Blossoming

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a poem:

In 2022

I will no longer apologise

For the way I take up space

For how you know when I walk into a room

For the fact that my intelligence shows on my face (even when I try to hide it)

I will no longer apologise

For the curves of my body

Or how they scream sex

And always have

Long before I even really knew

What that meant

I will no longer apologise

For my fat

For my wrinkles

For my hair

Or for any other part of my body that you deem unworthy

I will no longer apologise

For how I smell like home

For how badly I make you miss it

For the ache that lives inside you

That I cannot fill because it isn’t mine

I will no longer apologise

For my high standards

Or my ability to still hit every one

Or for your failure to

I will no longer apologise

For my inability to fake it

For my authenticity

For my honesty

Or for my refusal to compromise my ethics

I will no longer apologise

For breaking every mould

For not fitting into your boxes

For being the thing you cannot define

I will no longer apologise

For being a mirror

That reflects all the parts of yourself you try to hide

For exposing the cracks and the hypocrisy

For being the person you cannot hide from

I will no longer apologise

For who I am

How I am

Where I am

What I am

And if you can’t handle that

Then maybe you should apologise.

I remember my fury when I wrote it. Years of rage that was barely held back. The war-cry I hadn’t allowed to pass my lips fully in two decades for all sorts of reasons - because in spite of my fierce feminism, my work for justice, my ability to take on battles for others, I hadn’t always managed to live those values for myself. I had shifted, moulded myself around others’ expectations, tried to become someone who fit a box that was deemed more acceptable somehow. And the thing was, it wasn’t enough and I knew it. I have never been able to fit that box. I wasn’t built for it. I was built to break it. So every time I tried, parts of that poem leaked out of me - in a word or a look or the tone of my voice, in the way I dressed or walked or moved.

And finally, something in me broke. On the first day of 2022, I started to pull apart a life I had carefully crafted, a life I have loved but that wasn’t good for me or the people I love the most. It had been a long time coming but even still, it has been a long and arduous process, one that has often been clouded and unclear.

But on my birthday in March, as I blew out my candles and tried to see the path forward, the word my ancestors whispered to me was ‘fruition’. So that was the intention I set for the year. And it has, in every way that matters to me, been a year of fruition. A year in which things that needed to close have, sometimes more painfully than I had hoped, and things that needed to open have too. It has been a challenging process, often brutal to be honest, and I’m not done yet. But in that process, there have been some big lessons that I wanted to share here, because I hope this pain can turn into something beautiful for others, as it has for me.

First, trust the younger versions of you to know and hold you in the ways that matter the most. I have come back to much of my 16 year old self this year, and her brilliance and courage are what have gotten me through. At 16 I knew with certainty how I needed to move through the world. My life philosophy was that if people were going to be mad at you anyway (and they always were), you may as well do what you want. I knew I would never hit the bar of perfection expected of so many girls of colour, because it’s an unreasonable and unattainable bar, so I ignored it altogether. I lived a life defined by my own values, my own beliefs, my own moral compass and it never once led me wrong. Sure, I made some stupid 16 year old decisions, but never anything that I look back at with real regret. At 16 I believed that mistakes are lessons and what other people thought about me might sometimes hurt but it would never matter enough to change who I was at my core. These are deep truths I have come back to with ardour this year, with the tenacity of someone who has gone without the thing that sustains them for long enough to know to hold on.

Second, trust your body. I have never been as grateful for my body as I am this year. It has been a year where I have learned just how much this body of mine has held for me, and how many generations it has taken to build that beautiful capacity. My body is the product of a lineage that has literally survived drought and famine and starvation and migration and uncertainty and trauma. And so of course it holds everything. Every ounce of fat in my body has held my trauma for me, storing it and protecting me the only way it could, so I could survive another day. I know this because the moment I wasn’t immersed in that trauma anymore, the moment I was well and truly out of the toxic place I had been stuck in, my body transformed. And I had the true joy of watching my body come back to itself. I can see it in my face, in my eyes, in my smile, and even in my fat, as my body shifts into something that feels like it knows it’s safe. It’s been miraculous and though I thought I knew what body love looked like before, I know it now in my bones in a way I couldn’t have imagined. And I am trying to love it better by feeding it and moving it and celebrating it. I have taken almost daily selfies so I could see myself better and the photos in this post are from the boudoir shoot I did a couple weeks ago as a way to mark this incredible gift I have been given, my very first amanah and the one that will be with me until I die. (Shoutout to the incredible ladies at Pink Blush for letting me see myself so clearly and with so much love for the second time in a decade!). Loving my body better has allowed me to love myself better and though there are still days that it’s hard and the voices that tell me it’s a bad body are loud, my heart and my gut tell me just how wrong they are.

Third, I have learned that abundance requires surrender. In the middle of July, a friend messaged me to tell me she had a dream about me. She was light on details at the time, though she told me when I saw her in the autumn that she could see the shifts in my life coming. But that day, we had a conversation about abundance that fundamentally changed me. Because she helped me to see that I wasn’t even allowing for the possibility that abundance could exist for me. I had learned to settle. There was so much about my life that I loved but I had been accepting things I shouldn’t, pain and heartache and loss that I didn’t need to take on, as if it were payment for that goodness. I didn’t feel like I could or should ask for more. Allah is Al-Rahman and Al-Karim and can create so much beauty and brilliance but I wasn’t making room for Allah to give me more.

That realization sat in tandem with one from the week before, on Eid, when I talked about Bibi Hajar’s story. And in that telling, I remarked how translating Islam as submission feels wrong when applied to a Black woman and a slave, because it felt oppressive and unjust. Hajar’s story isn’t about submission, it’s about surrender. It’s about accepting our human limits and trusting Allah to take on the things we can’t. It’s about a deep faith, the kind that sometimes comes from our deepest despair, the moments where hope seems lost and we find ourselves on the ground. Islam is the surrender we find there on our knees. And my god did I feel like I was on my knees. And so I surrendered. I let go of my need to know the ending and my obsession with control and my feeling that justice would only come through heartache. I let go and leaned into the places that I felt I was being drawn to and abundance bloomed.

Now I know this may seem like fairytales and hocus pocus. Or perhaps that things like abundance are reserved only for those who already have so much. And I certainly did and do have much to be thankful for. But I was broken in ways I still can’t fully articulate and it took letting go and trusting the path would become clear for things to finally move. Abundance requires surrender because I had to let go of things that I might have kept holding, of ideals I thought I needed, of people I didn’t think I could live without, in order to make room for the goodness I have now. I had to accept my limits and though I am not naturally good at that, it is a lesson I am deeply grateful for.

Fourth, cultivate connections. Build the tables you want to sit at. Create community that will hold you and love you and cheer for you with true joy. The greatest blessing of this year for me has been to be shown over and over and over how well-loved I am. I am surrounded by incredible humans, compassionate and kind and loving souls who are deeply invested in helping to actualise a world that’s truly based on Rahma as a core principle and it has been a thing of true beauty to watch that world start to actualise in my own little bubble. I know the world is often lonely, that we feel like there is no one who really sees us or who can truly understand our pain. I have felt that at my core for years and years. And I can still promise you it isn’t true. It is possible to be loved as your whole self, without apologies or adjustments, and it is magnificent. Keep doing what you can to feed the relationships that feed you and watch that world grow.

Fifth, plan for joy. I said that to a client once, years ago, and it became a staple for her and for me in our journey forward. We have such a hard time with joy as humans at this moment in history. We are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of horror in our world, the abject cruelty, the injustice, the macro and micro cuts inflicted by just surviving this world of ours. And it makes us jaded and it makes joy feel like foreboding. But as Brené Brown reminds us, we gain nothing when we anticipate the bad things. We only lose our ability to revel in the joy, to allow it to seep into our bones and settle there, a balm for when the pain inevitably penetrates our lives. So joy has to be cultivated, tended to, and planned for, with intention.

And that’s the last lesson. I have learned this year how important it is to set intentions and put them into the universe, trusting Allah to make them real. Do the work too of course, because we are each a critical part of making our intentions a reality, but set the intention with meaning and purpose and belief in its power. I was told a couple weeks ago by someone I trust that the key to manifesting is to feel like you’ve already done it and you’re just celebrating it. And also that it’s important to infuse the mental experience of it - the images and sounds and smells and feelings - with joy. Somehow, I think I did that without meaning to this year, so I invite you all to join me as this year closes and do it for yourselves too.

May your new year be filled with abundance and joy, may you find your blessings bloom around you, may you be cherished and adored, and may your heart and your cup always be full.

Much love,

S.