shaking, for the messiness of your becoming. You were human, but you were trying. Allah sees that trying.

That is the mercy I keep reminding myself to return to. Allah’s understanding of the imperfection of humanity. He knows the fear behind our choices, the steps that look small but cost so much, the prayers soaked in shame, the moments we return quietly without anyone knowing how much it took.

Allah does not need our becoming to be neat before it can be beloved.

My journey is beloved because I keep trying. Thinking about that makes me softer with myself. That softness is proof that Allah carried me. I could have become bitter, let the loneliness make me hard. I could have allowed misunderstanding to become my language. Instead, I am somehow softer. Alhamdulillah. A softness with boundaries. A softness with myself, one in how I love and remember.

I am learning that forgiveness does not always mean closeness. Sometimes it is allowing distance, not as punishment, but as a loving acceptance that some relationships need space to heal. Space for fear to stop leading so that softness and mercy may enter.

If love is always led by fear, it becomes control, panic and grief that knows no gentleness. However, love led by mercy can learn. It softens. It tries to accept change without trying to reverse it. It makes room for the person standing in front of it. Alhamdulillah for that kind of love. May it continue to make me lighter.

May forgiveness make us all lighter. May Allah carry us through the fog, the fear, the ache and the guilt. Forgiveness is not the disappearance of the wound; it is the moment we stop punishing ourselves for how we survive.

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I chose a new name after reverting but I did not expect it to make me feel this split.

A couple of months before I reverted, I read a novel titled Broken by Fatima Bala. It is an Islamic romance that I think everyone should read, but that’s besides the point—it is where I got my name Fa’iza (my spelling Pha’iza).

I remember conversations with my sisters where I must have listed close to a hundred possible names. It was honestly fun—like a makeover. They made me promise to maintain our signature ‘Ph’ so we would not stop being ‘Px3’. Eventually, I settled on Pha’iza Asmira. Pha’iza meaning victory and Asmira meaning heaven’s flower. I love this pair for two major reasons: it sounds beautiful and makes me feel seen more softly and it carries my original initials, which I find oddly comforting.

A lot of people have asked me why I changed my name. Are you going through a quarter-life crisis? Do you hate the old version of yourself so much?

Initially, the answer felt simple: I wanted alignment. I wanted my outward identity to reflect the inward shift I felt taking place. I wanted to fit more naturally into Muslim spaces. I wanted to escape constantly explaining how a Phoebe can wear hijab. For a while, it felt like a rebirth—but rebirth is rarely as clean as it sounds.

Some people adapted immediately. Others still hesitate as though they are stepping carefully around a fragile truth. The rest call me Phoebe and correct themselves mid-sentence. I get it. It is difficult to know someone one way and then be asked to re-learn them in another form. I used to find it so endearing. Now, not so much.

I genuinely do not like being called Phoebe anymore.

Admitting that out loud confuses me more than I can fully explain. The thing is, Phoebe, in my head, is not just a name. Phoebe is a version of myself that I associate with people-pleasing, identity confusion and trying to make myself smaller in spaces where I did not fully belong.

Pha’iza, on the other hand, represents intention, faith and a self that feels chosen rather than inherited. She is the version of me that feels more confident, more self-aware and more aligned. Pha’iza means victory—and I carry that meaning as a quiet reminder that I am not where I used to be.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that the old version does not disappear just because you rename yourself. Sometimes I still feel her—not as someone I am, but as something I am trying to outgrow. The habit of shrinking. The reflex of pleasing. The fear of taking up too much space. When people call me Phoebe, it feels like being pulled backwards into what I have fought so hard to leave behind.

It makes me feel boxed. As though my being Muslim and the change I have made in ways that matter deeply to me are not being fully acknowledged. As though the growth is visible to me, but optional to them. I think that is what unsettles me the most—the perception it represents.

When I correct people, or do not out of politeness or exhaustion, something shifts internally. I either feel like I am finally standing in my present identity or like I am failing to defend her. In that tension, I have realised something uncomfortable. It is not only about remembering the old name but also about me trying to prove to myself that I care enough about who I am becoming to insist on it.

If I fully stepped into that belief, I would stop introducing myself as Phoebe in some spaces. I would correct people without hesitation. I would no longer say, call me whatever is comfortable to you. But that comes with the fear of losing more people, which I cannot ignore. This is both grief for who I used to be with them and grief for who I am now without them.

So I end up here—in a complicated middle space where hurt, anger and sadness coexist in ways I cannot separate cleanly. It is about control, not over others but over how I define myself and the distance between who I was and who I am trying to become.

Maybe, underneath everything, what I am really asking for is permission—from others, yes but mostly from myself to stop being pulled back into a version of me I am fighting to outgrow. In this, I am also learning that loving who I was does not require becoming her again.

Phoebe is not an enemy I have to kill to become Pha’iza. She is the reason I understand why change mattered in the first place. She is the version who led me here—even in her confusion, her softness and her mistakes. Maybe peace is not erasing her from history but being able to see her without flinching.

I am not trying to abandon her. I am trying to carry her forward without letting her be the only story people read when they look at me.

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The first time I wore hijab, I felt like I was trying too hard. Looking back, I think I just had not met myself yet.

I remember it like it was yesterday—3/03/25: blue jeans, a black bodysuit, black sneakers, and a black chiffon veil my sister got me. I went to school to hand in coursework, sitting there quietly adjusting it, hyper-aware of every fold and every stare (and there were many).

At some point later that week, when I thought I was slightly getting the hang of it, a classmate told me I looked oppressed. It was not said gently. It was not said with curiosity. It was said like a conclusion. From that day, I made the quiet decision: I would learn how to wear hijab like me.

I threw myself into it.

There is never a right time to start. You will never feel fully ready—and honestly, starting is one of the hardest parts. This is not because of the fabric or the learning curve, but due to everything that shifts around you. People look at you differently, speak to you differently, and name you differently.

Hajjat this. Hajjat that.

It is as if the cloth came with a script I had not read yet. Maybe that is what made it harder—the feeling that I had stepped into something that already had expectations attached to it before I even understood what it meant to me.

Later on, somewhere between the awkward outfits and second-guessing myself in mirrors, something softened. It stopped being about whether I looked ‘right’ to other people and started becoming about whether I felt like myself. Yes, I will not lie, the compliments feel good. When the outfit comes together, when the silhouette sits just right, when everything feels intentional—it feels good.

That was never the point though. The point was wearing clothes that made me love being a hijabi. Loving it, unfortunately, does not make it any easier. If anything, it makes it more demanding. When you care, you try, and when you try, you notice the gaps. You notice when something feels off. You notice when you have not quite found your rhythm yet.

Building a wardrobe that feels like me has been such a challenge—especially considering I do not fully know who she is. I practically started from scratch, learning modesty and style at the same time. Trying to be intentional with money, while realising that modest fashion is not always affordable.

I had to search for pieces, for inspiration, or at the very least some kind of direction. I got creative: Pinterest boards that felt more like mood-boards for a version of me I had not quite stepped into yet, TikTok scroll sessions of girls who made modesty look effortless and Instagram pages of hijabis whose style felt soft, confident and grounded. I looked for Ugandan vendors with staples that could anchor me. It is not just shopping. It is curating a language—my way of saying this is who I am, without feeling the need to explain it out loud.

Some conversations come up often about hijabi creators. Critics questioning their intentions while reducing their presence to something shallow. I do not think they understand what it feels like to be at the beginning. To try to reconcile your past self with the version you are becoming. Those creators matter—because sometimes, all it takes is seeing someone existing fully, comfortably and unapologetically to realise that you too are allowed to exist that way. They might not be perfect (Heck—none of us are) but they show us that hijab is not the end of self-expression. It is its refinement.

I used to think that hijab would make me smaller, quieter, less visible, less me, but it did the opposite. It silenced the external noise: the expectations, the comparisons, the pressure to perform a version of femininity that never quite fit. In that quiet, I was left with something I had not fully faced before: myself. Yes, I am still learning her, still experimenting, still getting it wrong from time to time, still having days where nothing feels right, but at least now, when I get dressed, it feels less like I am trying to impress an insatiable world and more like I am learning how to meet myself where I am.

Maybe that is what style is. Not perfection. Not approval. Not even confidence. Just alignment.

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“ They love Phoebe but they are still learning how to love Pha’iza.” ~ A

One of the most eye-opening experiences that comes with reversion (converting to Islam) is learning how to be left and how to be held differently.

Oftentimes, we imagine faith as something private—internal, personal, contained. I had to learn though, that when there is change in a phenomenon as foundational as belief, everything else has to adjust, even relationships (regardless of the kind).

Several people left. Some stayed. Most surprised me entirely.

I am still learning how to live within the space they left behind. There are forms of change that do not announce themselves loudly. They do not arrive like storms but like slow re-orientation—quiet, steady, irreversible. With that, you come to understand that reversion is not simply a change of faith; it is a change of being.

If I am being honest, I am really struggling to learn how to love this new unfamiliar self, and I am beginning to acknowledge that others may not know how to love her either. I do not say this from a place of bitterness for it is simply the reality of transformation. When the self shifts at its core, relationships are often forced to re-negotiate their language. Some will not. Some will try for a while until the weight of unfamiliarity proves too heavy. Some will soldier on, fighting the good fight.

Departures often tend to be unspoken. They are neither marked by confrontation nor by closure, but by silence—messages cease, presence gradually withdraws, and connections dissolve without explanation. There is a finality in that kind of absence that requires no announcement.

Others fade more gently. Like salt dissolving into water, presence becomes less distinct over time. Nothing dramatically changes, just a thinning of familiarity. Conversations shorten, effort softens and what once felt certain becomes something you can no longer reach.

Needless to say, I was wrong about who would stay.

Then there is the consistency that does not conform to expectations. The people who remain not because they fully understand or agree with the change but because they choose presence over confusion. They do not require explanation for every boundary or change. They adapt without turning difference into distance. I remember during my first Ramadan how some friends of mine, despite not being Muslim, would take me out for iftar dinners so that I did not have to un-fast alone. Then there were my Muslim friends who ‘mosque-hopped’ with me so that I did not have to pray Juma alone. It’s in these little acts that something profound is revealed: love when sincere, learns how to adjust without needing to diminish the other.

This tension, between inner transformation and external continuity, is not easily resolved. It must be lived and carried because as relationships settle into new forms, the self does not remain still. My reflection in the mirror is no longer as recognisable as it once was. There are moments when I see an outline of who I used to be, but not the distinct interior that once accompanied it. It feels like I am still learning how to inhabit my own face. Perhaps this is what it means to be reformed by faith—not instant completion but continual becoming.

Through Islam, there is no return to the past self only shaping into one not yet fully understood. This becoming is not abrupt but gradual, deliberate and unfolding in layers not always perceived in the moment. Some changes are visible, others can only be appreciated in hindsight. So I remain, between what was left behind and what is still in formation.

Not unfinished. Not undone. Becoming.

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