Kembali menulis dalam bahasa ibu karena sepertinya aku perlu blak-blakan untuk ini.

Banyak kata sifat yang pernah kuselipkan dalam doa-doaku mengenai kehidupan yang kuinginkan: bermanfaat, berguna, berkecukupan, nyaman, indah, ideal, penuh petualangan… namun sebetulnya, melebihi apapun, aku mau kehidupan yang jujur.

Kehidupan yang tidak menyuruhku untuk mereduksi diriku. Yang tidak menuntutku untuk diam. Yang tidak menahanku untuk berhati besar, berperasaan besar, bermimpi besar. Aku hanya mau punya kebebasan untuk mengungkapkan apa yang kupikirkan.

Ketika kecil, pernah ada rentang waktu saat diriku yang masih polos itu memiliki kebiasaan berbohong atas hal-hal yang kecil. Mengaku sudah sikat gigi. Mengaku suka Harry Potter. Mengaku pergi ice skating setiap akhir pekan. Tanpa mau menganalisis apa yang terjadi kala itu, berbohong adalah jalan pintas ketika aku merasa keadaanku sebenarnya tidak akan mengundang respons yang kuinginkan dari orang-orang disekitarku. Entah apa yang aku takutkan. Amarah? Ketidaksetujuan? Ditinggalkan?

Tanpa kusadari, kebohongan menjadi perisai yang kukira mampu melindungiku secara instan dari apapun itu mara bahaya yang akan datang, tanpa sempat memikirkan bahwa dusta akan membawa konsekuensi yang jauh lebih niscaya.

Di umur belasan, mati-matian aku membangun diri dan kehidupan yang berlandaskan kejujuran. Bodo amat atas apa yang akan aku dapatkan: lebih baik aku jujur namun langsung dihantam daripada berbohong dengan lapisan dosa dan penyesalan yang bertahun-tahun akan kuredam.

Ternyata dampaknya besar. Sekarang, di usia dua puluh dua, aku tidak memikirkan mau hidup macam-macam. Aku cuma mau kehidupan yang jujur.

Dibanding enggan berbohong pada orang lain, ternyata aku lebih ogah lagi berbohong dengan diri sendiri. Ya Tuhan. Berat sekali rasanya. Bilang iya, semua akan baik-baik saja ketika dunia rasanya mau runtuh di depan mata. Bilang iya, berpisah adalah jalan yang lebih baik untuk kita ketika dada sesak dan nafasku tidak terasa nyata. Bilang iya, aku mampu dan bisa ketika aku membendung ragu dengan seluruh raga dan nyawa.

Tubuh ternyata punya cara sendiri untuk menyimpan hal-hal yang kita bantah. Ia muncul sebagai nafas yang berantakan, kuku yang rusak digigit dalam kecemasan, mata yang panas namun tidak kunjung keluar tangisan. Dibanding lisanku, mungkin tubuh lebih jujur karena ia tidak pandai menyusun alasan.

Kehidupan yang jujur, bagiku, juga termanifestasi dalam segala keputusan-keputusan yang kutetapkan. Memilih pekerjaan yang sebisa mungkin dekat dengan nilai kemanusiaan. Menavigasi media sosial secukupnya, menolak untuk menoleh ke kebohongan-kebohongan lain yang manusia ciptakan, menolak untuk melihat segala pencapaian yang orang lain tampilkan seolah-olah itu wujud kejujuran. Mempelajari bidang yang tidak membuatku serakah terhadap alam. Meregulasi penggunaan AI yang mungkin secara harfiah juga bermakna kecerdasan tipuan.

Aku mau kehidupan yang jujur dan representasi diri yang mentah. Murni. Asli. Jujur. Seada-adanya.

Segala standar sosial ini membuatku muak. Aku benci dengan tren di internet yang berputar sebegitu cepatnya mengikuti ritme dunia kapitalis dan pemasaran. Berbondong-bondong mendatangi kedai kopi terkini meskipun harganya tidak masuk akal bagi gajiku sebulan. Mencicipi kuliner baru sampai antri seperempat hari, rekam, foto, unggah, sampai lupa bahwa ibuku juga masak sop iga super nikmat di rumah. Membeli rilisan terbaru kerudung dan blus yang juga dipakai oleh tiga ribu orang lainnya di Jakarta Selatan, takut ketinggalan, meski warna dan bahannya tidak sesuai dengan apa yang sedang kuperlukan.

Bukan objek materinya yang aku khawatirkan, namun betapa cepatnya hal-hal tersebut membuat kita melepaskan diri dari hal-hal lainnya yang lebih bermakna. Karena kehidupan yang jujur, di bayanganku, benar-benar didefinisikan oleh segala kompleksitas yang kita miliki. Baik dan buruknya, cantik dan jeleknya, tanpa harus memaksa diri kita untuk muat menempati kotak-kotak ilusi bernama validasi.

Aku mau kehidupan yang penuh dengan pengakuan-pengakuan sulit dan tidak mengenakkan. Bahwa aku sebetulnya pecundang, bahwa aku tidak suka keramaian, tapi juga masih kesusahan menghadapi kesepian.

Aku mau kehidupan yang bisa membuatku menampilkan diri secara utuh, meski dengan cara-cara yang sekilas menyerupai persembunyian. Seperti menulis ini, contohnya. Aku bilang bahwa aku mau hidup yang jujur, tapi kalian-kalian yang membaca tulisanku tidak sepenuhnya tahu mana paragraf-paragraf yang masih kuselipi taktik-taktik penyamaran.

Membangun kehidupan yang jujur, menurutku, dimulai dengan benar-benar menerima diriku sepahit-pahitnya. Dan jatuh cinta kepada diriku sendiri seutuh-utuhnya. Sampai-sampai aku merasa tidak ada bagian dari diriku yang perlu ditutupi dusta, yang perlu dipoles sedemikian rupa, dan perlu dirangkai dengan kepalsuan tak kasat mata.

Kejujuran buatku juga berkaitan erat dengan tanggung jawab. Meski ingin jujur dan menjadi sementah-mentahnya, aku juga perlu mempertanggungjawabkan kejujuran yang aku muntahkan ke dunia. Memastikan bahwa kejujuranku berangkat dari niat yang empatis, bukan untuk menyakiti dan menganggap orang lain naif.

Aku ingin punya keberanian yang cukup untuk kehidupan yang jujur, karena tidak semua kejujuran itu menyenangkan untuk diakui. Dan bagiku, mengakui hal-hal tidak menyenangkan itu akan lebih memuaskan daripada bersembunyi di balik diri sendiri.

And I think I have heard it so many times that I no longer know whether I became resilient because it was in me all along - or because, after a while, you start becoming the person other people have learned to expect you to be.

I have always thought there was something slightly absurd about being praised for enduring things, because endurance (and resilience) is such an unglamorous process when you are actually inside it. Nobody sees the small negotiations you make with yourself in the middle of the night, or the self-affirmations you whisper to yourself on your gojek ride to work, or the way you have to hug yourself so tight when you cry alone at night, or the way you learn to wake up and continue being a person after something in you has quietly changed, or how often being “strong” really just means that there was nobody else around to carry the thing for you, so eventually you stopped asking whether you should carry it and simply adjusted your grip.

Perhaps that is why I have never really understood when people tell me that I seem like someone who has a lot of love in her, because I know how much anger has existed alongside that love. Often, the softness people recognize in me has not come from a naturally peaceful disposition but from a long and exhausting practice of deciding what I want to do with all the less beautiful things I feel.

I have rage too, and resentment, and a tendency for saying exactly the wrong thing at the right moment (also followed by disgustingly wrong decisions). There have been many times when I have wanted to hurt someone simply because they had hurt me first - except somewhere along the way I became more interested in what kind of person I would have to live with afterward, and so I learned to let the feeling pass through me without necessarily letting it decide what I became.

I suppose that is one way of becoming resilient, although I am not sure I like the word anymore because resilience makes it sound as though the highest form of strength is being able to withstand more and more without changing shape. Sometimes I think the more important question should be why we have become so comfortable admiring people for how much they can endure before asking whether they should have had to endure it in the first place.

I have become very good at being the person who understands, which sounds like a lovely quality until you realize how easily understanding can become another form of disappearing. It can be tragic.

I can find the context for someone’s cruelty, the fear underneath someone’s anger, the insecurity beneath someone’s selfishness, and I can hold several contradictory explanations in my head at once which can be useful when you are trying to make sense of people. But sometimes I wonder if I have become so practiced at understanding everyone else that I have forgotten that understanding a person does not mean I have to make their behaviour easier for them to live with. Or it might be really be a form of savior complex.

People also get used to your capacity in a very quiet way without ever really deciding to take advantage of it, and suddenly you are the person everyone expects to come back after the argument. Someone to make the conversation easier, to forgive first, to be reasonable when everyone else is being difficult. And perhaps the strangest part is that they are not necessarily wrong about you because you probably will do those things. Sometimes I think I have mistaken being able to carry something for wanting to carry it.

I wish I had cried more. I have spent so much of my life turning feelings into objects I could examine from a safe distance. And there is something almost tragically funny about how quickly I can become a researcher of my own sadness, tracing its causes and identifying its patterns and locating all the little variables that contributed to it, while the actual sadness is still sitting somewhere inside me waiting for me to stop explaining it and simply admit that I am hurt.

I think there are things I have rationalized that I should have mourned, and things I have forgiven that I should have been allowed to resent for a little longer, and perhaps I have been too eager to turn every difficult experience into evidence that I am growing when sometimes an experience can simply be painful and unfair and unfinished, without needing to become a lesson immediately.

Often, it leads me to situations and thoughts that I cannot get out of this cycle on my own. More and more, I find myself wanting something that feels almost embarrassingly simple: to have someone around whom I don’t have to be the person who knows what to do next, because there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from always having one part of your mind standing slightly outside yourself, watching, assessing, anticipating, making sure that you are still okay enough to continue. And I think I want, for once, to be somewhere where that part of me can sit down too.

In silence, I found myself praying for a relationship that feels safer than my own solitude, which is perhaps a much bigger thing to ask than it sounds. Solitude is not merely where I have ended up in. It is something I have spent my whole life constructing, brick by brick, from every story that taught me to manage my own expectations, and really put myself accountable.

I want to be weak around someone (although I don’t think weak is really the word I mean) because what I want is not helplessness and I don’t want someone to rescue me from my own life. But I want to know what it feels like to stop holding myself together so deliberately. To cry without immediately becoming embarrassed by the inconvenience of it, to say that something hurt without having to soften the statement with an explanation, and to let someone see me at the exact moment when I have nothing particularly graceful or useful to offer them. Simply to not be the bigger person at all times. To not always be the one who can see further, understand better, regulate faster.

To me, there is something a bit frightening about that kind of intimacy - because when you are used to being capable, capability becomes its own kind of shelter, and you can always tell yourself that you don’t really need anyone because you have already proven that you can survive without them.

Sometimes I think I am quietly preparing for a life in which I exhaust myself in a solitary state because there is a strange comfort in making peace with an absence before you have to experience it. And some part of me wonders whether anyone will ever really meet me at the depth at which I have learned to live inside myself.

And yet, for all the ways I can imagine a life built entirely around my own company, there remains this very quiet and almost primitive desire to have another person close enough that I do not have to keep translating myself, someone whose presence does not ask me to become simpler, easier, less demanding, but instead gives me enough room to remain complicated. I think I want to meet someone there, in that strange place where two people have done enough of their own growing.

I want the kind of love that makes my body forget its flight-or-flight default state, the kind where I don’t have to keep my heart pumping and my fists clenched and my teeth pressed together at the same time, because there is someone beside me who makes it possible to believe that nothing needs to be defended against.

I still need to learn that accepting love requires a different kind of courage from the one I have been praised for all my life, because giving love can still leave me in control of something, while receiving it means allowing another person to see what I cannot manage alone. Perhaps intimacy is not the opposite of independence, but the strange decision to let someone stand beside the person you have worked so hard to become, without asking either of you to disappear.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being the resilient one, the understanding one, the person who can always make something beautiful out of whatever has been handed to her. Sometimes I don’t want to make anything beautiful out of it - I just want to sit beside someone and say that I am tired without having to prove that I earned the right to be tired. To be loved without having my strength mistaken for an endless supply of it, and to love without quietly making myself responsible for keeping both of us emotionally upright.

Contrary to popular belief, I want to put the suitcase down somewhere and know that I don’t have to pick it back up immediately. I want to be weak.

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Closing this with one of my favorite line across the holy Before Trilogy, the very reason why I put her up there:

“I always feel this pressure of being a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look my whole life is revolving around some guy. But loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff.

But isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”

Saya lupa kapan pertama kali belajar menulis. Bukan sekadar mengeja dan melafalkan alfabet, tapi betul-betul belajar menggunakan sendi jari-jemari untuk mengartikulasikan cerita yang ada di kepala saya. Kadang ceritanya fiksi alias halusinasi, kadang nyata, teramat nyata, seperti kisah saya jatuh dari kasur sampai ada sobekan di dagu ketika rumah kami masih di Condet.

Mungkin ketika saya masih kelas 2 SD. Iya, masih di Condet juga. Saya ada ingatan selalu menjadikan halaman paling belakang buku pelajaran sebagai tempat saya curhat. Bukan karena saya gak punya buku harian, (dulu saya punya yang ada gemboknya itu. Seolah-olah saya yang berusia 8 tahun sudah paham persoalan rahasia. Padahal mungkin isi bukunya cuman saya menolak belajar matematika, tapi saya sembunyikan rapat sekali sampai saya lupa dimana menaruh kuncinya), tapi karena dalam kondisi apapun, saya merasa selalu perlu untuk punya ruang khusus bagi pikiran saya.

Saya pernah coret-coret di tembok. Pernah juga tulis lirik lagu di meja belajar SMP yang menurut saya Ini Gue Banget. Saya pernah bikin alfabet buatan supaya bisa surat-suratan sama sahabat saya, dan jutaan cara lainnya untuk memastikan saya selalu punya cara untuk bicara. Saya gak bisa jadi orang yang punya dokumentasi lengkap tentang diarinya karena halaman-halaman curhatan saya terpisah di 1001 buku tulis yang berbeda. Saya banyak berubah seiring beranjak dewasa, tapi kebutuhan akan menulis itu berperan sebagai suatu variabel konstan.

Dari buku harian bergembok, hingga margin kanan-kiri buku pelajaran, hingga buku catatan hasil orang tua saya ikut seminar, hingga binder harvest, hingga Microsoft Word, hingga blogspot, hingga aplikasi Notes, hingga Substack: ternyata ide dan pengalaman saya tersebar dimana-mana. Tersembunyi di dunia, meski masih bisa saya temukan sewaktu-waktu. Mungkin banyak curhatan cinta monyet saya yang udah saya hapus dan terbuang di dalam folder Trash (atau bisa juga curhatan saya ketika merasa kesal jadi anak bawang di keluarga), tapi saya yakin bahwa di dunia ini, selama belum kiamat, apa yang kita tulis tidak akan pernah sebenar-benarnya raib.

Agak aneh rasanya menyadari bagaimana jari saya yang dulu terlatih dan tertekuk untuk memegang pensil sekarang lebih familiar dengan suara ketikan keypad di laptop saya. Rasanya beda meskipun cara saya merangkai kalimat masih kurang-lebihnya sama. Seiring berjalannya transformasi digital menuju Indonesia Emas 2045, lahirnya kehidupan gen alpha cybercore tech-bro automation labubu dubai chewy cookie atau apalah itu namanya yang sangat didominasi teknologi dan kecerdasan buatan ini telah membuat saya merasa tidak familiar dengan dunia di sekitar saya. Rasanya sangat menenangkan untuk mengetahui bahwa ketika saya menulis, setidaknya saya masih saya yang saya kenal. Masih saya yang dulu dengan bodohnya menulis tentang jatuh dari kasur. Masih saya yang harus selalu punya coretan kemanapun saya pergi. Masih saya yang selalu melihat dan selalu penasaran.

Akan tetapi, beberapa tahun terakhir saya mulai merasakan banyak keraguan dan kecemasan dalam tulisan-tulisan saya. Rasanya ada standar bayangan yang harus saya capai. Ada nilai tertentu yang harus saya gapai. Ada target untuk memastikan bahwa tulisan saya harus secakap mungkin, sebaik mungkin, se-KBBI mungkin. Saya menjadi sangat ketika menulis sesuatu—khawatir sulit dimengerti, khawatir salah diinterpretasi. Padahal tentu saja saya tidak berhak menentukan bagaimana pembaca akan mengerti dan menginterpretasi tulisan saya. Pun saya sebagai si penulis tak melulu menuntut untuk dipahami (dan saya tidak terlalu peduli kalau ternyata ada ‘teori’ sastra yang bisa membantah ini).

Sebentar. Rasanya saya udah terlalu banyak membicarakan saya.

Coba kita lihat ke sekitar: berapa banyak sekarang manusia yang nyaman membuat tulisan tanpa bantuan? Yang berani salah, berani typo, berani punya grammatical error, berani melanggar struktur penulisan, berani melanggar prinsip-prinsip padu padanan?

Berapa banyak yang berani menekan tombol upload atau submit di media sosialnya tanpa harus bertanya pendapat ChatGPT mengenai caption? Yang berani menulis seada-adanya, sementah-mentahnya, seberantakan-berantakannya, seakan-akan ini masih dunia yang sama dengan apa yang kita jalani sebelumnya? Tanpa saran dari mesin yang tidak lebih mengetahui isi kepala kita, tanpa perbaikan dari perangkat lunak di dalam gawai yang tidak lebih mengenal kita?

Sebelum saya lanjut, sebuah catatan: ini bukan tulisan akademik. Saya tidak berharap tulisan ini akan menghasilkan perdebatan intelektual—Bolehkan saya menulis agak asal-asalan kali ini, ya.

Saya pun menulis ini karena saya baru sadar bahwa saya sudah lama tidak menulis asal-asalan. Mungkin salah satunya karena kebiasaan pekerjaan yang menilai diri saya dari kualitas tulisan dan pencatatan saya. Di era serba-efisiensi ini, saya tidak mampu untuk memproduksi pekerjaan saya tanpa bantuan ChatGPT sama sekali (karena saya masih manusia yang punya ketakutan didamprat klien dan atasan), tapi saya termenung pagi ini ketika saya, setengah sadar, membuka aplikasi ChatGPT saat hendak memperbaharui biodata saya. Apa pula yang mesin itu ketahui tentang bagaimana saya ingin menceritakan pengalaman hidup saya?

Salah satu asisten guru besar Behavioral Science di NUS, Selene Koh, menceritakan melalui unggahannya di LinkedIn bahwa ada seorang teman yang mengirim surel dan mengandung typo. Typo kecil, namun cukup untuk membuatnya tersenyum, karena kesalahan tersebut di zaman sekarang juga memiliki makna lain: ada seseorang di luar sana yang mungkin sedang terburu-buru ketika mengirim surel, tidak sempat memeriksa ulang, dan membuat kesalahan. Betapa manusiawinya. Ketika membaca unggahan beliau, saya langsung berpikir bahwa kesalahan dalam penulisan membawa bukti seberapa mentah-nya kita. Seberapa indahnya.

Dalam unggahan yang sama, Selene juga mengutip sebuah temuan riset yang menjelaskan bagaimana AI telah membuat para pelajar terjerat dalam sebuah fenomena yang disebut pseudo-apprenticeship, atau “pembelajaran semu”

“Researchers studying computer science students found a pattern they call pseudo-apprenticeship: most asked AI for the complete answer before attempting the problem themselves, reaching for help at the first sign of difficulty (some even before) instead of wrestling with the uncertainty long enough to learn from it. It is a failed apprenticeship because the “mentor” responds so quickly that the student has no chance to flounder, no chance to take a wrong turn that requires correcting.”

Meski konteks temuan tersebut berada dalam permasalahan akademik, saya rasa itu juga cukup relevan untuk menjelaskan apa yang selama ini mulai terjadi terhadap kepenulisan. Tak hanya menyerahkan proses revisi dan validasi pada kecerdasan buatan, seringkali kita juga menggunakannya untuk menyumbang ide, struktur, atau outline penulisan sebelum sempat memikirkannya sendiri. Sebanyak apapun hasilnya yang kita adopsi atau modifikasi, bagaimana rasanya jika kita kembali mempercayakan otak kita untuk bekerja sementah mungkin, seberantakan mungkin, seceroboh mungkin? Berapa banyak lagi porsi dari proses berpikir kreatif kita yang kita lewatkan?

Ada seni tersendiri dalam menyerahkan diri pada tulisan kita yang hasil akhirnya lebih buruk dari ekspektasi. Ada harapan dan kepercayaan dalam tulisan yang asal-asalan. Bagi saya, kalau secarik tulisan bisa angkat bicara, dia tidak akan minta ditulis dengan kesempurnaan. Dia hanya mau dirangkai dengan kesadaran.

Saya tidak menuntut kita semua untuk jadi sembrono dalam semua luaran, tentunya, tapi saya menuntut agar kita kembali memberikan ruang pada kesalahan. Pada ketidaksempurnaan. Pada alfabet yang tertukar, pada padanan kata yang kurang koheren, pada kosakata yang terbatas, pada paragraf yang redundan. Pada metafora yang gagal. Pada kalimat yang kepanjangan.

Saya rasa kita semua harus kembali berani menulis asal-asalan. Apa serunya menjadi sempurna kalau otak, hati, dan raga kita diciptakan sebegitu kompleks dan menariknya?

Mesin-mesin itu mungkin bisa menerjemahkan data dan informasi dengan cara yang lebih akurat, dalam waktu yang lebih cepat daripada saya. Tapi dia tidak tahu rasanya jadi anak kecil ingusan yang mencoret pinggir-pinggir buku pelajaran. Atau menulis lafal basmalah di sisi atas kertas tiap kali mau mulai ujian. Dia tidak akan pernah bisa menebak mana pengalaman mana yang ingin saya simpan dan mana yang sengaja saya lupakan—mana yang mau saya buang jauh-jauh, mana yang mau saya simpan secara utuh.

Kita semua perlu lebih banyak menulis asal-asalan dan membuktikan bahwa kesalahan-kesalahan kita masih punya tempat di dunia. Masih banyak ruang untuk guratan bocah kita. Masih banyak ruang putih untuk diisi dengan segalanya yang tidak sempurna. Apakah kita benar-benar mau membiarkan em-dash favorit kita lebih banyak diidentifikasi sebagai mesin daripada sebuah tanda baca yang selayaknya dipakai untuk menyisipkan keraguan dan mengelaborasi keterangan?

Baiklah. Saya udah kehabisan ide dan ucapan.

Saya juga gak mau buka tab ChatGPT untuk bantuan paragraf penutup. Saya tau ini ngegantung, tapi setidaknya saya nutup sendiri.

Jadi, kesimpulannya: mari kita lebih banyak menulis dengan asal-asalan.

Upon so many stressful and hard things this job has given me, it also gave me one newfound thing: tree-watching as my favorite reset agenda. I have found what works best for me to rest and reflect: sitting in silence with the trees, counting as many leaves as I can, and trying to breathe in what they breathe out. Sometimes it lasts for merely five minutes, sometimes it extends to thirty, sometimes they hold me so gently I fall asleep and linger there for hours.

Fortunately, my treewatching agenda helps me treat my weekends and days off with higher importance than my weekday tasks. Surely not because I am lazy and irresponsible (I am still pretty dependable), but because I believe that me and my life are worth more than submitting deadlines and keeping the clients happy. I do not want my job to make me lose my sense of life - I do not want employment to make me lose sight of the world. Trees help me return to where I’m sure I belong: the earth, regardless of who I am, regardless of the work I do, regardless of my tight projects.

The relationship I have with my current job feels like having a partner that wants me to be a constant, in a perfectly, highly, intuitively reliable state. Who, at the other hand, always push me to be the best version of myself. Who, at the same time, rips out my soul from my body, and holds me back from living my life wholly, recklessly, peacefully. And the trees exist like that one best friend who’s staying despite the fact that I’ve been keeping us stuck in a friendzone. A backburner. They are always there. They are kinder. They help me think better and breathe slower. They remind me of how gentle and vast the world is, but I can’t make them my priority - because they do not necessarily help with my ambitions and bills. The world I live in does not reward people for sitting quietly under trees. It rewards people for sacrificing sleep, multitasking efficiently, and remaining available at all times.

But as selfish as I am, I do need both in my life.

Screens at work demand me too much to think, and the stress it comes with drives me so much into loathing and dissatisfaction. Staring at trees for hours demand me to feel. To make my thinking sensory, to get me closer with the earth, pulling me tighter to God’s embrace. When work personifies me as a machine, the trees rehumanize me; and remind me that my days are only a small fraction of this bigger world, that I’m not building my life on a solitary space, and that humans are not the only living beings worth existing.

Once I thought about how could I become so emotionally (and philosophically) dependent on something as mundane, often unnoticed, as trees - but lately I’ve came into a realization that maybe it’s because they never asked me for anything. I can just sit down and let the sun comes through the gaps between their leaves to finally kiss my face. They let me lie down, protected and safe. They don’t ask me to do better. They let me be.

Whenever talking about my future plans and the expectations put on me, I am weighed by how fast I learn, how quick I adapt, and how efficient my work is. Trees, in contrary, are ever-growing and ever-producing creatures that are terrible at optimization. Their growth is careful and steady. They take their time. They shed before they bloom taller. They survive winters by allowing themselves to become visibly bare.

I think modern adulthood has convinced many of us that exhaustion and ‘optimization of oneself’ is proof of purpose. That being constantly overwhelmed means we are important. We spend years learning how to become useful to companies more than how to remain present within our own lives. Schools and colleges do not teach us about keeping ourselves grounded. There is no crash course to teach you how to build a bigger life than your job.

Staring at trees remind me that living things are not supposed to operate endlessly without rest. That perhaps God never intended for human beings to spend most of their waking hours staring at glowing rectangles indoors while the rest of creation continues breathing outside unnoticed.

And maybe the saddest part is not that we work this much, but that many of us no longer remember there was another way to live at all.

Written and extended from my journal entry at JustWrite #21.

Or for whom.

I didn’t know if I was wearing it for myself or for God. Or for everyone that had simply been telling me to. I just know I didn’t have another option, neither could I create one.

Adulting and gaining autonomy (also having fluctuations in my faith and relationship with God) made me wonder about an alternate world in which I lived without it. Where my crown was my very hair, rather than my hijab, where I could style and straighten it like my friends did, where I did not have to worry about my clothes not being perfectly modest enough.

There was a time when thinking about my relationship with hijab brought me into a sudden spiral of existential crises: Was it ever my own decision? Did I own this decision? Am I doing this right? Why am I wearing it? Why is it never enough? Not long enough. Not covering enough. Not pretty enough. Not colorful enough. How much pieces of myself should I lose until it’s finally enough?

I had forgotten about my place in this dunya at all. I asked way more than I tried to understand.

It was not until I allow myself to unlearn and relearn everything I had known about God and my religion that I finally realized that I need my hijab more than it needs me. I needed to sit with my doubts, to question without fear, to return without shame…

to really acknowledge that it carries God’s love and forgiveness, and it can carry me to mercy more than retribution.

That if a fabric were to wrap my head and body I want it to hug me warmly and feel each inch of it forgives me tenderly. I know I have to do this but I do not want how it blankets me to be the only thing that defines who I am.

I want to allow every fibre of it sits on my hair and skin beyond obligation: not only because God tells me to, but also because God wills that I am willing to let it cover me. I don’t want to hold it out of guilt. I want to embrace it out of love and humility.

I want to wear hijab and I want to arrive at it with confidence. I want to do it no longer because I’ve been wearing it my whole life, but because I feel safe and graceful under its thin weight and color.

I want it to hold me gently and I want it to understand me as I learn to understand it completely.

I want my hijab to reach my shoulders and my spine because it likes to dance with me along the wind, and not because it wants to keep my arms intact. I love how God wills my hijab to protect me but I also want it to be my friend that understands, that listens, and invites me to be better. I want it to drape over my chest because I have a heart to preserve. Not because I have anything to hide, anything I am shameful of, but because I carry my body with pride.

I want my hijab to caress my head when I fail and holds my hand tightly when I am thinking of letting it go. I want a gentle and honest relationship with it: gentle enough to make me stay, and honest enough to keep me accountable.

I’ll see my hijab a path towards God’s kind hands. Not His anger, but love. Forgiveness. Mercy. Gratitude. I want to wear my hijab and remember God’s grace. His light rather than His fire. His glory.

And when its absence precedes my faith I want God to pulls me back in. For every time I betray it, I want it to let me try again.

And again.

And again.

I want it to change me into something unrecognizably better. Rather than shoving me into wall-thick boundaries, I want its wings to help me take bigger leaps. I want to wear it convinced that whatever He tells me to do, He’s doing it out of love.

And however I’m letting it be my shadow, I pray its beauty does not subdue God’s will. However I feel most comfortable standing with it, I pray it’s less about my pride and more about His grace.

I know hijab almost my entire life and I also know that this quest will be lifelong. I know my journey with my hijab will not always be steady. There will be days I question it again, even sharper; days I fall short of it, days I carry it with more doubt than devotion.

But I no longer want perfection to be the measure of my faith. I want every step towards it to count, every moment of consciously choosing it again and again to mean something.

For it teaches me that even in my uncertainty, I am already being guided home.

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