Monachopsis

The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place...

Monachopsis

The persistent feeling of being out of place,

Nagging at me; telling me to go away.

~

Saying, 'I'm not welcomed here'

That ‘they don't really care’,

~

If I leave or stay

I don't know how much more of this I can take.

~

Would I prefer,

To watch in the sidelines,

My image a blur,

As my 'friends' have the best time,

~

Without me...

~

The persistent feeling of being out of place,

Never seems to go away,

Until I do.

Background

So where do I start? When I was just a tad bit younger, one thing that mattered to me was finding my people; individuals who I could be my authentic self with without judgement. At the time I was obsessed with finding people that understood me and made me feel seen.

Alhamdululahi I've grown up with a lot of love but at that age I often felt like that love lacked understanding. You know when you love someone to bits but you both can hardly keep conversation, it's simple hi's and how are you's but little else. These people, my family are still beloved to me, I simply didn't think they could understand me at that point in my age and so I hoped to find that in some sort of friendship.

One could say that I did, it took several trials and failures but in my senior secondary days I found friends who were wonderful to me, no relationship is perfect but I loved the one I had with them. We had a myriad of similar hobbies and interests and yet enough differences that we weren't the same person, they taught me and loved me and best of all, at the time, understood me.

You might be wondering, Faheezal, if these friendships were so wonderful then what's with this title and poem? Patience, all will be clear soon, well at least most will.

I mentioned in an earlier publication that I grew up in a very mixed religion environment, and that I went to a predominantly Christian school.

Before any of you ask why my parents didn't just send me to a Muslim predominant school I will simply affirm that they had their very understandable reasons why, which I might clarify on a later date or which I might not.

I didn't have a problem being surrounded by Christians and Christain belief systems as a child. I sang their songs in assembly, I decorated their classrooms with them during December times and I didn't really see anything wrong with it being mostly Muslim by name and claim then.

I was well into my secondary school years when I started being curious about taking the deen seriously. Of course I previously prayed and other things such as reading the Qur'an as the child of Muslim parents but it was around then that I wanted to attach my whole identity to the deen, not just the part that was predominant at home, during Asaltu and Eids. It was also around then that I began to wear the hijab. (I'll probably put in an hijabi journey publication if y'all want) and try to stop listening to music, or give up on the idea of haram relationships and such.

The reaction to me wearing my hijab was an interesting one, my close female friends were ecstatic, Muslim and non-muslim alike, none of them were hijabies at the time but they were all so very accepting of my choice. My struggle with my journey didn't lie with them being unkind but there was a chasm growing between us after, that I simply couldn’t bridge.

So here I was, the ‘only’ hijabi girl in my class and one of the two or three hijabies in my whole school! A bit after that I even joined boarding school for my final year and was the ‘only’ hijabi in hostel. I used that word a lot 'only' at the time it felt like I was singular in my journey, the girls in my Asaltu that I spoke with, I wasn’t particularly close to, we had marginally different lives. I was an inexperienced brat in the deen and most of them just seemed to know more about the world, about the deen, more that I had never experienced.

So I had Muslim hijabi friends that I wasn't close with and non Muslim, non hijabi friends that were literally my soulmates.

It began to feel isolating

It was like I couldn't be myself with anyone anymore, my struggles and thoughts about the deen could only be half shared and understood by my friends from other faiths who I felt secure talking to but the people who I guess could have understood, felt like they were miles away from me in the journey, and I was running, trying to keep up.

It occurs to me now that a lot of the isolation could have been self inflicted but at the time, it really felt like I had no one, not really, not in the deep spiritual sense I craved at the time.

Poem/Disclaimer

I am going to share a poem that sums up a lot of what I felt during the embryo times of my hijab journey. This is a personal piece and an old one so it’s not the most poetic, but it’s real and true.

Personal:please refrain from reading without permission

I sometimes get tired of the restrictions,
No, Tired of being the only one here that adheres to em.
 ~ 
Being the only hijabi in hostel,
Has left me feeling self conscious. 
 ~
Though I won’t admit it,
I feel alone when I wear the oddest clothes
And no amount of compliments really take away that feeling.  
~
 I feel beautiful though;
 Happy in my soul,
 Because to me the hijab has real meaning .
 ~ 
The only real issue is the solitude, 
The obvious differentiation of me to everyone else.  
~ 
Normally I don’t notice it, 
But now I’m giving up activities,
~
Pacing in my room on what to wear to make my outfit halal yet casual,
Good enough for both Allah and my peers.
~
Of course I’ll try choose Allah, forever bihidinillahi, 
But it sometimes gets exhausting trying to balance it all.
~
Being the only one that worries about covering,
Having other Muslimahs tell you that ‘they don't know how you do it”,
differentiating themselves totally from you.
~
Maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if there were other hijabies I was close to,
But the ones I know are in muslim countries or my mosque.
I don't feel weird or alone there, for a while.
~
But then being around different people all the time starts to show,
Now there are Arabic terms they say that I don't know,
And here I am feeling once again, alone.
~
I try,
But still, it weighs on my mind,
Being the only hijaibi in my direct sight.

End

For me poetry was therapeutic, writing this rant in half rhymes was my form of a coping mechanism. I felt lonely, the kind of loneliness you feel when you're surrounded by people who do not know you or a part of you. It wasn't always like that of course but it was often enough for me to feel the need to write about this.

I think I needed to feel like that though, I had placed so much importance in being understood and accepted by people that I didn't really know who I was outside my relationship with them. Allah SWT knew what He was doing placing me in that environment and it was there that I learnt how to be alone with myself, aware of myself, content with myself and with Him of course.

It was a necessary pain and till this day I still cherish and love all my different categories of friends now that duty of being understood now lies with me and not someone else.

It's like this quote I saw once,

If you want the kind of love that moves mountains, learn to give that love to yourself first

‌If we want to be loved, cherished and understood by someone we should learn how to be that someone for ourselves first. That way, no matter how long it takes for you to find other people that are like that for you, you will never be alone.

Thank you for reading my publication, it always means a lot to me. Things happened and I haven’t been posting as much but Insha’Allah I’ll start prepping for the publication as much as I can. Peace be unto all of you, byee <33