Category Archives: Personal

Personal

Feb 26, 2024 – Journal Entry.

I wake up sweating.

I’ve been restless and uneasy. It feels like the storm after such calm. Some nights I slowly lose my mind over what I really don’t know. Little things add up, the past continues to haunt me. Nightmares of faces I once loved hunt me down to my last nerve.

Is my cycle close? I wouldn’t know; I’ve been late for months. Work is nuts, classes are fun, but I struggle to keep up. Why does life throw you in so deep out of nowhere?

Nothing’s really happening because everything is in my head. Am I now gaslighting myself? Maybe a bit, but then what’s real?

Are the voices in my head coming back? Healing isn’t linear; my therapist said it too. Now I believe it. What’s eating me away?

I was a girl who saw myself through the eyes of other men. I didn’t exist for me; I existed for them. I saw myself through them, had no identity of my own except the identity I formed with them. And this created such a chaotic personality; that’s where the borderline tendencies come through, I’m told.

Besides all that, I’m grateful for the last few months. My head was in a better place most days.

Grandma passed away. Her flesh flashes before me every night when I try to sleep. I think of her in vain and miss her. My earliest memories were around her.

Life is a funny little experience; its only guarantee is that it ends. Our existence is merely waiting for it to happen. Because it’s only then we truly rest, we are at peace. The world is too cruel for most of us.

Death used to creep me out; it still does. I couldn’t be around dead people; it was too heartbreaking of a thing. But now I kind of see the peace in it. We grieve our loved ones, but we also celebrate the end to their suffering.

So we live our best lives, being the good people we so desperately want to be, hoping to win even a glimpse of the heaven we are told exists. It does, I’m sure, even though this life seems so bleak most of the time. And maybe that’s why it’s so bleak. So the triumph of the end is otherworldly.

You’ll only know when you make it.

And that’s my stop. I’ll get off and maybe forget I ever wrote this.

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Personal

My phone occasionally shows me pictures of us, the ones I never got around to deleting, not because I hold them closely, but simply because it’s too much work and I never got around to it. I hate the way I looked with you, sleep-deprived and tired, dry skin and just a girl who was constantly neglecting herself. I think that was why it was so easy to let you go. Well, it wasn’t easy at first, but once I got around to it, it was. I wasn’t loving myself with you, and you never cared for it.

Thank god for some endings.

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Life has passed me by, and what I’ve come to realize is that although I’ve written of love for as long as I can remember, I now realize I might not have loved at all. These flawed feelings can’t be what love really is.

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I hate it when men approach you with no intentions. Like, what’s the point?

What’s the point of nice dinners, long walks on the beach, and conversations that stretch into the late hours of the night if you have no intention?

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He’s too confusing. And when a man confuses you, it means he’s confused about you too.

If they’re sure about you, you’ll know. They’ll be eager to make it known, afraid they might lose you.

And if they’re not afraid of losing you, they don’t want you enough.

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Even though we’re raised to believe in happy endings, the bitter truth is not everyone finds one in this lifetime.

So, we end up settling eventually.

And those of us who are too stubborn to settle and fiercely loyal to our hearts, often end up alone.

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I know I’ve fallen for multiple people in my life, but lately, it’s starting to feel like I haven’t really loved any of them. Those past loves are starting to seem less like love and more like different shades of infatuation.

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Honestly, I thought of going through with the unthinkable. It happens every time my mother makes me hate living. She does it time and time again, and every single time, I hate that I’m alive.

She makes it unnecessarily difficult. I think of all the things I could have become and continue to be proud of all the things I did become under so many different circumstances, and then there’s my mother, being my worst cheerleader at every turn. And then she wonders why I didn’t want to invite her to my graduation. She’s forgetting all the times she made it difficult for me to live while I was struggling to manage studies and life.

And I’ll be the terrible daughter in everyone’s book because how dare I. When this mother has sacrificed her whole life for us, how dare I resent anything. But I do. I’m eternally grateful for all the sacrifices she made, but I will always hate the moments in my life where she made me feel I should’ve been dead.

I’m in my thirties, and I continue to be heartbroken at the hands of my parents. The pain they inflict upon me is nothing compared to all the other shit I go through in life. It aches in my heart where these wounds are, and they never heal because they are constantly picked on.

It took me years to realize, or even share what it feels like with her. First, I was so embarrassed about it because it’s not like any other mother-daughter relationship I know. Second, I refused to believe someone who’d sacrificed so much for us could also be the reason for my pain. But it’s true, both of these can be true. She’s human too, and as flawed as any of us. But the way I understand her, try to see things from her view, she doesn’t bother with mine. My perspectives are irrelevant. All my life she made me feel like she hated the fact that she birthed me. She made me feel like I was a waste of space, air, breath. I hated myself. I grew up hating myself. I didn’t know what loving myself would ever feel like. I didn’t think I deserved anything nice, or any kindness even.

So I continued to settle with shitty men, glorifying their shitty treatment. Why wouldn’t I? I get the same treatment at home; I was right at home in these men’s arms. What they made me feel was what I felt by the two people I loved in this world first, my parents.

But even through this, there is something I appreciate about my mother, how she didn’t make it difficult for me when I took off my hijab. She did share her displeasure with it, but when I went ahead with it, she said little about it. Although had she gone on about it I would’ve understood too. But I really do appreciate that she didn’t.

And now the other thing she constantly gets upset over is my choice of clothing. She reacts a bit whenever I wear something that’s a bit see-through. And I get really annoyed at it because where was this energy when unwarranted men had access to me, when I was a minor.

I’m an adult now and, god willing, am able to take care of myself. I don’t put myself in rooms with people I can’t trust, so my choice of clothing, see-through or not, wouldn’t get me in trouble because I will make sure of it. I wouldn’t walk naked into the arms of men I don’t trust.

But that’s what happens with parents; they grow old and become more and more hypocritical and judgmental even.

And over the years, I really have tried to build a relationship with her, but every time she’s shot me down and left me more wounded than before. And so I’ve stopped trying and have accepted that we will never be like a typical mother and daughter. We will be so foreign to each other, but I came from her. And if I had to live this life again and could choose my mother, I don’t know if I’d make a different choice because through all the hurt and pain that is caused, I do love her, and she gave me my brother. I can’t imagine a world where I don’t have him as my brother; he was the reason I stayed alive for so long. He saved me with his existence. We might’ve grown apart as adults, but we were best friends as children. And I miss him constantly, the boy that he was. But life goes on.

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The other day, my therapist asked me the single question that left me dumbfounded. I don’t think I’d ever felt that speechless in my entire life because of how true and deep the realization was that struck with the question. He asked me why it is that I continue to be interested in men who will never be able to make me a priority, and he ended the session by asking me to think on it until the next session. So I’ve been thinking; it’s been on the back of my mind constantly.

And then this one plausible reason hit me: Could it be perhaps because I saw my father prioritize other women constantly over his wife and my mother, that I’ve subconsciously sensationalized the other woman? Could it?

My father was a serial cheater. He was the worst husband and a subpar father. But despite all of this, he is someone I will always love so dearly. I would go sometimes months without talking to him because I’m kind of going no contact, but the minute he stands in front of me, everything vanishes, and I’m just the 3-year-old girl he used to love more than anything in the world. At least from what I remember, that is.

I’ve idolized and loved him blindly, forgiven him for everything without him ever apologizing, and by doing so, I’ve enabled his shitty behavior my entire life, and it is only now that I’ve found the courage and clarity to put an end to it. So when people ask me, who was your first heartbreak, from this day, I will always say it was my father.

Because as ironic as it is, the day my parents finalized their divorce is also the day that I got my heartbroken over a boy, for the first time in my entire life. I was fourteen. I was in love. And I was broken.

And ever since then, all I’ve ever looked for is love, from wherever, and from whomever, and whenever. It didn’t matter; I just wanted to be loved. Because I was living with a void that I didn’t even realize.

But the thing with love is, you’re not happy when people love you; you’re only happy when the person you’re in love with loves you back.

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Before March.

Life got quiet, and I got a little busy. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this way, maybe a month, haha. But for the first time in what feels like forever, I wished I had a slightly more interesting Thursday night ahead of me.

Although, I love how slow my chaos has been. How everything negative I thought of my life and myself seems so far away that it almost feels like a distant dream. But today, for a split second, I felt worthless. And luckily, I managed to brush off that random, meaningless thought.

You can’t quiet your demons forever; they will try to creep up every chance they get. But I’d like to think that I’ve tamed mine, and the voices in my head are almost eerie. I’m starting to love my life, and I’m praying that the floor won’t fall through again.

It’s scary even to write this because I don’t trust the universe not to jinx my peace. I’ll let this stay in my drafts.

Maybe I’ll finally get to that book that’s been on my nightstand for the past month, hoping I’ll pick it up again. Maybe tonight is the night,

Or maybe I’ll watch that old romcom I’d been thinking of and hopefully, it’ll be as good as “The Way We Were.”

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