Living alone diaries #29; my spirituality, and realizations
Heyyyy guysssss,
Did you miss me? I know you missed me so stop fronting.
Happy new year!
Wow, wow, we’re really in 2023? Someone, tell me that doesn’t sound like a year in a sci-fi movie. I feel like the last year that sounded real to me was 2019. After that, I don’t even know what was going on again.
God was just freestyling when he wrote 2020–2022, and not for fake too.
Anyways, I missed last week’s entry, as I’m sure some of you noticed, and I didn’t plan to miss it, I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down and write. This wasn’t because I was feeling bad or sad or anything, the words just didn’t come, you know?
And so much has happened since the last time I wrote, wow.
The most significant has been with my mental health and my wellness in general.
The past almost two weeks have been… very eventful for me. And not in terms of physical activity, but more mental and spiritual.
I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, spiritually? Ahmad?
Let me explain.
You know when people talk about their spiritual journeys, and they always have this one moment that they say kind of puts things into perspective and their lives are kind of redefined?
Yeah.
I’ve always had a bad relationship with religion, and Islam in particular. Of course, this is my perspective and my experience, before you people come and beat me, so yeah. Islam always felt harsh and unyielding for me, and in a way that branched out across many different aspects of the religion.
I just always felt like I couldn’t resonate with it, I couldn’t relate to the dogma, I didn’t agree with some beliefs or practices that are fundamental to the religion itself, and so almost two years ago, I decided to silently leave.
Silently because my family don’t know about this, and only my friends (and now you, gentle reader, know about this.) My family are hyper-religious and very dogmatic about how people should be and how the world should move and how things should happen, so you can imagine they will not take the news well.
Which I don’t care about, but I do still need a roof over my head, you know?
I’m not saying that Islam is a bad religion, far from it, and as I write this and explain some things further, you’ll see that there’s some part of the religion I deeply resonate with and have incorporated into my daily life, but what I am saying is that the concept as a whole, is something that does not work for me.
And that’s fine too.
I’ve never really had much issue accepting things in my life, and a lot of the internal struggle that I read a lot of irreligious people have at first was almost absent for me.
Once I evolved into my cognition, I understood.
Anyways, back to the story, innit.
So, I’ve been irreligious for some time now, and I’ve been happier because of it.
Recently, you know I’ve been going through a tough time, mentally, and I’ve been feeling very lost, very alone, and very sad. I’ve been moping around, cosplaying at being alive, and not knowing what was wrong, or how to make myself feel better.
Then things changed.
I’m not sure exactly when — I know it was sometime last week or so — or exactly how, but I do remember the actions that followed after.
My birthday was on the 26th of December, last week Monday when I would have posted an entry.
And it was a few days before that I felt a shift.
It started with an almost overwhelming realization of the love I have in my life.
You know when something so stunning, so unique and astounding happens in front of you, and you just have to sit down and take it all in, unmoving?
Think fireworks, but… grander. If possible.
For some reason, it seemed like everyone in my life that meant something was showing love to me at the same time, and in varying capacities, but all stunning regardless.
It was like suddenly, my life was lit up, and I could see everything I had been blind to.
Like looking up from a book you’d been reading, to realize your train had reached its destination.
Love is an amazing, wondrous, powerful thing.
And in a few years, when I look back at the end of 2022, I’m going to remember that it’s love that started me up again, that woke me up really.
In those moments of illumination and clarity, I decided that things were going to change, and things were going to be better. Not just because I wanted them to, but because I would make them be.
Another thing that pushed me forward was a particular YouTuber.
If you know me, you probably know that I watch a fat load of YouTube.
I need them to sponsor me because, hm.
I had come across this creator a few months prior, and never really put much stock in her content; I knew I resonated with it in a distant, echoey way, but I never really…cared enough to watch her consistently.
Her name is Hitomi Mochizuki.
She’s a content creator in her 20s as well, and she shares her life online and talks about her spiritual journey a lot.
I binged at least five of her videos in one sitting that day, and it was so… amazing to see someone with very similar issues, personality and age as me talk about their journey to fulfilment and their experiences with darkness and light and their mental struggles and everything.
It was when I realized what had been missing from my life.
Me.
The person who I’ve been cosplaying, wasn’t actually me, and it was slowly corroding me internally, and I didn’t even know it.
I had many realizations, and if you’ll stay with me, I’ll tell you about them.
Realization 1
Islam was not for me, but many Islamic practices are.
What makes religious people feel so grounded in their faith, so in tune with God or Allah or whatever you want to call The Divine Source, is the practices they observe.
If you look at religion scientifically, it’s a way of comprehending the world that is backed by practices.
Belief is amazing and it’s powerful, but it’s only as powerful as the practices that support it.
If religious people acknowledged that okay, yes, there is a god, and there is heaven and hell, but they didn’t pray, they didn’t have any special sabbath days, they had no celebrations, how do you think that faith would hold up?
It would fall.
Faith needs physical manifestations to stick and to thrive.
Again, belief is only as strong as the practices that support it.
And I came to realize that to feel spiritual fulfilment, every human being needs to have practices; to be truly happy, and to be truly fulfilled, you need to have things that bring you back to your body and also connect you to whatever you believe in.
For Muslims, it’s the physical act of prayer; five times a day, Muslims perform ablutions (cleansing rituals with clean water) and go into the mosque to perform prayers to god.
I don’t have explicit experience with Christendom, but I do know that going to church is a staple, and morning and evening devotions and bible studies are important too.
All these things are what ground the practitioners to themselves and their god.
Religion is just a vessel to which people connect to what they believe.
If you look at it that way, you realize that any set of practices, combined with a connection/belief, that bring you spiritual and physical fulfilment, and are performed regularly, can constitute “religion.”
Am I making sense?
I realized that what was missing in my life was practices, and connection to what I believed in; Myself, the universe, and the connection between the two.
Realization 2
I had stopped listening to myself.
Remember how I spoke about the thing that was missing from my life being me?
Well, yeah.
I realized that over the past few years, I’d slowly morphed into this other person, this other version of myself that wasn’t me.
This other person was the person that the world had shaped me to be; I’d stopped all my creativity, my drawing, my calligraphy, my fashion illustration, my singing, and even my writing because the world had told me that those things were unrealistic and maybe even silly.
And the truth is, I’m empty and nothing without my creativity. At the core of who I am, is a creative, my purpose is to love and to create, and for a long time, I just ignored my creativity because it didn’t seem “realistic”, especially with the kind of family I have and parents that raised me.
God have mercy on them, but my parents have nought a single creative bone in their bodies.
So, as I grew up, it was almost this subconscious thing of letting go of all those things and being realistic because they (my parents) weren’t creative people too. I thought that to be an adult you had to be straight-laced and blue-collared.
And in this “growing up” I had now lost everything that made me Ahmad.
When you lose touch with something that is an integral part of who you are and how you show up in this world, there will naturally be a hole in your life that nothing and no one can fill.
I’d stopped listening to who I was, and instead was trying to play up who society thought I should be.
And that affected me in so many ways I didn’t even realize until now.
This is me from the future editing this now (hi) and I just wanted to, first of all, thank you for reading this far, and also let you know that I’m going to end this entry here — somewhat abruptly — because the original piece is very, very long, lol. So, I’ll pick up where I left off in next week’s entry, hm?
Thank you for reading and being on this journey with me.
also, i got published again! it's a beautiful fiction piece about love and lost, so i named it love lost, also after my favorite song.
Here it is if you want to check it out, let me know what you think!
below this entry is a clap icon and a comment section, and you can “clap” (hold down on the clap icon continuously) on a single post for as many as fifty times, this shows me how you felt about what you just read and also helps other people see my entries. Clap for me? you’re doing the lord’s work. im also an attention wh*r# and love to read and reply to comments, so leave me a comment, hm?
and if you want to keep up w me elsewhere, im mostly on twitter, but my instagram is pretty too :-)
