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I apologize for the abrupt frankness, but, tears are falling down my face as I write this. Today, my body has decided that it’s time I properly grieved the pain of losing the life I charted out for myself. I started university when I made a plan detailing how my life should’ve went, and it was beautiful. At least it seemed beautiful to the younger version of myself. If you must know, I’m not currently living that life, dear reader. And I am sincerely grateful to God for that. Alhamdulilah.

When I was planning the rest of my life at eighteen, Allah was never at the centre of my life plan; instead, my vanity and pride were in His place. I wanted to have it all: to be the perfect daughter, student and sibling. I envisioned a perfect future for myself, where I’d collect a lot of degrees from esteemed universities, a future where I would never starve or experience the same depraved, degrading feeling of hunger I fleetingly experienced when I was a child.

It’s very unfortunate that I didn’t truly believe in God back then as much as I do now. I thought I would eventually be the perfect Muslim once I ticked off the self-aggrandizing boxes on my so-called ‘Self-Edification’ list, when really it was all about me trying to fill a hole inside that could never be filled with material things. Spirituality wasn’t my strongest attribute at the time. I didn’t pray. I still find it very difficult to pray consistently, and this is now causing my sadness to resurface because… I believe I’m nothing and unworthy of anything if I find it hard to get up and meet with the Creator of the heavens and the earth on the appropriate and appointed times of the day.

I’m sorry for the negative vibes I’m throwing out today, but I need to get this out. I know this is going to take me to a very dark place if I don’t get it out. Not everyday is sunshine and rainbows and happiness, but I will never fail to praise Allah no matter what circumstance I find myself in. Alhamdulilah.

I never really plan grief sessions; the sadness just naturally oozes out of my body. God knows I know better than to try to shut it up and keep it all inside. I need to at least transmute what I’m feeling into something good, something useful for someone, anyone out there. I’m not inclined to talk about my problems with anyone other than Allah anymore. Talking about my hardships never really worked for me. I’ve also learned a difficult yet valuable lesson from a past friendship I’ll treasure for as long as I live, and it’s that people get tired of your continual self-deprecation. You can’t just dump all of your negativity onto someone else and expect them to keep taking the bummy, depressy feelings you keep dishing out.

A life plan without Allah is not a life plan; it is a cruel yet endless death cycle. Now that I know what I know, I will never make that mistake ever again insha’Allah. Not for all the riches in the world will I ever exclude Allah from my life. Never again will I delude myself into thinking that I could perfectly work out the life equation whilst putting God on the sidelines. If my life is not centred around my Master, then what’s the point of my existence? What am I living for? These days, I find consolation in the following ayahs, specifically ayah 162:

قُلْ إِنَّنِى هَدَىٰنِى رَبِّىٓ إِلَىٰ صِرَٰطٍۢ مُّسْتَقِيمٍۢ دِينًۭا قِيَمًۭا مِّلَّةَ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ حَنِيفًۭا ۚ وَمَا كَانَ مِنَ ٱلْمُشْرِكِينَ

قُلْ إِنَّ صَلَاتِى وَنُسُكِى وَمَحْيَاىَ وَمَمَاتِى لِلَّهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ

لَا شَرِيكَ لَهُۥ ۖ وَبِذَٰلِكَ أُمِرْتُ وَأَنَا۠ أَوَّلُ ٱلْمُسْلِمِينَ

Say, ˹O Prophet,˺ “Surely my Lord has guided me to the Straight Path, a perfect way, the faith of Abraham, the upright, who was not one of the polytheists” (6:161).

Say, “Surely my prayer, my sacrifice, my life, and my death are all for Allah—Lord of all worlds (6:162).

He has no partner. So I am commanded, and so I am the first to submit” (6:163).

When I was planning my life out, I was overconfident. Not that having confidence is bad—in fact, I think it’s actually a good, important quality for a person to nurture within themselves as they start out on a path they’ve never taken before. The problem is that I went into planning my life with a mindset I now know was blatantly wrong. Here’s what I did wrong: I didn’t want to end up making the same mistakes my parents did.

May Allah forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but I hope He forgives me for thinking that I was better and smarter and more capable and more daring than my parents were. May He forgive me for being deeply ashamed of my parents and the poverty they not only came from, but also belonged to in the socioeconomic hierarchy in the western world. May He forgive me for not being thankful nor grateful for all the sacrifices they had to make to raise me in a land foreign to them, a land whose culture and language they still remain foreign to.

I vividly remember being fourteen and feeling incredibly embarrassed whenever my parents showed up at my school for parent-teacher interviews and whatnot. I was deeply ashamed of my father whenever he’d drop me off at school. I’d tell him to park far away so that none of the kids in my grade would notice me coming out of his cab. My parents’ english wasn’t the best, and I didn’t like how my mom would always wear the wrong clothes to school meetings. They were shabby-looking to my fourteen year old eyes, but I failed to recognize that they represented a culture whose integrity and collective conscience remained closely tied to faith and Allah swt. I think this is the main source of my sorrow today, and it is one I’ve always felt and carried with me: I never wanted to be associated with having a poor background. I wanted to scrub, avoid, and evade the tenacious stain that being poor and belonging to a “third-world” country left on me.

I now believe that the driving force behind why I chose to study English at university was because of my desire to be perceived by white people as a cultured person who knew Proust and Faulkner and could quote Dickens by heart. I desperately desired to be accepted by people who weren’t my own. I wanted them to perceive me as their peer, as an equal when it came to their culture and histories. I wanted to get away from all that my family and my ethnic and Islamic culture stood for. I viewed myself as someone that had to redeem herself by adopting the appropriate-seeming values of my surroundings, particularly white culture and English heritage. I wanted to have the “right” cultural background.

Toni Morrison was onto something, and it’s unfortunate that I’m only catching up right now. But… better late than never?

I pray I never return to perceiving my own background as lacking, or thinking that I was born into the “wrong culture.” Ameen. If this was how I grew up—with this unrelenting feeling of unbelonging,—if this is how my childhood was, then I shudder at thinking about what the generations after me are now going through.

Part of me is writing this in hopes of at least one person feeling understood and seen. I want you to know that you are enough, dear reader. Don’t be like me and waste your childhood by thinking that you need to do everything under the sun to be seen as normal by people who will never accept you. They’ll never be satisfied with you being who you are. So, just be a kid. Do kid stuff. You don’t have to watch the “right” movies that all your friends think is cool. Know that what you think matters more than anything, dear reader.

All this time, I carried a lot of internalized shame for being Somali and Muslim and coming from a family with no real capital (I’m not just talking about money here, but connections, education, political experience, etc.). I forbade myself from even thinking of joining certain friend-groups in high school because I believed I wasn’t enough for them. I stopped myself from being myself. I waited for a future where everything would align perfectly, a future where I wouldn’t have to worry about not being enough for the friends I perceived above me. I waited for a hypothetical future where I was richer and more knowledgeable and more culturally cultivated. That’s messed up, isn’t it?

I never want to send the wrong message to anyone when it comes to this article, so I’d like to make one thing clear: I was never explicitly told by anyone that the race and ethnicity and socioeconomic background I belonged to was wrong. No. No one had to say that. Instead, it was slowly and painstakingly implied that I and the people I represent are meant to be in the peripheral margins of society. It was implied in the trendy movies and tv shows we all watched as children, the ones that barbarized the beautiful and perfect religion I belong to. It was implied by the way my name was difficult to pronounce for almost everyone I encountered.

I think I now at least partially understand why my mother had shut herself in the house for all those years. It’s not easy for someone to flee a country during civil war and move across an entire ocean to live amongst people whose mores and customs are utterly foreign to everything they’ve ever known to be true about the world. If your parents are in any way similar to mine in experience, I pray that Allah swt grants all of them the highest place in heaven for all the tireless efforts they put into raising us and existing in this world. Ameen.

I think we third-culture kids should start peeling off the outermost layers of our deeply rooted shame. With the help of Allah, may we Insha’Allah get through this journey and end up on the other side feeling lighter. Ameen.

فِي أَمَانِ اللَّهِ