Sunday, May 2, 2021

Ready to Trust Yourself - Readiness: A Ramadan Mini Series



“I used to be so fluent in God. / Now, / I don’t even understand the language.”


To my knowledge, mama and I have not shared the following story with anyone outside of our family, quite possibly because anyone who didn’t experience it firsthand might not understand the gravity of the meanings behind it. But she and I speak the same language. We always knew that when our intuition said something, it was a tiny elbow nudge from God—a yes or a no. Sometimes though, it’s a foreshadowing and with time we begin to strengthen our skills in the language of God. Here’s where this story begins. Cue Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls.

Picture it: Summer 2013. I woke up one morning to the sound of my mother shrieking, “Shu sar?!?!” Quickly, I rushed downstairs to check on her and found one of the most unforgettable sights of our lives. The large, almost floor to ceiling sliding glass door that leads to our backyard had completely shattered but in place. So it looked like a glass mosaic from top to bottom, holding on for dear life within its frame, too afraid to surrender to gravity. We looked at each other, confused, shocked, and somehow severely mesmerized by its poetic disaster. It felt like the spindle from Sleeping Beauty—you know you shouldn’t touch it but you just want to.

We didn’t. Well technically, mama did, but not like that. She decided the safest thing we could do until we found a repairperson was to cover the entire door with sticky laminate. Remember the old school clear sticky book covers we used to be forced to cover our textbooks with in grade school? Mama was OBSESSED with them and she apparently still had a stash in her magic closet of Islamic Narnia. She retrieved them and began softly taping the glass in place from floor to ceiling. In the process, she cut herself, at least that’s what we thought. Life would later prove a very strange turn of events as her finger continued to hurt her for years. Once she was done, the repairperson arrived, called her a genius, and replaced the door. Basic story, right?

The issue was something about the shattered glass felt like a sign, a warning of coming danger that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. However, I wondered if it had anything to do with the man I just started dating literally the day before. That man was none other than the notorious ex husband. Dun dun duuun!

It took me about four years to really heal from the experience and I look back at that door story and wonder if God was teaching me His advanced language earlier than I anticipated and so I didn’t receive it as easily? I don’t know. I think God takes us on various journeys that break and remake us and this was one. I remember going through the worst of the healing journey and not realizing it, thinking the worst was already over. I wrote a lot during that period—including the epigraph poem at the top of this article. My faith was really shaken; not that I left religion, but my relationship with God was a little damaged. Being in that space was hard because not only was I disconnected from God, but that in turn meant a disconnection from myself, and maybe I needed it. I needed a little bit of that reflective dip in the darkness to remember how strong my language with God used to be. How much wisdom He gave me to trust in myself. How to shift gears and come back to Him as a better me. Come back to me as a better me. Believe it or not, when that divine merger happened, mama’s finger—the one we thought she only cut on the glass but continued to hurt far after—revealed a piece of the glass that had been wedged in there despite being probed and tweezed by three different doctors. Some things even modern science and medicine can’t really explain. God is above all.

In a recent encounter with a therapist I dumped quicker than a guy on a dating app, she asked “Do you trust yourself?” condescendingly. Without hesitation I said, “Yes, I do. I always follow my gut because I trust it to steer me in the right direction.” She frowned. “Hmm, really, how can that be? Didn’t you end up in an abusive relationship?” You don’t have to be a therapist to recognize the toxicity of this question, but somehow she didn’t. Or maybe she operates on this new trend of therapy I’ve begun noticing where therapists gaslight clients overtime to develop a sense of codependency from their clients. Secures them quite the income at $320 per session.

Obviously I felt attacked and very much blamed for something that wasn’t my fault, which she did often, and so there I was required to explain (to a god damn therapist) what an abusive relationship is. “Well, I was experiencing something called gaslighting, severe emotional and psychological manipulation, verbal assault, and daily threats from my ex husband that led to prolonged isolation from myself and family. I don’t know how else to explain it to you."

I wish I could say that was the only time I was victim blamed or shamed, and if you haven’t experienced it, it feels awful. Suddenly you feel so small, worthless, and like an idiot. In 2017, I hosted two release parties in SoCal for my poetry book Oceans & Flames, a collection focused on the experience and survival of domestic violence. Believe it or not, at each of these events, I had someone ask me the same exact question during the Q&A session. “What advice can you give girls and women to avoid making the same mistakes you did so they don’t end up in an abusive relationship while searching for a life partner?”

As if it wasn’t already difficult to survive the relationship. As if it wasn’t already a challenge to write about it. As if it wasn’t utmost courage to publish it into a book as a means of raising awareness. I had to face this from “my” people? No one tells you that surviving domestic violence is only the first hurdle. Surviving your society’s abuse is the next. Neither one of those people had the wisdom to shift blame to the abuser. Neither one acknowledged community responsibility at mitigating domestic violence but instead made it entirely the victim’s responsibility. And neither recognized that abusers possess power dynamics that make it almost impossible to catch their red flags, unless you’ve been a victim yourself. I can educate, raise awareness, and share my story, but I will not be blamed for the actions of another nor will I be required to take on their responsibilities, all while silently coerced into a corner of eternal self doubt.

If you’re an avid reader of Lady Narrator, you remember my online dating debacle of 2020, and how the story ended with the return of my precious poetry book, Contortionist Tongue, slashed and scribbled with ridiculous notes in English, Arabic, and Chinese, from a man I rejected after feeling very unsafe with on our second date. As if that wasn’t traumatic enough, he attached a three page “love” letter confessing his intense feelings for me after only two dates and four days of knowing each other. But here’s where this comes full circle. He ended his letter with the following:

“The most important lesson I learned, in both my science & liberal arts classes: you cannot trust intuition, because once you get past elementary basics, intuition is always wrong. Never right.”

Intuition should know no gender, but I have to say from life observations, I hear it discredited the most from men. Maybe it’s the privilege speaking, specifically that of white/white passing men? Being able to cruise through life and not have to rely on internal cues? I don’t know, but I have seen it doubted even more so from men who’ve been rejected by women who follow their intuition, like the aforementioned bro.

What’s really frustrating about this reoccurring devaluing of intuition is that it is yet another example of how society entirely discredits people as being experts on themselves, specifically women. This is especially more exhausting for survivors of domestic violence and/or related trauma because we already had to jump through hoops to get you to believe our experiences in the first place. Now we’re being expected to surrender to a label of weakness, like we don’t know how to trust ourselves or our choices? As if becoming a victim was our fault?

I’ve said this before but it will always be worth repeating. As survivors of domestic violence (and other similar traumas) our instincts and trust in self become very fine tuned. Whatever internal alarm bells we marginalized before become our northern lights moving forward in life. So really, it’s no longer just #BelieveSurivovors for our stories, but also believe us when we express our needs, thoughts, and feelings. No one is a greater expert on themselves than a survivor, and I say this knowing that even my family, my incredible support system, doesn’t know me the same way that I know myself anymore, and that’s okay. Trauma changes us and as long as we learn to evolve with the revolution and find ways to love the newness of ourselves, it gets better. The key to this transition though is the reliance we establish on our intuition, on trusting ourselves, something humanity has severely disconnected from.

A few years ago, my friend recommended documentary called InnSaei. Honestly, I highly recommend it too, especially in Ramadan when our souls are thirsty for an awakening. The film is about the power of intuition but explores how humanity’s over reliance on technology has a caused a disruption in this connection. One of the things I loved about this film (and similar research) is it looks at village elders and wise folk, who the therapists and counselors were/are in older societies. It’s always the group of people most in tune with themselves and life experience. However, as we become so addicted to our devices, we’ve hindered our ability to really listen and trust ourselves, resulting in a loss of internal guidance and heavier dependence on external reassurances and validation.

Social media hasn’t helped with this at all. To say it bluntly, social media (especially Instagram & TikTok) have become the new WebMD of mental health, and I mean that in the worst possible way. You cannot unlock your phone and not be immediately bombarded with some psychological post (or a dancing doctor) profiling your personality, emotionality, and mentality. It gets abhorrently annoying and exhausting, especially when it comes from non-clinical folks, includes frequent and consistent typographical errors, or sounds like cheesy fortunes straight out of a cookie. And that’s the trick, using generic click-bait language the masses simply like, follow, and believe. The relationship ones are especially worse. You can’t even escape them! Lord knows how many blocks and deletes I’ve clicked and they still pop up. While I understand how helpful it can be to have tangible tidbits of relevancy and validation when going through something, this extreme overexposure—especially on a platform built for mindless consumption—perpetuates a dangerous and toxic over reliance on looking outward for self confirmation vs. looking in.

Recently I was listening to a Clubhouse talk on Relationship OCD (ROCD). As informative as it was, I felt compelled to speak up and share a caveat to the concept of ROCD because at one point it almost began to resemble victim blaming. ROCD “is a subset of OCD in which sufferers are consumed with doubts about their relationship. They question their love for their partner, their attraction to their partner, their compatibility with their partner, and their partner’s love for them.”

Maybe the talk had no room for disclaimers, but I had to step in, especially as someone clinically diagnosed with OCD as a child and experiencing it used as a weapon against me anytime I followed my intuition. I emphasized that doubts, or “sticky thoughts” as they called them, in a relationship cannot always be disregarded as ROCD. Sometimes it’s a toxic relationship, sometimes it’s an abusive one, and sometimes it’s just not the right one. (Can you tell this last point is a big point here? We aren't everyone's someone!) We can’t constantly create space for people to so deeply doubt their doubts. This further silences one’s ability to self reflect healthily.

I thought about my ex husband as I spoke. About how often he would call me mentally crazy, citing my diagnosis every time I’d cry following one of his abusive episodes. He’d frequently claim it was the devil whispering in my ears and that I wasn’t being strong enough to overpower satan’s attempts at breaking us apart. Then I thought about a recent relationship I ended just before Ramadan. While it was not abusive, it began developing very unhealthy elements that my intuition was picking up on. Once again I was left feeling guilty and insufficient for not reciprocating the same way that was expected of me. I was often questioned about my mental health practices and whether or not I’m just struggling with residual trauma from the domestic violence. I found myself gaslit and exhausted, all because something within me was saying, “This is not the right relationship for me.” I know myself better than any man does, and having OCD and being a survivor of trauma do not negate the significance of my intuition or how well I’ve healed.

 A big part of the healing journey includes seeking spaces and periods of solitude to detox, rejuvenate, and repair our sense of self trust. For survivors of domestic violence, it begins to yield a recognition of how many other toxic and/or abusive people and things are normalized around us, so we redevelop boundaries. We amplify the volume of our intuition and stride differently through life. It doesn’t help when those around us try to dismantle this growth by reigniting the victim blaming or the past shaming or whatever other excuses people use towards others to negate one’s own strength and intuition value.

That’s what makes Ramadan so significant. Last year, so many people complained about Ramadan under pandemic and how isolating it was going to be. But maybe that was God’s way of reminding us all that we deserve some alone time to practice His language and practice reconnecting to our spiritual core. Maybe that door was a sign for 23 year old Dania, maybe it wasn’t, but it serves as a reminder that even in the most finite cracks, God’s language is available to us, we just have to trust ourselves, and sometimes that takes a bit of solitude.